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-Introduction

Romans NASB95
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ; to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world. For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established; that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far) so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.” For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them. Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to each person according to his deeds: to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life; but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation. There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek, but glory and honor and peace to everyone who does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For there is no partiality with God. For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law; for it is not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus. But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon the Law and boast in God, and know His will and approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the Law, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal? You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God? For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” just as it is written. For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. So if the uncircumcised man keeps the requirements of the Law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? And he who is physically uncircumcised, if he keeps the Law, will he not judge you who though having the letter of the Law and circumcision are a transgressor of the Law? For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God. Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision? Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God. What then? If some did not believe, their unbelief will not nullify the faithfulness of God, will it? May it never be! Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, as it is written, “That You may be justified in Your words, And prevail when You are judged.” But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is He? (I am speaking in human terms.) May it never be! For otherwise, how will God judge the world? But if through my lie the truth of God abounded to His glory, why am I also still being judged as a sinner? And why not say (as we are slanderously reported and as some claim that we say), “Let us do evil that good may come”? Their condemnation is just. What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one.” “Their throat is an open grave, With their tongues they keep deceiving,” “The poison of asps is under their lips”; “Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”; “Their feet are swift to shed blood, Destruction and misery are in their paths, And the path of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since indeed God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith is one. Do we then nullify the Law through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law. What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven, And whose sins have been covered. “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account.” Is this blessing then on the circumcised, or on the uncircumcised also? For we say, “Faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness.” How then was it credited? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised; and he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while uncircumcised, so that he might be the father of all who believe without being circumcised, that righteousness might be credited to them, and the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also follow in the steps of the faith of our father Abraham which he had while uncircumcised. For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of the Law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise is nullified; for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation. For this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, (as it is written, “A father of many nations have I made you”) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist. In hope against hope he believed, so that he might become a father of many nations according to that which had been spoken, “So shall your descendants be.” Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb; yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. Therefore it was also credited to him as righteousness. Now not for his sake only was it written that it was credited to him, but for our sake also, to whom it will be credited, as those who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many. The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned; for on the one hand the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives? For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband. So then, if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though she is joined to another man. Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died; and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me; for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So then, the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be! Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful. For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but: “through Isaac your descendants will be named.” That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants. For this is the word of promise: “At this time I will come, and Sarah shall have a son.” And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. As He says also in Hosea, “I will call those who were not My people, ‘My people,’ And her who was not beloved, ‘beloved.’ ” “And it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, ‘you are not My people,’ There they shall be called sons of the living God.” Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, “Though the number of the sons of Israel be like the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved; for the Lord will execute His word on the earth, thoroughly and quickly.” And just as Isaiah foretold, “Unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left to us a posterity, We would have become like Sodom, and would have resembled Gomorrah.” What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone, just as it is written, “Behold, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.” Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. For Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on law shall live by that righteousness. But the righteousness based on faith speaks as follows: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him; for “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!” However, they did not all heed the good news; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. But I say, surely they have never heard, have they? Indeed they have; “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, And their words to the ends of the world.” But I say, surely Israel did not know, did they? First Moses says, “I will make you jealous by that which is not a nation, By a nation without understanding will I anger you.” And Isaiah is very bold and says, “I was found by those who did not seek Me, I became manifest to those who did not ask for Me.” But as for Israel He says, “All the day long I have stretched out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.” I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed Your prophets, they have torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.” But what is the divine response to him? “I have kept for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace. What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened; just as it is written, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, Eyes to see not and ears to hear not, Down to this very day.” And David says, “Let their table become a snare and a trap, And a stumbling block and a retribution to them. “Let their eyes be darkened to see not, And bend their backs forever.” I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous. Now if their transgression is riches for the world and their failure is riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be! But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them. For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the first piece of dough is holy, the lump is also; and if the root is holy, the branches are too. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” Quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either. Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree? For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery—so that you will not be wise in your own estimation—that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in; and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.” “This is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.” From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you once were disobedient to God, but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience, so these also now have been disobedient, that because of the mercy shown to you they also may now be shown mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all. Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen. Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation. Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. “But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’ sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts. Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions. One person has faith that he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats vegetables only. The one who eats is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him. Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me, And every tongue shall give praise to God.” So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let what is for you a good thing be spoken of as evil; for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another. Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are clean, but they are evil for the man who eats and gives offense. It is good not to eat meat or to drink wine, or to do anything by which your brother stumbles. The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin. Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his edification. For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached You fell on Me.” For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus, so that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers, and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy; as it is written, “Therefore I will give praise to You among the Gentiles, And I will sing to Your name.” Again he says, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people.” And again, “Praise the Lord all you Gentiles, And let all the peoples praise Him.” Again Isaiah says, “There shall come the root of Jesse, And He who arises to rule over the Gentiles, In Him shall the Gentiles hope.” Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able also to admonish one another. But I have written very boldly to you on some points so as to remind you again, because of the grace that was given me from God, to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that my offering of the Gentiles may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Therefore in Christ Jesus I have found reason for boasting in things pertaining to God. For I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me, resulting in the obedience of the Gentiles by word and deed, in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Spirit; so that from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. And thus I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, so that I would not build on another man’s foundation; but as it is written, “They who had no news of Him shall see, And they who have not heard shall understand.” For this reason I have often been prevented from coming to you; but now, with no further place for me in these regions, and since I have had for many years a longing to come to you whenever I go to Spain—for I hope to see you in passing, and to be helped on my way there by you, when I have first enjoyed your company for a while— but now, I am going to Jerusalem serving the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. Yes, they were pleased to do so, and they are indebted to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in their spiritual things, they are indebted to minister to them also in material things. Therefore, when I have finished this, and have put my seal on this fruit of theirs, I will go on by way of you to Spain. I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. Now I urge you, brethren, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God for me, that I may be rescued from those who are disobedient in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may prove acceptable to the saints; so that I may come to you in joy by the will of God and find refreshing rest in your company. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen. I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea; that you receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and that you help her in whatever matter she may have need of you; for she herself has also been a helper of many, and of myself as well. Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who for my life risked their own necks, to whom not only do I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles; also greet the church that is in their house. Greet Epaenetus, my beloved, who is the first convert to Christ from Asia. Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you. Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me. Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. Greet Urbanus, our fellow worker in Christ, and Stachys my beloved. Greet Apelles, the approved in Christ. Greet those who are of the household of Aristobulus. Greet Herodion, my kinsman. Greet those of the household of Narcissus, who are in the Lord. Greet Tryphaena and Tryphosa, workers in the Lord. Greet Persis the beloved, who has worked hard in the Lord. Greet Rufus, a choice man in the Lord, also his mother and mine. Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas and the brethren with them. Greet Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you. Now I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them. For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own appetites; and by their smooth and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting. For the report of your obedience has reached to all; therefore I am rejoicing over you, but I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. Timothy my fellow worker greets you, and so do Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen. I, Tertius, who write this letter, greet you in the Lord. Gaius, host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer greets you, and Quartus, the brother. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen.
-Introduction
Romans is thought to be the finest of all of Paul’s epistles and it is in this epistle that Paul sets forth the most logical, the most orderly and organized presentation of the foundation of doctrine for Christianity, especially in relation to the essence of God in terms of His righteousness and justice, very close concepts in the vocabulary of the Bible. Both in terms of the Old Testament and New Testament the word groups that are translated as either “righteousness” or “justice” are the same. In the Old Testament the verb root tsedaq and in the New Testament the noun root is dike [dikh], and so there are various forms of one of those words but they can refer to either the absolute standard to the absolute standard that is inherent within God’s character—He is the ultimate standard for reality—or it refers to the application of that standard. When it talks about the standard it talks about righteousness; when it talks about the application of that standard the idea is justice. So we know that there is perfect righteousness because it exists in God’s essence and the application of that is perfect justice. Even through we do not see righteousness or justice within our human experience within the realm of creation we do have that have that in the essence of God as an ultimate reference point. And so we can know what righteousness is and what justice is, and because all human beings are created within the image and likeness of God, even though that image has been distorted and corrupted by the sin of Adam, nevertheless there is something deep within the core of man that recognizes that things are not as they ought to be, and they have a sense that things ought to be somehow different, that there ought to be perfection, something where there is not suffering but rather an experience where there is no sorrow, no inequities, no injustice.
Yet, because we live in a fallen world we can’t experience that, and we will never experience that; and the failure to recognize that on the part of many people is what leads them into the trap of utopianism. We see a lot of examples of that today in various philosophical views that dominate politics, both in terms of other nations as well as various movements within the United States. The goal of government, the goal of human institutions is not to provide protection; it is rather to defend righteousness and to provide an environment where righteousness can flourish to the best of its ability within a fallen system. It is that every question of whether or not there is such a thing as the fallen-ness of man, the depravity of man, this inherent flaw in human nature, that is at the very core of the challenges and the disagreements between the various worldviews. Those who believe that man is essentially flawed are basically Christians. Others think of sin as some sort of cosmetic problem, something in the order of disease, but not a constitutional defect; and that is the distinction between biblical Christianity and all of the other world religions. This is why biblical Christianity emphasizes the grace of God, understanding the sin problem as a constitutional defect that man cannot overcome on his own; there has to be an external solution that is totally independent of human ability.
If we have a weak view of sin—and there are certain Christian denominations and theologians who have very diluted ideas about sin—then the more diluted that view of sin, the more we think of man as perfectible, and if man as an individual is perfectible, then society is perfectible. And when we think of society as perfectible we think that somehow it is up to mankind or the institutions of mankind to perfect the human race and to bring in some kind of utopia. What is important for us to notice at this point by way of introduction is the importance of understanding righteousness and justice, which is the very core of the message in Romans.
Authorship: The apostle Paul claims to be the author in , and even though there are those who in other books that claim to be written by Paul doubt Pauline authorship there are very few left in the world today who doubt Pauline authorship of Romans. The topic of authorship is usually broken down into two categories of evidence: internal evidence, which refers to evidence within the epistle or book itself; external evidence has to do with outside sources, outside references.
Internal evidence: Always start with Scripture; always start with God in any system of thought. Start with ultimate reality and work your way out. Whenever we start with Scripture we start with the Scripture’s testimony regarding itself. This is not a circular argument. It is the case of a witness. You go to the witness and ask the right probing questions of a witness, and their answers are either going to be consistent and give corroboration of their basic testimony or there are going to be some flaws or inconsistencies that may cause you to then look at other areas to validate or invalidate the claim. Se we are going to take the Scripture at its word: that is claims to be the Word of God written by God through men, using their personalities, vocabularies, gifts, talents and background in order to express the eternal truths that God wishes to communicate to man in a way that doesn’t violate their individual human nature or personality on the one hand, but on the other hand it communicates exactly what God intended to communicate. And it does it in a way that that inspiration extends down to the very words of Scripture, not just the words themselves but the forms of Scripture, whether a word is an aorist tense, a present tense, a future tense, whether one word is used or another word is used; this is a part of divine inspiration. Sometimes it may be that one word is used over against another word simply because of the author’s personality or his style, but that should be the last resort. Our first resort should be that this is the word that God chose because He wanted to emphasize something distinct about this word as opposed to this other word.
So we always start with the assumption that if the Bible claims to be written by someone then we are going to assume that is true until we find some evidence that may perhaps contradict that, and we are going to assume that when it claims to be from God that it is indeed from God.
The vocabulary that we have in Romans and the way that the theological arguments are developed are consistent with what Paul says in other epistles, such as Ephesians, Colossians, Galatians, books that are similar in doctrinal content to Romans, especially Galatians where we see the thinking that is in Romans developed in a much shorter book. In Galatians, especially in chapter two, we see his explanation of justification by faith, that it is not by works. NASB “nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.” It is also consistent with what he says in Philippians chapter three, and so this idea of justification which is part of our understanding of the righteousness of God is consistent in Romans, Philippians, Galatians, Colossians and all of these other epistles. So the language, the style, the way that he logically develops his subject is all consistent with what we know of as the apostle Paul.
The author states that he is familiar with Priscilla and Aquila. Paul was familiar with them, cf. , . The author mentions in , that he is in the process of taking up a collection of money to take back to Jerusalem for the support of the poor among the believers. We know that this was something that the apostle Paul was involved in on his third missionary journey. Cf. ; ; , ; ; ; . This fits what we know of what the apostle Paul was doing on his third missionary journey. We believe he wrote the epistle to the Romans from Corinth. This would indicate that this fits with that scenario and plan.
The author claims to be a descendant of the tribe of Benjamin, as was the apostle Paul, originally known as Saul of Tarsus. He makes this claim in cf. .
The author plans to visit Rome, as did the apostle Paul. Cf. ; with 19:21. We see that the things that are stated in Romans that are personal to the author of this epistle are consistent with what we know about the life and ministry of the apostle Paul and the chronology that we see in the book of Acts.
In terms of external evidence the apostolic fathers [In many cases they knew the apostles or came to salvation under the ministry of one of the apostles, yet are a second generation leader in the early church] there is a huge distinction between their ministries and the apostles. The apostolic fathers are often confused. They are talking about being saved when you get baptized and all kinds of other things. It took two or three generations to work out the doctrinal corrections that were necessary after the apostles go off the scene. That just reveals the difference between the active presence and ministry of God the Holy Spirit in the lives of the apostles and that that disappears with the death of the last apostle.
Under external evidence we know that the early apostolic fathers in the first generation after the death of John—Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp who was a student of the apostle John. Then the later second century, so this would getting into the third and fourth generation of leaders after the death of the last apostle—Iranaeus who was the bishop of Leon in France, wrote 15-170 era, Justin Martyr about that same era, and Hippolytus. All of these attested to the belief that the apostle Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans. Furthermore, we have one of the oldest canonical collections called the Muratorian Fragment which was discovered a couple of centuries ago and has been dated to approximately 170 AD, within eighty years of the writing of Revelation, and it indicates that the apostle Paul wrote Romans. There is no indication from that early time that anybody believed anything different. It wasn’t until the 19th century and what was referred to as the 19th century Protestant liberalism that anybody started to question whether or not the apostle Paul wrote the book of Romans.
A question comes to people’s minds, reading , in the statement: NASB “I, Tertius, who write this letter, greet you in the Lord.” This is Paul’s amanuensis (word for a scribe or secretary). It was typical in the ancient world that someone would write a letter and dictate it to a scribe. So Tertius is the one who wrote this down. Some ask how this affects the doctrine of inspiration. The inspiration is coming through the apostle Paul and he is the one who at the end signs of on it. He would dictate it to Tertius then go over it making any corrections and then the final copy would be completed by Tertius before it was sent out. In many case multiple copies like this would be made because in some cases it would be sent not just to one church or individual but to multiple churches.
Despite the attempts of some in the 19th century to debunk Pauline authorship by the beginning of the 20th century most of those arguments were seen as very specious and not demonstrable, and so today there is virtually no question about Pauline authorship.
Date: This was in 56-57 AD, probably early winter—January-February—of 57. It was during Paul’s third missionary journey. At the time he wrote three epistles, I & II Corinthians and Romans. He knows he is headed to Rome and states this in the very first chapter. But first of all he believed he had to go to Jerusalem. Romans was written at the time that Nero was emperor, and that is important to understand in terms of interpretation, especially when we get into the 13th chapter which talks about the fact that no authority exists apart from the will of God, and that God as He superintends history there are times when even evil rulers from our perspective are appointed and God allows them to reign. Nevertheless because they are the ruler they are to be obeyed. Authority is to be respected as a foundational establishment principle.
The church in Rome wasn’t founded by Paul; neither was it founded by Peter. We don’t know who founded the church there. We know from Acts chapter two that there were Jews from Rome in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. So it is possible that some Jews were saved from Rome and when they went back to Rome they proclaimed the gospel in Rome and a church began. It is also possible that when Paul traveled on his first and second missionary journeys, and as there were Jews in those cities and towns where he went, some of them could have been traveling from Rome or later traveled to Rome and could have been the source of the gospel first arriving in Rome. But it was not Peter, as the Roman Catholic church has asserted; Peter was neither the founder nor the first pastor of the church in Rome. Paul got to Rome before Peter did.
We are not really sure why Paul wrote this epistle. We can guess because of the nature of what he says, but there were questions that were being asked related to understanding foundational doctrine, there were questions being asked about the relationship of works, the faith. There were questions related to the necessity of works to salvation, questions related to God’s plan for the Jews. It is obvious from things that are written in the epistle that the congregation in Rome was mixed, containing both Gentiles and Jews. At the end of chapter eight, verses 38, 39 NASB “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Then Paul hears the Jew. Wait a minute! God promised us the land, God promised us this, God promised us that, why don’t we have it? If God is so faithful how can you be convinced that nothing can separate you from the love of God? We’ve been separated from the love of God, what is going on? And so are the logical development of his theme of righteousness: righteousness toward the Gentiles, righteousness toward all mankind, developed in the first eight chapters and then chapters 9-11 showing that God’s righteousness is vindicated in His dealings with Israel. Eventually all Israel will be saved and Paul begins in saying that all of the covenants and promises belong to the Jews and are never taken from the Jews, and that eventually all Israel will be saved, chapter eleven. Then everything shifts in chapter twelve dealing with the application of God’s righteousness into the life of the individual believer.
Historical background: Rome was founded in 753 BC. There are various legends, there is not a lot of hard data about how Rome was founded. There were the Etruscans that were in the area and some other groups that settled on the hills and tradition has it that Aeneas fled there after Troy was destroyed. His descendants were Romulus and Remus who had a falling out and Romulus killed Remus. Romulus became the first king of Rome, April 21st, 753 BC. The three basic periods of Rome are the pre-Republic period or monarchy period (753-510 BC), then the period of the Republic, and then the period of the Empire. With the death of the king in 510 those in the aristocracy who made up the senate of Rome swore that there would never be another king and that Rome would be ruled by the senate—the founding of the phrase Romanus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the People of Rome. That became the standard abbreviation for the Roman Republic [SPQR]. It was during this time that Rome began to expand outside of the seven hills. Beyond its basic walls it conquers the neighboring Etruscans and Greek colonists on the Italian peninsula. It expanded into North Africa, westward into Spain, northward into Gaul and eventually into Britain and eastward into the Middle East. As Rome expanded its wealth and prosperity expanded and, of course, no nation has ever passed the prosperity test and so they had all of the problems that came with prosperity—increase in vice and arrogance and self-centeredness, and all of the things that went along with that. On the other hand they had tremendous and wonderful accomplishments and they provided a tremendous legacy of culture in terms of law. Roman law provides the foundation for western civilization down through the present. What made Roman law great was when Christianity came into the empire and modified some of the cruelty and other aspects that were present in Roman law; it was really Christianity that allowed the good side of Roman civilization to continue. Historically no pagan culture has ever really had an enduring or lasting value, but what happens when Christianity comes into western civilization in conjunction with the thinking of the Greeks and the Romans it allows what is beneficial in those civilizations to endure. All of western civilization’s cultural institutions basically are grounded on a combination of Roman law and Old Testament law. That is what makes the difference.
The period of the Republic was from 510 BC to 27 BC and it was during this time that there was all of this expansion, remarkable contributions to culture not only in the realm of law but in architecture, art, engineering and road building. It is the unification of all of the territory from North Africa to the Middle East to Western Europe under the authority of the Roman emperor that created a peace which meant that the gospel could spread without worrying about crossing national boundaries and facing opposition from one area or another. This was just part of the wisdom of God and the sovereignty of God, and as the Scripture says, Jesus came in the fullness of time. God provided this perfect historical scenario for the timing of the gospel. The Republic ended with a series of civil wars and attempts to seize power by various generals. The lesson there is, human politics will always fail. It will never provide protection no matter how great people are or how wonderful the system is because of the depravity of man. There has to be a strong leader and this is what comes in with the granting of the title Augustus to Octavian. When the senate crowned him as Caesar he became the emperor in 27 BC, and that is the beginning of the empire which continued in the west until 476 AD and in the east until 1453 AD. What destroyed the Roman empire finally was the invasion of those “peaceful, loving” people of the book, those “peaceful” Muslims. We are still fighting them and have been fighting them ever since. Ever since 622 there has been this violent expansion of Islam and it hasn’t stopped. It has paused a couple of times but from Charles Martel to Constantinople battles were fought by rest against the attempts by the Islamic hordes to take over and capture the west. Rome stood as a bulwark against that until it eventually just collapsed from the weight of its own depravity in 1453.
Back to the first century. With the consolidation of power by Octavian there was now the empire. There are four emperors mentioned in the New Testament: Augustus, ; Tiberius, ; Claudius, ; ; Nero, ; . By the mid first century, the time of the apostle Paul, Rome is the largest city in the world with a population exceeding one million. The church in Rome was composed of slave and free. There were quite a large number of Christians. Tacitus tells us that the number of Christians persecuted under Nero was “an immense multitude.” So there was a large number of Christians in Rome at that time in the first century AD and it was to those believers that Paul writes.
The occasion: There are four clues that Paul gives within the writing of Romans, aside from answering their questions.
The only time that fits Paul’s description in chapter fifteen is his winter stay in Corinth at the end of his third missionary journey.
At the conclusion of Romans he is aware that he is reaching a transition point in his apostolic ministry.
He expressed a concern about his impending trip to Jerusalem and taking up a collection for the believers there.
Paul is seeking the support of the Roman Christians as he makes his way eventually to Spain. That was his plan.
Key doctrines and terms in the epistle to the Romans: Key words are, justice, righteousness, faith, law, grace, wrath, works.

-Introduction 2

Romans NASB95
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ; to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world. For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established; that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far) so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.” For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them. Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to each person according to his deeds: to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life; but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation. There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek, but glory and honor and peace to everyone who does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For there is no partiality with God. For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law; for it is not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus. But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon the Law and boast in God, and know His will and approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the Law, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal? You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God? For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” just as it is written. For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. So if the uncircumcised man keeps the requirements of the Law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? And he who is physically uncircumcised, if he keeps the Law, will he not judge you who though having the letter of the Law and circumcision are a transgressor of the Law? For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God. Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision? Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God. What then? If some did not believe, their unbelief will not nullify the faithfulness of God, will it? May it never be! Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, as it is written, “That You may be justified in Your words, And prevail when You are judged.” But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is He? (I am speaking in human terms.) May it never be! For otherwise, how will God judge the world? But if through my lie the truth of God abounded to His glory, why am I also still being judged as a sinner? And why not say (as we are slanderously reported and as some claim that we say), “Let us do evil that good may come”? Their condemnation is just. What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one.” “Their throat is an open grave, With their tongues they keep deceiving,” “The poison of asps is under their lips”; “Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”; “Their feet are swift to shed blood, Destruction and misery are in their paths, And the path of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since indeed God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith is one. Do we then nullify the Law through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law. What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven, And whose sins have been covered. “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account.” Is this blessing then on the circumcised, or on the uncircumcised also? For we say, “Faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness.” How then was it credited? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised; and he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while uncircumcised, so that he might be the father of all who believe without being circumcised, that righteousness might be credited to them, and the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also follow in the steps of the faith of our father Abraham which he had while uncircumcised. For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of the Law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise is nullified; for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation. For this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, (as it is written, “A father of many nations have I made you”) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist. In hope against hope he believed, so that he might become a father of many nations according to that which had been spoken, “So shall your descendants be.” Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb; yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. Therefore it was also credited to him as righteousness. Now not for his sake only was it written that it was credited to him, but for our sake also, to whom it will be credited, as those who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many. The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned; for on the one hand the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives? For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband. So then, if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though she is joined to another man. Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died; and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me; for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So then, the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be! Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful. For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but: “through Isaac your descendants will be named.” That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants. For this is the word of promise: “At this time I will come, and Sarah shall have a son.” And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. As He says also in Hosea, “I will call those who were not My people, ‘My people,’ And her who was not beloved, ‘beloved.’ ” “And it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, ‘you are not My people,’ There they shall be called sons of the living God.” Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, “Though the number of the sons of Israel be like the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved; for the Lord will execute His word on the earth, thoroughly and quickly.” And just as Isaiah foretold, “Unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left to us a posterity, We would have become like Sodom, and would have resembled Gomorrah.” What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone, just as it is written, “Behold, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.” Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. For Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on law shall live by that righteousness. But the righteousness based on faith speaks as follows: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him; for “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!” However, they did not all heed the good news; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. But I say, surely they have never heard, have they? Indeed they have; “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, And their words to the ends of the world.” But I say, surely Israel did not know, did they? First Moses says, “I will make you jealous by that which is not a nation, By a nation without understanding will I anger you.” And Isaiah is very bold and says, “I was found by those who did not seek Me, I became manifest to those who did not ask for Me.” But as for Israel He says, “All the day long I have stretched out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.” I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed Your prophets, they have torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.” But what is the divine response to him? “I have kept for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace. What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened; just as it is written, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, Eyes to see not and ears to hear not, Down to this very day.” And David says, “Let their table become a snare and a trap, And a stumbling block and a retribution to them. “Let their eyes be darkened to see not, And bend their backs forever.” I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous. Now if their transgression is riches for the world and their failure is riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be! But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them. For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the first piece of dough is holy, the lump is also; and if the root is holy, the branches are too. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” Quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either. Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree? For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery—so that you will not be wise in your own estimation—that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in; and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.” “This is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.” From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you once were disobedient to God, but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience, so these also now have been disobedient, that because of the mercy shown to you they also may now be shown mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all. Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen. Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation. Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. “But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’ sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts. Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions. One person has faith that he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats vegetables only. The one who eats is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him. Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me, And every tongue shall give praise to God.” So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let what is for you a good thing be spoken of as evil; for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another. Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are clean, but they are evil for the man who eats and gives offense. It is good not to eat meat or to drink wine, or to do anything by which your brother stumbles. The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin. Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his edification. For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached You fell on Me.” For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus, so that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers, and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy; as it is written, “Therefore I will give praise to You among the Gentiles, And I will sing to Your name.” Again he says, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people.” And again, “Praise the Lord all you Gentiles, And let all the peoples praise Him.” Again Isaiah says, “There shall come the root of Jesse, And He who arises to rule over the Gentiles, In Him shall the Gentiles hope.” Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able also to admonish one another. But I have written very boldly to you on some points so as to remind you again, because of the grace that was given me from God, to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that my offering of the Gentiles may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Therefore in Christ Jesus I have found reason for boasting in things pertaining to God. For I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me, resulting in the obedience of the Gentiles by word and deed, in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Spirit; so that from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. And thus I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, so that I would not build on another man’s foundation; but as it is written, “They who had no news of Him shall see, And they who have not heard shall understand.” For this reason I have often been prevented from coming to you; but now, with no further place for me in these regions, and since I have had for many years a longing to come to you whenever I go to Spain—for I hope to see you in passing, and to be helped on my way there by you, when I have first enjoyed your company for a while— but now, I am going to Jerusalem serving the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. Yes, they were pleased to do so, and they are indebted to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in their spiritual things, they are indebted to minister to them also in material things. Therefore, when I have finished this, and have put my seal on this fruit of theirs, I will go on by way of you to Spain. I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. Now I urge you, brethren, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God for me, that I may be rescued from those who are disobedient in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may prove acceptable to the saints; so that I may come to you in joy by the will of God and find refreshing rest in your company. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen. I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea; that you receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and that you help her in whatever matter she may have need of you; for she herself has also been a helper of many, and of myself as well. Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who for my life risked their own necks, to whom not only do I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles; also greet the church that is in their house. Greet Epaenetus, my beloved, who is the first convert to Christ from Asia. Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you. Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me. Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. Greet Urbanus, our fellow worker in Christ, and Stachys my beloved. Greet Apelles, the approved in Christ. Greet those who are of the household of Aristobulus. Greet Herodion, my kinsman. Greet those of the household of Narcissus, who are in the Lord. Greet Tryphaena and Tryphosa, workers in the Lord. Greet Persis the beloved, who has worked hard in the Lord. Greet Rufus, a choice man in the Lord, also his mother and mine. Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas and the brethren with them. Greet Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you. Now I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them. For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own appetites; and by their smooth and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting. For the report of your obedience has reached to all; therefore I am rejoicing over you, but I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. Timothy my fellow worker greets you, and so do Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen. I, Tertius, who write this letter, greet you in the Lord. Gaius, host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer greets you, and Quartus, the brother. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen.
-Introduction, Part 2
The Righteousness of God
1-5 Justification
6-7-8 Sanctification
9-10-11 God Righteousness Plan for Israel
12-16 Application of the Doctrine from the first 11 chapters
In the introduction we are oriented to the theme of this epistle, and the them of this epistle has to do with a vindication of God’s righteousness. That word “righteousness” is from the Hebrew word tsedak and the Greek word is diakaiosune [dikaiosunh]. In both languages the word for righteousness can also mean justice. Righteousness has to do with the standard of something, the qualification of something. So when we talk about the righteousness of God we are talking about the standard of His character. When we talk about justice we are talking about the amplification of that standard to His creatures. In the epistle to the Romans the issue is vindicating or demonstrating the righteousness of God toward His creatures: how is God righteous is His dealings with His creatures and how can God’s creatures meet the righteous standard of God since we are not perfect and God’s standard is absolute perfection? That is introduced in verses 16 and 17 of chapter one at the end of the introduction, and that introduces the basic theme.
The second division has to do with justification itself and that covers the area from 1:18 to 5:21. God’s righteousness is revealed in His condemnation of the whole human race because of sin and the provision of justification to all by faith alone in Christ alone. This first basic division from 1:18 to 5:11 focuses on what we refer to as the doctrine of justification by faith. Then the third division of the book has to do with sanctification. Sanctification grows out of justification. They are related, and how they are related is the topic of a lot of discussion. What we mean by sanctification is not positional sanctification, which is what happens in the sense of legally or forensically at the moment of salvation but it has to do with the spiritual life as a believer. So when we hear the word “sanctification” just think spiritual growth, the Christian life; and that is covered in chapters 6, 7 and 8. It is important to understand that distinction: that sanctification grows out of justification but it is not identical to justification. These chapters have to do with how God’s righteousness is lived out in the lives of those who have been justified—how God produces experiential righteousness in those who have already been declared righteous.
The next section is that God will vindicate His righteousness in His relationship to Israel. At the end of chapter eight Paul makes the well-known statement: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” To make that a little more succinct, what Pail says is, I am convinced that nothing in heaven or earth, nothing that any creature does, can separate us from the love of God. The love of God is absolutely dependable, He is absolutely faithful, and He will never leave us or forsake us. Objection: What about the fact that He seems to have left or departed or cut off His grace from Israel? The answer to that, then, is the focal point of chapters 9-11 where Paul writes a demonstration that God is faithful in terms of His righteousness in His past dealings with Israel in chapter nine. Then he focuses on God’s present dealings with Israel in chapter ten, demonstrating that though many Jews have rejected Jesus as Messiah that is not because God somehow made them but that it is as a result of their own individual volition. Nevertheless God has not cut off Israel from His promises and the promises and the covenants from the Old Testament still belong to Israel. Then chapter eleven deals with God’s future dealing with Israel, that the current status is not complete, the rejection is not final, and that God eventually will pour out His grace to Israel and all Israel will be saved.
Then there is a major shift that takes place in chapter twelve which focuses on application, though there is a lot of application in the first eleven chapters. What happens in chapters twelve through sixteen are the implications for day-to-day living from what we have heard in terms of what God has done for us in justification and what God has provided for us in sanctification. Chapters 12:1-15:13 really Has to do with the implications of God’s righteousness in the life of the believer who is already justified; how God’s righteousness is going to be displayed in the life of the justified believer. There are three sections there. Chapter twelve focuses on how that is displayed in the assembly, the local church; how it is displayed in relationship to human government in chapter thirteen; then in chapter fourteen how that is displayed in relationship to weaker believers and stronger believers. There is a conclusion where things are summarized and Paul gives more information about his plans to visit Rome, and then almost the entirety of chapter sixteen has to do with greetings to various individuals that he knows in Rome.
The introductory section in 1:1-17 contains Paul’s basic greeting, as he does in almost all of his epistles. He introduces himself and gives a reference to his authority—what gives him the right to introduce address this group of believers the way he does and this always goes back to his apostolic authority. NASB “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called {as} an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.” So we have the identification of Paul as the writer of this epistle. He describes the gospel in summary fashion, the foundation of the gospel in vv. 2, 3, 4. “which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.” The first thing he is going to do is he grounds what he is going to say, not in the Gospels, not in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament. One of the interesting things about Romans is that of all the epistles that the apostle Paul wrote, and all the times that he quotes from the Old Testament, half of his quotations from the Old Testament are in Romans. That tells us again, just as in the study of Hebrews, that you have to have some understanding of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, to understand what Paul is saying. He is developing everything that he says in Romans on the basis of what was revealed in the Torah in the Old Testament and the prophets. [3] “concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, [4] who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead…” So he is going to establish this on the basis of two important things: the fact that Jesus is born in the line of David and that He is declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. Both of those ideas are loaded with an Old Testament frame of reference.
For forty days after the resurrection Jesus taught the disciples concerning the kingdom of God. What did He say about the kingdom of God? This sort of summarizes the focal point of the message of Peter and the other apostles in the book of Acts. It always goes back to establishing Jesus’ credentials as the descendant of David, the one who is the focal point of all of the Old Testament prophecies related to the Messiah. We see this again in Paul’s introduction. He foundation was who was Jesus? Was He who He claimed to be? Was He born of Mary in Bethlehem, fulfilling over a hundred messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, or not?
Then in verses 5-7 Paul Talks about the readers who are in Rome “called to be saints.” That is just the salutation. Then he talks in the remainder of his introduction of his desire to visit them in Rome—verses 8-15. He praises them because their faith is known throughout the whole world, the Roman empire, so they have already developed a reputation; there is a sizeable number of believers there. NASB “to all who are beloved of God in Rome…” He doesn’t say to the church in Rome because by this time there were a number of different churches or congregations in Rome. He is addressing all of them, he doesn’t use the word “church” until he gets to chapter 16. He mentions their faith, the reputation that they are developing throughout the Roman empire, and that he continually prays for them, vv. 9, 10 and his desire to come to them to impart doctrine to them from the utilization of his spiritual gift as an apostle. Then he concludes the introduction in vv, 16, 17 with this quote from . He states in v. 16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel” –which is a figure of speech for saying “I’m proud of the gospel”—“ for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” So he establishes right off the bat the universality of the gospel; it is for everyone, Jew and Gentile. Then he says in verse 17, which is the key verse for understanding the epistle: “For in it [the gospel] {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith…” It is important to pay attention to how Paul talks about what is revealed as we go through Romans, and here we see that the righteousness of God is revealed. Then in verse 18 we see that the wrath of God is revealed. So we see that as he begins the first section in verse 18 he starts with the judgment of God which is the outworking of His righteousness. So His righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, “as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} [justified ones] SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.”
Then we come to the first major section of the epistle which focuses on this whole doctrine of justification. Justification by faith alone is the hallmark doctrine in Romans. We find it also developed in Galatians. Galatians was Paul’s first epistle and we see that all of the ideas and the doctrines in Galatians are developed and expanded much more in this epistle to the Romans. The epistle to the Romans is considered to be one of the finest pieces of any kind of literature of all of history. It is one of the tightest, most logically developed arguments in any kind of religious literature that will be found. What Paul does is start with what is revealed in the Old Testament and he puts it together logically to show how what is revealed in Jesus in the Gospels is the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies and that the Christian proclamation that justification, how a person becomes just in his standing before God, is by faith alone isn’t something that came along and was new with Jesus or Paul, not something that is just Christian, but it is grounded in the Old Testament. In chapter four he is going to take us all the way back to the Torah, to Genesis chapter 15:16, to show us that Abraham was justified by faith alone before there was the law and before there was circumcision; and that justification by faith alone was not something new with Christianity but that the Law was never intended as a way for man to be justified before God. So he begins in this first section, from verse 18 down to verse 32, to establish the condemnation of all mankind because they have rejected God.
He starts off by saying, NASB “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” This is the revelation of His invisible attributes. But what happens is that they have rejected Him. The revelation is clear enough that all mankind are accountable, no one is without excuse. [21] “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God …” They “suppressed the truth in unrighteousness.” Verses 21 to the end of the chapter is a summary of what transpired after Adam’s fall; it is a historical summation of mankind prior to the call of Abraham when there was the human race who had the testimony of God’s existence in a clear enough accountable fashion and yet they rejected it. Then summary is: “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…” This is what happened in that period before the flood and from the time of the flood to the tower of Babel, and then God, as it were, just throws up His hands because the whole human race is no good, and He is going to focus on one individual—Abraham—and his descendants. So the summation in vv. 18-32 is that the Gentiles—before there were any Jews and before Abraham was called—rejected the revelation of God.
Then starting in chapter two he is going to deal with two classification of people. We often think that somebody can come before God and say, Well I live a good life, I’m a moral person, I follow the Ten Commandments, the Torah, or whatever moral standard there is; I can have justification, I can be vindicated before God’s righteousness. What Paul shows in a masterful piece of logic in chapter two is that neither the moral person nor the religious person has standing before God because the essence of sin is of such a level of corruption that nothing that man can do can overcome the basic constitutional defect that we have because of sin. So in the first 16 verses of chapter two he shows that God’s righteousness condemns the moral man, the most moral person who tries to find his standing before God based on his own morality. He shows that basically even the most moral of person is still a hypocrite because he cannot perfectly, consistently fulfil or live out the standards that he claims to hold to.
Concluding about the moral man, NASB “but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth” anyone who doesn’t obey the truth “but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation. [9] {There will be} tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil…” He goes on in verse 12 “For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law…” that is, even though they don’t have the Torah, the Old Testament, the oracles of God, the prophets, nevertheless, he argues, they have a standard in their soul that is a residual of being created in the image and likeness of God, and they know what right is and what wrong is. And they can’t consistently do what they believe to be right. Therefore when they do not do that which they know to be right because of the inherent conscience that is in their soul from God then they stand condemned. Even though God is the one who will justify the good no one is good, no one really lives up to that. We may have a level of relative goodness and a level of relative righteousness when we compare ourselves to some other people, when we compare ourselves to the absolute perfect standard of God none of us measures up, not even the best.
Then he goes to the second argument in 2:17 to 3:8 to show that God’s righteous standard also condemns the Jews. The Jews had three things that they relied upon that set them apart from the rest of the human race. That did set them apart from the rest of the human race and they were part of God’s blessing for the Jews but it didn’t justify them, it just put them in a position of greater accountability. The first thing that they had was the Law, the Torah, the Mosaic covenant. They had all of the covenants, the promises of God, the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures; not just the first five books but the Law and the prophets. Yet, even with that standard given to them none of them can live up to that divine standard, there is always failure, they cannot boast in being completely obedient to the Law.
The second thing that they would rely on was circumcision. Circumcision wasn’t the sign of the Mosaic covenant; it was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant. Abraham was the one who was to be circumcised as a sign of the covenant that God had made with him, and so in the historical development of Judaism there was a reliance upon the fact that because God blessed Abraham then all of those who came from Abraham were also in this privileged position and would automatically be justified or saved before God because of their relationship to Abraham. So Paul concludes that it wasn’t really outward circumcision, outward circumcision was just supposed to be a symbol of inward circumcision or separation unto God; and unless there was that inner circumcision then there was no righteousness in the life of the individual. NASB “But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God.”
The third thing that the Jews would rely on was the fact that they possessed the oracles of God; they were the custodians of divine revelation. One again, Paul shows that that is not enough to give them justification. It put them in a position that they had more knowledge and to whom more was given more was expected, and one again they failed. The conclusion, then, is given starting in v. 9 down through v. 20: All have sinned: Gentiles, the moral person cannot live up to God’s righteousness, and the Jews cannot live up to God’s righteousness. Therefore he concludes in NASB “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There is no human being who has ever lived who can reach a level of righteousness that meets God’s approval. So if man can’t meet God’s approval on his own how can we be justified before God? That is what Paul begins to answer, beginning in verse 21. So from verse 21 down through the end of chapter five we see the explanation of justification by faith alone.
He begins at verse 21. This is really the core of this epistle. The foundation for this epistle is understanding 3:21 down through 5:21, and so he talks about the fact that the righteousness of God apart from the Law is revealed. Notice 1:17 the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, then in verse 18, the start of this section, the wrath of God is revealed. The wrath of God is a phrase for His judgment, the execution of His judgment on mankind. The wrath of God is revealed against Gentiles, against the moral person, and against the religious Jew—all have sinned. The he says, now the righteousness of God apart from the Law is revealed (v. 21). So how does God reveal His righteousness apart from the Law? He talks about three key words here. The first word is justification, NASB “being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” Freely: there is nothing done to earn it, to purchase it, to buy it.
In verses 21 down through 31 Paul emphasizes the fact that justification is by faith alone. He emphasizes that we are justified freely by His grace (v. 24), through “redemption,” the second key word. Redemption is the purchase of a slave; the entire purchase price is paid to free a slave. NASB “whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation…” This word hilaskomai [i(laskomai] is a word used in the Greek to describe the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant in the Old Testament, related to the day of Atonement on the Jewish ritual calendar. So these words—justification, redemption, propitiation, righteousness—are the key words that we have to understand. The principle is that man is now justified by faith alone. It excludes boasting, the Law: [27] “Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith.” So we have to be careful here because Paul uses the term “law” in two differe3nt ways: one in reference to the law of Moses and one in reference to simply believing the gospel—he calls that the law of faith. In the same way he will refer to works in terms of meritorious works in terms of trying to gain the approbation of God or be justified on the basis of these works, but sometimes he also refer to faith as a work, but it is non-meritorious; faith is merely doing something you believe, not in the sense of trying to gain favour with God. The object of faith is what has the merit and that is Jesus Christ.
So his conclusion in verse 28: “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” And it is not just the ritual of the law, it is obeying all of the 613 commandments that are in the Torah. And in chapter four he gives an illustration which comes from the Old Testament, from Abraham: that Abraham was justified by faith. In Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness. That is not when he believed God and it was imputed to him as righteousness, he had already done that before God called him out of Ur of the Chaldees; but it was that Abraham believed God and because he believed God the righteousness of God is imputed to him and it is on the basis of faith that he has received righteousness from another source. It is not his righteousness. Paul goes on to give a couple of illustrations from David, from the Psalms in 4:5-8. Then in vv. 9-12 he shows that Abraham was justified, and his statement of justification is prior to his circumcision. So it is prior to the law, it is prior to circumcision, it is prior to the giving of the Torah, and this shows that justification is by faith alone; it is not related to the law, to circumcision, or the possession of the oracles of God. In 4:13-16 Paul goes on to show that it is not on the basis of the Torah, but in vv. 17-25 he argues that it is on the basis of faith alone. Verse 22 reiterates , it was accounted to him or imputed to him for righteousness.
In chapter five we get into the benefits of justification. Chapter five covers the six basic benefits of justification. In the first verse we have peace with God. Because we are justified and God declares us just, we have peace with God therefore. There is no harmony between man and God rather than enmity. Second, we are able to rejoice in hope. NASB “through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.” Third, the blessings related to spiritual growth. We can glory in tribulations and suffering because we know that this produces perseverance, character, hope, and that all defines spiritual growth. Fourth, we have a tangible expression of the love of God that is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, v.5, and then in v. 8 NASB “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The fifth benefit of justification is that we don’t have to worry about condemnation anymore. NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.” Sixth, [10] “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God …”
In the last part of chapter five, vv. 12-21, he talks about how God’s grace in justification overcomes the deficit that we have because we are born in Adam with the imputation of Adam’s original sin. NASB “ For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.” So it is not on the basis of our obedience but on the basis of Christ’s obedience and His righteousness that many will be made righteous. That concludes the first part, which deals with justification by faith. His righteousness has been revealed in terms of condemnation of all mankind and justification by faith alone is available to every single human being.
Then in chapters 6-8 we have sanctification. Sanctification is the outworking of our justification. Only the justified person is now free to live and to express the righteousness of God in his life. So in chapter six Paul talks about sanctification in relation to sin. In chapter seven he deals with our sanctification in relation to the Law. In chapter eight he talks about our sanctification in relation to the Spirit. The foundation is given in vv. 2, 3 on chapter six—that die to sin. At the instant of our salvation we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, and at that instant the tyranny of the sin nature is broken. Prior to justification we can’t do anything but sin, everything comes out of this corrupt nature. We can produce morality or immorality but it is all out of that corrupt fallen nature; it doesn’t cut any ice with God. The unbeliever only has one option and that is to operate on the basis of his sin nature, but once we are justified we have a new nature given to us. The power and the tyranny of the sin nature is broken and so now we have to live in light of that freedom from sin. NASB “for he who has died is freed from sin.” Three commands are given in vv. 11-13: a) reckon or consider yourselves to be dead to sin; b) Don’t let sin reign in your mortal body; c) Don’t present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin. These are three mandates to the believer and he can now do this, he has the freedom to do this, because he has died to sin.
In verses 15-23 Paul is saying that believers are transferred from the position of being enslaved to sin to being enslaved to righteousness, and only when we live in light of that righteousness can we have the real life that we have in Christ. NASB “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is a verse that we have heard relates to salvation, but it doesn’t. This is in the sanctification section of Romans. , , and 8 isn’t talking about how we are justified, it is talking about how the justified person lives. This verse has to do with experiencing the full abundant life that God has for the believer. The wages of sin is death, i.e. the believer living in disobedience and the end result is not spiritual death, it is carnal death, a non-productive life. But there is a productive life, a fullness of life in Christ Jesus our Lord. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Chapter seven describes a relationship to the law, that we have been freed from the law and that the law cannot provide justification. In the Old Testament they were under the law and Paul tried to live under the law, but he experiences the frustration that you cannot consistently and fully fulfil the law. The law is designed to expose sinfulness. 7. Because whenever you sin, break the law, you realize you can’t keep it. NASB “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “YOU SHALL NOT COVET.” So the law exposes the fact that we can’t keep it, that that is not the path to justification; yet, the law is still good. [12] “So then, the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” Then in verses 13-25, you can’t live out your justification on the basis of the law because there is always this conflict in the life of the person just trying to do it on his own, he doesn’t do what he wants to do and he does what he doesn’t want to do, and that is the ongoing conflict in the life of the believer not living on the basis of the provision of the Holy Spirit.
Notice in chapters 6, 7, and 8 where there is the emphasis on the spiritual life the Holy Spirit doesn’t come into it until chapter eight. Chapter six talks about the fact that we are freed from sin. Well not that we are freed from sin how do we live to righteousness? Do we do it by the law? Chapter seven says, no you can’t do it by just pulling yourself up by your moral bootstraps. You have to rely on the Holy Spirit, and that is chapter eight. So we can’t answer the question of how that is raised in chapter six until we start dealing with the realities of the Holy Spirit in chapter eight where we are told, NASB “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus… [4] …who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” So we are talking about those who are in Christ Jesus, not unbelievers, in this passage—justified believers who are either living according to the Spirit or walk according to the flesh. There are those two options. If they are living according to the flesh then the result is going to be temporal death, carnal death; if they are walking according to the Spirit then they are going to experience the fullness of God’s blessings in their life.
NASB “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.” The verses here down to verse 17 focus on the benefits of walking by means of the Spirit, and then in verses 18-39 it is the goal of sanctification which is our ultimate glorification. It concludes: , NASB “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That raises the question: what about Israel? It seems like God has turned His back on Israel. So now in chapters 9-11 Paul is going to talk about how God’s righteousness is vindicated in His dealings with Israel. In chapter nine he emphasizes that God has not changed, He has not rejected Israel completely. In verse four he says that the Israelites still have the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, the promises [9] “whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever.” So that is the foundation; God has not completely left Israel. There is a purpose for God’s seeming rejection of Israel, it is because Israel rejected God, rejected Jesus as the Messiah when He came, but nevertheless God still has a plan and a purpose for Israel. He deals with the two objections, covered in verses 14-19 where the objection is: well God isn’t really righteous, is He. He answers that and shows that God is indeed righteous and as the sovereign God He raises up the people for one purpose, others for another purpose. This isn’t talking about salvation or justification but the purpose and the plan of God. The second objection is given in verses 19-29 which deals His plan for His people Israel and as God has the right to raise up Gentiles for His honor and His glory, and that if He wants to demonstrate His wrath to those who have chosen to be disobedient then He can do so (vv. 21, 22). Then he focuses on the fact that it is Israel’s rejection of God that has led to blessing to the Gentiles. The conclusion is then given in vv. 30-33, talking about how God has now opened the door of salvation to the Gentiles.
Chapter ten is about Israel’s present condition and that though many have temporarily rejected the gospel eventually they will call upon God. Chapter eleven deals with that in details, that Israel’s rejection now is not total, there are many Jews who will accept Jesus as Messiah, and there are many Jews who are justified because of that. The rejection of Israel is not final and there is a future time when the Jews will turn back to God and accept Jesus as Messiah and all Israel will be saved.
In chapter twelve we get into the implications of justification: now that we are justified how does a justified person live? How does a justified person carry out their life in relationship to those in the church, to those in society in relation to government, to those other believers, some who are weak and some who are strong? That covers chapters 12-14. The big transition begins in NASB “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, {which is} your spiritual service of worship. [2] And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” This lays the foundation for application. Now that you understand what took place in terms of justification—a non-experiential reality—you can see how this is to make a difference in all of your relationships, everything in your life. In verses 3-8 he talks about spiritual gifts within the local church and how those are to be used for the benefit of other believers, and then in verses 9-21 about how Christian love, unconditional love, impersonal love, is to dominate all the decision making in the Christian life—a rejection of arrogance and self-absorption and turning to humility and depending upon God to take care of any personal conflicts that arise.
Chapter thirteen talks about government. Remember that Paul wrote this at a time when one of the worst dictators of all time, Nero, was ruling over Rome and yet he says, NASB “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.” So even if in our opinion the authority is evil or wrong we are to respect the principle of authority. That is always hard for us to deal with, we are always looking at the person and we have to respect the office even though we may not respect the person in the office. Of course, repsect for authority always goes back to the basic issues in the angelic conflict. He connects this to paying taxes and customs and respect for those in authority in government. This is applied in other ways: in verses 8-14 in terms of how this relates to others in society. We are to love one another and he applies this in terms of the Ten Commandments. We can only do this by putting on Christ, verses 11-14.
In chapter fourteen we deal with how we deal with other believers. Some believers are going to be all twisted and are going to get the wrong ideas, some are going to try to impose their standards on everybody else; others are going to go in the other direction. So here he deals with the issue of how to treat weaker brothers, and esteeming one another and honouring one another even though we may be wrong in areas of application, and dealing with the law of love toward the weaker brother in the last part of the chapter.
Chapter fifteen at the very beginning Paul talks about the law of liberty, the principle of liberty in relationship to the application of bearing each others’ burdens and loving one another because we are all justified. So there should be a greater measure of love for those in the body of Christ. Then we come to the conclusion starting in verse 14 where he goes back to explaining his reason for writing again. He talks about his future plan to visit Rome in vv. 22-33, and then he begins in a long chapter to give greetings to a number of different people who are within the congregation at Rome. He concludes by saying, NASB “Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, {leading} to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen.”
That gives us an overview of Romans.

Romans 003b-Paul: Gospel Summary.

Romans 1:1 NASB95
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
Romans 003b-Paul: Gospel Summary. ,
The purpose that Paul has for writing Romans is to clarify the relationship of the righteousness of God to the human race and how the human race, fallen in sin—including the moral person who thinks that he is good enough to somehow gain God’s approval, including the Jewish person who has the law, circumcision, the covenants and relies upon them—all come short of the glory of God, and because all have sinned it is necessary for someone other than a human being to provide the kind of righteousness that we need in order to gain favour with God; we can’t do it on our own. As Isaiah said in 64:6, “All of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” The best that we do is still far below the standard of God’s righteousness. Righteousness always refers to the standard of God which is His own standard of holiness and perfection.
The first seventeen verses of Romans chapter one introduce us to the basic ideas and theme that Paul is going to develop in Romans. A point of understanding: In any piece of literature that is well written there is an introduction and a conclusion. The introductory statements often are repeated or clarified in some way in the conclusion. The introduction is going to orient and focus readers on the basic ideas that are going to be developed within the body of the literature, and then the conclusion is going to tie it all together. The same is true for most of the books of the Bible. Paul begins in verse 1 of this chapter with a salutation that is interrupted by an anacoluthon (a fancy word for rabbit trail, going off on a side track) from the middle of the verse and down through verse 6 in which he emphasizes some of the main ideas that he is going to cover and develop within the body of the epistle. He begins by identifying who he is as “the apostle Paul” and that he is known to the congregation in Rome, not because he has been there—this is the only epistle that he wrote which was to a group with whom he had no face to face contact—he had never been to Rome.
Paul was born somewhere between 4 or 5 AD on the one hand, and probably 15 on the other hand. The first place that Paul is mentioned is at the martyrdom of Stephen at the end of Acts chapter 7. He is mentioned there as a young man standing by holding the garments of those who are stoning Stephen. He is called a young man. That is not a technical term. He was probably between the age of eighteen and thirty, we don’t really know exactly how old he was at the time but there are some hints that do give us these parameters in Scripture. It is indicated that based on where he was when he left Jerusalem, when he left Damascus and who was ruling in Damascus that he would have to have left Damascus before AD 40. Then if Jesus was crucified in AD 33, and most scholars in chronology place the stoning of Stephen somewhere around AD 35, and if Paul is a young man, say eighteen, that would mean that he was born somewhere around AD 17. If he was twelve years older then he would have been born somewhere around 5. He came to Jerusalem when he was fourteen to study under Gamaliel (). He would have arrived approximately at the time when Jesus began His public ministry. If he was a little older he would have already been in Jerusalem for maybe seven or eight years before Jesus began His public ministry. It is probably a fair deduction to say that with all the things that were going on around the ministry of Jesus, all of the discussion, John the Baptist’s ministry—Luke tells us that everyone went out to the Jordan to be baptized by John—and when Jesus began to teach the same thing, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” there were people saying “Who is He? Is this the Messiah?” These questions were being raised, so it would almost be unrealistic to think that Paul being in Jerusalem during this time would not have been aware of the presence and the teaching related to Jesus. We can’t prove it but it is a fair deduction based on the chronology.
Paul would probably have had some training already in Tarsus. Tarsus had a university that was highly respected throughout the ancient world. Many scholars believe with varying degrees of certainty that the apostle Paul was educated there because he demonstrates such a tremendous skill with language and logic and rhetoric that are evidenced within his writing that this would not have all been the result of his rabbinical training but that he had had some education prior to that. Tarsus was also a major center for tent making and it is believed that his father probably had a major commercial enterprise in manufacturing tents. Paul had a Roman citizenship and that would have come through his father. So we can assume that Paul came from a fairly well-to-do family of merchants who manufactured tents. By the time that Paul wrote Romans in the winter of 56-57 he would be approximately 20 years older, somewhere between 40 and fifty.
NASB “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called {as} an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.” Paul speaks of himself by three things. He is a bond-servant of Jesus Christ, he was called to be an apostle, and he was separated to the gospel of God. So Paul emphasizes his mission, which is related to his commission by Jesus Christ to be an apostle to take the gospel to the Gentiles. That is his message, the gospel, and that is what he explains in the epistle to the Romans. The first thing that he says about himself is that he is a bond-servant of Jesus Christ, the Greek word doulos [douloj] which was a basic word that could mean either a servant who was in that position of their own free will or a slave. Paul’s use of the phrase that he is a servant of Jesus Christ has echoes of the phrase that is used again and again by the prophets of the Old Testament that they were servants of Yahweh, servants of the Lord. What this emphasizes is that they recognized that they were here on the earth for the primary purpose of serving the Lord and not their own desires, their own interests, their own agendas. They were given a divine mission to be carried out in terms of what God had instructed them. So the fact that Paul calls himself a bond-servant of Christ first and foremost is a recognition that he had reached a point in his spiritual growth and spiritual maturity that his whole life’s purpose is subordinate to God’s purpose for his life.
But this word doulos is also used in a more fundamental concept in relation to the spiritual life. Paul had to reach this point first before he would reach a more mature expression of being a servant of God, just as we all do, and this is given in NASB “I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in {further} lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.” Remember, , and 8 describe the spiritual life. In this verse Paul states the fact that we were originally born slaves of unrighteousness but now that we are dead to sin every believer is to be a slave to righteousness. So he had to first come to a point in his spiritual growth where he learned that he had a new master. It wasn’t the sin nature, it wasn’t his own self-centeredness, it was the Lord Jesus Christ because at the cross at the moment he trusted Christ there is this break with the sin nature. That tyranny is broken, we are to reckon ourselves to be dead to sin, and now we are to live as slaves of righteousness. Once we get to that point in terms of our spiritual growth then being a servant of God becomes the natural next step as we recognize that we are here to serve God and not our own agenda.
The second thing that he says is he is called to be an apostle. The word translated “called” is kletos [klhtoj] is one of two or three different ways Paul expresses this idea of being designated something by God. He is designated, given a commission as an apostle. That is what it means to be called to an apostle. At the point of salvation in Acts chapter eight when the resurrected, ascended, glorified Lord Jesus Christ appeared to Saul when he was going to Damascus to arrest a number of Christians, and said: “Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me?” Those with him saw the light and heard the sound of the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ. They didn’t know what Jesus said because it wasn’t any of their business. Paul was then ordered to go to Damascus where he sight would be restored and the Lord Jesus Christ at that point told him that he would be His messenger to the Gentiles. So the Lord Jesus Christ commissioned the apostle Paul for a specific task. That is the core meaning of this world apostolos [a)postoloj]. In the New Testament an apostolos is a man who is officially commissioned by an authorizing agent—Jesus Christ, a local church or someone else—and given the authority to perform a task. In the New Testament there are three different kinds of apostles and they are distinguished by three different categories: who commissioned them, what they were commissioned to do, and whether the commissioning involved a spiritual gift.
Jesus Christ commissioned the twelve disciples who were called apostles in Luke chapter six to take the gospel to the house of Israel, and their message was: “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.” There was no spiritual gift involved. They were called apostles but that is not the same as what we have after the day of Pentecost. Then there was Jesus Christ commissioning the twelve to go to the world, and this involved a spiritual gift that was given to them when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost and the apostles had the spiritual gift of apostleship, and it is a church age ministry. So there was an apostleship of Jesus in the time during the incarnation that is related to the house of Israel but it is not a spiritual gift, it is not a church age ministry at all, and then there is the church age ministry that began on the day of Pentecost that is related to this mission to the world. Then the third way in which the term is used and applied is to Barnabas and a number of other leaders in the early church who were not commissioned by the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ but were commissioned by a local church and are sent out as missionaries. So that is a lower case apostleship, it doesn’t involve a spiritual gift of apostleship—though it may involve a spiritual gift of teaching or evangelism.
There are three things in Scripture that are requirements for someone to be an apostle. First, it was a gift that was given by the Holy Spirit. They were appointed by Christ, , NASB “And He gave some {as} apostles, and some {as} prophets, and some {as} evangelists, and some {as} pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.” This clearly emphasizes that it is Jesus who appointed the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists and the pastors and teachers. He does the gifting by the Holy Spirit, . Second, an apostle needed to be an eye-witness of the resurrection or have seen the resurrected Christ, and commissioned by Him—, ; . Third, the apostleship was evidenced by an enduement by miraculous power, .
Paul was “separated to the gospel of God.” This is the Greek word aphorizo [a)forizw], aorist participle. We don’t have the main verb here so it is hard to tell just what the grammatical function of this is. There is a connection between his calling to be an apostle and is being separated, appointed to the gospel of God. The idea behind the word aphorizo is primarily that which is separate or separated for some purpose, the idea of being appointed. It is that he is detached from the world and attached to or united to the cause of the gospel.
In that first verse Paul in just three phrases says a lot about who he is. He identifies himself first and foremost in a means of humility by saying that he is a slave or bond-servant to Jesus Christ. The second thing he focuses on is his mission. He is called an apostle, which also emphasizes his authority to say the things that he is going to say and to explain and articulate the doctrine that he is going to articulate in this epistle, and that this calling to be an apostle is related to his being united to the cause of the gospel. As soon as he mentions the word “gospel” then he is going to say some things about what the gospel is. This is indicated in the next three verses. It is set up by a relative participle at the beginning of verse 2 which begins “which He promised.” The “which” refers back to the gospel.
NASB “which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.” It is the gospel that God promised before, i.e. in times past, a similar idea to that stated in . This is his main thought: the gospel which God promised through the Old Testament prophets. That is his focal point. The gospel didn’t start with Paul. At the time he is writing Romans the term “holy Scriptures” would have referred to the Hebrew Bible, and he is not referring specifically to the New Testament. This was a standard operating procedure within the movement of those who understood and believed that Jesus was the Messiah promised and foretold in the Old Testament. In fact, Jesus used this exact approach many times in His ministry but one of the most obvious occurred after His resurrection when He appeared to two disciples, one of who was named Cleopas, on their way to Emmaus. NASB “Now He said to them, ‘These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’” He pointed out that everything that He did was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, clearly saying that there are numerous statements in the Old Testament that point to the Messiah so that when the Messiah comes the Jews would be able to recognize Him as the Messiah. [45] “Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, [46] and He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day.’”
Jesus said on the road to Emmaus that the Old Testament said that the Messiah must “suffer these things,” that the Old Testament taught that the Messiah would both rule and suffer. The second section of Isaiah focuses on the servant. In chapter 53 Isaiah wrote: NASB “Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? [2] For He [this suffering servant in the future] grew up before Him [before God] like a tender shoot, And like a root out of parched ground; He has no {stately} form or majesty That we should look upon Him, Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. [3] He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.” He is rejected by His people, which is what happened with Jesus. [4] “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted.”
The Hebrew words that are used in verse 4 are the same words that are used in reference to the atonement of animal sacrifices. So the words that are used indicate that the suffering servant is going to bear in His body our griefs, our sorrows, our sin.
NASB “But He was pierced through for our transgressions [clear statement of substitutionary atonement], He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being {fell} upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.” He is punished that we might have peace. That is what Paul is going to talk about in : the outgrowth of justification is peace with God.
NASB “All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him. [7] He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth; Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, So He did not open His mouth.” What Isaiah is saying is that there is going to be this future servant and God is going to punish Him for our sin. [8] “By oppression and judgment He was taken away; And as for His generation, who considered That He was cut off out of the land of the living For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke {was due?} [9] His grave was assigned with wicked men, Yet He was with a rich man in His death, Because He had done no violence, Nor was there any deceit in His mouth. [10] But the LORD was pleased To crush Him, putting {Him} to grief; If He would render Himself {as} a guilt offering, He will see {His} offspring, He will prolong {His} days, And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.
This is one of the most precise prophecies in the Old Testament and yet there are some coming along today and saying this is not really talking about Jesus at all. That has proved to be wrong and debunked by many people, but we live in a horrible time today where people are just eviscerating the truth of the Scripture. Paul said that the gospel is what God promised through His prophets in the holy Scripture.

Romans 004b-The Humanity and Deity of Jesus.

Romans 1:1 NASB95
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
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Romans 004b-Humanity and Deity of Jesus.
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The life of Paul: four sections
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a) His birth to his spiritual rebirth.
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b) From conversion to his first missionary journey.
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c) The three missionary journeys.
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d) Jerusalem, Rome and beyond.
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In the period of from birth to conversion the most that we can guess is that he is born somewhere between AD 5 and 15, because at the time that Stephen was stoned we are told at the end of that the people laid their cloaks and garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. That term would be applied to someone probably not over 30 and not someone necessarily much younger than 20. He spends much of his time in Jerusalem, so we can identify each section of time with a general location. Regarding his background he states several times that he was of the tribe of Benjamin and a Pharisee. —a “Hebrew born of the Hebrews.” That is an important phrase because at the time of the early church in the first century there was a division between Hellenized Jews, those who were in the disapora; those who were in Judea, strictly following the traditions of the fathers and those who had become more attuned to the culture of the Greek civilization around them. Paul’s statement that he was a Hebrew born of the Hebrews is emphasizing his roots in first century Judaism and the fact that his family would have been strict observers of the Law. , NASB “For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it; and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.” He tells us a little more in NASB “ although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more: circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.” Again he is emphasizing that in terms of obedience following the Torah he was consistent. If anybody could have worked their way into heaven and into God’s favour, then Paul could have done that.
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NASB “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from {the} Law…” So he is contrasting his first part of his life, between his birth and his conversion to Christianity, to be a time when he was consistently obedient to the Law, zealous and pursuing righteousness on the basis of the Torah more than any other. Then he recognized that that never would be good enough. “…but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which {comes} from God on the basis of faith” is the only basis for salvation: we are given righteousness that comes from God, it is not something we produce on our own.
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NASB “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated under Gamaliel, strictly according to the law of our fathers, being zealous for God just as you all are today.” There is some debate over the exact meaning of the phrase in that verse, that he was “brought up in this city.” Does that mean that Paul was moved there when he was very young and lived his whole life there? We know from another passage that he lived with his sister’s family in Jerusalem. Or did he come when he was about fourteen years of age. The verb that he was “brought up in this city, educated under Gamaliel” is from the Greek word anatrepho [ a)natrefw] which can also mean to train or to educate. So does that mean that he was there from when he was very young, or did he just receive his primary education and training as a rabbi in that city? It is probably better to understand it as being sent there when he was around fourteen to study under Gamaliel. There has even been some speculation that Saul of Tarsus con tributed some portions in the Talmud as the brightest student of Gamaliel, though it can’t really be proven. There is a reference in the Talmud that there was an unnamed pupil of Gamaliel who manifested “impudence in matters of learning and tried to refute his master.” So there is speculation that that is an allusion to the apostle Paul.
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Then the second period is from his conversion to being a missionary. That involves three locations. He is saved on the way to Damascus. He had received authorisation from the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to arrest those who were followers of Jesus, accuse them of being troublemakers, put them in prison (and in some cases executed they were executed). It was on the way to Damascus that Jesus appeared to him and said: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” Saul is blinded by the light, commissioned by the Lord to take the gospel to the Gentiles, is sent to Damascus where his sight would be restored.
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He stayed in Damascus for three years and he had somewhat of an interesting ministry there. He was very confrontational in his approach to those who were hostile to Christianity. He was in Damascus for three years, and then on his first trip to Jerusalem he causes a lot of trouble. According to Galatians he is only there for fifteen days, then he was sent back to his home town of Tarsus and there was peace in Jerusalem. He spent somewhere around ten to fourteen years in Tarsus where he minsters in obscurity for ten years. During that time it is the church in Antioch that is established and begins to grow and there is a desire to send out missionaries to carry the gospel. One of the leaders in the church at Antioch is Barnabas and he sends to Tarsus for Paul and brings him to Antioch. It is from the church in Antioch that he and Barnabas are sent out on the first missionary journey. They take with them a young man by the name of John Mark.
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Paul goes on three missionary journeys. The first is rather short. He goes to Crete, the southern part of Turkey, the towns of Lystra, Derby, Iconia, Antioch in Pisidia; and they loop back to follow up on the churches they had started. Then they headed back to give an account back in Antioch. They were gone for a little over a year. They left in the April of AD 48 and were on the journey until September of 49. They go to Jerusalem for the Jerusalem council, and there is the second journey where he goes back and revisits some of the churches they went to the first time, then heads north-west at Troas. He goes across to Greece, to Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth, and then he goes back to Ephesus and then Antioch. On the third journey he will retrace his visit to Greece.
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On the first journey he writes one book, Galatians; on the second he writes two books, 1 & 2 Thessalonians; on the third journey he retraces his visit to Greece from September of 53 to May of 57, and he writes three books, 1 & 2 Corinthians and Romans. Then he is on his way to Jerusalem at which time he will be arrested. He will appeal to Caesar and will be kept in somewhat soft house arrest in Caesarea, and then eventually is sent to Rome where he is under house arrest for two years before he is released. That takes us to the end of Acts, and the rest is sort of speculation based on some things said in 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus and it is generally believed by most conservative Bible scholars that he went on a fourth journey which took him to Spain, possibly to England, back down to Crete, several cities in Macedonia and Greece. During this time he wrote 1 Timothy as well as Titus; then he is arrested again and imprisoned in Rome for approximately two years. This is when Nero burns down the city and blames it on the Christians. He is decapitated by Nero in 67.
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NASB “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called {as} an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.” The phrase “the gospel of God” becomes really the head phrase for the next three verses. The next three verses are then going to explain more about the gospel. When we get to verse 2 we have the relative clause, “which He,” God the Father, “promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.” So verse 2 explains the gospel: that the gospel didn’t just begin with Jesus, with Paul, it had its roots in the Old Testament. The Old Testament prophets are the ones who prepared the people, of God, Israel, to accept the Messiah. Paul immediately gets to the issue: he is separated to the gospel of God, and then we have a three-verse diversion here where he makes several points related to the gospel. First of all it was promised through His prophets in the holy Scriptures. The standard procedure all through the New Testament is to take the reader back to Old Testament prophecies to show just how Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies.
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NASB “concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh.” The claim that Paul is making here is that these prophecies were concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh. That verse focuses on the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in His humanity He is a descendant of David as prophesied in the Old Testament. So we see a movement in the prophecies from general to specific. predicts that it will be the seed of the woman who will defeat the serpent (Satan), and we see the shift to the third person singular pronoun, “he”, meaning the seed of the woman, “shall bruise your head,” addressing the serpent, “and you shall trample on His heel.” It appears from this verse that what happens is they each strike a fatal blow on the other. It is necessary for the seed of the woman to defeat the serpent through His own death and then He will be raised from the dead. This is fulfilled, NASB “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law.” Only someone who is fully human can die as a substitute, a true, genuine, real substitute for human beings. The second key prophecy is that the seed of the woman would come through a virgin birth. NASB “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.” Isaiah is addressing Ahaz who was one of the evil kings in the southern kingdom of Judah and it is at a time when the northern kingdom of Israel has gone in to an alliance with the Syrians and they are threatening to attack and conquer the southern kingdom of Judah. And not just that, but they want to replace the king in Jerusalem with someone of their own choosing. So it is a direct attack against the house of David. It goes back to the promise that God had made to David that there would always be someone from his descendants who would sit on the throne of David. The threat now is to the house of David and so God told Ahaz through Isaiah to ask for a sign. Ahaz in his false humility said he wasn’t going to do that, he wasn’t going to test God. Isaiah said the Lord would give him a sign anyway. “Behold a virgin” has an article, “the virgin; and the use of the article was designed to get his attention. There was a thread of thought within Judaism at that time of the Old Testament prophets that “the virgin” refers to the woman who will give birth to the seed. So the use of the article emphasizes a unique individual woman: that “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”
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Then there are prophecies related to calling Jesus the Son of God. identifies the Lord’s anointed, Heb. mashiach, as the Son of God; “this day I have begotten you” is fulfilled in passages such as where at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist a voice came from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” We also know that He will be a descendant of Abraham, NASB “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” This is fulfilled in such passages as NASB “The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” NASB “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as {referring} to many, but {rather} to one, ‘And to your seed,’ that is, Christ.” tells us that he will be a descendant from Jacob. NASB “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; A star shall come forth from Jacob…” So there is the allusion to a star which is then fulfilled at the time of the birth of Jesus when there is a special star that is seen in the heavens.
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Just a word about this star. Every year at Christmas time we are going to read in National Geographic or watch one of those specials on television where they are going to try to explain the star as a normal, natural phenomena. But this is not what we are referred to in Matthew’s magi account, because they saw a sign in the heavens, His star, and then they followed this star which took them directly to the house where the Lord Jesus was staying. Stars are so far away that they can’t indicate any particular individual house. So this was a special star, believed to be the glory of God, the Shekinah, that was shining to indicate the location of the birth of Jesus.
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There is also the promise in As Jacob was pronouncing prophecies over each of his sons. NASB “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, Nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, Until Shiloh comes, And to him {shall be} the obedience of the peoples.” This has always been understood both by Jews and Christians as a messianic verse indicating that the Messiah would come from the tribe of Judah. It is indicated in that Jesus’ descent is through the line of Judah. Jesus is also indicated as being a son of David. also points out that He is a descendant of Jesse, David’s father. NASB “Behold, {the} days are coming,” declares the LORD, “When I will raise up for David a righteous Branch; And He will reign as king and act wisely And do justice and righteousness in the land.” In & 10 the Messiah is indicated as a Branch coming out of the root of Jesse. Jesus is a Branch from David. Passages such as indicate that Jesus is of direct descent through Nathan, the son of David. The heir of David could not some through the Solomonic line, it comes through the line of Nathan. The purpose for the genealogy in Matthew is to show that Joseph can’t be the Dad, because Joseph comes from Coniah.
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He was born in Bethlehem. NASB “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, {Too} little to be among the clans of Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, From the days of eternity.” The only way to have somebody born in Bethlehem whose goings forth are from everlasting [eternity] is if the person that is born is also an eternal being. So again and again and again in the Old Testament these prophecies about the Messiah emphasize that he is going to be born of a woman, born of a virgin, born in the line of David; He is going to be true humanity but He is going to be called Mighty God, He is from everlasting. The attributes of deity are also assigned to Him. He is called Immanuel, ; .
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So in , the first relative clause, Paul states that the gospel was promised beforehand by the prophets in the holy Scriptures. The second clause, the prepositional clause in verse 3, also refers back to head noun, the gospel. Verse 3 is an extension of verse 2; verse 3 is on the same line adding more information related to the gospel. The gospel was “concerning His Son,” Jesus Christ our Lord. There is an emphasis here that Jesus Christ is His Son. That emphasizes the pre-existence of Jesus as the Son of God. Jesus did not become the Son of God when He was physically born, when He was baptized by John the Baptist, or at the resurrection; He was eternally the Son of God, recognizing that the Father was eternally the Father. These are distinctions or titles that are made to indicate their respective functions and roles within the plan of God. But Jesus is eternally the Son. So He is referred to here, “concerning His Son”; and NKJV “Jesus,” the Hebrew word meaning Savior, “Christ,” the Greek word for the anointed one or appointed one, the equivalent of the Hebrew word “Messiah.”
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There are prophecies in Isaiah that speak of the fact that the Messiah will appear and will heal many, give sight to the blind, and He will heal the lame. is one of those passages that emphasizes the role of the Messiah and that this would be one of the signs. Another passage is which is one of the most specific prophecies about the death of the Messiah. In that chapter there are twelve things that are pointed out about the Messiah: He would be rejected by His people, He would be called a man of sorrows, that He would live a life of rejection and suffering. He was despised by others, He carried our sorrows, He was smitten and afflicted by God, indicating that he would be judged by God. He was pierced for our transgressions, indicating a substitutionary payment; He was wounded for our sins, He suffered like a lamb, showing that the sacrificial lamb was a picture of the subsitutionary payment of Jesus for our sins. He would die with the wicked; He had two thieves on either side of Him on the cross; He was sinless and did not deserve the punishment that He received, He had committed no sin; and while He was being punished He prayed for others. Other passages such as indicate that His hands and His feet would be pierced. indicates that His side would be pierced, and in it indicates that they would cast lots for His garments. All of that was fulfilled as prophesied. In terms of chronology almost the precise week of His death was predicted in the revelation given to Daniel in . His resurrection is predicted in and His ascension was predicted in .
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addresses the human side but the next verse addresses the divine side. So there is a parallel between the one born of the seed of David according to the flesh, i.e. in His humanity, and on the other side, NASB “who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Note there that this phrase “declared the Son of God,” is a bad translation. He is not “declared,” that is not the meaning of the Greek word. The Greek word is horizo [o(rizw]from which we get our English word “horizon.” Horizon is a definition, it defines the end of our sight; we can only see to the horizon. That is the meaning of the word, it is something that has boundaries; it is something that is set, something that is appointed or determined. So the best translation is that “He was appointed, not to be the Son of God, but to be the Son of God with power. He has always been the Son of God but with the resurrection and His ascension to the right hand of God the Father He is now in hypostatic union and is awaiting the time that the Father will give Him the kingdom. The phrase “according to the Spirit of holiness” is the only time Paul uses it and it is another term for the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who is the one who enabled Him in His spiritual life during the incarnation.
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Then we have the last phrase “by the resurrection from the dead,” which is the Greek phrase ex anatasia [e)c a)nastasia] which indicates “out from the resurrection from the dead.” But the Greek preposition can also have the idea of cause, and can also indicate time or origin or a motive, and the best translation is the idea of cause—“because of the resurrection from the dead.” He is “appointed to be the Son of God with power because of the resurrection of the dead.” This is what prepares Him in His glorified state to then take on and conclude the role of being the Son of Man and establishing His kingdom.

Romans 005b-Paul's Priorities: Proclaiming the Good News.

Romans 1:5 NASB95
through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake,
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Romans 005b-Paul's Priorities: Proclaiming the Good News.
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What we see here is not only some of the key ideas that Paul is going to reinforce and expand as he goes through this epistle but also we see something of his priorities in terms of his own apostolic ministry. The trouble with priorities is all of the little things that come up every day in terms of immediate demands that interfere with our priorities. Priorities are designed for us to establish what our scale of values are in terms of work, family, our involvement in the local church; and then we live on the basis of those priorities. The problem that everybody commonly experiences is that we live in an era when everything is rushed. We can’t imagine what it must have been like a hundred years ago and before that, and just think that from the time of the creation up until the early eighteen hundreds nothing ever moved any faster than a horse. Communication never moved any faster than a human being could travel. Life proceeded at a really calm pace and nobody expected an instant response to a letter; nobody was in a hurry. Yet today we send a message and expect a reply within 30-45 seconds, and if we don’t we start getting a little bit impatient. It just puts that time pressure on us so that the immediate urgent things crowd out priorities, and the priorities are the things that at the end of the week we say we really wish we had got A, B and C done but instead all these other things got done except for the things that we really wanted or needed to get done. All that does is build up a lot of anxiety and tension.
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In the Christian life there are also priorities and those priorities we have to pay attention to in terms of spiritual growth, and we see the indication of what some of these priorities are in this opening introduction to the epistle to the Romans.
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NASB “who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, [5] through whom…” So now Paul is moving his statement forward that it is through this one who is identified as the descendant of David, according to the flesh, and is also identified as deity. The phrase “Son of God” is a Hebraism, an idiom in Hebrew indicating a character, an attribute or a quality of somebody, and so this phrase is indicating full deity. “Son of Man” is indicating true humanity. So He is validated by God the Father as the Son of God, full deity, by the resurrection from the dead. That is God’s seal of approval for what Christ did on the cross paying for our sins. Through Him “… we have received grace and apostleship to bring about {the} obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake.”
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This raises some questions, especially in main clause, “we have received grace and apostleship,” in trying to understand exactly what that describes. Both nouns are used without an article here and so we have to catch what the sense is. “We have received” is one verb, the aorist passive of lambano [lambanw], and we have to ask who the “we” is. Is Paul talking about “we” meaning himself and his audience? Have they received the grace and apostleship? No, so he is not using the “we” to refer to himself and his audience, he is using it as he does in several places like an editorial “we,” a royal “we.” Paul is just speaking about himself in a plural form, so he is talking about the fact that he received grace and apostleship. But these two nouns should not be understood as being dependent upon one another, they refer to two different aspects of what occurred when Saul was on the way to Damascus to arrest and imprison the Christians he would find there. When Jesus as the resurrected, glorified Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him in a bright light, his companions hear a sound but they can’t make out the specifics of what is said. They see the light as an objective experience; something happened; something objective took place that was witnessed by those who were on the road with him who certainly weren’t sympathetic to anything that was going on. So Paul is confronted by the Lord Jesus Christ; that is an act of grace. Grace means that those who are undeserving receive something of blessing, of benefit, even though they don’t deserve it. So Paul received grace there in that the Lord Jesus Christ personally appeared to him, and it is in that revelation of Himself as the risen Messiah that Paul responds by trusting in Him as his savior and accepting the fact that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, as promised in the Old Testament.
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That is the grace part. But in that action that occurred the Lord Jesus Christ is identifying Paul’s mission; that he is going to take the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. So his mission as opposed to the mission of the other eleven is going to be oriented to the Gentiles. So he receives two things. He receives grace in terms of salvation, and salvation is always by grace, not by works (, ); it is the free gift of God. And he receives apostleship in terms of a spiritual gift and a mission. An apostleship is a mission for a particular task. That task is laid out in the next phrase, “for obedience to the faith.” In the Greek this is a phrase that begins with the preposition eis [e)ij] which always indicates a goal or direction in a phrase of this nature—eis plus the accusative of hupakouo [u(pakouw)], “obedience.”
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There are lot of people who think that whenever somebody comes along and starts emphasizing obedience to the Bible that somehow that is legalism. But it is not, that is just a distortion of the concept of legalism. Legalism has to do with an external as the basis for the blessing of God: that if I do X, Y and Z then that is the cause of God blessing me. What the Scripture teaches is that God imputes to us the perfect righteousness of Christ—that is in every believer—and it is on the basis of that perfect righteousness that God blesses us, not on the basis of obedience. But on the basis of obedience what happens is we grow spiritually, and as a result of that spiritual growth God then provides for us many of the things that He has said or accrued to the believer as he grows in maturity and has the capacity to enjoy those things. But it is not because of obedience as the basis for blessing.
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The phrase here, “for the obedience of faith,” is understood different ways a man noun “obedience” but that noun is qualified by another noun that in this case is in the genitive case. The genitive case usually indicates possession and translated by the English preposition “of”—“obedience of the faith.” But that phrase “of the faith” has many different shades of meaning. So there are some who say that it is “for obedience from faith,” genitive of source, that obedience comes from the source of your faith (and that is possible). Others say it is obedience belonging to faith, in terms of the genitive of possession; others that it is obedience in the sense of with reference to faith. So we want to see if we can narrow down our understanding of what Paul is talking about when he talks about the obedience of the faith.
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The best way to understand that is to go to NASB “but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, {leading} to obedience of faith.” In literature often there is often the situation where there is an introduction and a conclusion and the main ideas are bracketed by repeating or focusing on a similar phrase. That is what Paul has done here. By repeating the identical phrase in his conclusion he helps us to understand what he means by it. That phrase “by the Scriptures of the prophets” should remind us of NASB “which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.” He picks up those same ideas: prophetic Scriptures in 1:2 and in 16:26. The end result: “obedience to the faith.”
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When we look at this phrase something else strikes us that doesn’t show up in the English. That is that in terms of the Greek, three words: the preposition eis, and two nouns. But in English there is the insertion of an article, “the.” Paul only uses the article in the Greek when he is identifying faith in terms of the body of doctrine that is foundational to Christianity: Christian truth, Christian doctrine—the Christian faith. So the inclusion of the article in English is misleading because Paul is not talking about “the faith” that has been given once for all to the saints, he is talking about the act of believing in what God has revealed. This is evidenced by the lack of the article in both 1:5 and 16:26. It should be translated “for obedience of faith.” It has a measure of ambiguity in the English. What Paul is talking about here is related to faith in terms of belief in the message, and there is more than one message, more than one commandment. The primary commandment is related to justification, what we usually refer to as salvation: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved (). “Believe” there is a command, an imperative. So the gospel is really a command from God to man to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and the result is that you will be saved. That is the first and most significant command, the command of priority, that first of all we have to be sure that we are justified before God.
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The second aspect of faith has to do with ongoing trust in God as we grow and mature in the Christian life. We need to look at a significant passage for understanding what Paul is talking about here when he expresses the fact that we have a message, as he states in 16:26, “the commandment of the everlasting God.” The commandment comes via the Lord Jesus Christ to the eleven disciples in NASB “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, [20] teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” In the English this is translated as if the primary command is to go, and the second command would be to make disciples of all the nations…teaching them.” That is true as far as it goes. The first word to go is a participle, not an imperative, and we will hear a lot of sermons also by people who say that the main command is to make disciples and that first participle should be understood as a temporal participle—when you are going, i.e. as you go throughout the process of life, of living, make disciples. However, the nuance in Greek is when you have an imperative that is preceded by an adverbial participle it can be an adverbial participle of command. The main verb is a command and that is like a magnet, and the participle preceding it is like a bunch of iron filings that get attracted to that magnet. So the meaning of that initial participle there, even though it is not a strict imperative mood in the Greek, picks up an imperatival sense because of its relationship to the main command. So it is correct to translate this as an imperative. There is an imperatival command to the disciples because they are to make disciples of all nations.
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When you are sitting in Jerusalem the only way you can make disciples of all nations is to get up and leave Jerusalem. You can’t just sit there in Jerusalem and think it is just going to happen. This was the disciples’ marching orders; they were to go to all the nations and to make disciples. That word “disciple” is the Greek word matheteuo [maqhteuw] which has the idea of making students of people. It is not necessarily and end of itself, it isn’t necessarily a word that means make them a Christian. Some disciples are believers, some aren’t. Even amongst the followers of Jesus the term “disciple” was not equivalent to someone who was a believer. The word “disciple” was used in different senses. One was the generic sense of students and listeners or those who were studying what a teacher was teaching; it didn’t mean they believed him, but they were studying. Then there is another sense in which as Jesus laid down principles: if you want to be a true and genuine disciple of mine then you have to do all of these other things. Well you don’t have to do anything to be saved so again that word disciple isn’t equivalent to being saved, but it is indicative of those who want to go beyond simply making sure they are going to end up in heaven; they want to advance in their relationship with God and be genuine students of what God has revealed to us and what He has to teach us. So that is the command. By the command to make disciples Jesus is saying that their primary mission is to teach, to instruct. That is the primary purpose of the apostolic ministry; that is the primary purpose of the pastoral ministry. It isn’t the sole purpose but it is 90 per cent, the focal point.
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The next two participles help to understand what is involved in making disciples. Two things are involved. The first has to do with the participial form of baptizo [baptizw] and the second has to do with the participial form of didasko [didaskw]. baptizo means to baptize, to immerse. In the early church the mode of baptism was immersion. Somewhere into the late second and into the third century they started sprinkling infants because the question came up: What happens if the baby dies? The idea was if they identified them with their parents then they would go to heaven. After Constantine legalized Christianity in the early fourth century and Christianity became the official religion of the state the entry into the church became identified with a person’s citizenship. So you would be considered a very poor citizen, even a traitor, if you weren’t in the church, and the way to get into the church was to be baptized. Baptism became equivalent to becoming a citizen of the state and those two ideas became really muddied up and confused all the way through the period of the Middle Ages and up into the period of the Protestant Reformation. When the Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther and he challenged the works-oriented theology of the Roman Catholic church, he was focusing on one thing: justification by faith alone. That became the major battleground, and he really didn’t go much beyond that because he didn’t have time. He never left the concept of splitting the church from the state; neither did John Calvin, Zwingli, and others. But Zwingli had some students who, as they were carrying out the foundational principle of the Protestant Reformation—the Scripture alone—and study the Scripture, applying a literal interpretation, they came to this word “baptism.” The looked it up in their Greek lexicon and saw that it meant to immerse and also that it seemed to be something that was done at the beginning of a person’s Christian life, after they had trusted in Christ as savior; it was a picture to teach something about the spiritual baptism when a believer is identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. This was a major heresy and they were tried, convicted and drowned. From that birthing point there was the rise of a group called Anabaptists. The word means being baptized again. They had all been baptized as infants.
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The other thing about baptism is that though the literal meaning of the word is to immerse its significance is something else. It was a way of identifying something with something else. Baptism as a believer has to do with identification and Paul makes the significance of it clear in Romans chapter six; that the spiritual truth is that when a person believes in Jesus at that instant they are legally identified with Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection so that the tyranny of the sin nature is broken and they are put in a new position in Christ. Baptism is always associated with a person’s conversion, their initial faith in Christ and their justification. So the phrase “baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” relates to justification or what we refer to as phase one salvation.
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The second participle “teaching”: they are made disciples first by baptizing, identifying them with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and ‘teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded.” That relates to the ongoing growth of the believer and how he learns the Word, and he is to observe all that Jesus commanded us. Once again we get back to that concept of obedience.
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So Paul concludes Romans in 16:26 by saying: “…Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, {leading} to obedience of faith.” This means that obedience consists of faith, the obedience to believe and the obedience to grow is also produced by faith. Faith has to do with obedience. This is seen again in 17 NASB “However, they did not all heed the good news; for Isaiah says, “LORD, WHO HAS BELIEVED OUR REPORT?” So faith {comes} from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” This is dealing with Old Testament passages and the failure of Israel to accept Jesus as Messiah. Paul quotes from and Old Testament passage and connects what was happening at that time with what had happened in the period 700-586 BC. In Isaiah says: “Who has believed our message (report)?” But it is the first sentence in that we focus on: “they did not all heed the good news (obeyed the gospel).” Believing the message is equivalent to obeying the gospel. The report is the message of the gospel. So faith is obedience, but it is not a meritorious obedience which is somehow the idea of working or doing something righteous that God somehow blesses us for; it is recognizing that the merit is all in Christ, not in me; God has commanded me to believe in Him but the value comes from the object of belief, not the act of belief.
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We recognize then that when Paul says “through whom we have received grace and apostleship” apostleship, the focus of apostleship, is to carry out the great commission of , . That is the mission of the apostles—to teach the gospel, the command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved (), and then the mandates related to the spiritual life that come after salvation. The apostles were commanded to take that message to all the nations. This is exactly what Paul said in . The words “for His name” is indicating the character and reputation of Him. If you do something in the name of someone it is in reference to their authority, their character, their person. It is not just this nominalistic idea that a name is just a label. The name in Scripture has something to do with the essence or character of a person, and it is with reference to the identity, the character and the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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NASB “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live [no longer a slave to himself], but Christ lives in me; and the {life} which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” So the life of the person after salvation, after he becomes a believer, is a life that is based upon faith. It is faith in the Word of God and faith in the principles and mandates of the Word of God.
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NASB “among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ.” The word “called” is one of those words that often crops up on the so-called Calvinist-Arminian debate. The word “calling” has a basic meaning of an invitation. NASB “For many are called, but few {are} chosen.” In the process of the parable Jesus said: [2] “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. [3] And he sent out his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come.” See the connection between calling and inviting. That is what calling refers to; it is everybody who is invited to the wedding. [4] “Again he sent out other slaves saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are {all} butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.” That is the call. Verse 14 says many are called; that is the invitation. Few are chosen; chosen has to do with those who responded to the invitation. These are the ones who are referred to then as the called. We might say in English that 100 people were invited, 20 people showed up; they are the invitees, and we refer to them as the called. That doesn’t mean nobody else got the calling, it just means nobody else responded to the calling. That is how Paul is applying to these believers in Rome.
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NASB “to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called {as} saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The word “as” or “to be” has been added to translations, it is not in the original. The word for “saint” in the Greek is the word hagios [a(gioj)] and it means something that is set apart. A saint is someone who has been set apart for the service of God. We are all called saints because we are set apart for Christ by means of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Every believer is a saint, set apart to God. Grace is the Greek word charis [xarij] which is not the word that was normally used, the typical word that was used was chairein [xairein], and he shifts it to grace because he is emphasizing grace comes from God. He joins that with the Greek word eirene [e)irhnh] which comes from the Hebrew word shalom and relates to the Hebrew greeting. He combines the two in his greeting, emphasizing that grace comes only from the source of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and peace comes only from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This becomes the unique way of addressing his letters.

Romans 006b-Paul's Prayer Priority.

Romans 1:8 NASB95
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world.
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Romans 006b-Paul's Prayer Priority.
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To reiterate a couple of points we have been looking at NASB “through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about {the} obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake.” Grace relates in this context to salvation (, ); apostleship refers to that one apostleship that was related to those who were commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ to carry out what is usually referred to as the great commission. This is what helps us to understand the phrase “obedience to the faith.” Obedience to the faith is a phrase that refers to obedience with relationship to faith, because believing in Christ as savior is also a response to a command. It is obedience to that command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Faith is also a response to the various other mandates and prohibitions that we find in the Scriptures. But the idea of apostleship for obedience of the faith among all the nations for His name specifically relates back to , which gives the primary mission for the church in the church age.
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We make a distinction here because what is often heard when this passage is taught is that this is directed not only to the individual apostles but to individual believers as well. We don’t think that is true. It is not the job of every believer to make disciples; it is not the job of every believer to make disciples by means of baptism or by means of teaching them to observe all things. Not every believer has the gift of evangelism; not every believer has the gift of pastor-teacher. So the mandate here is with reference to the mission of the church as a whole, the church looking at the church universal, i.e. everyone during the church age who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, when they are baptized by means of the Holy Spirit and are entered into the body of Christ, at the instant of salvation one of the Holy Spirit’s ministries in the life of every believer is to give the believer a spiritual gift—sometimes more than one. We get these spiritual gifts in different proportions and different measures. The role that each individual plays within the body of Christ is a complementary role. Some have the gift of administration, some have the gift of mercy, some have the gift of teaching, some have the gift of helps, some have the gift of pastor-teacher—all of these gifts work together in a complementary role so that the entire body of Christ is to be focused on this mission of making disciples by baptism and by teaching. (The phrase “by baptism” is a reference to entry into the Christian life, which is related to evangelism; then teaching is related to spiritual growth) These are two separate events. They are related in that they both have an organic unity in the work of Christ on the cross but they are distinct in that being born again or regenerate does not necessitate spiritual growth; it doesn’t make spiritual growth inevitable. That is the big heresy that we see in what is often referred to as “Lordship salvation.” Lordship salvation comes out of a reformed or Calvinistic theology and is usually related to what is referred to as the T in TULIP.
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Everybody plays a role on the team and the goal of the team is to make disciples of all the nations by baptizing and by teaching them to observe all things that we have been commanded. Even though that emphasis is on obedience, that doesn’t make this legalism. Legalism says obedience is the basis for God’s blessing, but what we are talking about is we walk by faith, and faith focuses on the promises and the mandates and the principles of Scripture. So faith looks at those promises, looks at those mandates, looks at those prohibitions and says I believe that is true so I am going to act this way, or I’m not going to act this way; I am going to think this way or I’m not going think this way; and that is how we begin to implement all the principles of Scripture and begin to grow. And this exactly is what was happening in the church in Rome. It has been pointed out from one other passage in , where Paul says in reference to the gospel that “they have not all obeyed the gospel.” So again obedience is linked with the gospel. There is clearly a recognition in Scripture that believing the gospel is a command to all human beings and those who obey the command believe—non-meritorious but it is faith based on hearing the Word of God.
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NASB “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world.” The word “first” is really a good way of translating this from the Greek because there is a little particle here that is usually untranslated but a native Greek reader would see that particle and expect something to follow. What Paul is really focusing on here is in terms of his priority. His primary mission had to do with the proclamation of the gospel in terms of the obedience to the faith among all the nations for His name. Now when we get into verse eight he is focusing on prayer and the priority of prayer for those congregations that Paul was associated with.
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What we see in verses 8-10 are some ideas. One sentence is covered in vv. 8-10 which focuses on his gratitude to God for the way these believers in Rome have responded to the doctrine that they have learned and the impact that that is having, not just in terms of their own personal private walk with God, but in terms of the impact it is having in the culture and city of Rome itself. And beyond Rome Paul says their reputation is being proclaimed throughout the whole world. That would refer to mostly the Roman empire. The second thing that he focuses on in vv. 11, 12 is on the fact that he desires to come to them in order to provide from his spiritual gift teaching that will edify them and move them forward in spiritual growth.
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We find as we compare Paul’s different epistles that Paul puts this emphasis on gratitude in prayer. When we think about prayer there are different elements that go in to any prayer. We have used the acronym before of A-C-T-S, and that prayer includes adoration, which is a focus on God, on who He is and what He has done. Adoration focuses on a praise for God for His works in our life, for all that He has given us, all that He has provided for us, and that focuses upon Him. It also includes the C which is confession. Confession has to do with admitting our sins to Him so that we are cleansed of sin and are in fellowship and our prayers, then, can be efficacious. When we are out of fellowship they cannot be efficacious. As the psalmist said: “If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me”—. Then a third area of prayer is thanksgiving. This is very important. In eight of Paul’s thirteen epistles he begins with an expression of gratitude to God for the impact that the Word of God is having on these individual believers in the congregations. E.g. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; . Gratitude is a reflection and a barometer of our own grace orientation. Grace orientation means that our thinking is aligned to grace. We understand grace; we understand that our relationship with God is based on grace; we understand that our relationship to other people should be based on grace. Grace orientation means that we are not operating on a quid-pro-quo approach to God, i.e. I’ll do this and then God will bless me; it is based on an understanding that everything is provided for us as believers because of the work of Christ on the cross. Therefore we are motivated by gratitude that God has done everything for us rather than being motivated by trying to get more from God. Grace orientation means that we come to understand that as we live our spiritual life we are to live in a way where we recognize God has already provided everything for us, we are not trying to get more from God, to motivate God. Our relationship with Him is not based on meritorious works. The application of that is then, in terms of our relationship with other people, we treat them in grace and not on the basis of who they are or what they’ve done. We treat them in grace and kindness even though they don’t deserve it and we focus on living our life on the basis of humility which is the underlying mentality of grace orientation. Grace orientation recognizes that I don’t do anything, I can’t do anything. No matter how smart or gifted I am everything comes from God and I have nothing to offer God whatsoever, therefore I am only to serve Him. It is an attitude of genuine humility, that I am under His authority, He has given me everything and whatever I have has nothing to do with anything other than God’s plan and purpose for my life. And we realize that our life is not about us. Life is not about us, it is about God’s plan and about serving Him.
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The opposite of humility is arrogance, and arrogance is something that is totally self-centered. We only have those two options: we are either going to be God-centered or we are going to be self-centered. When we are God centered we are going to be in fellowship. The consequence of being in fellowship is spiritual growth and when we shift back to arrogance then it is all about me again, and that means that we are out of fellowship and the sin nature is under control. In arrogance we are operating on self-absorption; it is all about me. We move from self-absorption and self-indulgence and then we learn all kinds of sophisticated ways to justify all of our self-absorptions so we can be very proud of it, and this just leads to redefining reality on our terms instead of God’s terms. We can’t see reality or truth for what it is because that is going to really run counter to our own self-absorption and our primary motto is really all about me. In arrogance, then, we end up worshipping ourselves, worshipping the creature, we are the ultimate determiner of truth, and that is self-deification. This is what Paul ultimately refers to in . In describing the pre-flood culture he says that although they knew God they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened. So rather than glorifying God we see the contrast: they are not thankful, there is no gratitude.
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Another thing that is important in understanding grace and being grace oriented is that in grace orientation our focus is on gratitude and thankfulness for whatever we have. We understand that we don’t have an innate right to anything. Once we realize that then we are thankful for anything that we have, and we can then focus on serving God instead of serving our own narcissistic whims. In Paul looks at it this way: NASB “He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God.” In other words, there are those who have and there are those who don’t have and are thankful. They are able to operate within that environment of having or not having because their focus is on the Lord. Paul talks about is personally from his own experience in . NASB “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
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Anxiety and worry all come out of a me-centred orientation. We are so consumed with what might happen in our experience that we just become absorbed by our circumstances and the details of life. When that happens, when that appears to be threatening, then we become anxious and we worry and just can’t put it in the Lord’s hands. The final letter in our acronym is S for supplication, which is bringing our requests before God. It is supplication that really can be broken down into two other areas of requests for others, which would be intercession; and requests for ourselves, which would be under the category of petition. So Paul says that gratitude to God should be something that raps itself around our prayers; that we are thankful for whatever the Lord has given us. And the result of that is that there is peace, which means stability in our life that is in contrast to anxiety. NASB “And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” It is not something that we are going to arrive at through rationalism or through empiricism, it is something that is a by product of our spiritual life because we are focusing on God and His plan and agenda and not on our plan and our agenda. It provides, as it were, a defence structure, so that as circumstances change we don’t fall apart in worry and anxiety and panic, and all of these other mental attitude sins. We are able to maintain stability because circumstances are always going to change and we can’t do anything about them by worrying about them.
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Then Paul relates this in terms of personal example. That personal example has to do with the fact that his current status as a prisoner in Rome under house arrest, yet he is restricted to some degree in his movements and has not always had all of the creature comforts that he would like. This was his first imprisonment which was somewhat more comfortable than what he experienced later. But during that time the Philippians believers had sent him a financial gift which had helped him in his situation in Rome. NASB “But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned {before,} but you lacked opportunity. [11] Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am.” He can have happiness and tranquillity and peace whether he has or whether he doesn’t have, whether he is free or whether he is under house arrest. [12] “I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.” Then he concludes that by saying [13] “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” The “all things” isn’t something that’s out there and I can do whatever I want to do because Christ strengthens me. That is how a lot of people think about this verse because they have learned it out of context. The “all things” in this verse refers to abounding and suffering need, to be full or to be hungry. So he can handle any circumstance and have stability and peace and tranquillity in his soul because he is living for Christ and not for himself.
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In terms of gratitude and understanding the significance of it there some other passages that we need to relate to. NASB “in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” In every situation be thankful to God that you have what you have. Sometimes we are going to look at our circumstances and say this is not a good situation. It could be worse; it could always be worse. So we are to be thankful that we have what we have because God is still in control and has a purpose and a reason for us to be in that state, those circumstances. We may not understand that until we get into eternity; that is why we walk by faith and not by sight.
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The next two verses are interesting because they are consequences of the filling of the Holy Spirit and the filling of the Word of God in our life as a result of the filling of the Holy Spirit. The first of these verses is . In verse 16 we have the command “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you,” and one of the results of letting the Word of God richly dwell within us and to fill up our thinking is gratitude: [17] NASB “Whatever you do in word or deed, {do} all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.” Another thing: notice in Paul says, “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all.” That phrase “through Jesus Christ” is something we are going to see in these prayers because as Christians we are commanded to pray in the name of Jesus and through Jesus because He is our high priest, and it is by virtue of our position in Him and His intercession for us that we have access to God the Father. So giving thanks and gratitude is a barometer of our spiritual life and our making the Word of Christ richly dwell within us.
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Paul says much the same thing in NASB “always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father.” Verse 18 Paul says we are to be filled by means of the Holy Spirit. Here, two verses later, we have a participle that expresses the result of the filling of the Spirit—giving thanks always for all things and, again, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are representatives of the body of Christ. So both and are verses that emphasize the fact that it is through Christ and in His name that we are to pray. This is clearly taught by the Lord in . Several times He emphasizes this as He is giving new instructions to His disciples the night before He went to the cross. Up to the point of His rejection by Israel He had focussed on the message of the kingdom. Once the kingdom was postponed then He began to teach in terms of what the situation would be in the intervening dispensation between the day of Pentecost and the Rapture. Twice in He talks about praying in His name.
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NASB “If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do {it.}” We do not think that this necessarily means that we have to close every prayer by saying “in the name of Jesus.” That is our custom but that is not what this is saying. Doing something in the name of someone is doing something on the basis of what that person has done and in reference to that person as your authority. So if we are praying in the name of Jesus what we are doing is praying on the basis of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, that our sins have been paid for and we are now right with God and in fellowship, and because Jesus is our high priest we have access to God so that we can come boldly before the throne of grace. That doesn’t mean that there is any thing wrong with saying that we pray in the name of Jesus. That is a great reminder but it is not a formula that if we don’t say it God is not going to listen to our prayer. That is not what Jesus is saying here. He is talking about the fact that now prayer is going to be done on the basis of who He is. Praying in the name of Jesus is praying on the basis of His person and work and on our new relationship with God the Father.
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NASB “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.” Here we have that same phrase, “in My name.” The Father sends the Spirit but the Spirit is not saying, “I am here in the name of Jesus.” He comes on the basis of who Jesus Christ is and what He did on the cross.
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NASB “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and {that} your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.” This is not talking about salvation. Jesus is talking to the eleven now and He is giving them part of their mission statement. He chose them to be the apostles; this is not talking about choosing them to be saved. John talks about this in a little different way in NASB “This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” It is the same thing; it is not a blank check that whatever we ask in the name of Jesus it is going to be answered, it is qualified by the fact that God still has sovereign rule over prayers and sometimes He will say no to what we request.
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NASB “In that day you will not question Me about anything. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in My name, He will give it to you.”
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NASB “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world.” The phrase “spoken of” is the Greek katangello [kataggellw] which has the idea of a public proclamation or public statement. Usually it is used in reference to public pronouncements related to what God has done. So what Paul is thankful for is that the faith is not just their saving faith but what they believe and the application of it. They are learning the Word and are applying it. It is their desire to learn the Word and to put it into practice that is being announced, not just that they have a good reputation. This is being proclaimed and becoming well known throughout the whole world [Roman empire]. These Roman believers have a tremendous spiritual life; they are learning the Word and are applying it, and it is becoming known. Paul is thankful that the Word of God is having such a transforming impact on this congregation.
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NASB “For [gar/gar, a continued explanation] God, whom I serve in my spirit in the {preaching of the} gospel of His Son, is my witness {as to} how unceasingly I make mention of you.” God is his witness. What he is saying here is: you can’t see me pray because you are in Rome and right now I’m in Corinth, but God does and He is my witness. The word “{serve” is the Greek word latreuo [latreuw] which has to do with the personal worship of the individual in his spiritual life. The ultimate goal isn’t just the accumulation of the knowledge of doctrine but the knowledge of doctrine is a means to an end, and that means to an end is serving God and serving man—or as Jesus expressed it is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself. That is serving God, so it involves the whole dimension of our relationship with God as the driving motivating force and that what that results in is how we operate in the horizontal area of our relationships within our families, within our work place, within the culture around us. The words “in my spirit” is something we would express differently: in terms of my spiritual life. And it is in relation to “the gospel of His Son.”
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We use the word “gospel” in a couple of different senses. We have a narrow sense of the gospel which is what a person needs to believe in order to have eternal life, in order to avoid eternal condemnation. But there is a broader sense of the gospel and that is all that flows out of that, the good news that Jesus came not to just give life but to give life abundantly. So in this broader sense of the gospel it includes what one needs to do to avoid eternal condemnation but the question of how do I grow and mature as a believer? Paul is referring to Romans as an expression and development of the gospel and it includes justification only in the first five chapters. Chapters 6-8 talks about sanctification, 9-11 about how God’s justice is demonstrated in history through His relationship to Israel, and then chapters 12ff talk about how the righteousness of God needs to be worked out in the life of every believer in all the different areas of life. Here in verse 9 Paul is talking about the entire dimension of biblical teaching on how to get saved and how to live once we are saved.
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“…how unceasingly I make mention of you.” This is such a priority that on a regular basis, whenever he has an opportunity, he is praying for other people.
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NASB “always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you.” This is what is driving him. He is requesting God in terms of a personal petition that some how he would be allowed to come to Rome to teach. At this point God has not opened the door and made the opportunity available to him.
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NASB “For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established.” The end result is that he is establishing them, building them up and getting them form in the faith. The idea of “spiritual gift” is two words that are frequently used to refer to spiritual gifts: the word charisma [xarisma] indicating the gift part, the grace part, and pneumatikos [pneumatikoj] which is related to the spiritual part. But here it is in the singular, where as when we find those words in the spiritual gift passages they are in the plural. So here the idea is really more the idea of sharing his gift as an apostle pertaining to the spirit or the spiritual. That is, he wants to share with them a gift related to his spiritual gift of that which is related to the spiritual or their spiritual life. So actually in vv. 11 and 12 he expresses three things that he wants to do. First of all he wants to impart to them something that builds them up spiritually, using his spiritual gift. Second, he wants to be mutually encouraged. There is a mutual encouragement just to be in the presence of other believers who are positive to the Word and are putting it into practice. NASB “that is, that I may be encouraged together with you {while} among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.” The third thing, which goes into the next verse, is that he can have some fruit among them also. That is, seeing some production as a result of his teaching among the congregation in Rome.

Romans 007b-How the justified live.

Romans 1:10 NASB95
always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you.
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Romans 007b-How the justified live.
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NASB “always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you.” One thing a lot more of us have to pay attention to is the consistency and the frequency of our prayer life. This is not something that is a suggestion in Scripture, this is a mandate. We are, as says, to pray without ceasing. That means that this is to be a continual thing in our life, and prayer really does make a difference. James says, “we have not because we ask not.” Too often we succumb to the strain of fatalism in our culture that things will just work out the way they are going to work out and God’s will will be done, and so we justify it that way and move on. We just don’t take the time for prayer. Paul talks about the fact that he always makes mention of the Romans in his prayers, he consistently prays for them. What he is emphasizing in this section from verse 10 down through verse 15 is his desire to come to Rome and to have a ministry among these believers.
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Then he lists the first of three reasons for his coming to Rome. NASB “For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established.” This is an odd way of stating this because Paul isn’t using the phrase “spiritual gift” like he uses it in or , or in other passages where he is referring to those special enablements that God the Holy Spirit gives every believer at the instant of salvation. Once the apostles were off the scene there was no longer going to be special revelation because there was no longer a “quality control officer” in the church. Once they were gone there is no instruction in any of the epistles on how to verify or validate divine revelation. Those were leadership and spiritual communication spiritual gifts. Then there are other spiritual gifts related to leadership such as in administration and service, and this is usually found in those who serve as deacons and many others in the local church. There are gifts of helps and mercy and other gifts of service that can cover a wide variety of manifestations. But that is not what Paul is talking about here, even though he uses the same word, charisma [xarisma], which is from the Greek word charis [xarij] meaning grace. It is a gracious bestowal of something. That is the word for gift. The word for “spiritual” is the word pneumatikos [pneumatikoj] which is the same word that is used for the spiritual man in as opposed to the natural man; but as an adjective it is also used in passages like to talk about the spiritual endowments. But that doesn’t make sense here. Paul is not the one to impart spiritual gifts, it is the Holy Spirit who gives spiritual gifts at the instant of salvation. What Paul is talking about here is to impart to them something from his spiritual gift which will provide edification and spiritual blessing for those in Rome: that there will be the basis on which they will be able to grow. So it should be understood to means something like, “I long to see you that I may impart to you something from my spiritual gift so that you may be established.” This is the best way to understand the use of this particular term.
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Then the second reason he wants to come to Rome. NASB “that is, that I may be encouraged together with you {while} among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.” This is an important verse, one of those that people run right past but there is something important here. This is the apostle Paul who is saying that one of the reasons he wants to come to this congregation is not so that he can teach them but that they can encourage him. Within the body of Christ we have a mutual ministry, and this is part of the reason we have spiritual gifts. As Paul says in we are members of one another. There is a mutuality in ministry. There are all of these different challenges or exhortations to believers that we are to love one another, we are to encourage one another, we are to edify one another, we are to pray for one another; all of these different ministries that we are to do to one another. There is a back and forth ministry that takes place within the body of Christ. So Paul tells them that not only does he want to come and teach them from his spiritual gift of apostle but also that in watching and observing how they are growing and how God is working in their lives, how they are ministering to others within the body of Christ and taking the gospel to others outside of the body of Christ, but he will be encouraged by that. This is very similar to what we read in NASB “not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging {one another;} and all the more as you see the day [of judgment for the church] drawing near.” The word “encouraging” here is parakaleo [parakalew] which is the verb form of the noun that is used to describe the ministry of God the Holy Spirit as the paraclete. That doesn’t mean that we are to function like the Holy Spirit in everybody else’s Christian life, it has the idea of being an encouragement to one another. The word in Romans, sumparakaleo [sumparakalew], means to encourage together.
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There are a lot of different ways we encourage each other. There are superficial ways in which Christians try to encourage one another, found in a certain number of churches, and then there are more substantive ways in which we encourage one another. One way we encourage one another is as we get to know other believers and we learn how God is working in their life. The encouragement comes by the mutual faith that is shared, and there it relates to the application of doctrine: what is believed and what is practised on the basis of what is believed. It incorporates the totality of Christian belief and application.
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Now Paul adds a new element. NASB “I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far)…” He had a desire to do something but God was not ready for him to do it. An interesting doctrine is the doctrine of our desire to do the right thing but God doesn’t let us. On Paul’s second missionary journey he wanted to take the gospel into the Roman province of Asia in western Turkey and the Holy Spirit said no—no ministry here at this time, but later on. It was a matter of timing and it is the same situation here. Paul had tried to go to Rome several times but there was always something that prevented him because the time wasn’t right. God was providing the guidance. It wasn’t that God came out of heaven and said, “Paul, don’t go now.” He just drew the arrangement of various circumstances and made it impossible for the apostle Paul to make the journey when he wanted to. That is how God works in divine guidance a lot.
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“…so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles.” This word “fruit” is an important word to understand because there are too many people who think that they have been hired by the Holy Spirit to be fruit inspectors, and to go around and try to determine who is saved and who is not. And if you don’t have “fruit,” by which they mean something observable and quantifiable in your life, then you probably weren’t saved. There are a tremendous amount of people who have views related to that and the term that is used for this type of theology is called Lordship salvation. The reason it got that name is because in the early to mid-point of the 20th century there was an emphasis on the gospel not being just believing that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, but you also had to make Him Lord of your life—by which they meant that you had to commit to his total authority over your life at the same time that you believed in Him or you weren’t really saved. And the way to tell if you were really saved was to evaluate the fruit in your life, and of you didn’t have the right kind of fruit then you weren’t saved. Then they would always quote a verse out of context and say: See, “by their fruits you will know them”—you haven’t led fifty people to the Lord in the last year, you haven’t led fifty people to the Lord in the last ten years, you haven’t led fifty people to the Lord in your whole life; you’re not saved. So they set up these artificial standards to try to qualify and quantify fruit, impose that on people and say that is how you are going to tell if you are actually saved.
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There is only one way to know if you are saved, and that is if you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins and you are resting in Him alone, trusting in Him and Him alone for salvation, then you are saved. That is the promise of God. Our assurance is based on the promise of God and His character, not on your character. The promise with Lordship salvation is that it puts the focal point of your assurance on your character and not on the character of God and the work of Christ on the cross.
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The first way in which spiritual fruit is used is in passages such as and . NASB “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit…” The interesting thing is that we live in a world today that is so divorced from agriculture. It takes a long time before a plant produces fruit. Fruit is not a term that is equivalent to spiritual growth, except in maybe a couple of passages. Generally fruit is something that is the product of a maturing plant. You take a seed and plant it in the soil and water it. When it germinates and there is life there that is equivalent to regeneration or being born again. But then you have to continue to fertilize it, which is like feeding it the Word of God and giving it water, like the Holy Spirit between the nutrients in the soil and the water, then that little bit of green that comes out of the seed begins to grow. If it is a tomato plant it takes 60-90 days before it can bear fruit. In some other cases, if it is an oak tree, it takes several years before it can produce acorns. So there is a lot of growth that has to take place before fruit is ever observed. It is only the maturing plant that ever produces fruit.
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Fruit is also used to describe praise to God. NASB “Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.” This is actually describing what God has done and how He has done it.
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In Matthew chapter seven we have the fruit of false teachers. It is not talking about their morality, it is talking about the content of what they are teaching. The context here is the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is challenging the Pharisaical interpretation of the Mosaic Law. NASB “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Immediately He is using a descriptive metaphor to indicate that on the outside they are going to look one way. They look good on the outside but behind the camouflage they are something else. So how do we discern if they are wolves or sheep? [16] “You will know them by their fruits…” A lot of people come along and say that must means their lifestyle, their morality. It doesn’t mean that at all. “…Grapes are not gathered from thorn {bushes} nor figs from thistles, are they? [17] So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.” He is still talking about the analogy, He hasn’t crossed the line into talking about the reality yet. [18] “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.” He has shifted from animals to trees. A bad tree is equivalent to a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a good tree is a sheep. What is the fruit of a prophet? It is his message.
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What is Jesus doing in context here? He is giving the divine interpretation of the Mosaic Law in contrast to the Pharisaical interpretation of the Mosaic Law. So what is He talking about? He’s talking about the Mosaic Law. Where does it talk about false prophets in the Mosaic Law? There are two places where there is a test of a prophet: & 18. In , if a healer, a miracle worker, a dreamer of dreams comes and performs a miracle and it actually occurs don’t believe his message; don’t believe that it came from God. That doesn’t mean anything. What is important is not the miracle; what is important is the message. When he says Let us go after other gods, that message contradicts the Word of God on Mount Sinai, therefore he is a false prophet. You identify a false prophet by a false message. A false message is bad fruit, so Jesus is not talking about lifestyle here, He is talking about message. “By their fruits (message) you will know them.” What Jesus said in is exactly the same as what Moses said in . A prophet’s message has to be consistent with everything else that has been accepted as the revealed Word of God.
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Fruit is used in , our passage, for general spiritual edification. Some of the passages to go to for character qualities that are developed over time in the life of the believer are , ; , ; , ; (spiritual growth that has occurred).
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NASB “I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. [15] So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. [16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. [17] For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’”

Romans 008b-Salvation, Deliverance from Wrath, and the Gospel. Romans 1:14-16

Romans 1:13 NASB95
I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far) so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles.
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Romans 008b-Salvation, Deliverance from Wrath, and the Gospel.
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There is no transition here from verse 13—no “and,” no “for,” no “but,” no “now,” etc.—which may indicate, perhaps, Paul’s emotion at this time because he is so caught up in what he is saying. He really does have a desire to go to Rome and to have a ministry to the Roman believers.
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NASB “I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.” He is not under obligation to them because of something that the Greeks and barbarians have done, he is under obligation because of the grace of God in his life and because God saved him and gave him the gift of apostle and the mission to take the gospel to the Gentiles. He was under obligation to fulfil the mission that God gave him in terms of his spiritual gift. In that Paul isn’t any different from anyone in this room. At the instant we were saved God gave us a spiritual gift that we were to use under spiritual maturity to the benefit, edification and encouragement of the body of Christ. And that is part of the mission that God has given each and every believer, so that we are under obligation to God to the same degree the apostle Paul was to grow to maturity and to serve God and to minister in terms of our own spiritual gift which was given for the purpose of using it in relation to the body of Christ. If we look carefully at , which says that God gave gifts to men, and then enumerates those gifts—apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastors and teachers—and verse 11 states the purpose: for the purpose of equipping the saints to do the work of ministry. That means of somebody has the gift of evangelism his primary mission isn’t evangelism but teaching the rest of us how to witness effectively and to be better at communicating the gospel to people who need to hear the gospel. It is the same with the pastor-teacher. His mission and ministry is to the body of Christ, to equip the saints to do the work of ministry. And we are equipped to do that by learning how to think according to God’s plans and purposes.
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Sometimes people get the idea that this being obligated to God to serve Him is legalism. Somehow along the way there is this distortion of legalism, usually by those who are have a trend towards antinomianism and irresponsibility in the Christian life and they don’t understand that grace doesn’t mean that we don’t have mandates, obligations and responsibilities in the Christian life.
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Paul’s obligation is pointed in a specific direction because God called him to be an apostle to the Gentiles. It is interesting that there is no definite article there, it is not necessarily definite in the sense that he is the only one, which is usually what is thought: that he was the only one, but others had a ministry to the Gentiles, even though that may not have been their primary objective. We know that other disciples went to the Gentiles, e.g. Thomas went to India. But Paul was the pre-eminent apostle to the Gentiles and so his obligation to God was in that direction. And he categorizes the Gentiles into two groups where he uses opposite terms to describe these groups. The first group are the Greeks and the barbarians, and the second group is “wise and unwise.” “Wise” is parallel to the Greeks because Greeks were the originators of philosophical thinking, and the emphasis was on wisdom. In contrast to the Greeks were the non-Greeks, the barbarians who were parallel to the “unwise.” By categorizing them in this manner it seems like the apostle Paul was using the term “Gentile” here more in the way that we would use “educated” or “cultured,” and then at the other extreme those who were uneducated or uncultured. So by saying he is a debtor or obligated to the Greeks and to the barbarians he is including everything in between. In other words, the entire Gentile world is the target of his ministry. The word that is used here is the Greek word hellesin [E(llhsin] which usually means Greeks but it doesn’t just have to refer to ethnic Greeks. Paul uses it many times as a synonym for Gentile as a contrast to the Jew, and her it is used in contrast to the barbarian.
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NASB “So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.” Those who are in Rome fall somewhere between the wise and the unwise, the Greeks and the barbarians, and he wants to come and preach the gospel. The word there for “preach” isn’t the normal Greek word that is translated “preach,” kerusso [khrussw], which had to do with a herald or someone who would come to proclaim an announcement from the king, but this is just the verb form of euangelizo [e)uaggelizw] from which we get our word evangelism. It means to announce good news (eu = good; angelizo = announcement). So Paul is going to proclaim the good news. Then he explains something about the gospel and why it is important for him to do this.
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NASB “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” This is an important verse for several reasons. It is a great verse to memorize if we are somewhat nervous or skittish or if we lack confidence in witnessing to people. It reminds us that we are not to be ashamed of the gospel, we are not to be timid about giving the gospel, and by memorizing this it will help to strengthen our own convictions and courage in presenting the gospel. There are some passages in the New Testament that also use this same word translated “ashamed.” In Jesus said: “For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation [of Jews in that generation who rejected Him as Messiah], the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.” In that context it indicates lack of salvation. NASB “Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me His prisoner, but join with {me} in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God.” So we are not to be ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Our mission as believers that we have been given by the Lord Jesus Christ is to communicate the gospel to those who need it.
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A couple of things should be made clear here. We ought to have some common sense. There is the right time and the right place to witness to somebody, and sometimes it is more important for us to keep our mouth shut and to establish a relationship with people so that later on we can have a better foundation for giving them the gospel. We have to build relationships with unbelievers, and this doesn’t happen all the time in our lives.
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“…it is the power of God for salvation.” This is where this verse gets really interesting. So often we think of “gospel” in a narrow sense: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,” in the sense of saved from the penalty of sin. Yet that is a very narrow sense of the gospel and even though Paul uses the word “gospel” in that sense many times, many times he uses the word as he does here to refer to the entire body of Christian doctrine and the Christian message. Salvation here is not just getting saved from the penalty of sin, salvation here has to do with what we often refer to as phase one salvation or justification, in Romans it is never a synonym for justification. And yet where most of us read Romans and see verses like we think it is a great salvation verse. It is a great salvation verse but it has nothing to do with justification. That is not the gospel. Paul quit talking about how to get justified at the end of chapter five. Romans chapter six is talking about how a justified believer lives and experiences the fullness of life. So when he is talking about “the wages of sin is death” he is talking about the believer who is living in carnality and operational death (living like an unbeliever) and not experiencing the fullness of their spiritual life; he is talking about divine discipline and carnal death in the life of a believer. But the “free gift of God” he is talking about there is eternal life but meaning the quality of life. That is a hard thing for many evangelicals to understand because we have been taught and have heard so many sermons about eternal life that we think of eternal life as unending life in heaven. But it may surprise us that eternal life doesn’t mean that ever in the first epistle that John wrote.
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Paul uses this word “salvation” to describe our deliverance from the power of sin in our spiritual life and ultimately deliverance from the presence of sin in glorification in phase three. The next time we have the word sozo [swzw] used is in NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood [past tense], we shall be saved [future tense] from the wrath {of God} through Him.” We can be justified by we are not saved. Paul never uses the word sozo or salvation in Romans to refer to phase one justification. He makes a distinction between the two. Justification was the topic of the last half of chapter three and chapter four. By the time he is getting to the wrap-up in chapter five he has moved beyond the discussion of justification and is transitioning to chapters 6, 7 & 8 which is the spiritual life.
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“The power of God for salvation” should really be understood as deliverance from wrath. Wrath in Romans is rarely, if ever, eternal condemnation. It is the judgment of God on rebellious mankind, whether they are saved or not, during human history. So it should be understood more in the sense of deliverance: “…the power of God for deliverance, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Notice he says, “to everyone who believes.” He doesn’t say anything else, the issue is always faith alone in Christ alone—for justification and, as Paul says in , we are to walk in Him the same way we received the gospel, and that is by faith. That doesn’t mean that we don’t obey Him in multiple areas in the Christian life but ultimately it all rests on trusting in Him. Faith is the foundation for everything in the Christian life, including entry. Then there is the principle “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” That was the pattern.
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We are to focus on the gospel because it is the gospel that has power: the power of truth, not some sort of mystical power, because truth is the thinking of God. We are aligned to the thinking and the reality of God when we believe the gospel. It is the same thing Jesus is saying when He prays to the Father and says: “Sanctify them in truth, thy Word is truth.”
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NASB “For in it [the gospel] {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘but the righteous {man} SHALL live by faith.’” Here we have the first mention of the righteousness of God which is the topic of Romans. Romans is the greatest logical explanation of the righteousness of God in history. If we understand Romans we will never have a problem with “Why did God let this horrible thing happen to these so-called innocent people in history.” We can understand everything if we understand the righteousness of God: that God is righteousness, all that He does is just, and that man because of sin is unrighteous. God has revealed His righteousness to man in the way He has judged mankind, the way He has brought His wrath upon mankind in history, and it is through His righteousness that He has provided a free gift of salvation to satisfy His righteousness through propitiation and the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. And it is in the gospel, phases one through three, the entirety of the gospel which is the full gospel in its true biblical sense. It is the truth and the implications of everything that flows out of the cross.
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It is hard to understand what Paul means by these two uses of pistis [pistij] here, which is the Greek word for faith. Is it faith to faith meaning faith at justification, to faith at sanctification (ongoing spiritual growth), or is he simply saying “from faith to faith” as a summary of the entire spiritual life of the believer from regeneration and new birth, which is faith alone in Christ alone, to the fact that every step of the way we are constantly growing in our faith all the way through until we are absent from the body and face to face with the Lord? Because his explanation here comes from a quote from , “The just shall live by faith.” Herein lies a problem. This is an extremely difficult verse to translate and to interpret because of the question: is Paul using this in its original sense? If he is then it is not a gospel justification by faith verse because that wasn’t the issue in .
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Others have said that based on the way that Paul uses these key words—justification, live and faith—in Romans where whenever the word “justification” is modified by the phrase “by faith” that this should be, when understood in terms of its use in Romans, translated “The justified by faith shall live,” which is a way that explains the structure of Romans. In the first four chapters Paul is going to explain what it means to be justified by faith, and then there is a transition chapter in chapter five. Then chapters six through eight talks about how the justified by faith live in terms of sanctification, and also applies it to the Jews in 9-11 and their ultimate deliverance. Then from chapter twelve to the conclusion of the epistle he has practical applications related to life. So there is a good case for translating this “the justified by faith shall live.” But the problem is the wording in the Greek is the exact same wording and word order that is in the LXX of which follows the word order of the Hebrew in that verse. So what does Paul actually mean here?
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That means we have to go back and remind ourselves of the four different ways in which the apostles quote and view Old Testament passages in the New Testament. We have gone through this in our series on Acts. We will have to look at this a little more in Habakkuk because isn’t dealing with justification by faith in terms of deliverance from the penalty of sin, it is in the context of the fast approaching invasion of the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonian hordes. Habakkuk starts off in chapter one saying, “God, these despicable, obnoxious Jews all around me are violating your law and need to be punished.” God said He was bringing the punisher, the Babylonians. Then Habakkuk was appalled and asked how a righteous God could use these unrighteous, nasty, vile Babylonians to punish a righteous people—who aren’t living righteously, but how could He do that?

Romans 009b-Justified by Faith Shall Live.

Romans 1:17 NASB95
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”
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Romans 009b-Justified by Faith Shall Live.
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NASB “For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’”
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This is an extremely important verse, it sets out the theme of the whole epistle. “For in it,” i.e. the gospel. The use of “gospel” here isn’t the narrow use in the sense of only that message which is required to believe in order to have eternal life but Paul uses the gospel to refer in a plenary sense to the whole realm of theology that flows out of the gospel. In other words, the doctrines that are fundamental to Christianity.
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The “righteousness of God is revealed” introduces the topic, the subject matter, of Romans. It is to explain the righteousness of God in relationship to mankind, to human history, how God’s righteousness has been violated by the human race and how God’s righteousness is satisfied by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross; and how the righteousness of Christ, then, is imputed or credited to the account of the person who believes in Christ so that they are saved not on the basis of what they have done but on the basis of the righteousness that they possess from Christ. This is the basis for God saying that they are justified.
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This is a tremendous verse but there is a little controversy about it: how should it be translated? Should it be translated, “The justified by faith shall live”? Or should it be translated, “The justified shall live by faith”? In the first way of translating it the emphasis is on how those who are justified by faith shall live in their Christian life after salvation. In this first formulation, “The justified shall live by faith,” it is just a fine shade of a difference but it puts the emphasis on the fact the post-salvation life is by faith. The first puts the emphasis on being justified by faith; the second puts the emphasis on living by faith. So we have to answer this question, and it is another quote from the Old Testament, from . We have to understand how Paul is using it because the meaning he is giving this phrase in isn’t exactly the meaning that Habakkuk had when he originally wrote this.
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There are four ways in which the Old Testament is quoted and used in the New Testament. This is based on how the rabbis used quotes from the Old Testament in different ways, using what we refer to as fulfilment language. The first is the idea of literal prophecy; literal fulfilment. This is where an event or a verse in the Old Testament clearly is predicting something, saying that something is going to happen in the future and then when it is fulfilled in terms of prophecy the New Testament quotes it as fulfilment. Example: , .
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The second use is called literal historical event. It is not a prophecy, it is not predicting anything. It is simply describing a historical event or situation but it is a type or shadow or picture of something that would take place in the life of the Messiah or the future history of Israel. So in we read that Joseph and Mary, after they were warned by the angel, went down to Egypt with baby Jesus so that He would survive the slaughter of the babies by Herod, and they were there until the death of Herod, “that is might be fulfilled what was spoken by the Lord through the prophets, saying, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’” That is a direct quote out of Hosea talking about the historical exodus from Egypt. This also connects with a statement in in the prophecy of Balaam indicating that the Messiah would come out of Egypt. This is a picture, a foreshadowing of what would happen in the individual life of the Messiah. It is a typological fulfilment.
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The third use is an application. It is not a type, it is looking at a series of historical that happen and then there are another set of historical things happening at the time of the New Testament and the writer is simply saying something like, This is like that. It is an analogy where, let’s say, five or six things that are the circumstances of the original event only one of which is analogous to what is happening at the time of the writing. It is that that is used as an analogy. E.g. , which describes the slaughter of the infants by Herod in Bethlehem. What we have to recognize is that this refers back to the historical situation () that occurred around 598-586 BC during one of the conquests by Nebuchadnezzar when a group of hostages were taken and deported to Babylon. The Jewish mothers were seeing their children being taken away and would never see them again and they are weeping for them. Ramah is a village north of Jerusalem, but this is being applied to the weeping of the mothers in Bethlehem and Bethlehem was south of Jerusalem. At the time of Nebuchadnezzar the children were being deported but in the time of Jesus the infants were being killed. The writer, Matthew, is applying this and saying what was happening of Jesus with the slaughter of the infants and the mothers weeping over the murders is like what happened at the time of . That is the literal history and application.
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The fourth use is a summary where, for example, Matthew says that Jesus returned from Egypt and came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth “that is might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.” Nowhere is there a prophecy that says that the Messiah was going to be called a Nazarene. But every place we live there is somebody down the road that is thought of as being less bright, less intelligent, less talented than where ever we are, and they are made fun of. In Israel in the ancient world it was Nazareth. The summary is that “Nazarene” stands for somebody who is just backward, uneducated, and not really going to contribute anything to society. This reflects the teaching of the Old Testament teaching about the Messiah, especially in Isaiah chapter 53: that He would be despised and rejected among men. Nazarenes were despised and rejected by their neighbours, so this is a summary of different things that are said about the Messiah being rejected by His people.
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So how is Paul using in ? The original quote, NASB “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.”
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Habakkuk is a book that answers the question that everybody asks at least once in their life, if not many times in their life: Why do bad things happen to good people? This is really what Habakkuk is asking. He precedes that question with the question: Why don’t bad things happen to bad people? In other words, he is looking around at all the people and they are all losers, all disobeying God over and over again. It has been going on for a long time: God, why don’t you judge them? Then he realizes that God is going to judge them and there are a lot who are not necessarily participating in the evil so how come God’s judgment is going to happen upon those who are innocent? So these questions are basically around how God judges in human history, and why is there evil, why is there suffering for people who are not evil, and why isn’t there more suffering for people who are evil? These are basic questions that anybody asks.
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We don’t know anything about Habakkuk as an individual other than he lived in the southern kingdom some time just prior to the invasion of the southern kingdom by Nebuchadnezzar. His name means to embrace, in the Hebrew. Luther wrote of him: Habakkuk signifies an embracer or one who embraces another, takes them to his arms. He embraces his people and takes them to his arms. That is, he comforts them and holds them up as one embraces a weeping child to quiet it with the assurance that if God wills it shall soon be better.
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The exact time of this prophecy is not known. Some think it was as early as the reign of Manasseh. There is a prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem in 1:5 and in that God says, “Because {I am} doing something in your days…” So it couldn’t have been as far back as Manasseh because Habakkuk wouldn’t have lived as long as from Manasseh to the time of 586, so it was relatively close. The setting comes at a time when the Assyrian empire has been waning and they are finally defeated in 609 by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar and his father Nabo-polassar at the Battle of Carchemish. Israel was surrounded by her enemies. One of the characteristics of this time was that the people were out and out rebellion against God in some of the most horrible ways as they were practicing the fertility cults with all of the sexual perversity that went along with it. It was a time of violence, a time of conquest by the Babylonians, a time of instability and chaos, crisis and war. Internally it is a time also of violence, of people doing whatever they want to do, a time of rejection of God and the Mosaic Law and rebellion against the prophets.
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Yet there was still a remnant of believers in Judah who were worshipping God and Habakkuk is one of those. He was a righteous man and when he saw what was going on around him—all of the depravity and violence—he said: God, it can’t be long before you are going to judge these people.
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NASB “How long, O LORD, will I call for help, And You will not hear? I cry out to You, ‘Violence!’ Yet You do not save [or, You will not hear and deliver from the sin that is taking place].” It is as if God is insensitive; He just isn’t doing anything about it. [3] “Why do You make me see iniquity, And cause {me} to look on wickedness? Yes, destruction and violence are before me; Strife exists and contention arises.” He is a little self-absorbed, a little self-righteous. [4] “Therefore the law is ignored [Heb. Word means to be numbed, chilled or frozen] And justice [application of the Law] is never upheld [is powerless]. For the wicked surround the righteous; Therefore justice comes out perverted.”
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Nobody can get justice. If you don’t have justice then there is no value for life or property or a future because everything is in limbo, in turmoil. There is no stability, everything is destroyed because there is no rule of law and there is nothing but corruption among those who are ruling. This is the cycle of civilization that occurs time and time again. When the ruling elite, whether they are elected, business elite that is put into power, some sort of oligarchy, once you lose this foundation of righteousness and integrity then instability and uncertainty comes in. That is what we are seeing today. There is nothing that is more embarrassing to this country than most of the people who are operating either in the civil service or in Washington as elected leaders. They have no sense of objectivity, they are more concerned about their own power and preserving their own political power and whatever base they can establish that gets them some kind of extra money (and there are all kinds of hidden deals that take place in Washington), and the corruption just gets worse and worse.
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But the leaders always reflect the people. If the people don’t have integrity and virtue the leaders will not have integrity and virtue. And the more the culture moves in the direction of absolute licentiousness and moral relativism the more the fabric is destroyed that is necessary to produce the kind of integrity and leaders to do the right thing. It gets to a point in a culture where when people who want to do the right thing come along, in a culture that has slipped to the point where moral relativism has become the norm, and those who hold to an absolute standard are viewed as the enemy. They become ridiculed and are attacked.
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Then the Lord gives Habakkuk a reply. NASB “Look among the nations! Observe! Be astonished! Wonder! Because {I am} doing something in your days— You would not believe if you were told.” Look at the nations. Quit focusing on the domestic issues and look at what I am doing on the grand chess board of human history and nations. Assyria has been destroyed and I am raising up Babylon, you are going to be astounded at what is going to happen. These pagan Chaldeans are going to be my instrument to bring judgment upon Judah. Judah has been unrighteous, yes; I have given them time.
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The bottom line questions: Why do bad things happen to good people and why does evil exist and God seem to allow it to exist and continue? It is because God gave the human race freedom. We have freedom to do wonderful things and freedom to do evil things, and you can’t limit one without limiting the other. So when God allows man to make those choices God is going to give them the rope to hang themselves and to go to the extent of their depravity. And God is always going to be calling them back to change, to repent, to turn back to Him, because once God stops it stops, it is over with, it is the end. There is judgment coming and they are destroyed. God gives them grace and extends their time, gives them opportunity to turn back to Him. That is His grace, but ultimately the time will come when God has to bring that judgment. Now is the time and He warns that He is bringing judgment against the nation of Judah. He is going to do it through the Chaldeans.
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NASB “For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, That fierce and impetuous people Who march throughout the earth To seize dwelling places which are not theirs.” There are twelve things listed in the next verses that describe the Chaldeans. Fierce, which is that they are bitter in temper, angry and violent in warfare. They are impetuous, which means they are swift, fast. They march throughout the earth, which means their armies are continually conquering new places. They are dreaded and feared, they strike terror. They listen to no one but themselves, they set their own standards and agenda and are a law unto themselves. They are described as more fierce than evening wolves, the idea of being keener, sharper, more attuned to what is going on. They can respond quickly in the battlefield to what is happening. They swoop down on their horses like eagles—surprise attacks. Their faces are set like the east wind, which indicates that they are set hard, they are not going to succumb to compassion. They gather captives like sand—they defeat so many there are just multitudes of captives. They scoff at kings, they don’t care about the rulers of these other countries. They have the ability to conquer anything that is thrown up in their path.
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So God’s description of the Chaldeans in vv. 5-11 basically spells out the horrors of being defeated by the Babylonians, and the conquest and what was in store for the southern kingdom of Judah as they would come under Nebuchadnezzar’s gazes. Three different times he would invade and only the last time would he conquer and destroy Jerusalem and the first temple.
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Then Habakkuk’s question: You are a holy God, how can a holy God use these wicked people? God’s answer is that He is the one who controls history and He can raise up whomever He wants to to bring judgment upon His people for their violation of His Law. NASB “Are You not from everlasting, O LORD, my God, my Holy One? We will not die. You, O LORD, have appointed them to judge; And You, O Rock, have established them to correct. [13] {Your} eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You can not look on wickedness {with favor.} Why do You look with favor On those who deal treacherously? Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up Those more righteous than they?”
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Then there is a description of what this conquest will be like. NASB “{Why} have You made men like the fish of the sea, Like creeping things without a ruler over them?” Why do you allow this to happen? is what he is asking. God’s answer is broader than the individual situation. He thinks in terms of the scope of history and pictures how He is going to use this to bring judgment upon Israel for the purpose of eventually raising them up so that they are a nation that is righteous and worships and glorifies Him.
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We get into chapter two which begins: NASB “I will stand on my guard post [a mental watch] And station myself on the rampart; And I will keep watch to see what He will speak to me, And how I may reply when I am reproved.” He is going to observe this and write about it. He understands that he will be corrected by God.
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The answer that God gives. The opening salvo from God is in verses 2-5, and this is where we see the quote that shows up in Romans. NASB “Then the LORD answered me and said, ‘Record the vision And inscribe {it} on tablets, That the one who reads it may run.
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Then starting in verse 6 five woes are announced against Judah, and when it is over with Habakkuk is going to recognize that God is the one who is sovereign. The conclusion in verse 20 is: “But the LORD is in His holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him.” He recognizes that he was judging God’s way of conducting Himself in history and he understands the justice of God and how it has worked itself out in the history of Israel. He is basically saying no one has the right to judge or question God’s ways. Why? Because we do not know all that God does.
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In verse 2 God instructs Habakkuk to write down the vision. This will serve as a warning to those who read it to pay attention to it. NASB “For the vision is yet for the appointed time; It hastens toward the goal and it will not fail. Though it tarries, wait for it; For it will certainly come, it will not delay. [4] Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.” Who is the proud? The Chaldeans. They are the proud, the arrogant, and even though God is using them to bring discipline against the southern kingdom of Judah that does not absolve them of their guilt and arrogance. Judah is wrong and needs to be punished for their rebellion against God; the Chaldeans are wrong but God is going to use them in their unrighteousness to punish Judah, and then God in turn will bring judgment upon the Chaldeans. There will be justice in history; God does not forget.
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There is a parallelism here. “Behold, as for the proud one…” This is an analysis of this group; they are called proud. Then there is a diagnosis. What happens to the proud? It comes in verse 5: “And he is like death, never satisfied.” What happens to the proud? He dies. In contrast to the proud we have the just. They are going to live. “But the righteous will live by his faith.” The question is how this is going to be translated. The word order in the Hebrew: “The righteous by his faith shall live.”
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The word translated “faith” here is the word emunah. There is a lot of controversy over how this is translated. Most translations translated before the last 20-20 years consistently translate this as “faith.” The contrast is between the pride of the Chaldeans and the faith of the believers in Judah. This is the only place in all of the Old Testament where emunah has the idea of faith; in every other place it is “faithful.” So there are some modern translations which translate it “faithful,” but there is a judgment that is being pronounced on both the proud and the just. The judgment is that the proud will die; the just will live. You can’t pronounce the judgment if you have an open-ended value. The open-ended value is faithfulness. How do you know if you have been faithful or not? It doesn’t fit the contrast. It is not a contrast between the unfaithful and the faithful, it is between the proud (those who have no faith) and those who have faith. This is why most commentators and translators understand that this should be translated “faith” and not “faithful,” and it is accurately translated that way.
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“The just by his faith…” They are righteous by faith. Abraham was declared righteous for his faith in . He is declared righteous on the basis of his faith, not on the basis of works. Works do not make us righteous enough. NASB “And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.” So the point in verse 4 is in contrast to the proud who die. The one who is justified by faith shall live.
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There are five woes that are announced. The word “woe” in the Hebrew is hoy. It is the basis for a judgment. In the first (vv. 6b-8) the judgment is on the transgressors, the Chaldeans because of their ill-gotten gains. They have taken too many spoils and this is unrighteous, so God will spoil the spoils of the spoiler and plunder the plunderer. The second woe (vv.9-11) focuses on the covetousness and self-exaltation. They see themselves as the ultimate, they ignore God, they focus on evil gain and for that they will be judged by God. In the third woe (vv. 12-14) they are building their empire on the death, destruction and violence done to those they conquer. So they are going to be judged for their tyrannical oppression of captive people. You can never build yourself up on the basis of destroying others. The fourth woe is for their violent conquest of others (v.15). The drunken person is typically used as a picture of conquest of someone who can’t control himself. The Chaldean lust for power and conquest leads to their destruction. They are drunk on their power, their lust, and they will become conquered as a result of that. That applies also for any individual and any nation. When the leaders is business and government serve themselves at the expense of their customers or the citizens then they become ruled by their own lust and passion, and they will be easily destroyed because they become slaves to their own sin nature. The fifth woe: Judgment is pronounced upon them again because of their dishonesty and unrighteousness (v.19). The judgment is upon their idolatry because they are worshipping idols of wood and stone that they have overlaid with gold and silver.
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The conclusion: “But the LORD is in His holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him.” God will bring judgment at the right time and in the right way.
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This causes a change of thinking on the part of Habakkuk. His prayer is in chapter three. He recognizes that at the beginning he questioned God’s judgment because God didn’t do things the way Habakkuk thought God ought to do things. But when God explains it he gets it. He recognizes the principle of , NASB “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. For {as} the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.” In those verses God makes it clear that He is the sovereign God who rules history and He is going to do things the way He deems best because He is omniscient and He knows all the facts. When man, the creature, comes along and says God should have done it this way or that way he has a microscopic, infinitesimal amount of data and he is trying to extrapolate from this grain of sand sized knowledge, and he thinks that that grain of sand is the size of the universe. What God does is just because that is His essential nature, and this is the conclusion that Habakkuk comes to. NASB “The Lord GOD is my strength, And He has made my feet like hinds’ {feet,} And makes me walk on my high places.”
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The life that he is talking about here is fullness of life even in the midst of judgment and defeat, the life that God has for every person who is a believer. When we look back at verse and the phrase “justified by faith shall live” he is talking about the mentality of the believer who can surmount any circumstances and difficulties because he is walking with God and therefore can have the fullness of life.
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If we plug that into Romans chapter one that is exactly what Paul is talking about. NASB “For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’” Just as the righteousness of God was revealed for Habakkuk, so it was revealed for us in the way God deals with the believer and the believer’s life. But the one who is justified by faith shall live. In the last part of Romans chapter one through chapter four the focus is on how a person becomes justified before God. It is by faith and not by works. In onward the issue is the result of justification by faith. In chapter 5 the believer has piece with God. Chapters 6-8 talks about the believer’s life and how he can live in service to God. Chapters 9-11 focus on how God’s righteousness is demonstrated in His dealings with Israel and that Israel will eventually will be saved. Then there is final application in chapters 12-16. So this lays out the outline of the book, that those who are justified by faith shall live. That is what Romans is all about.

Romans 010b-The Justified by Faith Shall Live.

Romans 1:18 NASB95
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
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Romans 010b-The Justified by Faith Shall Live.
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When Paul says he is not ashamed of the gospel ( he is referring to the entire Christian body of doctrine. That is the power of God to salvation, to bring us through phase one, phase two to phase three. Paul is going to expand on that in the next sentence and clinch it with an Old Testament quote: NASB “For in it [the gospel, the body of doctrine that makes up Christian belief]{the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’”
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There is a lot of discussion about the phrase “from faith to faith,” it is somewhat ambiguous. But the best explanation in terms of context is “from faith,” i.e. the initial faith in Jesus Christ as the Messiah promised in the Old Testament who died as the final and complete sacrifice for sin on the cross (justification faith), to sanctification “faith,” the faith that is essential to grow as a believer.
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Then Paul uses the phrase “The righteous shall live by faith.” He is using this phrase from to illustrate the point that he has just made, i.e. that everyone who believes will be saved. This is not talking about just eternal life; it is talking about what we refer to as enhanced life, the fullness of life. It is not just talking about length of life, unending life, but it is talking about the quality and the largeness of life that is the believer’s because he is no longer dead.
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The first thing we need to do to understand this is to go back and understand the Old Testament context which comes out of Habakkuk. Chapters 1 & 2 of Habakkuk relate a conversation, a dialogue between Habakkuk and God. Chapter 3 is a hymn of praise to God because Habakkuk now sees how God’s righteousness is being displayed by His temporal judgment on Judah in 586 BC. As the prophet began in the first part of chapter 1 he is looking out at his fellow Israelites and he is appalled at their unrighteous behaviour. He complains to God in terms of His justice: Why haven’t you brought judgment on these unrighteous Jews? God says: Come to think of it, I was just about to do that? I have these people over here to the east called the Chaldeans and they are on the verge of coming in and will bring judgment into Judah. As soon as God said that Habakkuk was taken aback and says: They are more unrighteous than we are. How can you use an unrighteous people to judge righteous Israel?
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, NASB “Are You not from everlasting, O LORD, my God, my Holy One? We will not die. You, O LORD, have appointed them to judge; And You, O Rock, have established them to correct. {Your} eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You can not look on wickedness {with favor.} Why do You look with favor On those who deal treacherously? Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up Those more righteous than they?” Who is he talking about? Israel—more righteous than the Gentiles. He brings in that idea of righteousness.
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Then in chapter 2 he makes this statement: NASB “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.” The proud are the Chaldeans. Where is the proud headed? To death [5] “Furthermore, wine betrays the haughty man, So that he does not stay at home. He enlarges his appetite like Sheol, And he is like death, never satisfied. He also gathers to himself all nations And collects to himself all peoples.” So the Chaldeans will be judged by God. But in contrast, the just, i.e. the righteous remnant in Israel, shall live by his faith. What he is talking about there is how the righteous in Israel will be sustained in the coming calamity by his faith. So it is comparable to what we would describe in relation to the Christian life as phase two—our ongoing dependence upon God as a believer, trusting Him in the midst of crises and calamities. The issue is, for the believer, that he is to live by his faith.
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That is the original context. But if we take that and that meaning to “The just shall live by faith” to it doesn’t fit. Paul is not making a literal one-to-one correspondence with the historical circumstance of Habakkuk to the circumstance of believers in the first century. So to understand it we go back to our categories of how the Old Testament is used in the New. The first category is literal prophecy-literal fulfilment. This isn’t a prophecy and it is not talking about literal fulfilment in . Next category is a literal historical event, like the exodus from Egypt, applied typologically to the New Testament. Example: Applied to Jesus when Joseph and Mary brought Him back from Egypt. Then the third usage is literal historical event as indicated by Jeremiah’s statement in 31:15 that is quoted in , , and it is applied. There is something analogous between the original historical event and the present event so that under divine inspiration a statement is taken from the Old Testament and applied and enlarged in its meaning. So it is an application by analogy. The fourth category is summary. This just takes a phrase and sort of summarizes and Old Testament teaching. What we see Paul doing in and the other two passages where he quotes Habakkuk is to apply a principle in a fuller sense from the original phrase.
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Another thing we see is that the Hebrew word order, the LXX word order and the Romans Koine Greek order are somewhat different. The Hebrew word order states: The righteous by his faith shall live. You can imply the same thing: the righteous by faith shall live, the emphasis being on the basis of righteousness. And if we say the righteous shall live by his faith then the emphasis is on living by faith. The LXX word order keeps the same word order as the original Hebrew: ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται. Romans keeps that same word order as well but moves the “by faith” to a position following the verb, so it is translated into English in every English translation as “The just shall live by faith.” So we have to address this as to whether that is a legitimate translation.
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“For in it righteousness of God is revealed…” In Romans the word dikaiosune [dikaiosunh] is used 34 times. The suffix, the une, indicates the quality of something, so it is the quality of righteousness that is used 34 times in Romans. The phrase, “the righeousness of God” is used eight times in the New Testament, seven of which are in Romans. That phrase literally scared the hell out of Martin Luther before he was saved because he pictured the righteousness of God in terms of this Judge up in heaven casting thunderbolts of judgment at mankind. It wasn’t until he began to study through the Psalms that he realized the righteousness of God wasn’t a focus on God’s righteousness as much as it was the provision of God’s righteousness by His mercy to mankind. That eventually led him to realize that it was through the imputation of God’s righteousness to man by faith that was the basis for salvation. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament agree that man is not righteous. He can perform good deeds, do many wonderful things in history for his fellow man and his family. Jesus said to His disciples: “You being evil know how to give know how to give good gifts to your children.”
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Just because we say as Christians that man is totally depraved we don’t mean that he is absolutely depraved. Human beings are not absolutely evil. The doctrine of total depravity means that every part of man’s being has been affected, corrupted by sin. Therefore man is inherently evil in his orientation, and evil is always defined in Scripture as oriented away from God’s authority towards idolatry, which is what we see in Romans chapter one. Evil is not defined in Scripture in terms of specific acts such as incest, child abuse, sexual assault, genocide, slavery or any of these other things that are sins occupying the minds of contemporary people. Evil is the idea of the rejection of God as the creator God of the universe. Even though man does good things they are relative to other people. We can do many good things, things that improve the lot of mankind, but we can’t measure up to the absolute standard of God’s character. That is the definition of God’s character. Righteousness is the gold standard of God’s perfection. Justice is another word that comes out of righteousness—the same words that are translated out of Hebrew and Greek that are translated “righteous” are also translated “justice.” It depends on whether the context is talking about the objective standard or the application of the standard. When the emphasis is on the standard of God’s perfection (His righteousness) then the word should be translated “righteousness,” and that is the standard by which God relates to mankind. That is what is rejected by man because he cannot live up to the absolute standard of God.
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This absolute standard of God “is revealed.” In the gospel we understand that man doesn’t measure up to the standard. Man is a sinner, . This is the same thing Isaiah was saying in . The gospel reveals God’s righteous standard and it also reveals the solution to measure up to that standard—faith in Christ, at which time God’s righteousness is imputed or applied to man. This is what is referred to as the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Another thing that we run into here is that the Hebrew word that is translated “faith” in is the word emunah. The root is the same word from which we get amen and aman meaning to believe. Emunah is translated “faithfulness” or “steadfastness” or “stability” in every place else in the Old Testament except for here where it has always been translated “faith,” except perhaps for the last 20-30 years. So the interpretive question is: Does it mean faithfulness or does it mean faith.
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If we take it here that it must be faithfulness then we end up saying that it is the faithfulness of man that is the basis for justification. In Habakkuk it is clear that he is not talking about faithfulness because the contrast to the just is the proud. So what we are talking about is two groups of people who have already settled what they are; they are closed groups. Whereas if we define the second group as being faithful, faithful is a linear process: you have to see if you have been faithful enough and for a long enough period of time. It is a process; it is open-ended. What we are talking about in the way it is expressed in is those who are of this category shall by faith live. They are viewed as a set category, it is not a process. We are not trying to find out of they are going to be faithful, they are already defined as this set category. This is why historically has been understood as faith rather than faithfulness. The theological implications of faithfulness, also, will change. Some people will say this is reading New Testament passages back into the Old because when Paul quotes from he always deals with it in terms of faith, not in terms of faithfulness, a different Greek word—pistos [pistoj] rather than pistis [pistij]. pistos is faithfulness. Paul always quotes this with pistis, which is how it is translated in the LXX. Even the rabbis who translated Hebrew text into the LXX before Christ understood this to be faith and not faithfulness.
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This fits with what we see in . It begins with a causal participle which should be translated “because we know that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ”—faith toward an object, which is Jesus Christ—“even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.” We are justified only by faith and only in Jesus Christ.
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So when we look at NASB “For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.” Is it the just by faith shall live, or the just shall live by faith?
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Reasons why this should be understood as the justified by faith shall live: If we look at the structure of Romans and how the words “righteousness” and “faith” are used righteousness and faith are always connected together. Faith is not connected to life. So it is not living by faith, that is not the issue in Romans. Again and again and again we have righteousness by faith stated throughout the epistle. The noun pistis [pistij], faith, and the verb pisteuo [pisteuw], I believe, appear twenty-seven times in Romans chapters three through four. & 4 is the greatest exposition and explanation of justification by faith in all of Scripture. In Paul’s mind in Romans chapter four he goes back to when it is said that Abraham trusted God and it was imputed to him as righteousness. That is the Old Testament foundation for understanding that justification is by faith. That is what Habakkuk is alluding to in his statement; that is what Paul is alluding to in and develops in chapters three and four. uses the words pistis and pisteuo again. We don’t read them again until the latter part of Romans. He stops talking about faith in , . There it is simply a transition from the topic of justification by faith alone in chapter four to the topic of reconciliation and the peace we have with God in chapter five.
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On the other hand, the noun zoe [zwh], life, and zao [zaw], the verb to live, appear 25 times in chapters 5-8 which are the sections dealing with the spiritual life that comes after we are justified. Those words are not found in the section dealing with justification by faith. So when we look at these three words—dikaosune for justification, pistis and pisteuo for faith, zoe and zao for life, we see that in Romans Paul always associates justification with faith, not life with faith. Therefore on the basis of that statistical analysis within the context of Romans we see that Paul is emphasizing that what begins life is justification by faith and those who are justified by faith, if they continue to the second faith of 1:17, will live; they will have the abundant life, the enhanced life, the joyous life that Christ promised us. Those two verses set up the basic theme for the epistle to the Romans.
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Starting in verse 18 we shift into the first major division of Romans: 1:18-3:20 the focus is on the condemnation of man from God’s righteousness. God’s righteousness is His absolute standard and His justice in the application of that standard to His creatures, because as His creatures that are moral, volitional and have responsibility we fail to meet the standard of His righteousness and therefore His justice must condemn us. What God’s righteousness rejects God’s justice condemns. What God’s righteousness accepts God’s justice will bless. So in this next section we see the condemnation of man, revealing that no matter what man does he just cannot measure up to the righteousness of God. In the first part of this we see God’s condemnation upon the human race as a whole and that this condemnation is based on man’s rejection of God.
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In verse 18 we have the word “for” again, third time in a row. It introduces an explanation. It is explaining why it is true that the justified by faith shall live.
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NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” First of all we have the phrase “the wrath of God.” It is without an article in the Greek, which means it is talking about the quality of the noun as opposed to the distinctiveness. So it is referring to the absolute judgment of God. The word “wrath” speaks of anger in its literal meaning. However the phrase “wrath of God” is not to be understood in terms of the literal meaning of the word, but it has an idiomatic sense. It expresses the harshness of God’s judgment, His judicial activity.
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There are those who go to phrases like “God’s anger” or “God’s wrath” and they want to say that this expresses God’s emotion. There are problems with that. The phrase “wrath of God” in the Hebrew where it originates is not a literal phrase, it doesn’t even use the word for wrath or anger, it uses an idiom, a physical idiom. Literally in Hebrew it means God’s nose burns. So right away we see that this is a figure of speech when it is applied to God. It is called an anthropomorphism, meaning that something related to human form is applied to God but God doesn’t actually possess it. We have phrases like the eyes of God, the finger of God, God turning His back on Moses; but God doesn’t have a human body like we have a human body. These words are used in an analogous sense because they help communicate something about God’s purpose or His plan toward us so we can understand Him. So when we see this phrase “the wrath of God” we must understand that it originates from an idiomatic anthropomorphism. It is then applied as an anthropopathism—anthropos = man; pathos = emotion. We are talking about a human emotion and ascribing that to God, and just like the word anthropomorphism God doesn’t actually possess that form and He doesn’t possess that emotion either.
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Anger is a response to a change of circumstances where we don’t get our way. It happens when we suddenly recognize we are not getting our way and we respond or react to the circumstances. It is absurd to think this about God because God in His omniscience knew from all eternity that man was going to rebel against Him and man was going to reject Him. God doesn’t wait until somebody says they don’t believe in God to throw temper tantrum and to get mad at him. God has always known that they are going to reject Him. So He doesn’t operate in terms of visceral emotions that are always in a state of flux. The phrase “the wrath of God” just expresses the severity of judgment. We have a similar expression in the English language. If you are going to court and are given a sentence that is the fullest extent of the law you might say that the judge threw the book at you. The judge was not angry, he may have been very impartial and very objective and, in fact, very cold, but he didn’t literally pick up the book and throw it at you.
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The “wrath of God” is a term that is never used to describe eternal condemnation. It is always a term that is used to describe God’s temporal judgment on mankind. The way the wrath of God is revealed in the coming verses, beginning in vv. 24 and down through v. 32, has to do with the historical manifestation of God’s judgment in human history in civilizations up to the point of the time of Paul’s writing. Later on we read in 1 Thessalonians that God has saved us from the wrath to come. That is not talking about the lake of fire, it is talking about the Tribulation which is the outpouring of God’s judgment on human civilization during the period of Daniel’s seventieth week. It is not a term for eternal judgment.
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We read that the wrath of God is revealed, disclosed from heaven, which is where God’s throne is located (the Supreme Court of heaven) against two things: all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. The phrase “of men” applies to both ungodliness and unrighteousness. To what do these two terms refer? The first word is asebeia [a)sebeia]. The root sebeia has to do with something related to deity. When it has the prefix eu, which means something good, we have eusebeia [e)usebeia] which has to do with something that is good in relationship to God. That is the word that is translated “godliness” usually, from the old English word Godlikeness which just means that we are to be conformed into the image of God. asebeia is the negation of that. In English we have the prefix un, which means it is not something; in the Greek the prefix is just the letter a [a]. So asebeia is ungodliness or a lack of a spiritual life or a lack of a focus on the spiritual realities of life. It is a rejection of everything God has established in terms of true spirituality. The second word that is used is adikia [a)dikia] and it has to do with unrighteousness. John says, “All unrighteousness (adikia) is sin.” So we have something that has to do with negating God and something to do with the violation of righteous standards.
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It is interesting that this fits on the Ten Commandments, that asebeia relates to those initial commandments that relate to worshipping only one God and adikia has to do with violating all of the other standards like honouring parents, committing adultery, stealing, being a false witness. So by using these two words, asebeia and adikia Paul is assuming all violation of that which relates to God and that which relates to man. Remember, Jesus summarized the Law by saying that all of the Law is “Love the Lord your God for all your heart, soul, mind (first half of the Ten Commandments) and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself (second half of the Ten Commandments).” So this is a rejection of that.
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So the wrath [judgment] of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness—asebeia, all that rejects the truth of God in terms of spiritual life and man’s relationship to God—and unrighteousness—everything related to the violation of God’s standards and relationship to other human beings—of men. The final phrase and relative clause, “who suppress the truth in [by means of] unrighteousness.” This is a great phrase one of the most significant phrases and verses in all of Scripture.
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The relative clause “who suppress” describes the men: those who were receivers are those who are ungodly and unrighteous. These are men who are suppressing truth by means of unrighteousness. The verb katecho [katexw] means to hold something down, to push something down, to stuff something down and out of the way so you don’t see it. People don’t want to have a place for God so they try to find some place in their soul to stuff Him in some dark corner somewhere so they don’t ever have to deal with Him. But God isn’t just going to go away and leave them alone. His reality is in their soul. Every now and then when somebody says X, Y and Z is wrong someone gets really upset. We see this every now and then in our culture when somebody is just going along, everything is fine, and then they make some statement in relation to something that is wrong. And all of a sudden somebody just goes ballistic over it because they have been trying to keep God in a box somewhere and not come out, and those Christians want to talk about creation. This just drives the atheist and the evolutionist nuts because they are working so hard to create a scientific explanation for the origin of life that leaves God out and it just doesn’t work. It is pseudo-science. Man is constantly trying to suppress truth by means of that which violates God’s standard, so he comes up with all manner of ways that violate God’s Law, the Torah, so suppress the existence of God.
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Then Paul is going to answer the question: How did they even know that God exists? He is going to explain that in the next two verses, that what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. The conclusion of verse 20 is that they are without excuse. God says they have enough information by looking at creation. Everything He has created has His fingerprint on it and every time they look at a tree, a leaf, a snowflake, a flower it is screaming to them that it can’t happen by chance. Every time they see that it resonates with something God put in their soul and they hate it. They want to live life their way and do what they want to do, and as soon as they are reminded that there just might be an absolute accountability to God they just go ballistic. God says they have enough information so that they are without excuse.

Romans 011b-The Existence of God.

Romans 1:18 NASB95
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
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Romans 011b-The Existence of God.
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NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
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In verse 18 there is a shift. The introduction to this verse is the word “For” and most of the time in English this is a translation of the Greek word gar [gar]. It advances the argument to the next step. Sometimes it is an explanation; sometimes it is sets things up a little bit; sometimes it almost has the sense of because, because of an explanation, and it almost borders on that in this verse. What we have here is the beginning of a section that goes down to chapter three verse 20, and verse 20 states NASB “because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law {comes} the knowledge of sin.” The point there, from 1:18 down to 3:20, is that no one can measure up to God’s righteousness. His justice must be satisfied; it must condemn that which does not qualify according to God’s righteousness. Only creatures who qualify on the basis of God’s righteousness can be declared just. So basically the indictment against the human race is given in 1:18-3:20 and then the solution to the indictment follows from 3:21 down through the end of chapter five.
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begins by talking about this judgment of God. For the most part the majority of the verses that speak of the wrath of God are verses that speak of God’s discipline or judgment within human history; it is not talking about condemnation at the great white throne judgment or the wrath of God in the lake of fire. There are some passages where the wrath of God is related to the Tribulation period, the time of Daniel’s seventieth week, the time of Jacob’s trouble. This is related to God’s plan and purposes for Israel, but this wrath is poured out on the entire human race. The reason it is called Jacob’s wrath in the role of Israel is because as God is pouring out His judgment on the human race the human race blames Israel. So wrath is used to refer to that coming eschatological judgment. NASB “So he [John the Baptist]{began} saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’” He is talking about this future judgment. Remember, he was announcing that the kingdom was at hand. For the kingdom of God to come there had to be the seven-year period of judgment upon mankind and that is why he is phrasing it “the wrath to come.”
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NASB “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days; for there will be great distress upon the land and wrath to this people.” Jesus is talking about a time of judgment that will come in AD 70, during the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, the defeat of the Jews in the Jewish revolt by the armies of Titus and the destruction of the temple.
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NASB “For God has not destined us for wrath…” That is, those who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, those who are members of the body of Christ. “…but for obtaining salvation [deliverance by not going through that future judgment of the Tribulation] through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
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But then it also relates in other passages to non-future events, to just the ongoing divine discipline in time. For example, NASB “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” That is a verse where people might say that seems to be future judgment, the lake of fire—except for the present tense verb there. It doesn’t say that the wrath of God will abide on him but the wrath of God (present tense) abides on him. This is exactly what is saying: “The wrath of God is revealed”—that’s now, it is not talking about the future. It is a gnomic or habitual present, indicating something that is going on throughout time; it is a customary situation. So we see that God’s wrath is a present reality. Those who do not believe in the Son are under wrath and continue under wrath.
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NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.” There if we understand wrath to be divine discipline in time then it is talking about sanctification truth, spiritual life truth; that if we are walking in obedience to God we will avoid divine discipline and the temporal judgments of God upon our lives.
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NASB “For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience.” Again, this is a customary present tense.
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NASB “hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved; with the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the utmost.”
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So these are all uses of wrath in present situations and when we read Paul says the wrath of God is being poured out right now. It is being revealed or manifested and displayed right now because there is sin in the world. Because the human race is rejecting God, God is going to judge the human race. This happens in two different ways. It is not always raining down fire and brimstone like God did at Sodom and Gomorah. God has built into the structure of human relationships and human souls cause and effect so that when we violate God’s standards there are consequences that come into effect. That is what we see in the rest of this chapter. Paul is going to outline, starting in verse 24, how God allows these consequences to enter into human history and social, marriage and family relationships end up having disruptive and destructive consequences, and there are three stages that God takes the human race through in terms of giving them enough rope to hang themselves.
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So the principle that is laid down in 1:18 is that God’s judgment in time, in history, as an ongoing state in history is revealed from heaven. It is revealed from heaven because heaven is the location of God’s throne as the sovereign ruler of the universe. He is the one who in His providential care oversees the execution of His judgment.
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Then the text goes on to say it is “revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.” The word “ungodliness” is asebeia [a)sebeia] which indicates that which violates God’s character and probably relates to idolatry, especially as it relates to the first four of the Ten Commandments; and “unrighteousness” which is adikia [a)dikia], that which is a violation of the last six Commandments in terms of its violation in human relationships. Incidentally, in John says “All adikia is sin.” This is the same word that is used in —“all unrighteousness.” Paul covers everything by these two words, ungodliness and unrighteousness. Ungodliness probably alludes to forms of idolatry because that is exactly what is brought into the context beginning in verse 21. So God is not passively sitting off somewhere in heaven, He is actively involved in allowing the human race to reap the consequences of its rejection of Him, and He oversees that so that things are not always as bad as they could be. One of the ways He oversees it is through the restrainer— which says the Antichrist will not be revealed until the restrainer is removed. The restrainer is a term for God the Holy Spirit who is working in history right now to restrain evil so that things can’t get as bad as people think they will. That doesn’t mean they can’t get bad.
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Definition of sin: Anything that violates the character of God. It is when the creature acts independently of the creator.
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When we act in autonomy we are making ourselves and our standards equivalent to God’s standards; we become self-idolaters. Once that happens within the human race there are all manner of different consequences that happen and it eventually leads to the collapse of personal life, family life, businesses, nations and civilizations. That is what the rest of this chapter is really describing. The wrath of God is revealed against this and the core problem, as we will see, is idolatry. It is worshipping something as the absolute standard and reference point of the universe other than God.
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The focal point in verse 18 is the human race. Only the human race among God’s creatures, other than angels, can sin because they have volition. You can’t sin if you don’t have volition. We are created as image bearers to reflect God and when we deny God and we put ourselves in the position of God then we are violating our core humanity. You cannot be a genuine human if you do not recognize that you are here to reflect God, not to be God. When you take God off the throne and sit down on the throne yourself then you have violated your humanity.
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“…against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The word that is used here to describe the suppression of truth in unrighteousness is the Greek verb katecho [katexw]. It means to push something down, to suppress it. It is the rejection of God and a description here of the men who are practising ungodliness and unrighteousness. To worship an idol means that you also have to be denying truth. At the same time you are affirming error you have to be denying and suppressing truth, and you do it “in unrighteousness” or “by means of unrighteousness.” The kind of thinking that is entailed in denying God is unrighteousness. So we think in an unrighteous way to suppress the truth and the reality of the existence of God.
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Why do they suppress the truth in unrighteousness? This is described in the next verse. NASB “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” This is an interesting verse. The terminology here relates to all mankind—anthropos [a)nqrwpoj] = humanity. Paul says, “that which is known about God.” So there is positive content to the meaning of the word “God” and His existence and reality—“is evident [manifest] in them.” Prior to everything else, prior to seeing and observing creation, the Scripture says the knowledge of God is embedded in the soul of every human being because they are in the image of God. There is a point and counterpoint between deity and the image of God in us so that our souls automatically, inherently vibrate to the existence of God because we are a human being.
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A theist is somebody who believes in the existence of God; an atheist is somebody who does not believe in the existence of God. If somebody says that it is wrong to talk about God in the classroom because any statement that affirms the existence of God is teaching religion, then it is also wrong to teach that that God doesn’t exist because the statement “God exists” is as theological and religious as the statement “God does not exist.” Just because you negate the statement doesn’t mean it becomes non-religious. The statement that there is no God, or I’m not sure of there is a God, are just as strong religious statements as the statement there is a God. So we have to realize that whenever anybody speaks of or teaches about ethics, whenever they teach or speak about ultimate reality, whenever they teach or speak about creation, they are making a religious statement. They are either saying God exists, we don’t know if God exists, or they are saying that God does not exist. Whatever they are saying, if they are saying one of three things, they can’t avoid that. Anything and everything ultimately goes back to one of those three positions, it is ultimately a religious statement.
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If you say I believe X is right or X is wrong and somebody says, well how do you know that, ultimately to prove your case you have to affirm some sort of ultimate value. Where does that ultimate value come from? Either the creature or God, but you’ve made something God—either the creature, man, or God’s revelation; something of that nature. Everything related to an ultimate reality is religious whether you want to admit that or not. We live in a world that wants to say only the positive statements about God are religious, statements that there is not a God: that’s okay, that’s not religious. That is a rationality, which is exactly what this text is going to demonstrate. In , though, Paul says that God created man in His image and likeness, and what that means is that from day one the creature knows he is a creature; he knows that he is the mirror image of God. What happens because of volition is that he starts to suppress it: “I don’t want anyone else to be over me, I’m going to figure out how to deny.” Then what happens when somebody comes along and says, well maybe there’s a little evidence here that there is something out there beyond us, they just go ballistic. What it means is that this whole house of cards they’ve constructed to justify their life and belief system and everything else is threatened. If God exists then everything they are devoting their life to and for is wrong, and their belief system, their value system, is wrong and everything else is wrong, and they can’t stand that. So they have to squash it. All of a sudden that which they have been suppressing in the corner of their soul, the reality of the existence of God, starts to wiggle a little bit. God is not going to let them rest.
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So Paul says first of all that what may be known about God is clear from the intelligent design argument. Is that what he says? No, he says it is manifest in them; it is something that God built into every human being from creation. The nature of being human is that you know you are in the image of God; you are a reflection of Him. Then it goes to the next level: “for God made it evident to them.” Not only is there something internal in the makeup of man but there is something external where God has shown it to him. How did God show it to him?
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NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” The invisible is clearly seen. How do you see something that is invisible? The literal idea of the words “clearly seen” is that it is apparent, obvious, understood. Scripture says that God is a spirit. He is not flesh and blood; He is not mortal, so how do we see Him? We see Him by the effects of His work. They are understood by the things that are made, “even the eternal power and Godhead.” The bottom line is that God is saying that you look at creation. Creation came from the hand of God. God’s brand is stamped on everything He created. There is something in man and man’s makeup in the image of God so that when he looks at anything in God’s creation he also sees God’s brand stamped there. These two things resonate with each other so that he knows God exists. That is what Paul is saying.
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“His eternal power and divine nature.” That doesn’t mean he is going to be able to go out and say God is sovereign, just, etc., and name all of His attributes. It is a general revelation; he doesn’t have the specificity of special revelation. The attributes of God we learn from special revelation; all general revelation gives us is the fact that we know that God exists, we know that He is greater than we are, and we have this sense that he is righteous and good.
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You can’t talk about good and bad if you don’t have a God or something out there that is the source of what is good and what is bad. Just because you think lying is bad that is just your culture. You go to some cultures in Papua New Guinea and they believe that lying and deception and being able to deceive another person to the point where it costs them their life is the greatest virtue in life. Who is to say they’re wrong if there is not some ultimate reference point? What this verse is saying is that in general revelation there is enough evidence of God’s existence to hold every human being accountable to the knowledge of God. And it is not based necessarily on understanding rational philosophical arguments for the existence of God because it is ultimately based on what is manifest in them: that God put in every human being, deep in their soul, the brand of God. That means that within them there was at some point a knowledge that God existed, and at that point they had to decide whether they wanted to know more about God or not. They could either seek God or reject Him—suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Most people suppress. They are out there trying to stuff everything down the garbage can because they don’t want to admit there’s even garbage there because then they have to take out the garbage. They just want to stuff it all down the garbage can of their soul and keep it stuffed down, keep it suppressed.
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So it is not ultimately based on understanding these sophisticated articulations or arguments for the existence of God—not that those don’t have some role to play. But based on the exegesis of this passage it goes beyond that, it goes before that, back to the three-year-olds, the four-year-olds and the five-year-olds who have never heard of the cosmological arguments of God because there God’s brand in their soul was telling them that when they looked at a daffodil, a snowflake, etc. and when they saw the clouds form in the heavens there was something in their soul that said God exists, or something greater than I am. Then they said yes or no to that. From that point on that wasn’t the final decision. Later on they could say no or they could say yes. But what this verse is saying is that the most devout, dedicated atheist in all of history at one point knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists, and it was evident within their soul. It is the external that brings out the internal. So, NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” When they show up before the throne of God they can’t say there just wasn’t enough evidence. NASB “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” It is non-verbal.
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There are four ways in which we think and in which we look for authority and knowledge. Somebody asks, how do you know that is true? It is because of reason, because of empiricism (validation of things in the laboratory), because of mysticism (intuitive insight into the nature of things), or it is because somebody told you it was true (authority or, in Christianity, revelation).
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The first three are all manifestations of the same thing. We have rationalism, the belief that human reason alone can arrive at truth. What is the object of your faith? It is really based on faith ultimately and human intellectual ability. That is the focus of faith: I believe man is capable of doing it. That is part of humanism: man can do it; he doesn’t need God. But in terms of philosophy philosophical idealism and rationalism has always collapsed under its own weight because it can’t to ultimate truth. The method is always on the basis of logic and reason but it can’t get beyond a certain point. Rationalism historically is always followed by empiricism. Empiricism says that truth comes from observing what we can see, taste, touch, feel. It follows the scientific method but again it it is this faith that man is neutral and that he can properly and accurately interpret the data that comes in through his senses. And again, it is based on the rigorous use of logic and reason. Empiricism has always failed. You can’t get to truth on the basis of reason and you can’t get to truth on the basis of empiricism.
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Where are we going to go? Well we’re just going to leap into the void, we’re just going to take this big leap of faith, we are just going to believe it because we can’t live in the darkness and the scepticism that neither reason nor empiricism can give us the answer. That is too hopeless. We know there has to be meaning; we can’t live in a meaningless world. So we either have to turn to drugs, to alcohol, sensual pleasure or to success, ambition or something to give meaning in my life because reason can’t give the answer, experience can’t give the answer. And then there are those who turn to mysticism, some sort of internal religious hot flash: I just know it because it is true. So this is based, just like rationalism, on some inner private mental event but it is not based on logic or reason; it is irrational, not verifiable. How do you know it is true? I just know it is true!
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In contrast we have revelation. God who is outside of creation, who is not a creature, not subject to the laws of creation, and He is saying, I was there when I created everything, let me tell you how I did it. He is an eyewitness; He is an authority; He is giving us that information. That is what revelation is analogous to. It is on the basis of authority: God revealed to us and on that revelation, though, we can validate. That is why in & 18 there are tests for a prophet, because there are going to be those who come along and say God told me this, and God said this is how you evaluate whether it is true or not. God said I am embedding my Word with all kinds of validation points. Nothing in archaeology has ever disproved any claim in the Bible; nothing in history has ever disproved anything in the Bible; nothing that has ever been discovered has disproved anything in the Bible. God has salted history with things that will validate His Word. Not that that will convince people to believe because it will just harden them in their unbelief, but it will give those who do believe Him the evidence to confirm them in their belief. Christian evidences has more to do with giving us confidence that what we believe is true because it is not going to convince the unbeliever that God exists, because he has got more evidence in his soul of the existence of God as per verse 18 than you and I can ever give him through some kind of rational argument for the existence of God. He is suppressing it in irrationalism.
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Revelation is objective, it can be validated, and its understanding is based on a dependent use of logic and reason, dependent upon God. It is not irrational, it is not rejecting reason but it is using it under the authority of God.

Romans 012b-The Knowledge of God.

Romans 1:18 NASB95
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
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Romans 012b-The Knowledge of God.
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Within Paul’s structure of his discourse in Romans he is stating the righteousness of God and how it relates to human history: to human beings individually as well as human history as a whole which is covered under the concept of what we usually translate as the world, whether it is kosmos [kosmoj] or aionos [a)iwnoj], and it has to do with the time frame where fallen man is in control of history. So we see that the breakthrough in history is God, in terms of His grace from the time that Adam first sinned and God came to the garden of Eden to confront Adam and Eve with the fact that they had sinned. And what was their initial reaction? They ran and hid. This sets up a pattern. If it had been you or I we would have done the same thing. If God had come we would have run and hid because we had disobeyed Him and because something happens to every human being because of sin. It happened to Adam who was created without sin and he was perfectly righteous because he was created in the image of God. Being created in the image of God there was something in the immaterial makeup of man that corresponded to similar attributes in the makeup of God so that man could reflect God in a way that is unique and distinct from all other creatures.
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When Adam sinned and then God came to walk in the garden that afternoon with Adam and Eve, as He had done on a day-by-day basis, their reaction was to run and hide because something happened to them when they sinned. There is a constitutional impact of sins. Theologians call it total depravity. Sometimes that word is not always used or properly understood. Sometimes, especially in the case of Reformed theology or Calvinism the phrase that is used is “total inability.” That is a major issue that comes out of our study of this passage because in the Reformed camp the idea is that man, because of sin, is so constitutionally affected that he cannot do anything towards God, he can’t even express positive volition toward God. Because of that in their view man is dead and they view dead as something that is completely inoperable rather than being separated from God.
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Adam is also a word in Hebrew that means mankind and refers to all of the human race. So this is a reference to what happens within the human race: the judgment of God in time that is revealed, disclosed, poured out against man who is all under condemnation. Condemnation is the outworking of God’s character. His righteousness establishes the standard of His character and His justice is the application of that standard to His creatures.
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NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men…” That is a sort of topical statement of how God’s wrath, which is His judgment in time, in history, the outpouring discipline of God on mankind during this life or this age. We are told why He does this in vv. 19, 20: “because” and “For.” Then when we come to the end of the explanation in 1:21, there is the word “For.” Usually the word gar [gar] is used but it is not that here. gar is a word that is building a case, it is adding additional information or explanation for what has just been said. This is a different Greek word here dioti [dioti] which means “because.” It is emphasizing that and is in conjunction with the participle which reduplicates that. So there is a string causal sense at the beginning of the verse. “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks.” That is the indictment against mankind; it is a rejection of divine authority. That is the very core of what happened at the beginning with the sin of Eve and the sin of Adam. The only sin they could commit was the act of eating the fruit but the thought and the act went together inseparably in that event, and when that happened they were showing complete disrespect and rebellion for the authority of God. He doesn’t know what He is talking about, in essence. So the issue we see here throughout this passage is an issue related to knowledge. “…they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” The word “speculations” in the Greek is another word for knowledge, a word that is related to knowing something or learning something. There is a series of words here that are used that all have something to do with the acquisition of information and acting on it.
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“…but they became futile in their speculations.” The word for “speculations” is the Greek word dialogismos [dialogismoj] which has to do with the thought process. They become empty in their thought processes. That is wiped out as a result of their spiritual decisions. That is really interesting and what we are seeing here is the ideas that come out of this passage in relation to understanding who we are, what God is saying about human beings. Our thought processes get completely rewired and screwed up—not the brain but the thinking—because we want to start at the wrong starting point. Because we start at the wrong starting point we end up with the wrong conclusions.
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Then NASB “Professing to be wise, they became fools.” “Wise” and “fools” are both words that relate to knowledge. [23] “and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” So they go into idolatry. A break then occurs at verse 24, “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” This deals with ethics in a broad sense and morality. The morality is a result of something that took place in their knowledge, or in philosophical terms, in terms of their epistemology. Their epistemology gets messed up and therefore their morality is messed up. What messes up their reasoning and knowledge and their thought machine in verse 21 is what? It is their rejection of God. So it is not a question of do they know that God exists, not a question of at some level and absolute conviction of that knowledge, which is epistemology; but they reject it, that is their volition. And what they are rejecting is the existence of the God who has revealed Himself to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and revealed Himself in the Bible. That is what philosophers call metaphysics: that which goes beyond the physical. As man seeks to understand reality apart from Scripture and seeks to have knowledge and wisdom that comes under the category of philosophy.
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Philosophy seeks to answer the same questions that religion seeks to answer, except that it seeks to do it apart from any claim of any external source of revelation. So the questions: Is there an ultimate reality? Is there something beyond the physical? Is there a God? That is metaphysics, and what you do with that question dictates what you do with the next question, which is knowledge and the certainty of knowledge, and can you know anything. That, then, determines the conscience: sense of right and wrong, morals, ethics, etc. That then works itself out in terms of how you structure society. So if you reject the Word of God and its absolutes that changes your understanding of absolute reality, which dominoes down and changes your thought system, views of knowledge and reasoning. Then that changes your sense of morals and absolutes and right and wrong. Everything dominoes. So if you take God out of the equation then you can’t have a right view of knowledge and you can’t have a right ethic. And ethics is where we get law, politics, government, marriage, family; all those things come under that category. It is important to understand these things because this is how we build our ability to think critically about what is going on if we open up the newspaper, turn on the radio or television and listen to what is going on, and all the things that are happening today in the political sphere.
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No matter what we do we can’t get away from the fact that people are either suppressing the truth in unrighteousness or they are trying to learn the truth and conform to righteousness. There is no middle ground; it is either one or the other. That is what Paul is developing here in his foundational statement in . This paragraph has so much, not only in terms of its immediate content and interpretation of these verses but in terms of its implications for who man is, who God is, why man has the problems he has, and understanding why bad things happen to good people, why we have bad things such as natural disasters, why these things are allowed to take place. It goes back to this concept of divine discipline from God. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” It is the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men that is the moral cause of all of this. Based on it is all caused by a moral, ethical problem, or what we would call a spiritual problem: the rejection of God.
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What is interesting is that when we get to verse 24 and following we have statements that are made: v. 24, “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” In v. 26 the next level of intensification, “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions…” Then v. 28 the third level, “And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind…” What is God doing? This chapter explains all the problems of history, whether social or physical, and that is that as man rejects God, God gives him enough rope to hang himself. That is basically what this is saying: “I am just going to let the leash loose a little bit more and give you a little more room to destroy yourself and show that when you reject Me it is the most self-destructive thing you can do.” What it does in turn is just confirm them in their rebelliousness and goes to the next level. What we will see when we get into vv. 24-32 and look at all of these various things described that are the result of God just basically taking His hands off the controls a little bit more, each time He takes them off there is more sinful activity. In the first stage there is an increase in idolatry, in the second there is the increase of homosexuality—that is the judgment. We are not going to be judged for homosexuality; homosexuality is the judgment for negative volition. The third stage, being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness, etc., describes modern culture.
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This is what happens when people are negative to God. God begins to remove the cultural restraints and there is the increase in immorality, violence, role reversal takes place—the men become feminized and the women become masculinized. What always happens when there is role reversals in the culture is that women become treated less and less like people and there is physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse of women which increases because of the dominance of pagan thought. So the irony is that when we are living in the devil’s world are operating on human viewpoint instead of divine viewpoint, as the feminist movement seeks equality for women what they have done is produced for a couple of generations now increasingly feminized males, and what has happened as a correlation to the promotion of their feminist goals is that it has led to greater and greater abuse of women. We have to learn to think biblically or we are just going to be swept along with the tide that goes with that culture.
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NASB “For the wrath of God [discipline on man during human history] is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness”—“the truth” has an article with it and it shows that even in this discussion there is something embedded here, something that is presupposed and assumed by the biblical writers under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; that is, there is an absolute truth that controls and governs all thought, and that that absolute truth which ultimately comes from an understanding of God is being suppressed by means of unrighteousness. This idea of suppression: as a kid seeing if he can close his eyes tight enough and put his hands over his eyes to see if he can shut out all the light and have total darkness. It can’t be done; ultimately light comes in. That is what happens in this illustration. God is always present. There is something that resonates in the soul of every human being because they are created in the image of God, that no matter how sophisticated their arguments may be, no matter how intelligent and intellectual they can be God’s reality is always popping up at various inconvenient times. That is the real “inconvenient truth”! God exists and He is in control.
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NASB “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” There it is very important to understand that God built it into the makeup of every human being. There’s nobody you can talk to that doesn’t have something, long before he ever saw the stars in the sky or had examined the details of a cell, long before any of the intelligent design arguments came along, when a little baby is two or three years old there is something that is vibrating in his soul and he knows God exists. The once that child grows up and sees creation, he sees that creation bears the stamp of God’s ownership and creativity on everything. But man says, I am not buying that, I don’t want God to make me. If God made me then I am accountable for the decisions I make and I am accountable spiritually. So I have to reject that, I have to suppress it.
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NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” It is not written out for them but they have so many pictures that they have enough information about God that people are spiritually accountable for their relationship with God. This is what is called general revelation. We have two books—this is how this has been understood: one is a picture book, general revelation, the non-verbal disclosure from God as contained in His works of creation and in His acts of providence in human history; second is special revelation, the direct verbal self-disclosure of God to His creatures. What is the difference between the two? One is verbal; one is non-verbal. The verbal has precision; the non-verbal can be misinterpreted at levels. But we see in the Scripture that the writers go to general revelation in order to illustrate principles in special revelation. One example is in the Proverbs. We read there that we are to observe the ant and how he works. There are patterns that God has built into revelation but you have to have special revelation to interpret general revelation, otherwise you can misinterpret it. No matter how much general revelation Adam had it was the special revelation, Thou shalt not eat of this tree, that told him which tree not to eat of. All the general revelation would not have told him the specifics he needed. These aren’t equal books. The picture book is interpreted by the word book and the word book has authority over the picture book.
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An Old Testament truth: NASB “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” We can look at creation and learn something about the creator. [2] “Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge.” There is communication there. The Bible is consistent; we can learn things from the picture book. We can also make more mistakes looking at the picture book so we can’t ultimately make the picture book our authority. [3] “There is no speech, nor are there words; Their voice is not heard.” General revelation is universal to every human being on the planet. But as Paul says in Romans there is a problem, and the problem is clearly stated in the Old Testament. Two of them are NASB “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” Man can’t discern the machinations of the human heart because it is inherently evil. That is what the Old Testament teaches. Does that mean that man is as bad as he can be? No. What is evil in the Old Testament? Idolatry: replacing the worship of the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with something else. That is the essence of evil. Evil is rejecting God and substituting something else. So the heart’s orientation is to replace God.
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NASB “This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all men. Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. Afterwards they {go} to the dead.” It’s not a very happy picture. But without God, without the intrusion of grace, it isn’t a happy picture. That is why the gospel is so important, because with the intrusion of grace God is going to say that you can’t be righteous, it is impossible, but I am going to give you righteousness; and it is the righteousness of Christ. And that is what Romans is all about: how God gives us righteousness and the implications of that righteousness to us in terms of our spiritual life and our service to God.

Romans 013b-The Effect of Sin on Knowledge.

Romans 1:18 NASB95
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
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Romans 013b-The Effect of Sin on Knowledge.
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In this passage, verses 18-23, we have one of four or five of the most significant passages in the Scripture that talk about the nature of man. There are other passages that talk about sin and the specifics of sin but this passage talks about the consequences of sin on human beings, on who we are as creatures in the image of God, and specifically on our thought processes. It is important to understand d this because as we look at this passage and see the descriptions that are there in vv. 18-23 there are implications that we can then take from this text that relate to understanding how to communicate the gospel to someone who isn’t saved. Because they are in the position of being spiritually dead and spiritually unable to understand fully the Word of God.
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There is a lot of controversy over this. There is a very strong Calvinist position on these verses that flows from their theology called total inability. In their view on the doctrines of salvation they focus on five key principles and these came out of a theological synod in Holland about the same time as the publication of the King James Bible. Just after that in 1616 there was a synod that was held among the Dutch Reformed churches because of a controversy that occurred due to the teaching of some of the professors that took the teaching on free will too far in one direction. One of the professors who had died by the time they had this synod was Jacob Arminius, from whom we get the term Arminianism. Arminians in their full extreme form don’t believe that Adam’s sin really affected anybody else, that each person is born in the same unadulterated, uncorrupted state that Adam was created, and so every individual makes a decision on their own life and which way they will go. So theoretically people can live their life sinlessly. They would say that no one does but that theoretically they could. They believe that God’s choice is totally dependent upon human choice, that God’s movement, God’s wooing of the unbeliever, is completely resistible, because the individual is really in charge and not God. It is the polar opposite of strong 5-point Calvinism. We would be somewhere in between but probably on the light or moderate Calvinist side, although we don’t like to use those terms because in terms of the five points of Calvinism we would redefine all of them. But none of them would be redefined in the way that Arminians define them.
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So the student of Arminius who was teaching at the time was the one who was actually up on charges. The Arminians brought together five points, what they called their remonstrance, and in response to their five points the Calvinists had five counter-remonstrance—usually referred to by the acronym TULIP. Some people have somewhat facetiously said that you either have TULIP theology or DAISY theology. DAISY theology (Arminianism) is where you set out to talk about God: does He love me? He loves me today; He loves me not. He loves me today; He loves me not. Because in Arminianism you can lose your salvation; you can choose not to be saved anymore. So there is no eternal security.
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In Calvinism there is total inability, which means man can’t do anything. And they always stress this emphasis on man is spiritually dead, and they miss the boat there. Spiritual death doesn’t mean that he is non-existent; spiritual death means that we are separated from God and we don’t have a spiritual life or operation of our spiritual life in relation to God. It is non-operable, it doesn’t mean that the unbeliever can’t think, can’t understand some things to a limited degree. Then there unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance. Those five points make up what is considered to be Calvinism—high Calvinism. The term “hyper-Calvinism” is actually a technical theological term. It emphasizes the sovereignty of God in an extreme way and they go beyond high Calvinism. A hyper-Calvinist believed that those whom God elected would be saved. You didn’t need to tell them the gospel because if God chose them He would save them without any help from us. That was their view.
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But all of this relates to understanding the impact of sin on man’s intellectual abilities, his ability to understand truth after the fall. It is important to understand this because if we are talking to somebody who is an unbeliever and they are spiritually dead in the sense of high Calvinism (total inability) they really can’t understand and won’t ever understand anything we are saying unless they the elect. God the Holy Spirit won’t even make it clear to them. They are not the elect and so He is not going to be moving upon them in any resistible manner, and if you go to the extreme of hyper-Calvinism it also lends itself to a lot of rationalization that occurs: well, if God wants them to be saved they will be saved, we’ll just let somebody else who is a little better at it than me witness to them. So there is a minimizing of human responsibility because they put so much emphasis on God’s sovereignty. As a result when they come to passages like this and they talk about, for example, NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,” they take that last clause (and it can be taken a number of different ways grammatically) as being a gnomic or universal truth, i.e. that all men suppress all truth at all times. Therefore the unbeliever can’t even exercise positive volition to God in a non-meritorious manner.
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It is also important to understand the nature of man and the nature of the unbeliever’s ability to understand and what he is capable of on his own, as well as what the Holy Spirit does. Obviously the Holy Spirit works on the understanding of the unbeliever in order to understand the Word but we would not agree that He does so in an irresistible manner, as Calvinism teaches.
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Romans is all about righteousness. That is what salvation is: God gives us righteousness. Romans is in some sense a defence of the righteousness of God in light of the fact of all of the things that happen in history, the things that happen in terms of individuals’ lives, and how can God hold people accountable when they have never heard anything about the Old Testament or anything about Jesus? How can God bring condemnation upon the unsaved who never heard the name of Jesus? Romans answers that by one of the most brilliant explanations of the process of justification and the spiritual life and the implications of it. That is what Paul develops here. For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith [Justification] to faith [Sanctification]; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS [Justified by faith] {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.”
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Now Paul is going to explain that so that we can understand the implications of what he has just said. NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The contrast is between the righteousness of God and the unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Twice we have the use of the negative here of unrighteousness, and we have this emphasis on suppressing the truth, that there is from Paul’s perspective one truth. There is an absolute universal truth, we are not left to just sort of guess our way or fell our way blindly through the room where everybody’s truth is ok, whatever works for you, etc. There are a lot of inconsistencies in that position. When you have destroyed reason—that came out of the enlightenment—and you have destroyed knowledge, the possibility of objective knowledge which is basically what happened in the 19th century, then you are only left with scepticism and despair. If you don’t know truth then you can’t answer any questions and life is meaningless. People can’t live that way and so then they leap into some sort of mysticism where they just conjure up their own answers, because that is what works for them; because the alternative is despair, gloom and meaningless life.
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NASB “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” Even inside the fallen soul Paul says that something may be known about God within every single human being. And God has shown it to them, and that is the external evidence of God. There is a resonance that occurs within every single person. When they look on God’s creation there is something that vibrates, for lack of a better term, something that resonates within the soul so that they know. They know internally, first of all, that God exists. Then God gives evidence of His existence throughout every detail of the creation. Everything shows something about God’s power and God’s character.
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NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” So by looking at what God has made they can understand certain things about God’s character: “so that they are without excuse.” This is the answer to that question of the ages: what about those who have never heard. They’ve seen enough in the universe to know God exists. That is where volition enters in. At that time they could desire to know more about God or not to know more about God. That volition is not meritorious; it is not the cause of anything. And they can still suppress a lot of truth because we still do that—even as believers.
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, NASB “And even if our gospel is veiled [If it is veiled it is not invisible], it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” Here’s a question to the hyper-Calvinists, to anybody who takes that first T in TULIP the way a Calvinist does—total inability: If spiritual death means man is unable and incapable, apart from any movement of the Holy Spirit, of having any perception whatsoever of the existence of God (because he has suppressed it in unrighteousness) or any perception of the truth of the gospel, why did Satan have to blind their minds? Satan has to blind their minds because there are still certain capabilities of the fallen mind to understand the existence of God and to want to know more. It is not soteriological knowledge but it is knowledge that gives man an opportunity to choose to know more or less. The implication of is that fallen man can know; he has some light available. It’s not much; it is not going to get him saved; it is not going to give the content of the gospel but he does have a certain amount of light so that he does know that God exists.
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There are unbelievers who can give the gospel as good as any believer, but they don’t really understand it. They understand it in a certain academic sense and they probably know more about the gospel than a lot of Christians do; but they can’t really put two and two together spiritually, that ultimately comes from the work of the Holy Spirit. So there is a measure of understanding on the part of the unbeliever, but what he is doing is suppressing that truth. He is in rebellion, he is rejecting the authority of God because he says I don’t like what God says. God defines truth; I don’t like it, I want to create my own truth.
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The average person is really concerned about how to make decisions about the details of life. How are we to behave? That is a question that relates to ethics. We would refer to it perhaps as spirituality, but that is the realm where this takes place. How is a human being supposed to behave? In marriage, in family, what is the role of husbands and wives, who does what and is responsible for what? What is the role of parents? What are the limitations of the role of parents? What is the extent of their responsibility? What about educating their children? What about the role of schools? What about politics? Who is right and who is wrong? Where do we draw all these decisions? All that has to do with just the basic, practical decision making we have in life. Economics: how should we spend our money?
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To answer ethical questions it really presupposes that we have answered the question: how do we know what is right? We have a question of knowledge here. How do we know it is true? How do we know there is truth? The very fact that we talk about it implies that there is truth. It is amazing the way God structured vocabulary and communication, that when we talk about something, anything—a tree, a lazy-boy recliner—it can’t mean anything else, it has limitations to what that word means. To be able to communicate even at the most primitive level presupposes that there are absolutes, that there are specific set meanings that can’t be changed and aren’t going to evolve over time. Saying the sky is blue doesn’t in five or six years mean the sky is red. When we look at epistemology we are concerned about truth claims but as soon as we imply those ideas of truth in right and wrong that also implies accountability and responsibility and a response to authority. If somebody says this is the right thing to do, this is true, that is where it transitions to ethics. There is an authority response at that point. Well who is the authority? Who is the source of truth? Where do we get this idea of truth? That takes us to the next question: how do we know what the ultimate authority in life is? How do we know if there is a God—capital G or lower case g?
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Then the question which is the realm of epistemology—which is, how do we know anything?—to the question of metaphysics, which is the question of existence. There we have to answer the question: is there something or is there nothing? We can’t really say that there is nothing, so there is something and where did the something come from? Did it come from something that was impersonal and just material, or did it come from something that was personal? What do these words personal and impersonal mean? When we have the Bible we have the authoritative information from God who created everything to tell us, to give us the answers. But most people don’t have the Bible and are trying to figure this out. They come up with different things such as arguments for the existence of God and philosophy and other things of that nature.
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Once we answer the question, is there something to exist, then that is going to necessarily impact our understanding of knowledge, where knowledge comes from, and where truth comes from and how we are going to define truth. When we are looking at these types of questions ultimately we are asking the question: is there real meaning and order and structure to the universe or not. That is basically the question that is asked. People may not come right out and say it that way but that is what they are asking. To bring it down to a more basic level it is the question: does my life have meaning and value or not? When we get it down there, there are really only two answers everything can boil down to. The first is that there is really no logical, rational answer to that question. We just don’t know. That is depressing. If we are consistent with that answer then what we must conclude is that existence is meaningless, that everything is governed by pure random actions. There is no purpose, meaning or real cause and effect in relationship. Nobody can live like that though. If everything is random and pure chance and life is meaningless then why does it matter? They can’t live in a way that is consistent with their basic assumption about life.
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The only other answer is that life has some meaning and value. If it does, how much? If life has real meaning and value and purpose then we need to define that.
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As believers what this passage tells us is that whenever we are talking to an unbeliever we don’t have to prove the existence of God. We may have to resurrect their suppressed knowledge of the existence of God but we don’t have to ultimately prove it. There is something inside of them that when we start talking about it they are just trying to keep God like a jack-in-the-box ready to pop out and are just trying to stuff Him back down.
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has some critical vocabulary: “clearly seen” is the Greek word kathorao [kaqaraw] which means to see or perceive thoroughly. So His attributes are clearly seen by everybody. Fallen men clearly see it. That seems to argue against that total inability concept that is in Reformed thinking. Then “understood,” a verb noeo [noew] which is based on the noun nous [nouj] which has to do with thought, so these are clearly words of perception, of understanding and gaining insight into something. There is real true knowledge about God and His being, at least enough to where every human being can be held accountable.
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NASB “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” What is interesting is that all through these verses there are about ten words that are related to knowledge. The word here, “knew,” is ginosko [ginwskw], a word that conveys understanding, comprehension, perception. There is clear understanding and knowledge of the existence of God and the rejected it, it was a volitional decision. Arrogance and ingratitude always go hand in hand. The word “futile” is the Greek word mataios [mataioj] when means something is rendered futile and made worthless. It is in the passive voice which indicates that something acts upon their thinking to make it worthless. What is it that acts upon their thinking? When they suppress truth the result of that is that their thought processes, their ability to understand truth and to reason truly is gone. So their rational system is designed to suppress truth, not to get to truth. No matter how much they talk about finding truth they are trying to suppress it.
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The word “speculations” is the Greek word dialogismos [dialogismoj] from which we get our word dialogue, and the basic meaning in Greek was the same as it is in English. It had to do with a conversation. But in the world of philosophy they used the word to express this intellectual, rational conversation because they understood that while you were trying to understand the nature of reality and express that through your vocabulary what underlies every sentence is a system of logic. Just the very structure of grammar is a logical structure. So in philosophy they understood the dialogismos was the rational foundation of logical, coherent conversation and thought. What Paul is saying here is that as a result of suppressing truth our thought processes, not just the content of our thought but our reasoning processes, become corrupted as a result of truth suppression.
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The words “foolish hearts” is asunetos [a)sunetoj] which means senseless or foolish; “hearts” is kardia [kardia], the thinking part of the soul; “darkened,” as a result, not of sin in terms of their fallen state but as a result of suppression of truth. The more truth suppression there is the more the understanding becomes darkened.
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The result: NASB “Professing to be wise, they became fools.” How many times have we been impressed by the academic credentials of somebody who is completely wrong? God says they are fools because their starting point is the assumption that there is no God, and the result is foolishness no matter how erudite they are. It is foolishness because is starts from the wrong starting point. So the question that we have to ask coming out of this is, what is man’s basic problem? If we are going to talk to an unbeliever what is the basic problem we have to deal with? If it is intellectual we need to give them sophisticated arguments for the existence of God and the truth of the Scripture. If it is social we need to socialize people and come up with social solutions and restructure society so that they can come to know the truth. If it is education then we need to solve the education problem. But what Romans is saying is it is not intellectual, social or education, it is spiritual. They have rejected God; they are truth suppressors.
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This is the same thing we see in NASB “ So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind.” Paul is using nous here for mind and mataiotes [matiaothj] for futility. [18] “being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.” So we see that there is a volition that takes place there that rejects God and that sets a course of action that darkens the thinking.

Romans 014b-Epistemology and Arguments for the Existence of God. Romans 1:27-32

Romans 1:27 NASB95
and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
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Romans 014b-Epistemology and Arguments for the Existence of God.
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From , we know that God says that He has constructed the creation in such a way, and the human soul in such a way, being in the image of God, that there is an inherent knowledge of God within every human being. This inherent knowledge of God also is connected in some way to an external testimony of who God is by His creation. We can look at His creation and there is something non-verbal that attests to the power of God and His invisible attributes. That is not the same thing as the so-called arguments for the existence of God, which are an attempt to articulate this in a philosophical structure. This knowledge is prior to an argument. Philosophical arguments are different. This is prior to an argument. This is when a person first comes to God-consciousness before they ever hear any kind of argument for the existence of God. There is something inside them that tells them without a shadow of a doubt that God exists. When they look on God’s creation it is as if God has branded everything in His creation, from the smallest element inside of a molecule all the way up to the largest element, with His brand. So when a human being is growing up and he comes to self-consciousness where we realize we are not a dog or a cat and we identify where those boundaries are where we stop and everything else begins. And then sometime after that he comes to a recognition that God exists. This is not an intellectual or rational construct. It is not mysticism, it is just this sort of internal connection that God builds into every single person so that they know He exists. When they look on these external things that God created they see that brand. Everything God created speaks out as to who the creator is. And it is the rejection of that that is the basis for God’s judgment on mankind within human history. In that denial of truth there is a basic substitution of that which is true with a fantasy that is conjured up by the rebellious human soul.
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Once a soul rejects God it seeks for explanations of ultimate existence, explanations of knowledge, explanations of right and wrong on its own terms apart from God. That is the essence of rebellion. In the garden of Eden Eve is going to evaluate whether God knows what He is talking about when He said if you eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will surely die. So what is the basis issue there? The issue of authority. It is an issue of truth, an issue of how you know something is true. It is really those ideas that reverberate down through history and each individual has to make up their own mind in relationship to that. NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” states that since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. Notice that comes after verse 19 which puts the internal knowledge of God prior to verse 20. Verse 19 says that what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them. Then verse 20 explains how God shows it to them.
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Then there are questions about the basic issues of life. Why are we here? What is right or wrong? How should we conduct ourselves or live our lives in certain areas? This is in the arena of ethics where we talk about marriage, family, law, politics, economics, things which have to do with social structures. But ultimately it is, how should we conduct ourselves? Then the question is: if you are going to say that is right and this is wrong, on what basis do you know that? That is epistemology, truth claims. How do you know what is true? Then you say because God told me or, because I just feel it in my heart, or whatever the answer is; and that is an appeal to authority. So once again what we have is a truth claim that is resolved by an appeal to authority.
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General revelation has to be interpreted in the light of special revelation, which is the direct verbal self-disclosure of God to His creatures. Mostly for us this refers to the Scriptures. The problem is that in getting it from the Scriptures we have this fallen nature that gets in the way. . This isn’t the Calvinist view of total inability. In that view they misunderstand that metaphor about being spiritually dead and they think it means that a person can’t do anything at all towards God. In we have words like “clearly seen, understood,” words that relate to knowledge in these verses. They became futile in their thoughts, in their thinking. “Futile” is mataioo [mataiow] which means to make worthless. So once a person makes the ethical or spiritual decision to reject God then it has an epistemological consequence. In other words, if you make a decision to reject God is starts messing with your thinking, and the more you reject God the more it distorts your thinking. The more your thinking gets distorted the more you create a fantasy world and you live in them. The word for thinking is dialogismos [dialogismoj] which has to do with their reasoning. It is not that they can’t come up with logic, but their starting point is wrong so their end point is wrong. Their reasoning processes have become distorted because they have rejected the starting point, which is God.
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Their “foolish heart was darkened” – “foolish,” asunetos [a)sunetoj], they are senseless, foolish because of their thinking. God doesn’t have a very high opinion of these thought capabilities of triple Ph Ds from Harvard who reject God’s existence. NASB “Professing to be wise, they became fools” – fools: moraino [mwrainw], from which we get our word “moron”; wise: sophos [sofoj]; and combined this words come to “sophomore,” somebody in the second year of a course or curriculum and he thinks he knows more than he does.
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In all of these verses what is the basic problem? That man’s foolish heart is darkened? That his reasoning process is out of kilter? No. The basic problem is that he rejects God, negative volition. That is what starts everything going. His basic problem is spiritual. There is a spiritual rejection of God and this changes the person’s view of reality. These same words are picked up in as Paul describes the Gentiles. NASB “So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility [matiaothj] of their mind [nouj], being darkened in their understanding [dianoiow], excluded from the life of God [the ultimate cause] because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.”
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The issue that we have seen here is knowledge: how does a person know God? If you are talking to an unbeliever how are you going to talk to him about the gospel? Option A is to shoot him with your gospel gun, a drive-by. That is the wrong answer because that doesn’t necessarily mean anything to somebody. What do you mean by believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Who is that? The more we live in a pagan world the more we have to pay attention to that.
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The basis for knowledge: This relates to authority. Authority answers the question: how do you know something is true? To what authority do you appeal? If you are a Christian and you are talking to an unbeliever and we assume that unbeliever is consistent within his thought pattern and you are consistent within yours, how are you going to communicate to them? To what authority will you appeal when you say the Bible makes truth claims? The unbeliever says, how do you know it is true? You can’t just say the Bible says so. NASB “but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always {being} ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you…” Often when we are witnessing to somebody it is not a monologue, not a drive-by one-shot decision, it is a conversation, a dialogue. So we have to think about these things.
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There are four ways in which man has developed his sense of authority in terms of knowledge. The first three are ways that are valid in a limited sense. You can apply any one of them in isolation and come up with some things that are true, but only the last one gives truth with a capital T. The first system is rationalism. In its pure sense it is the idea that we were born with certain innate ideas and we can start with those innate ideas and through a method of logic and reason we can answer all the questions in life; we can come to truth—decide what is right and wrong, the nature of man, whether or not there is a God, and make all kinds of decisions.
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Empiricism in its technical sense is based on sense perception. The idea was among the empiricists that there is no total depravity, no fallen nature; we are just like an erased tablet, a blank slate, and our knowledge comes from whatever we experience—taste, touch, sight, whatever. Rarely do we meet people outside of the philosophy classroom that are pure rationalists or pure empiricists. Usually they are a mix of the two, and that is what most scientists are. They mix rationalism and empiricism and what is critical is that their method is the same; it is an independent use of logic and reason. So if you grant their assumptions about whatever it is they’re talking about, and if they are consistent in their use of logic, then their conclusion will follow. That’s where it gets slippery because they approach things with the assumption that God is not there. If they are an unbeliever they are approaching with the assumption that the God—not just any god—of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Trinitarian God, isn’t there, the God of the Bible isn’t there. That is their starting point. And what did Paul say earlier in Romans about how that affects their dialogue, their ability to reason? It messes it all up; it becomes empty and worthless. We have to be aware of the fact that nobody out there is just neutral. The other thing is that they are operating just as much on faith as you and I are. This is one of the real problems that came out of the Middle Ages and came out of the Enlightenment: this attempt to juxtapose faith and reason. This really came out of a lot of Roman Catholic theology in the Middle Ages because they were blending the Scripture with the study of Greek philosophy, first Plato and then later Aristotle.
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Every system always operates on faith. At some point you have to believe something. When Descarte said “I think, therefore I am” and starts there, thinking he can get to the existence of God through the rigorous use of logic, his faith is in human ability. The same thing happens with empiricism: the thought that you can get from sense perception to the existence of God. So it is always faith in human ability.
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Mysticism also puts faith in human ability. It starts with inner private experience. Where are innate ideas and rationalism? Inside your head. Where are inner private experiences? Inside your head. So they are both starting with something that is inside your head but the difference is that the mystic uses a non-logical, non-rational, non-verifiable method to reach his conclusion; he is not getting there through logic. That’s why it is so hard to talk to somebody who says: I just know it is true, don’t confuse me with facts. You can’t argue with me because it is true, I just know it. It is totally experience based; it is a mystical experience.
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Some people blend all three of these together. The difference is that all three are operating in human autonomy or independence from the authority of God. And that is the last category: revelation. Sometimes you will even see this classified as authority: that we are told something by an authority. The issue is rejection of what God has said in His Word. When we start with the objective revelation of God—whether it is the non-verbal general revelation and then we go from there to special revelation and build on that—we use logic and reason but our starting point is different; we are using it under the authority of God to get to our conclusion. There are those who will say you have to use reason. Really? All they have is an autonomous use of reason. Aren’t they compromising themselves to go over there? If they say it is empiricism they have the same problem; mysticism, the same problem.
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So as believers, whenever we are talking with an unbeliever we have to make sure we don’t compromise the integrity of the Word of God in the process. Basically what that means is that we have to realise that the person we are talking already knows God exists through internal evidence and external evidence. What God is going to use us to do is, in the communication of the gospel and how we can answer questions or ask questions to get them to think, we are going to expose the fact that they have got something stuffed down in a box in the corner of their soul, and it is that knowledge of God that is going to pop out. Sometimes when it pops out people get mad at us because they don’t like the fact that all of a sudden we have reminded them that there might be a God to whom they are accountable.
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When we look at rationalism and empiricism we have to realise that the problem man has is that he is finite and his amount of knowledge or experience is extremely limited.
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In terms of common ground each of the arguments for the existence of God—cosmological, teleological, moral, anthropological, ontological—presuppose that there is a common ground between the believer and the unbeliever that is either going to be reason or history. What is the problem there? If the common ground is above revelation then you’ve compromised your authority by appealing to an idolatrous authority. Truth is not established by history. History can validate and be a witness to truth but it doesn’t establish truth; it is not the authority. The authority isn’t experienced, isn’t reasoned in logic.
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So if you appeal to experience, reason or intuition what you’ve done is basically said: I am going to step out of my truth zone, and I am going over to this pagan unbeliever who is thinking consistently within his system and says, this is what I believe establishes truth. What have you done? You have compromised your truth rather than, in terms of a strategy, say, okay let’s just think about what you just said establishes truth and see if there are any problems with that. Can you really live on that basis or does it have problems?
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Paul says there gospel is truth; there is one truth. In he castigates the Galatians because they had gotten away from this and had brought in something else. It wasn’t a reliance upon grace and God’s provision but a reliance upon trusting God and doing something. So he says that he is amazed that they so quickly turned away from “Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel”—different of another kind, which is not another of the same kind but it is categorically different; it was a works based gospel. This verse uses the word “gospel” in a narrow sense: deliverance from eternity in the lake of fire.
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Jesus also said in His high priestly prayer to the Father in NASB “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.” He presupposes an absolute truth, an absolute body of doctrine that is the basis for our spiritual growth and spiritual life, and that is embedded within God’s Word, God’s revelation.
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NASB “because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of which you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel [6] which has come to you, just as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing, even as {it has been doing} in you also since the day you heard {of it} and understood the grace of God in truth.” Fruit: the results that God intended; production. “the grace of God in truth”—here we have that “in” clause in Scripture in the Greek indicating by means of truth. The only way we know the grace of God is by means of the truth. And the truth is where? In God’s Word.

Romans 015b-What Could be Wrong With the Arguments for the Existence of God?

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 015b-What Could be Wrong With the Arguments for the Existence of God?
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Like most of the Word this next passage is simple enough for a child to understand but to get into some of the details and mechanics it may challenge some of our brain cells. The bottom line is that it gives us great confidence in our witnessing because it ultimately emphasizes the fact that the real power and authority is in the Word of God and the Spirit of God, and it is not in our intellectual ability, our ability to master a certain number of facts or certain ways of argumentation, but it puts the focus on the truth of God’s Word. But we have to make sure that when we are talking to people who are unbelievers we have to really understand the questions they are asking and we have to understand how to answer them in a correct manner. By correct manner is not meant answering necessarily with the right facts. We are really dealing with issues related to strategy and ultimately it just comes down to the same basic principle that goes through all the Christian life, which is trust and obey. We just trust what the Word of God says and assume what it says to be true. But so often what happens is that in our strategy in talking to unbelievers, for various reasons—sometimes it can be because of our desire to be accepted by them, sometimes by our desire not to come across as being radical, sometimes because we don’t always understand the implications of questions that are asked—we build our answers on the foundations or assumptions of their questions. But Scripture says we are not to answer a fool according to his folly. A lot of times when we answer certain questions or we approach them a certain way inadvertently what happens is we are assuming a non-biblical position; not for the sake of argument but we just inadvertently slip across the line.
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In the process of communicating the gospel to people we have to exercise discernment. We can’t just go to drive-by evangelism, quote and say, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved because there is not necessarily an understanding on their part of who Jesus is. And what does it mean to be saved? What exactly is “believe”? Saved from what to what? We may think that the answers to those questions are obvious because we have been in Christianity for so many years we can’t think like an unbeliever anymore. When we talk to unbelievers we have to have a strategy and we have to have certain tactics that we use. By that is meant we mean certain question we might ask, certain ways we might explain things, and it takes time to learn that. We only learn by doing, which is the hard part.
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It is always helpful if we start with an assumption and we know something about this other person, about every human being, that they don’t believe and they don’t know, but God tells us it is true, and so we have to build everything that we say on that foundation. This is something that in the theological arena is called pre-suppositional apologetics, because it presupposes the truth and the authority of God’s Word and God’s Word alone in any kind of communication with an unbeliever. So , tells us NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” One of the characteristics of an unbeliever is that he is a truth suppressor. When we are talking to an unbeliever his knee-jerk reaction is suppress truth. He has developed consciously or unconsciously a lot of techniques to keep God at as much of a distance that he possibly can. There is an internal and an external knowledge of God that they recognize. We know and God knows that this is going on in the person we are talking to and it is God the Holy Spirit who is the ultimate agent in making the gospel clear, and as we are explaining the gospel He is going to be working internally and tickling the latch on that box where they have stuffed God. That lid is going to come open, God is going to come out and scare him to death. So we never know how the reaction to that is going to be.
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NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” His invisible attributes are clearly seen; this is what God says.
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What Romans chapter one is pointing out is that man’s problem is spiritual. There may be intellectual, social, educational, moral arguments that are then imported in order to suppress the truth but the issue in truth suppression has nothing to do with a person’s IQ in terms of their intelligence—if I could just say it the right way, if I could present the right structure of the argument then we would convince them that the God of the Bible exists. The issue here is that if we are talking to an unbeliever and are making a truth claim, and are saying the gospel is true and if you don’t believe it then there are eternal consequences, then we are appealing to something above us as truth. That is an authority issue. What authority can we go to that both we and the unbeliever will accept? If we go to an authority the unbeliever accepts we have already lost the argument because we are assuming his suppressed view of the world; you are assuming his distorted human viewpoint system as having some level of validity.
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We have rationalism and empiricism that are both built on a same method. When we talk about method, how we do something, remember a right thing done in a wrong way is sometimes right, especially if they end up getting saved. That proves it was right, doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t prove it was right. A right thing done in a wrong way is wrong, it is just that the grace of God sometimes overrides our failures—more frequently than not. So both rationalism and empiricism are built on an independent use of logic and reason because it is dependent on truth that comes from Scripture, which should be the foundation of our thinking. It is built on reason independent of anything else; just autonomous reason. And both rationalism and empiricism can come to lower case truth but not upper case truth: they can’t rally answer the question of why is all this here? They can tell us what is here, observe what is here, but they can’t answer the question of why or what the meaning of all of these things is. Then there is mysticism which is just rationalism gone to seed. You don’t have any evidence for your position anymore but you are going to believe it in spite of the facts, so this is independent again, just as the other two are—independent of God. It is not logical, not rational, and it is not verifiable.
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This stands in contrast to revelation. We are talking about revelation of the order of what God said to Adam in the garden. When God said Adam could eat from any tree of the garden except this one, the only way Adam could have ever learned that was from somebody telling him, speaking to him with the voice of authority. This is the only basis for objective truth. In revelation there is the dependent use of logic and reason. Paul reasoned with the Athenians. He used reason. The Bible is not anti-reason, it is against the use of independent reason.
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The question before us is: how do we as a believer committed to the authority of Scripture talk to the unbeliever who is committed to unbelief without sacrificing the authority of God and the truth of Scripture in the process? That is an important question; it may never have occurred to us.
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One of the ways that people think that you can communicate with people is through what has been laid down as arguments for the existence of God. In Christianity one of the most significant expressions of this was Thomas Aquinas who was considered to be the systematic theologian of Roman Catholic theology but actually it goes back to the five ways of Aristotle, and these arguments for the existence of God simply can’t get you out of the o0rder of creation. If you start with creation you end up in creation; you can’t get out of creation. You have to make a leap to get over into the realm of the creator. All of these start with human experience; you can’t start with the finite and ever get to the infinite, it is logically impossible.
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The teleological argument is the argument that in its manifestation today is more popularly referred to as the intelligent design argument. It goes back to a book written by William Paley in 1802 that was called Natural Theology. Remember: special revelation and general revelation. General revelation focuses on God’s revelation of Himself in creation, or nature. That general revelation came to also be called natural revelation. Then that developed into an autonomous view that natural revelation had the same level of authority as special revelation. That basically split off on its own and the assumption was that you could go to anything in creation and get as much specific information about God and argue for the existence of God as from special revelation. Paley basically took the idea of God as a watch-maker. You have an extremely sophisticated watch; you look at it and think about it in its entirety. It is a group of systems that are brought together, it is not just individual parts but each part represents a number of sub-parts and some of those sub-parts represent even more sub-parts. All of this comes together into an extremely complex whole and it works magnificently. But if one of those little parts in any of the systems of sub-systems is off then nothing works and it is not a viable watch. So using that argument Paley argues that we can look all over the universe and wherever we go we can see all of these systems that fit within the whole of the creation of planet earth. So therefore we come to a conclusion that based on the fact that we can observe order and purpose in the universe chance cannot account for this, therefore only an omniscient, infinite designer could account for this.
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How can we get to an omniscient designer from looking at all the intricacies of the creation? How do we make that leap from finite to infinite? All we can really say is that whoever designed it knows a heck of a lot, a whole lot. But we can’t say He knows everything, we can just say that He knows everything about this system of the universe. We can’t say He is omniscient; that is a universal claim and the evidence that we have under the rules of empiricism can’t allow us to go quite that far because we don’t know anything about who the designer is. So if we say that the designer is God how do we know if it is Yahweh Elohim of the Old Testament? It is just some being that is a lot more powerful and knowledgeable than anything we can imagine. So this is the argument that is used from teleology. In which talks about design and purpose in the universe, and there is. But on the basis of what the unbeliever thinks, does the design and purpose get us to the burning bush, the existence of the self-existent God that is revealed in the Scripture?
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Then we come to the anthropological argument for the existence of God. It says that since man is a moral, intelligent and living being he can only be explained if there is a moral, intelligent and living God. The presupposition that is the assumption that is brought here is that since man manifests these qualities (man is a person) then he must have come from a creator that is also a person. Something that is non-personal cannot create something that is personal. Scripture that is sometimes used to support this is NASB “He who planted the ear, does He not hear? He who formed the eye, does He not see?” That is not really an anthropological argument; that is an argument that starts with God and ends with man. The anthropological argument, like these others, starts with something in the creation and tries to go to God, but the Bible always starts with God and goes to anything within creation. That is an important distinction to make.
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The moral argument is that the moral laws, the fact that we believe in a right and wrong, and that this is universal to the human race, implies that there is a universal morality, a universal truth, a universal right and wrong. Therefore since everyone believes in a moral law that implies that there is an objective moral law and therefore there must be a moral law giver. Once again we see that there are some weaknesses within this argument. They all come down to the same problem, i.e. moving from the finite created world and universe and crossing that boundary from the creation to the creator. What is distinct about the Judeo-Christian God is that He is a self-existent God who stands completely outside of everything in creation. In paganism there is what is called the chain of being. Aristotle was the first to utilize this, and in the chain of being everything shares in the same essence or being from the gods all the way down to the smallest molecule, the smallest atom. Everything is in the same chain of being; there is nothing outside of that chain.
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What is distinct about Scripture is that God is presented as a self-existence, personal, infinite God who exists for eternity without any creation, without any universe. He is not dependent in any way on the universe and the being that the creation has is not derivative being, it is creative being. These are huge distinctions. This is why all the other systems, basically the chain of being, is just an early form of the same thing that is present in Darwinism.
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So we are going to have a conversation between an unbeliever and a believer—two different kinds of believers. One believer is thinking pretty much like the world thinks, like the unbeliever thinks. He is a believer but he has the same basic assumptions about life and existence and creation as the unbeliever. Then we will have a believer who is consistently thinking about everything on the basis of the Bible.
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The believer who is thinking like an unbeliever is trying to convince the unbeliever of the truth of Scripture. The first issue that he has to deal with (he may not talk about it but it is embedded in all of this conversation) is the issue of authority. For the unbeliever what is the ultimate authority? It is either going to be reason or experience, or a combination thereof, or it is going to be his intuition as a mystic. Those are his only options for him to appeal to. It has to be consistent within his experience or it has to somehow resonate within him—the burning in his bosom, or an inner mental hot flash or insight into reality. So for the unbeliever his own abilities, his own reason and intellect becomes his ultimate judge and arbiter of truth, either through rationalism, empiricism or mysticism. The believer who is thinking like an unbeliever is still making reason and experience or mysticism his ultimate authority because he doesn’t recognize that in the total radical authority demand of Scripture—which is typical of most evangelicals. For the Bible-based believer he accepts only the authority of God’s Word and he believes that the unbeliever is exactly what God says the unbeliever is, and that in communicating the gospel to the unbeliever he is not communicating to somebody who somehow has a measure of objectivity, who is basing his thought on something epistemologically neutral; that his ability to reason, his experience, his interpretation of experience is spiritually neutral. So the believer says no, he is an unbeliever; he knows God exists; he is suppressing that truth in unrighteousness.
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If you are a believer talking to one person and you think that they have the ability to objectively evaluate the data and come to truth, and there is no hidden agenda coming up within his soul, then your strategy is going to be different from if you are talking to somebody that you know already knows the truth but is suppressing it in unrighteousness; and the ultimate one who is revealing truth in the conversation is the Holy Spirit and He is just using you to do the best you can to communicate the gospel and answer the questions this unbeliever has. So for the believer who is thinking like an unbeliever, the compromise believer, he is going to appeal to either reason or experience to prove the claims of the Bible. He has accepted the same assumptions as the unbeliever. He thinks that reason and his ability to interpret reason and interpret experience are valid. Remember, the problem with rationalism and empiricism is that it is an autonomous use of logic and reason; it is independent of the use of Scripture. That means it is built on a foundation of unbelief that isn’t clear. So the real issue is, again, authority. The believer acting like an unbeliever is adopting the same ultimate truth authority as the unbeliever, and by thinking he is not going to argue with that person on the authority of Scripture, he is saying to the unbeliever, just like you, I’m going to reject the authority of Scripture. So the real issue is being consistent with our belief that the Scripture presents absolute truth.
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The Bible-based believer recognizes the unbeliever knows what the truth is, he just doesn’t want to admit it; he is just going to suppress it as much as he can, so he is approaching the whole discussion with a warped view of truth, a warped view of reason, and a warped view of experience. Which tells us what? That as you discuss things with them there are going to be a lot of inconsistencies and problems. Part of what we might choose to do as part of our tactic is to ask questions like, how can you explain how a loving God can allow the holocaust to take place? We might respond, before I answer that let me ask how do you explain it? Well we just live in a random universe. So if we just live in a universe that is random how can you really make these judgments of what is right or wrong? How can you ask the question you ask on the basis of your assumptions? You can’t. So the strategic approach is not necessarily to prove the truth of the Scripture, but by assuming the truth if the Scripture you can expose the presuppositions of the unbeliever.
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When it comes to looking at general revelation in terms of nature of the creation the claim of the unbeliever and the claim of the believer that is thinking like the unbeliever, that general revelation is a book of truth that is no different from special revelation; it has the same authority. It doesn’t have any words so how can you learn anything specific out of a picture book? All you have is pictures. The failure with this position is that all of nature is being interpreted by the unbeliever in terms of truth suppression. He is looking at all the data and is suppressing it. The data says: God made me. And in his soul there is something that is resonating with that and he is just stuffing it down and suppressing it as much as he can. When the unbeliever looks out at a tree and all of the factors related to the leaves, the cells and everything else, he says anything can happen here. Isn’t it marvellous? Just give it enough time and it can just happen. It is irrational on the believer’s assumptions; it is not irrational on the unbeliever’s assumptions, because on his assumptions given enough time anything can happen. It is a random product of chance.
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The believer operating on the assumptions of Scripture is going to look at everything in creation differently from the unbeliever. The believer operating on the assumptions of the unbeliever says okay I’m going to take him on a tour of the planet. So they go all over the plant, all over the universe, and go over all of the marvellous and intricate facts of God’s creation; then he’ll believe in God. But the unbeliever, based on Scripture, doesn’t have a problem with knowing that God exists, he has the problem of accepting the God exists. He is suppressing all of that truth.
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The point being made in all of this is to show that the believer who is operating like an unbeliever is using a method and a strategy that is assuming the same ultimate truth authority as the unbeliever. He is trying to start with that to get him over into truth. He is saying, okay under your assumptions we are going to end up with God. The unbeliever then comes along and he says we see cause and affect, order, design, and all of these things exceed anything that man is capable of doing, but all it gets us is to the probability that there exists something that is a greater cause or designer. It doesn’t get us to certainty; it doesn’t get us to absolute reality; all it gets us to is probability. Probability rests on possibility, and so all that argument gets anyone is the probability that God exists. But the probability that God exists is also the probability that He doesn’t exist. Since probability is built on the foundation of possibility it doesn’t get us a self-existent God, it just gets us a contingent God.
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The God that the Bible presents is not a God that is just possible, not a God that is contingent upon anything; it is an eternally existent self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, and by going to these kinds of arguments what suddenly happens is you’ve bought into a smaller God view, a God that is built into a false view of natural theology, and you can’t cross the line from finite to infinite.
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In conclusion what we see is a) each of the four arguments start from finite experience and attempt to argue to infinite reality, and it can’t cross that line; b) these views use the idea of cause and effect, purpose, human morality and design, and assume that they are just as intelligible and mean the same thing to the unbeliever who is suppressing truth as they do to the believer who accepts truth. But remember, the unbeliever is suppressing truth, so how can you assume that his truth position is anything different from his truth suppression? How can we go over to his view and argue from what is wrong to what is right? It can’t be done; it is logically impossible; c) each view attempts to start with ideas of cause and effect, morality and purpose, but it treats them as being autonomous. God is the one who creates cause and effect, design and purpose, and defines what those mean; God does not have autonomous ideas of purpose and meaning, and design and cause and effect behind them. Those are not autonomous realities in the universe; they are what they are because God made them that way.
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Those five ways all are based on what is call a posteriori, what comes after creation is observed. You observe different things in the creation and then you try to argue to universal truth. That didn’t work so there was the development of what is called a priori, i.e. prior to—prior to looking into the elements within creation. So the ontological argument is based on a certain understanding of the meaning of being or existence itself, that if there is a perfect being He must necessarily exist. Anselm was the first to articulate this in his book Proslogion. He said that because we have an idea of a most perfect being, because the idea of a most perfect being includes existence since a being otherwise perfect who did not exist would not be as perfect as a being who did exist. Therefore since the idea of existence is necessarily contained in the most perfect being that most perfect being must exist.
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Where does this idea come from? It is the idea that an absolute being that did not exist is not as perfect as an absolute being that did exist, so therefore since we have the idea of an absolute being that exists he must exist. Once again we get into some basic problems, and that our basic concept of existence and necessity are defined within a creaturely finite concept, and we are trying to argue from creaturely finite over into the infinite. Since the time of Emmanuel Kant (late 1700s) this argument has not been accepted.
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Essentially to believe any of these is because you already believe God exists. That leads us to talking a little bit about the importance of Christian evidences and apologetics. Apologetics is defined as the way we defend what we believe and present the content of it. A lot of the details relate to Christian evidences of Christian, evidences of the resurrection, evidences of the veracity of Scripture, evidences for the correct transmission of Scripture, have more to do with building the confidence of the believer and what he believes than in convincing an unbeliever to move from unbelief to belief. Because his problem isn’t essentially an absence of knowledge or information; his basic problem is negative volition and is spiritual. That is not to say that there aren’t unbelievers who have legitimate questions because they have been brainwashed with a lot of garbage and we have to flush out some of that garbage by exposing them to the truth; and God uses that. But the ultimate issue is presenting the truth of the gospel and answering questions that are necessary. What this takes us back to ultimately is what Abraham said to the rich man in Tartarus. NASB “And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, that you send him to my father’s house—[28] for I have five brothers—in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’” The rich man is thinking like an unbeliever and is looking at empiricism as the ultimate arbiter of truth. He is begging Abraham to let Lazarus be raised from the dead so that on the basis of that empirical reality my brothers will believe in God. [29] “But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’” The authority isn’t in empiricism, not in a miracle; authority is in the Word of God, because the Word of God speaks with authority. The voice of God, which is the Word of God, carries embedded within it the authority that is self-authenticating, it is not a circular argument, because on the basis of what the Scriptures teach God isn’t part of the finite chain; He is outside of it. So He is the ultimate reality and when God speaks because He is God there is no higher court of appeal for a higher authority or a higher truth. It is the voice of God that is self-authenticating and it is God the Holy Spirit who works in the soul of the individual to make that clear. They reject it not because there is not enough evidence. That is what points out. Those brothers aren’t rejecting God because there is not enough evidence; there is more than enough evidence. They are rejecting God because they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

Romans 016b-How Paul Communicates the Gospel. , cf., &

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 016b-How Paul Communicates the Gospel. , cf., &
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In the apostle Paul gives one of the greatest explanations of the core problem in human history. Men suppress the truth on the one hand and live in a fantasy world on the other hand. There is a suppression of truth, rejection of God; and when God is rejected something moves in and replaces Him. He worships the creature rather than the creator. What are some of the conclusions we can draw from that? We are talking in terms of application of the principles we have seen in , especially in terms of communicating the gospel to those who don’t know it, don’t understand it, or who have not accepted Jesus Christ as savior.
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First of all, what this passage tells us is that all men are inherently religious. Mankind is not inherently secular; mankind is inherently religious. Whether that religion is expressed through a secular religion—and actually secular humanism was recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States as a religion—the belief that there is no God is just as much a religious statement as the belief that there is a God. It is just plain logic. If the statement that there is a God is religious then its opposite must be equally religious. There is no such thing as neutrality, no such thing as an area of life that is not touched by someone’s belief in an ultimate power or reality. So all men are inherently religious. That is, they worship something. Even if all they worship is their own belly they worship something. They worship money, and ideological system, their own lust patterns, an idol made of wood, stone and metal, or they worship some abstract ideology; but they all worship something. But what they worship is something within creation; that is the bent of fallen man.
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All men are also in rebellion against God. They are truth suppressors. They are in rebellion against the creator God as defined in the Old Testament. They are in rebellion against the creator God because of sin, and thus they will always default to some substitute god. They create a fantasy, a fantasy reality based on their view of ultimate reality that is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the creator-God of the Old Testament. All men also know, just as they know that God exists, that they are in violation of God’s standards. At the very core of their being they know this and that is why they are suppressing the truth: because they don’t want to come face to face with the reality that they don’t measure up to the righteous standards of God. And they can’t, no matter what; they never reach perfection.
God created all men with an internal knowledge of His existence. It is known within them, and His external witness of what He has made in the universe is a witness that is sufficient to every human being so that they are without excuse. Every human being, no matter what they may claim, deep down in a dark corner where they have stuffed it, suppressed it, there is the knowledge of God, and it is always peeking out at the most inappropriate time.
The ultimate issue in life was neither intellectual nor educational. It is not IQ; it is not experience; it is a moral decision to reject the knowledge of God. The problem with the unbeliever isn’t that he doesn’t have enough evidence or that it is not rationally presented—because it is; there is more than enough evidence—but he doesn’t want to believe that is the way reality is; he doesn’t want to submit to the authority of God who said: This is the way I have made things; not the way you wanted it. That is essentially what happened with Adam and Eve. They both wanted to redefine reality and say there was nothing wrong with that fruit.
There are some people who have already understood who this creator God is, so the issue in communicating with them is different. When we are communicating with a pagan who is committed to his pagan unbelief then we cannot argue them to the gospel by virtue of reason, experience or mysticism. Those are human systems of knowledge. When we try to do that we are trying to go over to the pagan’s foundation and construct eternity on that foundation of sand.
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When there is the unbeliever committed to unbelief on the left and the believer committed to the authority of Scripture on the right the question is: one what basis do we appeal for things such as truth and authority? What is the ultimate truth? Is it experience, reason, intuition and mysticism, or Scripture? What we want to do is look at examples from the Scriptures of how the apostles communicated to unbelievers, and see that they did not violate the foundation of Scriptural authority by setting it aside and appealing to logic or reason or experience as the ultimate determiner of truth; how they were able to assume the authenticity of Scripture, the authority and the veracity of Scripture, and they never compromised it in how they communicated truth to the unbeliever.
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NASB “But Peter, taking his stand with the eleven, raised his voice and declared to them: ‘Men of Judea and all you who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give heed to my words.’” Peter is talking to a group of Jewish men who were called “devout” men in . When he addresses them it is with the assumption that the common ground between them is the authority of the Scriptures. Many of them were unbelievers but he assumes the veracity and the authority of Scripture and the prophets of Joel and of David in the Psalms, and he doesn’t validate the authority of Scripture. He knows that he has that as common ground with his audience. They already know who God is: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We see the contrast with Paul in Lystra and later in Athens where his audience had no idea who the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was, or who Jesus was. Paul takes a completely different approach. He also takes a different approach when he is dealing with a Jewish audience that already understands who God is.
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Peter addresses this audience with the assumption that they know the Hebrew Scriptures. He begins with a quotation from Joel related to the messianic kingdom. They already have this as a common understanding. He follows this with a quotation from , which deals with the messianic statement of David that the Messiah would go into the grave but His body would not be corrupted. In other words, the Old Testament predicted that the Messiah would be raised from the dead and that He would have victory over death; then , that God would raise Him to heaven and He would be seated at the right hand of the Father, and that all authority is then given to Him. So Jesus Christ is represented as the divine authority over creation and there is no compromise on that point in his presentation.
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In Acts chapter three we have Peter’s second sermon as recorded in Acts. The context is that he and John have just healed this lame man who sat outside the temple. But how does Peter begin? He doesn’t begin in Genesis chapter one, he begins in Genesis chapter twelve. NASB “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus, {the one} whom you delivered and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him.” He starts with the common ground of the God of the Old Testament. He is not compromising the Scripture; he is assuming the authority of Scripture, and he doesn’t step out from that foundation. In this sermon he uses messianic references in the Old Testament and appeals to the Hebrew prophets as his authority. His ultimate authority is: This is what God says and this is how it has been fulfilled. We see this in NASB “But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled.” He is not questioning or giving any ground on divine authority. [24] “And likewise, all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and {his} successors onward, also announced these days. [25] It is you who are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant which God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘AND IN YOUR SEED ALL THE FAMILIES OF THE EARTH SHALL BE BLESSED.’” When he gets to the point of the resurrection he says, [26] “For you first, God raised up His Servant and sent Him to bless you by turning every one {of you} from your wicked ways.” The point of this sermon, as with the one before, is on the resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate evidence and validation of who Jesus is as the Messiah. Peter is not appealing to it as an autonomous act of history; he is locating it within a biblical view of history. This is why he goes back in the sermon and the sermon to Abraham and gives a context before he even begins to talk about resurrection. By establishing the Old Testament framework he locates the resurrection within a context of Scripture.
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He goes on to talk about the restoration of all things which is a reference to the messianic kingdom. Then he uses the phrase “times of refreshing” which will come (v. 19), and this, again, emphasizes the messianic kingdom as promised in the Old Testament. So he appeals to the resurrection within the context of Old Testament predictions. It is not an isolated historical event where you are just looking at it within the context of how some apologetics are done in isolation of that Old Testament framework. You can’t understand the resurrection if you don’t understand the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
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The next situation is when Peter and John have been arrested and now they address the Sanhedrin. We see the same thing happen. The appeal is made to the Scriptures without compromising their authority and they quote from passages such as (). Then they conclude with the statement: NASB “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.” So again, this is locating their explanation and defense of their gospel message on the basis of Old Testament authority.
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In Acts chapter seven we have Stephen’s sermon and his challenge to the abuse of authority by the Pharisees. NASB “And he said, ‘Hear me, brethren and fathers! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran.’” Where does he start? He is talking to a Jewish audience who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that is where he starts in his communication of the gospel. He appeals to the Scripture throughout the entire chapter and he never compromises its authority.
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In addressing a Jewish audience Peter and Stephen operate on the common ground of Scripture; they never compromise the authority of Scripture by appealing to reason, logic, or experience of history as if it operates independently of the authority of Scripture. History is what it is because God says it is; facts are what they are, not because they operate autonomously but because they are what God says they are. So they always establish the facts of what they are talking about within the framework of divine revelation and authority.
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In Acts chapter eight we have Philip talking to the Ethiopian eunuch who already believes in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So there is, again, the common ground of Scriptural authority. It is the same with Paul in NASB “and immediately he {began} to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’” He starts from a framework of Scripture as his common ground. In Acts chapter ten Peter does the same thing. In all these instances there are individuals who believe in the God of the Old Testament, and the starting point is with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and His work and revelation in the Old Testament.
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The situation changes after Acts chapter thirteen when Paul and Barnabas are on the first missionary journey. In chapter fourteen Paul addresses the Gentiles in Lystra. The context is that he is going to Greek-speaking people who do not have a framework for the Old Testament. But before he goes anywhere Paul always first goes to a synagogue. The first place he goes to is Iconium, and that is covered in the first three verses. He addressees the synagogue of the Jews and in the synagogue there are both Jews and Gentiles. The Gentiles in the synagogue are God-fearing Greeks who had become proselytes to Judaism and part of the synagogue. As Paul explains the credentials of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah we are told, verse 1, “…a large number of people believed, both of Jews and of Greeks.” But there were also unbelieving Jews. These were the Jews who were suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and as a result when the truth is given and that God-consciousness is being tweaked they react. There is one of two things that happens when the gospel is proclaimed to people: a) in humility they accept it and believe it; b) if they don’t like it, it doesn’t fit their fantasy world that they have constructed, it is in opposition to it, they react in anger and hostility. The unbelieving Jews here then went out to the Gentiles in the broader context of Iconium and they poison their minds against their brethren; they distort what Paul has said, they twist it so that they can generate opposition from the legal authorities. The multitude becomes further and further divided because these unbelieving Jews are stirring things up, violence breaks out and the unbelievers want to stone Paul and Barnabas.
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They head south to Lystra where something important happens as they present the gospel. NASB “At Lystra a man was sitting who had no strength in his feet, lame from his mother’s womb, who had never walked. [9] This man was listening to Paul as he spoke, who, when he had fixed his gaze on him and had seen that he had faith to be made well, [10] said with a loud voice, ‘Stand upright on your feet.’ And he leaped up and {began} to walk.’” So we have a miracle that attests to the authority of the apostle Paul and is a validation of their message. What happens when this miracle occurs is that the people who are pagan reinterpret what has just happened. This is what is typical of truth suppression. In truth suppression as soon as something is seen that is biblical it is reinterpreted within a pagan framework. [11] “When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they raised their voice, saying in the Lycaonian language, ‘The gods have become like men and have come down to us.’ [12] And they {began} calling Barnabas, Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.’” They are identifying them within their pagan religious system.
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The paganism of that day is not a lot different from the paganism of today. Any system of thought has to deal with ethics, how we know what we know, and what ultimate reality is. You can’t separate these things. As soon as somebody says this is right or this is wrong we have to ask the question: how do you know you are right? Paul is dealing with people who are thinking with a view of God isn’t a God who is a separate and distinct creator who is radically different from everything in the creation, and He doesn’t share the same essence or being with everything that He has created. So he has to talk about God is a completely separate and distinct way, which is what he does in when they start worshipping him NASB “and saying, ‘Men, why are you doing these things? We are also men of the same nature as you, and preach the gospel to you that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, WHO MADE THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH AND THE SEA AND ALL THAT IS IN THEM.’” These people don’t know what the issue is. It is either to be worshipped like a god and have their message plugged into this same pagan chain of being and they sort of assimilate to the pagan view a little bit—or they will be stoned. How is that for an option? We could say we are really talking about the same God, it would be very easy to do. In fact, that is how most Christians witness. They talk to an unbeliever and say we are talking about pretty much the same thing. No, you’re not! Don’t give up your ground. As soon as you say we are talking about the same thing you have lost, because you are not talking about the same thing. They are talking about the chain of being; you are talking about a creator God who is totally other than all of His creation. Paul recognizes there are two kinds of people: either creator worshippers or creature worshippers. He isn’t going to settle for a compromise.
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Paul goes back to Genesis chapter one. Before he can get to the cross or resurrection he has to make sure they understand that they are talking about a different God, the God who created everything. The doctrine of creation isn’t some secondary thing. If we don’t communicate the gospel within the framework of a literal Genesis chapter one creation we are grounding the gospel on a false god, a non-biblical being. Both here and in Paul grounds his gospel, before he ever gets to the cross and resurrection, in the God of Genesis chapter one who creates all things and gives life to all things, and who is the God who can then bring Jesus from the dead and give Him life, raising Him from the dead. Without Genesis chapter one we can’t get to the resurrection and Paul wants to make sure that he identifies what the resurrection truth is and where it comes from before he throws it out there. Otherwise their pagan thought is just going to absorb it and reinterpret as just another oddity in history and put Jesus up with all of the other gods and philosophers of history.
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The principle we want to see in is that Paul, when he is addressing pagans, he doesn’t start in . There is no common ground with the Old Testament Scripture. He starts with, without compromising Scripture, the fact that you have to understand who God is before you can understand what is going to be said about sin, salvation and resurrection.

Romans 017b-Paul Confronts Paganism. Romans 1:28-32

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 017b-Paul Confronts Paganism.
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We are looking at application of . It is in those passages that we come to understand some things about the nature of every human being. What Paul emphasizes there is that everybody with no exception, no matter how much they protest they know in their dark, depraved, wicked little hearts that God exists. So we don’t really have to prove to them that God exists. Often these “proofs” for the existence of God really address the knowledge of God as if the problem is an intellectual one, as if the problem is an evidential one, that we just don’t have enough evidence and so we have to construct a logical argument to convince the unbeliever that God exists. What Scripture says is that he already knows that God exists. And often what happens is that we unwittingly compromise our own position by acting as if the problems are intellectual or evidential. The problem is a volitional and spiritual one; they have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness; they have rejected the truth. It is not that they don’t know it; it is not that it is not clear; it is not that there is not enough evidence; it is that they have made a decision to reject the authority of God at God-consciousness or consistently from God consciousness.
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The knowledge of God is within the unbeliever because he is created in the image of God, and the heavens and the earth declare that (; , )—non-verbal evidence, witness. The unbeliever has just turned the volume down. What we are doing in witnessing what we are doing is turning the volume up a little bit and so the question becomes really a methodological question. It is not so much a question of do we or do we not use evidences, it is how we use those evidences. Do we appeal to those evidences as if they exist in independence of God’s Word? In other words, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ something that we look at just as an independent autonomous fact of history or, does it gain its meaning as a fact in history because God tells us what it means?
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The issue is how to communicate as a believer committed to the authority of Scripture to an unbeliever who is committed to unbelief. Where is the common ground? What Paul is demonstrating is that the common ground is Scripture. What we see in Acts chapters 14 and 17 isn’t necessarily that Paul is coming to these unbelievers quoting chapter and verse but that everything that he is saying is based on Scripture. He is paraphrasing or summarizing but he is not necessarily coming in and quoting , or some other verse to make his point. Nevertheless he is still making Scriptural points from the Old Testament.
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Now we want to look at Acts chapter seventeen in relationship to Paul’s message at Mars Hill. We have seen that when Paul witnesses to these unbelievers he demonstrates that he has a very well educated and informed view of what they believe. He knows his audience. The best way to know about the person we witness to is to understand something about his culture. That is why when a missionary is going to go some place the need is to study the culture in order to have some idea of how the locals think and what the vocabulary issues are. In the Greek culture Paul clearly understood that they had a lot of gods, but what they meant by the word theos [qeoj] wasn’t what he meant when he used the word “God.” So that had to be cleared up.
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Greek culture had been dominated by the value of philosophy and intellectual pursuit of sophos [sofoj], wisdom. Wisdom was viewed not as the Hebrews viewed wisdom, which was something intensely practical, a skill at living. Wisdom in the Bible is not abstract reasoning, it is the ability to take what God has revealed to us and develop something that is aesthetically beautiful, attractive and shows skill because it results from what we have learned from God.
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Paul is coming to Athens to present the gospel to the Greeks, and he being the extremely well educated man that he was, understood very much how they thought. He had read all of the significant pagan philosophers and writers and so understands all of their thought.
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NASB “Now while Paul was waiting for them [Silas and Timothy] at Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he was observing the city full of idols.” As Paul had walked aro0und all he could see was one temple after another, one god or goddess after another, and because he is so committed to the truth he had a little righteous indignation. He could see the city was completely full of idols and it violated the second commandment of the Old Testament. So he follows his normal methodology, to the Jew first and then to the Gentiles. [17] “So he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing {Gentiles,} and in the market place every day with those who happened to be present.” He is having conversation with them, explaining the Scriptures; he is not going to a drive-by with his gospel gun.
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In the market place what he was teaching focused on the resurrection, Not in an autonomous sense, but remember that when he talks to a Jewish audience with the Old Testament and to a God-fearing Gentile audience he is explaining the revelation in context. But he has some other people now in his audience—Epicureans and Stoics—and they are conversing with him. It is a dialogue. NASB “And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. Some were saying, ‘What would this idle babbler wish to say?’ Others, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,’—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” The Stoics were basically the pantheistic monists of their day, everything came from the one element of fire and everything ultimately will return into one cosmic conflagration, and then it starts all over again. There were the people in Greek thought who said history repeats itself over and over again. Christianity is the only way of thinking that has a linear view of history where it begins at one point and is resolved at another point. Other systems have come along since Christianity, Marxism being one of them, who have stolen the idea of a linear history and a purpose in history from Christianity. The Epicureans, on the other hand, were the atheist materialists of the day. So these were two very different people but they were both part of the paganism of the day; they both believed in human autonomy.
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First, Paul had been talking to groups with an Old Testament background, so he was talking about Jesus and the resurrection because they have a frame of reference to understand that. But when the pagans come and hear that it is just meaningless gibberish, and all they can do is just try to wrap their pagan thought around this idea. It doesn’t have any coherence for them because it is assuming a totally different reality and Paul is not going to compromise with them.
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NASB “And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, ‘May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming? [20] For you are bringing some strange things to our ears; so we want to know what these things mean.’” Intellectual curiosity. [21] “(Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new.)” They are not looking for truth, they just want to have their ears stimulated with something new. [22] “So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, ‘Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.’” That is , —no matter what your view is you are religious. [23] “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. [24] The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; [25] nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all {people} life and breath and all things.”
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Paul defines theology proper. There is a methodology here. The first thing he is going to do is make sure that the content of the Word of God is clear. He is not going to let them come up with their own ideas or read that into what he is saying. Then he is going to redefine who man is before he ever gets to anything close to the gospel. He wants to make sure they know who God is and who man is. They are not going to like either one. NASB “And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. Some were saying, ‘What would this idle babbler wish to say?’ Others, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,’—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” The translation “idle babbler” is the Greek word spermologos [spermologoj]—sperma = seed; logos = word or message or study. This was actually a pejorative term, an idiom that was used to describe someone who lacked any intellectual sophistication, someone who picked up little seeds or scraps of information here and there and then tried to act as if they knew something. So they are very insulting towards the apostle Paul. But he is communicating the gospel to all of these people and is clearly proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God whom God designated in power by His resurrection from the dead. So the resurrection is clearly a strong element of his gospel presentation.
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Another thing that Paul recognizes here is that they are going to be antagonistic to him from the very beginning. They had a prior intellectual commitment in their suppression of truth in unrighteousness that no God like Paul proclaims could exist and something like the resurrection couldn’t exist—don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is already made up. But that doesn’t stop Paul. He knows that they have this predetermined precept commitment but he is going to explain things anyway because God the Holy Spirit works with His Word and there were some who did respond to the gospel. He is going to make sure he makes the gospel very clear. He knows that whatever it is that they say is all smoke and mirrors because every one of them knows in their heart of hearts that God exists and that God is who Paul says He is, and that they are what God says they are. They just don’t like it and they don’t want to admit it. Paul knows, as we know when we are communicating to somebody about the truth of the Scripture, that they know we are right. They don’t want to admit it, but we have a secret agent that has already put truth in their soul and who is exposing it, and that is the Holy Spirit. So we can just relax and do the best that we can.
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But before Paul gets to the details he has to expose the error because he doesn’t want them to just envelop his ideas within their system. He is going to start and redefine who God is. He will begin by explaining the God of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, and the God of the Bible. He is going to authoritatively declare His reality to these philosophers. He is not going to try to convince them, he assumes and authoritatively proclaims that God exists; he doesn’t give any ground on that. “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” Paul is using this to expose the fact that every human being has the knowledge of God in his soul. So he just points this out: You have limited knowledge. He is challenging their basic epistemology. He begins to define this God and he declares that the God he is communicating to them about is the creator God. He is emphasizing this creator-creation distinction which is completely contrary to their monistic chain of being. So the first thing that comes out of his mouth is going to rattle their cage. That is not how to win friends and influence people in your evangelism methodology!
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He says: “I am going to tell you about the God who made the world and all things in it.” He is starting with creation. “…since He is Lord of heaven and earth.” He is emphasizing authority here. Heaven and earth pretty well incorporates all of creation. He “does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all {people} life and breath and all things.” God doesn’t exist to be served; He is independent of His creation. NASB “Thus says God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread out the earth and its offspring, Who gives breath to the people on it And spirit to those who walk in it.” Paul is not compromising on his view of God. Paul is emphasizing just who this God is: creator of everything.

Romans 018b-The Areopagitica: Paul at Athens. : cf.,

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 018b-The Areopagitica: Paul at Athens. : cf.,
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NASB “Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he was observing the city full of idols.” This is a form of righteous indignation. The word translated “provoked” is the Greek word paroxuno [parocunw] which means to be irritated, provoked, angered and has to do with a disagreement or emotional incitement. So as Paul walked from temple to temple and idol to idol he was just getting more and more irritated and wanted to speak the truth.
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He first goes into the synagogue—always to the Jew first. Remember he was still in the transition period between the age of Israel or the beginning of the church age, but Israel is still in the land, they hadn’t come under the fifth cycle of discipline yet, so there was still the emphasis on Jew first and then the Gentiles.
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NASB “So he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing {Gentiles,} and in the market place every day with those who happened to be present.” The word “reasoning” here was also used in verse 2, when they were in Thessalonica. “And according to Paul’s custom, he went to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures.” The word translated “reasoned” is dialegomai [dialegomai] which has to do with talking to someone, discussing things with someone, conversing with someone. So Paul is not just coming in and dumping a load on the Jews in the synagogue, he presenting a case, interacting with them, being questioned, and he is answering those questions. He recognizes the legitimacy of helping people come to a clearer understanding of what it is that he is presenting. That is further defined in verse 3 by “explaining and giving evidence”—explaining: dianoigo [dianoigw] which means to open something up, sometimes having the idea of interpreting. He is helping to disclose what God has revealed and to make it clear. The “giving evidence” or “demonstrating” is the Greek word paratithemi [paratiqhmi] meaning to set something before someone in teaching.
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NASB “And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. Some were saying, ‘What would this idle babbler wish to say?’ Others, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,’—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” They can’t get a mental grip on these ideas because the idea of a physical bodily resurrection, that somebody would conquer death and would no longer be mortal but immortal, is just beyond their comprehension. It doesn’t fit with their whole philosophy of history and life and creation; this just can’t happen. Paul talks about it and they are just confused. The normal word for “preaching” that we think of for preaching is kerusso [khrussw] which has to do with a herald going out from the government making an announcement. But that is not the word that is used here. Most of the time in Acts the word for preaching comes from the Greek word epangelizo [e)paggelizw] which is the verb for proclaiming the gospel. He is evangelizing through Jesus and the resurrection. The other thing to notice in Acts is that every time the gospel is presented the focus is on the resurrection. Why? We will see in this passage. It is not presented because the resurrection is related specifically to the payment of sin. The resurrection connects with something vital about who Jesus is and the validation of what He did on the cross, and it is connected to His ascension.
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So these men give Paul an opportunity to speak. As he begins he points out that they are religious. They may not have quite understood that or accepted it but we know from Romans chapter one that what Paul is saying is that they already know that God exists and that is the God I’m going to tell you about. , NASB “So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” Paul is going to use that “unknown God” to pull them toward the God that he is going to tell them about. The gods that they had were finite gods, but Paul is going to use this as a way to teach them about the true God. They had no concept of a creator God as the Bible presents, a creator God who is totally distinct and set apart from His creation.
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, NASB “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all {people} life and breath and all things.” He is putting the focus on the fact that it is God who gives us everything. This comes right out of the Old Testament. Even though he is not quoting Scripture per se everything that he is saying is right out of the Old Testament. Cf. NASB “Thus says God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread out the earth and its offspring, Who gives breath to the people on it And spirit to those who walk in it.” So it is God who is the source of life, and this is the God he is proclaiming to them. This is very different from the god they think of which is a god who is dependent on man.
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The second thing Paul does, is to point out a different view of man than they held. NASB “and He made from one {man} every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined {their} appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation.” That probably struck those Epicureans and Stoics just as harshly as it would strike anybody working in a biology department or science department or sociology department on the planet today. They didn’t like it. Their view was that the Greeks were higher than everybody else and that they weren’t like everybody else. But Paul says everybody came from one man, that Greeks aren’t any better or worse than Romans, than Persians. All are from one God and He is the authority over human history; He is the authority over mankind, and not only that, He determines their appointed times, the rise and fall of nations. And further, He identifies and sets the boundaries of their habitation.
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This is a great verse because it emphasizes that God establishes national boundaries. Internationalists today want no borders and to let everybody run back and forth without any definition of authority and this flies completely in the face of the fact that God is the one who established national distinctions and national boundaries. So this is a great verse to use from a biblical viewpoint for why we need to defend our borders, and why a nation should have a policy on immigration so that they can control the application of their legal system within their borders. If the legal system within the borders cannot be controlled then society will become chaos. We can see illustrations of that today in man, many areas because we have lost control of these areas. This is an Old Testament idea and it is based on NASB “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, When He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples According to the number of the sons of Israel.” Remember the core idea of inheritance is possession. The Old Testament idea isn’t so much that inheritance is something you gain when someone dies and it is passed on to you. That is a secondary meaning. The primary meaning of inheritance is a possession. When God gave the land to Israel He said this was their inheritance, their possession that He had given them. “According to the number of the sons of Israel” means that there is a correlation or proportional ratio there between Israel and the Gentiles. We don’t know what that is but it emphasizes once again that Israel is the very core of all of human history.
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So Paul goes on. Now he has established the fact that God is the creator God who created the heavens and the earth and everything that is in them and has emphasized the fact that God created all of the human race from one man, this completely blows their whole understanding of humanity and their arrogant pride in the Greeks. He asserts that God is the sovereign over all of mankind. NASB “Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.” Right here Paul comes right out and says they have made all of these beautiful statues of gods and goddesses out of silver and gold and stone but you don’t have a right to do that. Who are we to think that God can be restricted to this kind of representation? He is challenging the very foundation of their thinking. Here he hasn’t even gotten to Jesus and the cross yet, he is spending all of this time focusing on their understanding of God because if there is no right understanding of God they are not really going to be able to understand who Jesus was and why He did what He did at the cross. And they are not even going to be able to comprehend the resurrection. He just challenges the fact that their idea of ultimate reality is completely false and he has just eradicated their foundation.
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NASB “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all {people} everywhere should repent.” They would really have loved that! Imagine those philosophers and professors when Paul comes along and says that basically they have been ignorant up until now and God has just overlooked it. You think you were smart. We will see that coming up: professing to be wise they became fools. But now God is taking a more active role in relation to the Gentile nations and He commands all men everywhere to repent. The idea that Paul expresses in verse 29 related to idolatry goes back to the Old Testament, the Torah. NASB “And {beware} not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them, those which the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.” Paul is accurately presenting what Scripture says. Then he says there is a change now and God is commanding all men everywhere to repent. Up to this point in Scripture the word “repent” almost always has a Jewish focus, but now there is a shift and it is going to a Gentile audience. The gospel is moving out from a Jewish focus to a worldwide focus. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a responsibility for Gentiles to turn to God in the Old Testament but it is not in the same way that he is speaking of it right now.
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NASB “that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” Here Paul is simply recognizing the fact that God is always exercising then grace initiative to reach out to mankind. Paul has defined God as a creator God, a God that the Athenians don’t want to accept. Now he says that if they would seek Him they can go for Him and He will be there. He is near; He is not far away. NASB “They have burned Your sanctuary to the ground; They have defiled the dwelling place of Your name”—the recognition that God is still present even though, in the context of , there has been a rejection of Him.
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NASB “for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’” Their idea of having their being in God is within the chain of being; it is not God as the separate, distinct creator God of the heavens and the earth. Paul is not going over into paganism and trying to argue on the basis of paganism or argue them to Christianity. What Paul is doing is showing that even within the history of their thinking there is always this evidence of God and evidence of truth that just unavoidably pops up in the thinking of the unbeliever. They can’t avoid it because we do live and breathe and exist within the creation of the God of the Bible, He is always near. People realize this every now and then. It is not really consistent with their philosophy at times but they do recognize this.
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Now we get to the punch in his message. NASB “because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world…” There is accountability. It is not just random, not just cyclical. This implies that there is a direction and an end. The Greeks didn’t believe there was an end, they believed in the eternality of the universe. “… in righteousness.” The Greek preposition en [e)n] should be translated at this point “by means of righteousness.” What is the basis for God’s judgment of mankind? What is the criteria He is going to use? His own righteousness. What Paul is saying here is not that He will judge the world in righteousness, but He will judge the world by righteousness. Righteousness is the standard that holds His creatures to. “… through [by] a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.” That righteousness is in a person, the person of Jesus Christ. And because He was perfectly righteous and without sin He was qualified to go to the cross. The word “appointed” is horizo [o(rizw] in the Greek. God had a plan. It doesn’t imply some sort of foreordination or predestination soteriologically but it indicates that God had a specific plan set ahead of time and that He has established a purpose for the Lord Jesus Christ. Notice Paul emphasizes His humanity here. He doesn’t say by the God-Man, he says by the Man. Because it is the fact that Jesus in His humanity passes all of the tests that Adam failed that qualifies Him to go to the cross. He maintains His righteousness not by depending upon His divine attributes to avoid temptation but by doing it on the basis of the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Jesus in His humanity has to solve the problems and not yield to sin on the basis of totally His humanity. If He goes over to His deity and avoids sin by relying upon His divine essence then He is not demonstrating anything for us, and that would fail the test; He has to do it as a Man. So His righteousness is established in terms of His humanity. Then Paul says God has given assurance of the judgment that is coming to all by raising Him from the dead.
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Why did Jesus rise from the dead? The resurrection is not what provides the basis for justification but the resurrection is what validates from God the mission that Jesus was sent on was accomplished. If you don’t have that everything else falls apart. That is why the resurrection is central. In every single gospel presentation in Acts the focus is not on the atonement but on the resurrection. Think about that. God has given assurance of the fact that it is by righteousness and by this Man whom God ordained that salvation was accomplished. He did this by raising Him from the dead. As soon as Paul says this the Greek reaction was that it doesn’t happen; it is impossible. They are using their limited experience to judge something that is totally beyond human experience. It all extends from the fact that because they have a high view of man and a limited view of God that they can’t comprehend it. They hear Paul mention it and they mock, but there were some who were positive and said they would hear him again on this matter.
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What was the first thing that Paul did? He goes to the synagogue and is talking to Jews and God-fearing Gentiles. Then he went out in the market place. He is not expecting people to respond to the gospel on the first or even the second time they hear it. He has to explain it; he has to go over it again and again. He is answering questions. He is dialoguing, talking to them. He is not afraid to emphasize creation. What Paul shows us in & 17 is that if you don’t have a God who creates the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them, a God who is the kind of God that Genesis presents, then you can’t have the kind of Jesus that the Gospels present.
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These Greeks couldn’t understand resurrection because they didn’t have the kind of God in their mind that is the God of life in . In the conclusion we learn that Paul departed from them. But, NASB “But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.” “Dionysius the Areopagite” means that he was one of those who gathered at the Areopagus at Mars Hill to debate the issues of life. Luke gives a couple of major names to show that Paul did have converts there.
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We have to recognize that the world is what the Bible says it is and God says it is. When we talk to people we need to talk in the confidence that that is the way the world is, also recognizing that at some level they know that. They may have covered it up with 1000 tons of concrete but it is still there, and the Holy Spirit can crack concrete. So it is not up to us; it never is up to us. It is up to us to be as prepared as we can be but it is up to the Holy Spirit ultimately.

Romans 019b-The Consequences of Rejection of God. Romans 1:26-32

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
Romans 019b-The Consequences of Rejection of God.
What are the consequences of rejecting God? First of all, either the personal infinite God of the Bible exists as the Bible depicts Him or He does not exist. Those are the only two options. If He exists then we must understand the Bible in a somewhat literal manner because the logic of His existence and knowing about Him within the Bible is that we can only know Him as He has revealed Himself to us. Otherwise we are just making it up; we are creating our own idea of God. If the God of the Bible exists then we know about Him only through the Bible because this is where He has revealed Himself to us. On the other hand, if He does not exist then the Bible is no more relevant to either Jews or Christians the Koran or any other religious or non-religious book and we have no idea what is out there.
If the Bible is true (and we believe it is true) then it claims not only to give truth but also certainty and hope—confidence so we can base everything on that. So our assumption is that the Bible is true, that God exists, and that He has revealed Himself to us in a way that we can understand His revelation to us in the Bible. The next assumption is that if we reject self-exposure of God then, based on His revelation, we are simply creating fantasies about reality.
We are often provided with a guide book for assembling something. But many of us, rather than look at the instructions, we assume that somehow we are so mechanically inclined that we can just look at all of the various little screws and nuts and bolts and pieces and that we can put it all together by ourselves. Then after three or four hours of frustration we finally decide to find the instruction book and see if we can look at the pictures. Well what most people are doing in life is that they have not only rejected the instruction book and thought that they can do the assembly themselves but they have burned the instruction book so that there is no way they can ever find their way back to it, and they are committed to running life on their own terms. This is what Paul is talking about here when he says that everyone knows that God exists, they have an internal compass that points them to God, but they are suppressing that truth in unrighteousness. As a result of that God is going to bring judgment upon them.
We see the consequences of that rejection of God outlined in this chapter. What this chapter is telling us is that when we reject God and reject that instruction book (general revelation, the picture book) what happens? People in their arrogance begin construct reality according to their own imagination. That is why in the Old Testament there are the statements about the imagination on man being evil continuously, because man in his imagination is generating these fantasy worlds; he is constructing his own view of reality. He has rejected the guide book and so now he is making things up as he goes along. This is just called fantasy, and the more the individual gets divorced from the reality of truth and constructs his fantasy, the further his fantasy gets away from reality then the more dangerous that person becomes. He becomes dangerous to himself; he becomes dangerous to others. But when there is a tribe or nation of people or a culture of people who have rejected the truth and are living in a group fantasy then things can get even worse. Just think about radical Islam.
The problem that we see in this whole issue of rejecting truth and then trying to manufacture it out of old cloth without any idea or reference to some sort of ultimate absolute is like when we all have the same jog-saw puzzle but we are not going to look at the box tope to see what it is supposed to look like. We are just going to look at this jig-saw puzzle and all of the 5000 pieces in front of us and then generate out of our own imagination what it is supposed to look like. Then we are going to start putting together those pieces. Some don’t fit, some almost fit so we force them, others don’t fit so we ignore them and brush them aside somewhere because they don’t fit our reality; and then we just construct our little castle in the sky. But once we start living as if those castles are real it has significant consequences, and that is what Paul is talking about here. It is that when people reject God and substitute something else it has consequences because they have divorced themselves completely from reality.
With the initial rejection of God we see that there are basically five results: The first is arrogance. They don’t glorify God, i.e. they reject the creator out of any gratitude, and that is nothing more than pure arrogance. We start with self-absorption. Man makes himself the ultimate measure of reality. There is not an external reference point to appeal to; we become the ultimate determiner of truth; we are self-absorbed. Then we begin to indulge ourselves in that fantasy that we actually determine the course of life; that we are in control. After a whole if we live on the basis of self-indulgence we begin to justify all of our actions that come from self-indulgence, and this leads to greater self-deception. Now we are moving into that castle in the sky. This leads to self-deification, which is what we see in Romans chapter one. We become the ultimate determiner of reality: reality is what I want it to be, don’t let God interfere whatsoever. This is a never-ending process unless it is broken by the grace of God. The center of all of these is I. Self-absorption destroys gratitude to God. The reason for that, according to 1:21, is because the reasoning processes become warped because they are missing the vital element of God’s control—God’s existence, God’s control, and God is the one who determines reality. There is a loss of understanding based on the loss of the ultimate reference point of objectivity; there is no truth. And then they start playing the truth and changing the definition until you get into the kind of quagmire we are in today where there is no truth, and then that begs the question: is that true that there is no truth? How can you know it is true if there is no truth? Now you know why it is empty reasoning, because they are ultimately living in a realm of complete irrationality and the only thing that can move them is either their emotions or power, or some other form of lust.
As a result they erect these fantastic castles in the air of science and logic to justify the existence of the castle in the air. That is verse 22 NASB “Professing to be wise, they became fools.” They think they are filled with intellectual accomplishments and wisdom and skill but it is really foolishness. And Psalmist said in the Hebrew Scriptures that the fool has said in his heart there is no God. He is a fool because he has said there is no God. It is not because he existed autonomously as a fool and this is just somebody who is a moron with a room temperature IQ and are not smart enough to accept the fact that there is a God, it is the fact that they have an IQ of 130, 140, 180 or 200 and they say there is a God and now they are a fool because they have denied the ultimate reality in the universe. So the fourth result is they are claiming to be wise and they become fools. The fifth result is they exchange the glory of God for creatures.
Now we have consequences, and they start to get spelled out in verse 24 NASB “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” This begins with a word in the Greek that is a little different from what we normally expect when we see a “therefore.” It is a strong word dio [dio], and it is a strong emphatic stating a conclusion. It is stating the result of a previous statement. When we look at the context of verses 24 & 25 we see that they are beginning to spell out the consequences of those first five results—arrogance, self-absorption, the warping of the reasoning, the loss of understanding, claiming wisdom and in reality it is foolishness, and then exchanging the glory of God for a creature. All of that is immediate as a result of sin. Then what we see in v. 24ff is what happens as God gives the human race enough rope to hang itself, so to speak. That is the basic idea in the phrase “God gave them up.” In the Greek this is a word that means to deliver someone up. For example, you may deliver a prisoner to his prison; you may betray somebody and hand them over to somebody. The word is used of Judas handing over Jesus to the Roman authorities. It basically means here that God let them go their sinful way. But if you put it that way God just let them go their sinful way to realize the consequences of their decision it indicates a sort of permissiveness to God’s will and a level of passivity that isn’t there. This is an active voice verb; God is actively involved in overseeing this process. We will see that there are three such statements in the following verses. In verse 24 we have stage one: God gives them over to certain things. Verse 26 “For this reason [because of the sins identified in vv. 24 & 25] God gave them over to degrading passions…” This is the next level of degradation. Then in verse 28 we read, “And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind…” This is the third level of degradation.
These three levels of degradation that we have here in vv. 24-32 are actually judgments of God on the human race. We often hear it said that if you look at this culture that we have God certainly needs to judge it. No, this culture that we have is God’s judgment for rejecting Him. It is just going to get worse and God is going to continue to remove whatever restraints there are on the culture so that people realize the ultimate consequences of their bad decisions. But the fact that this word “God gives them over” is used shows that God is actively involved in the process. He is overseeing it; it doesn’t just happen in a random way. It is not just simply removing the restraints. He is doing it in specific stages to bring about certain consequences. Part of His design is so that some people as they hit the negative consequences will sort of wake up and begin to think that maybe they ought to rethink their position. As some people come under divine discipline they respond by saying, Okay I need to correct something and get right with God, whereas other people just continue to harden their volition against God.
In verse 24 the NKJV has a different order of words from what we have in the Greek text. The NASB follows the Greek order, but it is thought that the NJKV has an order that is better in terms of English: He “gives them up to uncleanness.” Uncleanness is expressed in the text with a phrase that indicates the ultimate goal. That is what God is giving them over to—uncleanness—and it is expressed as the result of the lusts of their hearts. The word that is translated “uncleanness” is the Greek word akatharsia [a)kaqarsia]. katharsia is the word for “clean”; the “a” in front of it is a negative: “unclean.” What is interesting is that when this word is used in the New Testament it tends to be slanted towards more of being used in the context of sexual immorality. But that, it is believed, is read more into the text by our modern theologians than what the Scripture says, because if we go back into the Old Testament this word in the LXX was used to translate anything that resulted in ritual impurity or spiritual impurity. Anything that separated a person from God is akatharsia; it makes one unclean. Basically it makes one out of fellowship. Sexual perversion isn’t the only result of rejection of God, so it is a mistake to limit this to a nuance related to perversion, it is related to all areas of sin that separate human beings from God. So God gives them over to un cleanness which is in the lusts of their hearts. Uncleanness is the result of their lusts.
The drive shaft of the sin nature is the lust pattern. This is what is at the very core of our sin nature; this is what motivates us—our various lust patterns. In one direct we have our area of human good which is just as much a product of the sin nature as what we define as personal sins but it is done in the context of not being in relationship to God. For example, there are many kinds of people who are unbelievers. They don’t believe in God at all, they are not regenerate; they only can operate on the basis of their sin nature. They can do many wonderful things. There are many wonderful people out there who are not Christians and they have great morality. They do a measure of good, but it is not a good that measures up to God. Jesus, when speaking to His disciples said, You being evil know how to give good gifts to your children. Being evil or what theologians call total depravity doesn’t mean you are as bad as you can be, it means that every area of our being has been corrupted by sin so we can’t do anything that measures up to the absolute perfect righteousness of God. This is clearly taught in the Old Testament when Isaiah said that all of our works of righteousness are as filthy rags, and that even the best we do falls far short of God’s absolute standards. So the filthy rags righteousness is human good. At the other end we have personal sins.
When we look at the trends of the sin nature we can go in two opposite directions. One trend goes in the direction of morality—asceticism, legalism, and epistemologically there is rationalism This is the idea that in asceticism and legalism somehow we can impress God with how good we are. But this can degenerate into moral degeneracy. Nothing can be as bad as a self-righteous person who is going around trying to make everyone else conform to his self-righteousness. That is just a tyranny of arrogance. On the other side are the people who reject standards. This crowd is a lot more fun! The other crowd are the hardest to witness to because they think they’re good enough: they don’t need to be saved; they don’t need salvation. But in the other direction where the trend is toward licensciousness, which means everything is okay, which produces antinomianism, anarchy, irrationalism where there is no logic, no boundaries, which leads to mysticism and to immoral degeneracy.
The lust patterns drive things, and what Paul is saying here is that God gave them over to uncleanness by the lusts of their hearts. The lust pattern is the core mover and what it produces is the sins that separate them from God that become the uncleanness. So God gives them over to that. That doesn’t mean that God causes them to do those things but it is that God gives them the freedom to pursue the rejection of Him that they want to and to see the consequences of that in their lives. “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” We see that it is not just a mental thing but it has an outworking in the physical life of the individual.
NASB “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie…” It is an aorist tense there which indicates that the starting point for this was the rejection of God and idolatry. This word “exchange” accepts the fact that there is an absolute truth, it has an article with it. They are exchanging the truth, the absolute truth that comes from God for the lie. That is the only option; they are either believing the truth of God or believing the lie. The result is that they “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” In the process of doing this what are they doing? They are getting involved in idolatry—either overt idolatry or abstract idolatry. The first two commandments of the Ten Commandments relate to the exclusive worship of God and the rejection of idolatry. There is a reason that is at the beginning. In , the first commandment, God said, “You shall have no other gods before me.” In verse 4, the second commandment, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image.” The reason these are first is because they become the foundation for all law. If you don’t have a law grounded in an ultimate reference point, an ultimate absolute, then there is no basis for law and law either becomes the whim of the kings or the majority of opinion of people, either of which can change in another five or ten years. That is one of the things we are seeing in our culture because we have lost this idea of law being grounded in God. This isn’t an issue of freedom of religion, it is the issue of what is the ultimate source of law. The ultimate source of law is God.

Romans 020b-Consequences on Gender Relations.

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 020b-Consequences on Gender Relations.
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What we have been seeing in Romans chapter one is pretty much a pathology of human viewpoint culture. Human viewpoint culture is defined as a culture that rejects the revelation of God, whether we are talking about general revelation or special revelation, and substituted some other metaphysical system. (Meta is a Greek word that means beyond; physical means the physical world. So metaphysics has to do in philosophy with understanding that which eye cannot see and ear cannot hear; it the study of that which goes beyond the empirical and the physical. It usually relates to whether or not there is some kind of supreme being, deity, or something other than what we can see on the basis of science, etc.) So what Paul teaches is: a) that everybody knows God exists; b) that everybody rejects that and suppresses that truth in unrighteousness; c) they exchange that for another idea. That means that everybody is religious; everybody is worshipping something as God, even if it is their own ability and they are worshipping themselves through their own arrogance. Self-deification is putting ourselves over God; it is putting the individual in the center as the ultimate determiner of truth.
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We have seen that there are certain patterns that occur in terms of the sin nature. This sin nature is driven by a lust pattern which is emphasized a number of different times in these verses, starting in verse 23: that as the human being as a culture rejects God and replaces Him with some other deity, no matter what that deity may be, what God does is begin to give them over. We have seen that that is not just a passive idea that God is just letting people reap the consequences of their decisions, but He is going to orchestrate how those negative consequences develop. He is going to give them over to lust patterns so that their lusts become more and more uncontrollable. This degenerates within a culture and there are three stages in this passage of God giving them up: vv. 24, 26, 28. So there are these successive stages of degeneracy, perversion and rank immorality.
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When we look at the text here all of the verbs from verse 24 down through the end of the chapter are all aorist tense verbs. There is some debate as to the sense or nuance of those aorist tense verbs: Is this a historical aorist or is this a gnomic aorist? There is nothing objective in the text to distinguish between those two. If it is a historic aorist then what Paul is talking about is a pattern of degeneracy that was evidenced historically. It could be seen between Adam and Noah and it could be seen again between Noah and the tower of Babel, and eventually to Sodom and Gomorrah. Or is he talking gnomically, which means these are general or universal principles that are characteristic of all people at all times. We think that in the structure of the argument here, which is where we have to go, Paul is talking in this chapter about the underlying problem that the human race faces. Then he is going to critique them in terms of two different categories of persons, starting in chapter two. Chapter two addresses the moral person who thinks that in his relative righteousness he can garner approval of God. Then starting in the middle to late part of chapter two he is going to switch over to the religious person who thinks that somehow in his religion (following the Law of Moses) he can garner the approval of God. So since the structure of his thought here suggests that he is not thinking in terms of a gnomic or universal principle but is talking about the historic manifestations of the rejection of God, negative volition and idolatry historically.
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NASB “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” The clause “their bodies would be dishonored among them” certainly indicates perhaps that he is talking about sexual sin, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is all that is in view here. Lust is not restricted to just sexual lust, it is just this desire to find meaning and purpose and value in life through something in the creation. You can even have a lust to sleep, though there are times when a lust for sleep isn’t necessarily sinful. This is all manner of different lusts, and uncleanness also is not a word that is sometimes related to sexual sin but that is not true here, we haven’t had that brought into the context yet. What is focused on here is the idea of sin, and uncleanness is a word that is used for any kind of sin that separates man from God. Any sin can render a person separated from God. The word “uncleanness” was used numerous times in the Mosaic Law in terms of ritual uncleanness. God was teaching how pervasive sin was and that there are many, many things that we don’t even think of as sin that is indeed sin. So God gives them up to uncleanness, He begins to take the restraint or ‘take the governor off the motor’ and allow the person to ratchet up their rpm’s a little bit so they become a little more sinful.
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He does this to those who have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” And here in Paul’s thinking he clearly accepts the fact that there is one truth. It is God’s Truth with a capital T. God defines truth because God as the creator is the one who defines reality. When we exchange truth for a lie what we are doing is trying to create our own reality and we are going to try to live our life on the basis of that fantasy. “… and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” And it doesn’t matter who you are discussing they are serving and worshipping some aspect of creation; they are inherently religious; they are worshipping that instead of God.
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Then we come to the second stage. NASB “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, [27] and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.”
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God gave them up to “vile” [NKJV] passions. The fact that an adjective of this type is added to “passions,” which is simply a word for lusts, relates to the category of lusts that motivate from the core of the sin nature. The description is intensified here by the use of this adjective atimia [a)timia] which basically means that which is dishonorable. It describes a state of shame, dishonor or disgrace. It is used here with pathos [paqoj], “passions,” indicating dishonorable, disgraceful, or shameful lusts. God gives them over to this. Then we are told how this is manifest. It is manifest in the next phrase “for,” indicating an explanation: “…their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.” It is interesting that Paul deals with this in terms of women first. It is put this way because women are responders. What we see here is that this becomes manifest because the men have failed to be men. They have either abused their authority or they have rejected or abdicated their authority, in which case the women have nothing left to respond to and so they turn from their men to women. The word translated “exchange” is the word metallasso [metallassw] which indicates to exchange one thing for another. It is similar to another Greek word katalasso [katallassw] which is the word for reconciliation. So by adding the prefix meta it changes the meaning to the idea of exchange. This is the same word that is used in verse 25, “exchanged the truth of God for the lie.” So what they are doing is redefining reality.
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In the early years of the Soviet Union they tried to experiment with role reversals among men and women having the idea that men and women are just interchangeable parts. They did completely away with traditional male and female roles within Russian society. It led to a collapse in the family and in the work place because men need to be men and women need to be women. They had to go back to the more traditional roles. When women reached certain levels of responsibility and authority within the Russian culture the men just quit. Women have a unique area of creativity, and that is in the womb. Men are designed by God to have a unique area of creativity as well, and that is in the realm of work and labor. And when women become involved in those areas of creativity the men need to have a very unique involvement and unique leadership. This is one of the reasons God distinguishes roles for men and women in the Scripture.
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So we see that the women exchanged the natural function for what is contrary to nature. Here we have the Greek word phusikos [fusikoj], natural in the sense of God’s normative design. The word is used a number of different ways by Paul but here it has the idea of that which was the intent of God. God intended by the creation of a man and a woman to have heterosexual relationships and not homosexual or same-sex relationships.
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There are some in the modern arguments and discussions about homosexuality, nature versus nurture, and what does the Bible actually say, who try to claim that this verse isn’t talking about homosexuality, it is talking about things that are wrong within a heterosexual relationship. That is proved to be a wrong interpretation by the beginning of the next verse which begins with the Greek word homoios [o(moiwj] which means “likewise” or “in the same manner” or “similarly”—“ the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another.” So of verse 27 and verse 27 are analogous then verse 26 has to be talking about same-sex relationships between women. NASB “and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function [phusikos ] of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” The word translated “burned” is a word that indicates being inflamed. The word that is used for “men” here is an antiquated Greek word, arsen [a)rshn]. There is also an antiquated word for “women” in the passage, but these are the words used for male and female in the LXX in Genesis chapter one. So Paul uses those particular words—not the words normally used for male and female in the New Testament—because he is talking about what happened from the beginning after the fall in Genesis chapter three. “…receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error” indicates that there is a physical consequence. It doesn’t define what that is but there will be physical consequences that will come as a result of same-sex activity.
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What we see here at the very least in this passage is that when men and women succumb to idolatry and they begin on a downward trajectory in terms of their rejection of God and their arrogance, God takes them over. He takes the restraint off of the sin nature. The way that He does that is primarily within the realm of male and female relationships. This is a really important observation here. It is that when a culture or a society really begins to go out of control it manifests itself by divine design within male and female relationships. Let’s just pause and think about what has happened within the history of western civilization going back to the early part of the nineteenth century. We started to see in the 1830s and 1840s the rise of the feminist movement. We will never hear people talking about its relationship to bad theology but it had a bad theological foundation. It came out of the Unitarian transcendental utopic views that dominated both Finneyism that dominated evangelicalism, which was a quasi-liberal sort of approach to man and mankind which minimized sin, and it was wedded to transcendentalism and bringing in a utopic society. And what happened on the side of liberalism was that they believed that man was basically good. Finney was often touted as a great evangelist in this period but he didn’t believe in total depravity. He believed that every human being is born without sin just as Adam was created without sin; he didn’t believe in a substitutionary atonement of Christ; and it is doubted that he ever understood the gospel. He may have at one point but then he distorted it in his writings and his theology. He believed that man was perfectible, and if man is perfectible then society and culture is perfectible. And he was post-millennial—the church in terms of Christendom would bring in the millennial kingdom. So there was an affinity within the non-Christian version of the transcendentalists and the Christian version of the Finneyites.
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They identified four or five basic societal sins. The idea was if we can just clean up these sins then we will have the perfect society, the perfect country. The first sin, of course, was slavery, the second was women’s suffrage, the third was temperance and prohibition, the fourth had to do with labor, the fifth was child labor. If we think about the history of the United States and social action from the 1830s on the first thing to go was slavery, then there was dealing with temperance and women’s suffrage, later the rise of labor unions which then became influenced by communism and socialism, the social gospel, liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So that theological matrix that came out of the 1830s really set the social action agenda for the next 150 years. We have been suffering consequences from that ever since. One of their big things had to do with the role of women in society because according to the US Constitution originally women were not given the right to vote. There was a reason for that. It was because in the vision of the founding fathers the country was made up not of individuals, which is how we think of the US today; it was made up of family units and the head of the family was the man. The man voted because he represented a family entity. They understood that it was the family that was the core cohesive element within a nation, and that if you break down the family, if you break down marriage, you break down the culture. They came from that perspective. Once you have a nation shift away from a biblical God, which begins in the early 19th century, then you begin to see a deterioration historically that affects the role of men and women, and how men view men and women view women.
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God designed human beings to operate together as a unit, as a team, in marriage and then a family. It is a team concept. The emphasis in is that God created man in the image and likeness of God; male and female He created them. So men and women are equally in the image and likeness of God and together they were to exercise rulership: a dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky and the animals of the field. It was a team operation, so in the pre-fall condition the standard for God is a couple who together complement one another in the outworking of God’s plan of man ruling over creation. The primary purpose here is that they could serve God better, so there was a role distinction here. The man is the leader and the woman is the assistant. There are a lot of women who don’t like that idea but that is because they have been influenced probably by the human viewpoint thinking of our culture that somehow being an assistant is bad. The Hebrew word that is used there is ezer, which means a helper or assistant, one who comes along and enables the first person to get the job done. The only other entity in the Bible who is described as an ezer is God. Think about this theologically. If we say it is somehow demeaning to be a helper we have just committed blasphemy against God. We have just said it is a demeaning thing to be like God and to be a helper. The fact that only women and God are called ezers puts women in a pretty high position. Unfortunately that hasn’t always been recognized or had much of an impact on how men treat women.
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When sin came along that really muddied things up. As a result of sin God said that there was an impact on these roles. starts with the judgment upon the serpent; verse 15 deals with the enmity between the serpent and the seed of the woman. Then verse 16 starts dealing with the woman. These are consequences, not the penalty for sin. The penalty for sin was spiritual death, so the man and the woman are standing there before God and have already experienced the penalty. How do we know that? As soon as God showed up they ran and hid and then tried to cover themselves up with fig leaves. They are already spiritually dead. That is the penalty for sin; this is the consequence of the penalty for sin. NASB “To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.’” The idea is: You were going to have babies before but now it is going to be painful. The point is in the last clause: “your desire will be for your husband.” There are a lot of people through the ages who have said that is an emotional or sexual desire. This isn’t talking about either; it is talking about power lust. What it is telling the guys is that your wife wants to wear the pants in the family. Through grace, doctrine and spiritual growth that may not be an issue but what this is saying is that the trend of the woman is that she wants to be the power player and the authority in the marriage. That relates to her original job to be the helper. In sin she is going to want to be the driver. “And he will rule over you”—the Hebrew word here, mashal, indicates a trend toward a domineering, tyrannical sort of rule. So in those two lines we have the war of the sexes; it goes right back to the fall. The ladies want to wear the pants in the family and the man wants to exercise his authority in an unreasonable, tyrannical fashion; and therein lies a lot of history.
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We know that that word for “desire” has that connotation because in the next chapter God warns Cain who is jealous about Abel. God said, “sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you.” It pictures this ravenous wolf who wants to consume you. So this isn’t a nice, sweet, passionate desire, it is something evil and voracious. The only thing that can reverse that is the Word of God and grace. This works itself out negatively in a lot of ways. The principle that we are seeing here is that a culture that rejects God is going to be given over to certain consequences by God in terms of judgment and discipline upon that nation, upon that culture, upon that people, and it is going to play itself out in role relations between men and women.
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Romans chapter one describes how in an idolatrous culture one of the first areas where the judgment of God is felt is in male and female roles, how they get reversed and how they get screwed up; and we see it from Genesis chapter three all the way through the Bible. The only way to reverse this is by understanding the Word of God and humbling ourselves under the Word of God, to obey the Word of God and to follow it. It doesn’t mean what a lot of things that people think it means, that women just become doormats and everything else; that is just another distortion of the text and a false viewpoint. What it means is that women were designed to do some things and men are designed to do some things, and what one is designed to do isn’t demeaning to the other. When the world comes along operating on a human viewpoint system of Darwinism then individuals become totally interchangeable and it really doesn’t matter, and it just wipes out all of the moral standards, family and marriage, and the end result is cultural collapse. Then you have the anarchy like the period at the end of Judges.

Romans 021b-Gender Role Degeneracy.

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 021b-Gender Role Degeneracy.
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It is interesting that the second stage that we go to in societal and individual corruption and degradation has to do with the complete breakdown of gender roles and sexual identity. This is something that we have witnessed in the contemporary history of the United States since World War II. It is not that there have not always been those who have had homosexual inclinations. That could be a trend in the sin nature and it is a sin just like any other sin except that it has damaging consequences in relation to the second and third divine institutions, marriage and family. What we see here in Romans chapter one is the assault that occurs on the divine institutions. What happens initially with the rejection of God and negative volition is the perversion of these first divine institutions—individual responsibility, marriage and family.
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The divine institutions. Definition: The term “divine institution” has been used by Christians to speak of absolute social structures that were embedded by God into the human race. An institution in this sense is something that is absolute; it is a transcendental reality that applies equally to all human beings who were descendants from Adam, because Adam is the designated head of the race. He is created first, the mandates are given to Adam first, and then God takes the woman from his side showing that she has her origin from the male; she is not created separately. So there is an organic unity in the human race. The divine institutions, therefore, are these social structures that are embedded in creation for the entire human race, believers and unbelievers alike. Marriage was instituted to be a framework within which children would be reared, and they were to be reared and taught by the parents so that values could be passed on generationally.
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All of this has its ultimate roots in understanding the first divine institution, which is called individual responsibility. When ever we are responsible for something we are responsible to someone. When God gave mandates to Adam in the garden, to whom was Adam responsible? He was responsible to God. Ultimately every individual is responsible to God for the revelation that they have been given. This is what Paul is talking about in , . Every human being is responsible to God for how they respond to the knowledge of God that is evident in creation and that God has made evident within them. That is the first divine institution. It is built on the fact that man was created in the image of God, to reflect God to creation. , NASB “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” The idea of dominion is the idea of rule, that man has authority over all creation. Man is distinct from the rest of creation because he is created in the image of God. He is to rule, and that means he has the authority to determine how resources are utilized and allocated. In sin he is going to mess that up, but the position of authority has not been removed from man. It will not be fulfilled in its perfection until the Son of Man returns, the Lord Jesus Christ, in order to rule and reign over the kingdom.
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“… male and female He created them.” There is a unity and equality of being between men and women, male and female; one is not inherently superior to the other in terms of their possession of the image of God. They have different roles, different abilities and capabilities, and too often what happens because of sin is somebody who is a team player covets the other person’s position. As Paul describes in the first divine institution is utilized irresponsibly, God is rejected, and so this has negative and damning consequences upon the woman especially.
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NASB “Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” Job responsibility. That is part of individual responsibility and the foundation for understanding labor and productivity. So there is work in the sense of responsibility, but not in the sense of toil. This isn’t toil, it is responsible labor. Toil comes only after they have sinned. [16] “The LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; [17] but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.’” So there are commands, responsibility and negative consequences for disobedience. [18] “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’” The word that is used there for “man” is “male,” it is not a word that could be translated “mankind.”
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NASB “Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought {them} to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.” These are more domestic animals, not the broader array of species that populate the planet. When Adam begins to name them God isn’t saying to go out and name 15,000 families, He is saying start here with the domestic animals that are in the garden. Adam begins to recognize that for every male there is a female. God is teaching him to recognize that he is missing something. In vv. 21, 22 God forms the woman, so there is organic unity between the male and the female.
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In verse 24 there is an editorial application. Remember that Moses is writing this to the Israelites on the plains of Moab, and after he gets through describing certain events he then makes a point of application to them in 1440 BC. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” Again it is the male there, not the female. The male leaves father and mother and is joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. It is an application from the doctrine that has just been developed from the historical creation order. The point is, Moses teaches the order of creation: male, then female. Then Moses says here is one application. Men leave their family to join with their wife to start a new family. So we move from marriage to family and they are then going to be given the mandate to multiply and fill the earth.
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In , in terms of the consequences of sin, God addresses the woman. NASB “To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.’” It is not that there would not have been physical pain—physical pain is just a function of sense; if you don’t have pain you can’t feel things—there is a certain negativeness to pain that might have been normal in the garden as sort of a warning. Adam would still have burned his flesh if he had put it in a fire, so there would have been a need for pain as a warning that you were doing something wrong but not the kind of pain that comes in a post-fall world. So the woman would have had a measure of discomfort in giving birth but now, having had the command to multiply and fill the earth, that command is going to be tarnished, hindered, become difficult, because now there is going to be labor involved in the process of childbirth. Then there is the final statement, “Yet your desire will be for your husband.” The word “desire” has a very negative connotation, a desire for control, not a passionate or lustful desire. And, “And he will rule over you.” So he is going to want control also. This is the beginning of the war of the sexes and it can only be resolved by following the precepts of Ephesians chapter five.
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We have the first problem here with divine institution # 1 in terms of not being responsible towards God and rejecting His existence at God consciousness. The second result that we see from this impacts marriage. Marriage is defined biblically as between one man and one woman. It came under assault almost instantly by Satan in the guise of a serpent when he began to divine and conquer, to separate the woman from the man and to get her away from the man so that he could entice her into disobedience and then use her to tempt the man into disobedience. He did it knowing that it was the male’s decision that was the critical factor. It didn’t affect anybody but Eve when she disobeyed, but Adam’s decision caused the fall of the human race. There were consequences to Adam’s decision. NASB “Then to Adam He said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you will eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.’”
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Having set that up we see that there is an assault on marriage, on male and female roles within marriage, and immediately marriage comes under attack, and by the end of chapter four there is the introduction of polygamy. God may have permitted polygamy in the Old Testament but He never validated it. Polygamy is always presented in a negative light in the Old Testament and it was not God’s original intention.
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The other problem is the development of homosexuality, and that is one of many sins against marriage and it attacks the stability of marriage and the possibility of propagation of the species. If there is a culture that gets to a certain level of homosexuality then that culture is just going to die off. Those human beings are not going to propagate.
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One of the problems conservative Christianity has had for centuries is that more women are interested in spiritual things than men, and because of that some men get the idea that church is for women. When we get into this issue of gender distinction and role distinction an important chapter is 1 Timothy chapter two. At the beginning it is addressing behavior within a church, a local congregation. The first issue is prayer. NASB “First of all, then, I urge that entreaties {and} prayers, petitions {and} thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, [2] for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.” We just want to be left alone so that we can witness to people and grow spiritually. That means that sometimes pastors in this country from the time of the war for independence at different times have recognized that if pastors don’t lead their congregation to wake up politically, then in the next five or ten years it won’t matter because we will lose the freedoms we have. So there are times when it is necessary to set aside the normal operating procedures of a pastor to wake people up to the fact that you have to get involved politically or your freedoms will be gone within another decade. We can pray all day long in terms of the government but if we don’t let our representatives know what the issues are what happens is we lose our freedoms because we have done what we should do as a responsible member and citizen of the country. It doesn’t have anything to do with being a Christian, it has to do with being a responsible citizen under the law of the Constitution.
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When Paul says, “thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men,” he uses the word anthropos [a)nqrwpoj]. It can mean male and it can just be more generic for all humanity, which is mankind because all of the human race came from Adam, a man. NASB “who desires all men [mankind/humanity] to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. [5] For there is one God, {and} one mediator also between God and men [anthropos], {the} man [anthropos], Christ Jesus.”
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Then in verse 8 Paul starts talking about the roles of males and females. NASB “Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and dissension.” The word for “holy” is hosios [o(sioj] which has to do with “holy, devout, pious,” the fact that you are in fellowship. But the word for men is aner [a)nhr]—not mankind but males. It is a real indictment of any local church whenever there is a prayer meeting and there are more women than men. The command is to the men to pray everywhere. That doesn’t mean the women are left out, but that is what it means to be a biblical man.
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Then the women are addressed. The word “women” is the Greek gune [gunh], which is the female. The men are to pray; the women are to dress in a non-distracting manner. NASB “Likewise, {I want} women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, [10] but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.”
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Then Paul gives a command. NASB “A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness.” And immediately all the feminists tighten up; there’s Paul being a misogynist again! No, he understands there is a role distinction between males and females. [12] “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” The women are to learn in silence. The word there is a present active imperative, indicating this is to be a standard operating procedure. Paul said the same thing in 1 Corinthians chapter fourteen. And the context is the local church, not teaching in an elementary school, etc. It is talking about teaching the Word of God within a congregation.
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“For it was Adam who was first created, {and} then Eve. [14] And {it was} not Adam {who} was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression.” So there was an authority structure before the fall and there are consequences to Eve’s deception. [15] “But {women} will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.” The word “preserved” is translated “saved” in some versions. This doesn’t refer to justification salvation, it is deliverance. What was the original mandate back there in Genesis? Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. So what this is talking about is that generally speaking the role of the woman is to play that role in the propagation of the species by having the children. But it is not just to have babies, which is how some people read that. We have to pay attention to the “if” clause; that is what is important. The issue is whether they continue in faith, love, holiness and self-control. That is repeated again and again throughout the Scripture. But in terms of role the male is the spiritual leader in the home and it is the woman who is the one who has the children. What happened after the fall and with negative volition is that the culture gets all screwed up. They failed to understand what leadership is because no one understood the creator-creature distinction. They failed to understand role relationships within marriage, they failed to understand gender and role distinctions within a culture, and they failed to understand gender and role distinctions in sexuality. The result was, the further they got away from God the more the culture would implode over those very issues. We are witnessing that today.

Romans 022b-Homosexuality; Is there a Gay Gene? Perversion. Romans 1:26-32

Romans 1:28 NASB95
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
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Romans 022b-Homosexuality; Is there a Gay Gene? Perversion.
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We have seen in looking at these first two stages of divine discipline that we have seen, that God allows more of the function of His permissive will than necessarily an active judgment as He sort of lets people have enough rope to hang themselves. He gives people the freedom to reject Him and then gives them even more opportunity to follow their negative volition in their rejection of Him, and it continues to culminate in increasing stages of degradation and perversion. One the major themes that go throughout each of the three stages—marked by “God gave them up”—is the indication that there is some level of sexual degradation and perversion. It is most clearly seen in the second stage in verses 26 and 27 where it is clear that the rise of homosexuality is a consequence of the rejection of God and is part of God’s divine discipline on a civilization. Part of that really fits within a web of different sins that are all related to sexual identity and gender confusion.
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Another thing to be brought out is this word “nature.” In the Greek there are two different forms of it: phusis [fusij], which is a noun, and also phusikos [fusikoj], an adjective. In verse 26 there is the natural use which is against nature. NASB “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.” What this phusis word group does not mean is nature in the sense of creation, what is going on in the natural world. We have taken this concept of Mother Nature, with a capital N, and have personified it. What the word indicates is a sense of what God originally designed and intended. There are various indications from other Jewish writers at the time the New Testament was written that this was the normative understanding within second temple Judaism, and that would reflect a tradition in Judaism going back all the way to Moses. Both Josephus and Philo use the word “nature” as basically a synonym for God’s original created intention. So when we read a verse that says “the natural use” we could do a simple word substitution that women exchanged God’s intended created design for what is against God’s intended creative design. Likewise, also the men leaving God’s intended created design for the woman. NASB “and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.”
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This particular passage is one of three or four passages in Scripture that are at the very center of the debate over homosexuality, sometimes framed, is it nature or nurture? And it has bled over into “Christian” circles. There are those who try to use the Scripture to argue for a pro-homosexual position. They assume what they have heard out in the market place of America that it is not “nurture” (a choice), it is really nature. They believe the view that there is a gay gene or even a genetic predisposition toward homosexual behavior. So assuming a conclusion derived empirically from various studies that homosexuality was determined by genetics and there really wasn’t anything that could be done about it. And there are evangelical scholars on the loose or left side of the spectrum within evangelicalism who believe that Paul is not condemning all forms of homosexuality here, or in or some of the other passages, but that he is just talking about homosexual acts that are contrary to the nature of the individual—not contrary to nature as a universal absolute, it contrary to that person’s nature. So even though they are homosexual they are involved in some sort of homosexual activity that really goes beyond even their nature, and that is when it becomes wrong. It’s funny how people play all kinds of games to justify sin!
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As we look at this passage we see that the sins related to homosexuality are not singled out or identified in terms of some special class or super class of sins. In fact the specific revelation related to homosexuality in only in the second stage of God’s giving people over to their vile passions. The third stage includes just about any other kind of sin that we could possibly think of.
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Observations
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As part of the religious degeneration that takes place from the rejection of God one is social and sexual degeneration. Social and sexual degeneration comes as a result of rejecting God’s authority in what we have identified as the divine institutions. As a result of that what happens is these social institutions that God establishes begin to become perverted and are really attacked by sexual degeneracy.
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As Biblical truth impacts a culture it transforms that society with Biblical norms and standards and establishment truth. The result is stability and order, peace and economic prosperity.
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As Biblical truth is rejected and diluted Biblical norms become dehumanized by a pagan culture. We are seeing more and more of that in our culture today. As a culture turns away from Biblical values and absolutes those who hold them become more and more at odds with the culture until we get to the point where they are identified as the problem and they become demonized.
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The four divine institutions:
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1) Individual responsibility: every individual is responsible to God.
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2) Marriage: the authority of marriage is the husband. Homosexuality, sexual perversion, adultery, fornication all attack marriage.
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3) Family: the authority of the family is the parent. Homosexuality attacks the family.
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4) The government. Once these kinds of things are being legitimized it has a series of consequences within government because government now has to start changing all kinds of rules and laws and regulations. These laws have been built around centuries of realization that marriage is between a man and a woman, not between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, and that these laws provide stability for inheritance, property ownership, and many other things within a nation.
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As society utilizes and applies establishment principles it stabilizes and strengthens a nation. It provides mental discipline; it supports strength of character and developing virtue within a nation. But when these things are removed or change them it has the unintended consequence of assaulting character and integrity and virtue within the nation and it promotes self-centeredness. When the divine institutions are promoted it promotes a mentality that is against self-centeredness.
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When society rejects these norms the result is the fragmentation, destabilization and loss of prosperity.
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Sodom in the Old Testament is a picture of a society at the end of that cycle, and God brings judgment on them. We see this also in the book of Judges.
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Divine viewpoint teaches that gender confusion and homosexuality are a direct assault on a nation, but they are a part of God’s judgment on a nation that has already rejected Him.
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Is there such a thing as a gay gene?
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1. The human genome project completed its task in mapping out the human gene in 2003. They never identified a gay gene. The silence is loud; they never discovered a gay gene.
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2. In the early 90s there was a study that came out that there might be a gay gene. There was a suggestion of it. However the way they reported it in the news was that they had identified a gay gene. In Science Magazine and article entitled Male Sexual Orientation and Genetic Evidence offered by Neil Risch, Elizabeth Squires-Wheeler, B.J. Keats it was concluded that there is little disagreement that male homosexual orientation is not genetic.
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A basic argument on pro-gay web sites is to say that homosexuality is genetic is one of the most homophobic things you can say. Basically what they are saying is we are just trapped in this horrible lifestyle of being homosexual but we can’t help it because it is genetic. So what they are saying is we are trapped here, we can’t do anything about it so we are just going to stick with it because that is the way fate has determined it; that is the way our genetic structure is. Then they said they ought to be proud of the fact that they had chosen a homosexual lifestyle. So they are out there promoting choice! They have a number of citations from booklets and pamphlets supporting the fact that homosexuality was a choice. And that is what Scripture affirms, that this is a choice. It is a volitional decision like any other sin. There may be various environmental factors, developmental factors and genetic predispositions in the sin nature or whatever but that doesn’t mean that they have to act on those predispositions, temptations, or whatever they might be; it is a matter of making a decision. Homosexuality and this whole thing with gay marriage is all fueled by a false assumption and propaganda that it is the result of a gay gene and so we ought not do anything to take away from their civil rights. We are witnessing the application of this second stage of divine discipline before our very eyes.
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The third stage comes up in verse 28. NASB “And just as they [those who have rejected God] did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper.” The ultimate cause of this is their negative volition. As it is translated here, “they did not see fit to acknowledge,” based on the Greek verb dokimazo [dokimazw]—a form of this verb shows up three times in these last few verses—which has the idea of to test something, to accept something as true or approved. So a better translation of this would be “just as they did not approve having God in their knowledge.” They have rejected God and so they don’t approve of having God in their knowledge. What better term to express the views of so many liberals in the United States who are saying we just don’t approve of having God in the classroom, we don’t approve of having God in the pledge of allegiance, we don’t approve of having God in the public square. They have rejected God and so now they disapprove of God.
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The result is that God gives them over, He takes His hands off His restraining power on sin a little more and gives them over to debased/depraved mind. The word for depraved is the noun adokimos [a)dokimoj]. The verb for not approving God is dokimazo. It is the same root idea, having to do with approval. Each form has a little different sense to it and here in adokimos the a at the beginning is a negative, so it is talking about something that rather than being qualified or approved is unqualified, not approved, unfit or reprehensible. It is translated in the sense of a depraved mind, a debased mind, a perverted mind. So God is giving them over to a perverted or debased mind, He is just letting their sin nature follow its own course with the result that they do things that are not fitting or not approved—the verb katheko [kaqhkw], not fitting, not approved and it is detestable or abominable. Now that becomes defined through a list of twenty-two sins that come up in the following verses.
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NASB “being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; {they are} gossips.” Why is unrighteousness the first word? Because the subject matter, the key issue in Romans, is the righteousness of God. They are filled with all unrighteousness in contrast to the righteous God they have rejected. The Greek word for being filled is pleroo [plhrow], a perfect passive participle and it has to do with completed action, completed results, and it often has the idea of a descriptive use—this is what described these people, these are the words that characterized this third stage.
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Several of these are just what we would identify as general descriptions of sin—righteousness, wickedness, hostility, inventors of evil, senseless, undiscerning. Then there are the mental attitude sins—covetousness, malice, envy, deceit, hostility, violent arrogance (also translated “insolence”—acting out on that arrogance)—without natural affection, i.e. heartless or unloving, the Greek noun astorgos [a)storgoj]. storge is a Greek word for love, not used anywhere in the New Testament. astorgos is the opposite of that, it is unloving and uncaring and it is because they are given over to arrogance and self-centeredness. Then there are the sins of the tongue—slanderers, strife, gossip, proud in a boastful, conceited manner as opposed to the next verse which is just being boastful—and then two overt sins, murder and being disobedient to parents. , NASB “slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful.”
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NASB “and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” The word “practice” is prasso [prassw] is what they are committed to, an ongoing practice. The word for knowledge at the beginning of the verse is epignosis [e)pignwsij], so it is a full experiential knowledge of the righteousness of God. Take verse 32 at the end of chapter one and use it as the conclusion and bracket that with verse 20, which says, “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” It begins with the statement that they know God exists and it ends with the statement that they know God exists. Yet in between they are doing everything they can to suppress the knowledge of God by means of unrighteousness. The result is that God just gives them over to act out on their negative volition and to be as unrighteous as they can. He removes the restraints.
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They not only practice these things, they deserve death. But God in His grace doesn’t bring temporal judgment on them; He postpones that so that He can extend mercy and the offer of the gospel.
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These who deserve death not only practice these things themselves but they also approve of those who practice them. There is a battle going on, a war going on, and often we forget this. We are engaged, especially in the culture in which we are in now, in a major war against the forces of darkness and we are soldiers in that conflict as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is our responsibility to fight according to the principles of Scripture. We are tearing down every lofty thought that is raised against God; we are to fight according to the principles of , and we are engaged in representing God to a fallen world primarily through witnessing of the gospel and in our own lives. But in order to be well trained soldiers we have to know the Word because that is our field manual.

Romans 023b-God's Standard for Judgment.

Romans 2:1 NASB95
Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.
Romans 023b-God's Standard for Judgment.
Righteousness is a word that means something according to a standard. If you are going to let somebody come into your home they are going to meet the standards that you have set. God is the same way. If He is going to let somebody come into heaven He is the one who sets the standard. He wants them to measure up to His standard and He is not going to let them in just because they think that they have the right to be in there. God has a righteous character and He demands that anyone who comes into heaven meets His righteous standard and His righteous character. This is why Paul is writing this epistle to the Romans. It is to explain what God’s standard is and how it can be met, and how that standard of God’s character has been worked out and displayed within the framework of human history and individual lives. So he sets forth the principles that we see in those key verses in the middle of chapter one in vv. 17-20.
In verse 17 he lays down the theme verse for Romans: NASB “For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’” The word there for righteousness is dikaiosune [dikaiosunh]—the sune ending is an ending that indicates the quality of something. In the quote from we read “the righteous will live by his faith,” and the word for “righteous” there is the noun dikaios [dikaioj]. That word group can mean either righteousness or justice. Righteousness is the standard of something; justice is meeting the standard. NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The Greek word there for unrighteousness is the noun adikia [a)dikia]—the a prefix is negative. So there is this contrast with verse 17 with the righteousness of God and the righteous shall live by faith, and the wrath of God which is revealed against unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth by unrighteousness. God’s approval is toward the righteous but His disapproval is directed toward the unrighteous. The phrase that is used to express that is “the wrath of God,” and a lot of people want to see something emotive in that and it is just not really an emotive term. It is an anthropopathism that indicates the harshness or strength of God’s justice in a negative sense, the harshness of the penalty of violating His righteousness.
The other thing that we see with wrath if we look at how it is used in the Scripture, and especially in Romans, is that it has a primary focus on wrath that is the outpouring of God’s discipline or judgment on human beings in time, i.e. within history, not a future wrath such as the Tribulation period. In Romans it is talking about the present tense outpouring of God’s wrath—“is revealed,” it is ongoing in present time.
From verse 18 on Paul speaks about how God’s wrath or judgment is going to be applied to those who are unrighteous. We saw one category of the unrighteous in vv. 24-32, and that has to do with a form of unrighteousness of those who have rejected God and it degenerates into immoral degeneracy. When we come to 2:1 it begins with a “therefore.” It is not the normal Greek word that is found for therefore, oun [o)un], it is dio [dio] which is the same word as in 1:24. So there is sort of an introduction to this section dealing with the wrath of God being poured out on the unrighteousness of men, then there is one category expressed by the first dio in 1:24 and then a shift to another category of application of His justice starting in 2:1. So what we see it this breakdown of two different categories of degeneracy.
The sin nature is driven by the core motivation of the lust pattern, a variety of lusts, and we all have them to one degree or another. Everybody is different. There is everything from power lust, approbation lust, money lust, materialism lust, sexual lust; all kinds of different lust patterns, just desire on steroids to have certain things beyond anything that is legitimate. And the way one perceives getting those is going to be characterized by certain trends, and each of us has different trends. Trends can change over the years. If these trends are allowed to work themselves out over time then they are going to end up in one of two categories: moral degeneracy or immoral degeneracy. Most people think of degeneracy as something immoral, but someone who is self-righteously moral is so mired in his own arrogance and so degenerate in his arrogance that people often don’t recognize it, and that is the moral degenerate. Scripturally we look at the moral degenerate in terms of so many of the Pharisees; they are just loaded with all kinds of arrogance. No sense of grace, no sense of humility whatsoever; he is morally over the edge, morally degenerate.
What Paul has dealt with in Romans chapter one is the consequence of suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness in relation to the immoral degenerate; now in 2:1 and through chapter two he deals with the consequence of the moralist who emphasizes his own morality as being good enough to get into God’s heaven. Others call him self-righteous, but the problem with using that term is that it sounds as if he comes across that way, and they don’t necessarily come across that way. Others have a pseudo-humility and we don’t see the fact that they just feel like they are good enough to get into heaven. In chapter two Paul is talking about the moralist and the first eleven verses really focus on the moralist and it could be either a Gentile or a Jew. It doesn’t become clear that he is applying this to the Jewish self-righteous, like the Pharisee, until verse 12 where he begins to talk about the law. When he gets into the second part of this and begins to critique the Jewish moralist Paul refers to them as “the Jew,” just as the apostle John does in the Gospel of John. But these are not terms that are being used in an offensive or anti-Semitic way. Over the years people have come along and accused John of being anti-Semitic but he is referring to the leaders of the Jews, and he was Jewish himself, as was the apostle Paul. It is not a racial issue at all in an anti-Semitic way. Paul is very much pro-Jewish. He is anti-Pharisee, anti-Sadducee, anti the Jewish religious concept that by works you can gain approval with God. And that is not unique to Judaism. Every religion in the world other than biblical Christianity puts an emphasis on works. What Paul is going to point out in chapter two is that even those who avow a strong system of morality can’t measure up. No human being can measure up to the absolute perfect standards of God. Paul’s focus here is not one that is condemning Jews as Jews, he is condemning the approach of Pharisaic Judaism to righteousness through works. As he gets into this he is going to show that on the basis of divine revelation all are condemned, Jew and Gentile.
Paul’s second conclusion in relation to his argument that all are without excuse is NASB “Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.” The phrase “without excuse” is the same Greek word as is used in 1:20, and it is only used two times in the New Testament. The one Paul is going to define here is he who is judging others. He is still talking about the consequences of wrath. When does it come? Now; it is not talking about the future, it is talking about the present time just as in chapter one.
“… everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.” As he draws this conclusion at the beginning there are three things that we should note.
First of all he is drawing a conclusion which is not a conclusion from the list of sins and the stages of sins in 1:24-32 but it is a conclusion that comes from the rejection of God and rejection of the evidence of God’s existence which he described in vv. 18-20. So verse 24 gives one conclusion; 2:1 gives a second conclusion.
Second, with this “therefore,” Paul transitions from the first group of immoral degenerates who are without excuse to the second group of moral degenerates of the self-righteous who are also without excuse.
Both groups come under the judgment of God, the wrath of God, as is evident from the statements in chapter one and in 2:5-8.
What Paul says in this section is the human beings are going to react in one of three ways to the knowledge of the existence of God.
The first way is that they are going to reject it and then as God takes away the restraint of their sin nature they are going to spiral down into immoral degeneracy.
The second group is going to reject the existence of God and God is going to allow them to spiral down into moral degeneracy.
The third group reflects those who want to accept the existence of God on His terms rather than on their terms. This idea that all have sinned and come under the judgment of God, which is what Paul’s conclusion will be in , is not some New Testament Christian teaching. This goes back into the Old Testament, and one passage that makes it very clear in the Old Testament is NASB “All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him.” Isaiah is talking about the entire Jewish nation under the covenant to Moses. That is who he is referring to by “all”; it is all in the nation who are under that covenant. He compares them to sheep: All of us (literally) are like sheep. Sheep have absolutely no ability to take care of themselves. God created at least one creature that can’t function, live or survive without man, and is a perfect illustration of why evolution could never be true. Darwinian evolution is based on the assumption of the survival of the fittest, that the reason there are certain species is because they survived with the traits that they have because they were more fit to face the challenges of survival than others who had different mutations. It presumes something of fitness on the part of these species. Sheep have no fitness. The shepherd provides everything for the sheep and of the shepherd isn’t there the sheep can’t even find a drink of water. Sheep have no sense whatsoever and they are perfect illustrations of what human beings are in terms of their understanding of God. In the concept of Darwinian evolution nothing can survive unless it can do it on its own. Sheep can’t survive without man, so that shows that sheep cannot have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years before human beings because they never would have made it.
“Each of us has turned to his own way.” The Hebrew word translated way means a path or a road. It is the same word that is used in Proverbs when it says “There is a way”—there is a path or a road—“that seems right to man, but the end thereof is death.” We have all decided that every path leads to God—except one: Christianity, because they say theirs is the exclusive path.
In Romans chapter two Paul says: “Therefore you are without excuse.” He is talking to the self-righteous moralist, the person who thinks that somehow by religious works, by moral effort, ethics, his own integrity he can gain the approval of God. Then he says, “everyone of you who passes judgment.” It is better translated “all you who judge” or “anyone who judges.” The word “judge” is the participle form of krino [krinw], and krino has a wide range of meanings. It has the idea of separating, distinguishing, exercising discernment in decision making, considering, reflecting upon something, the idea of judging in the act of a legal judge sitting on the bench adjudicating a trial, the idea of deciding something. So what does Paul mean by judging here? It has to be here the idea of judging in the sense of being God, making negative judgments about whether or not a person is approved by God. It is exemplified in the Gospels by the Pharisee who comes into the temple and sees the beggar outside, looks down his nose and says, well thank God I’m not like him. That is judging, saying I am better than he is, I am superior to him in the eyes of God; pure arrogance. So the sense of judge here is in the sense of that arrogant condemnation of others where the person judging has no right, no knowledge, no basis to do that.
NASB “And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things.” NKJV “according to truth.” There is a standard, “according to the truth.” The article is there, it indicates a specific, absolute, universal transcendent truth. The judgment of God is according to truth. Why? Because God knows everything. God’s standard is perfectly righteous; that is His character. God is omniscient; He knows all the facts. There’s not one little fact that escapes His knowledge, so only He can make a perfect decision. And because He is absolute truth, and it is impossible for Him to lie, there is no shadow there, so God’s judgment is going to be according to a perfect standard. Only He can judge according to a perfect standard and His judgment is against those who practice such things—not the ones who are committing all of those sins in chapter one but the ones who aren’t committing any of those sins and think that they are superior to those who are because they are not doing those things. Their arrogance makes them just as guilty as the arrogance of those who are immoral. Paul uses the Greek word oida [o)ida]. ginosko [ginwskw] is another word in the Greek for knowledge; it has the idea of coming to learn something, going through the process of studying growth and learning, whereas oida has to do with seeing something intuitively. It is used in the Gospel of John to refer to the omniscience of God but it is also used of recognizing a self-evident conclusion.
NASB “But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same {yourself,} that you will escape the judgment of God?” We think that because we are not committing all of those horrible sins of those people we don’t like that somehow we are not going to get the same judgment they are. But Paul is saying no, even the moralist is just as guilty of sin an d falling short of the glory of God as licentious and the one who is involved in all of the moral degeneracy.
What Paul says in these three verses is just a reflection of what Jesus said in Matthew. In the sermon on the mount Jesus is addressing the problem that within first century Judaism the Pharisees, in order to keep the Jews from violating the Torah, had built a wall around it of various traditions and prohibitions so that as long as people didn’t break those they knew they wouldn’t break any of the 613 commandments in the Torah. Those traditions, though, came to have the same authority as the commandments in the Mosaic Law. So the Pharisees are putting this burden on the people that they have to not only watch out for the 613 commandments but they can’t violate the 1500 other regulations and traditions that they had built up around the observance of the Torah. Jesus addresses this in the first five verses of Matthew chapter seven.
NASB “Do not judge so that you will not be judged.” He is using the verb krino, but He is not saying don’t make evaluations, don’t make decisions. He is not saying it is wrong to have judges in a courtroom. He is talking about the fact that judgments were made by the Pharisees as to individual spiritual status based on their observance of that person’s external behavior. That is what is under condemnation by Jesus. He is saying nobody can put themselves in God’s place and look at somebody and determine whether they are in a right standing with God or not. Part of the reason is because we all sin at times and our standing before God is based on His grace and not based on our behavior. When He says, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged,” He is saying the basis of your self-righteous, vindictive criticism of somebody is the basis for your judgment as well. [2] “For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.”
The first sin is judging somebody, and that means condemning them on the basis of their behavior in terms of their spiritual status before God. This wasn’t being critical of somebody, it was far beyond that; this had to do with determining their spiritual standing before God. The second issue that comes along is that you are now going to be judged on the basis of the criticism that you made of the other person; that discipline is going to be given to you. So you are going to judge somebody and you are going to get disciplined for that, and then that discipline is going to be compounded again as it is brought back on you. Then Jesus begins to illustrate it. NASB “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
NASB “Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye?” Then the accusation: [5] “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
NASB “Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?” The answer there, again, is yes. They are despising the grace of God because they have decided that rather than accepting a free gift they want to earn it. The hardest thing for Christians to learn is grace orientation, because we live in a society that say we don’t get anything for nothing. What Paul says here is that when the grace of God is rejected and you put the emphasis on works you are in essence despising the fullness of God’s goodness, His patience, His longsuffering, that the goodness of God, all of these blessings, is to change your mind and to turn back to God, to accept the free offer of grace.
NASB “But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” The two words, “hardness” and “impenitent heart” are Greek words sklerotes [sklhrothj] and ametonometos [a)metanohtoj]. The first represents a hardness; you have strengthened your heart against God. The second is impenitent, it is not going to turn, it was not going to say I was wrong and God was right; there’s no sense of humility or turning to God. What this is doing is loading up your savings account with divine discipline. This is to an unbeliever. He is going to reap the consequences of what he has sown. The word translated “storing up” is the present active indicative of Greek word thesaurizo [qhsaurizw], from which we get our English word “thesaurus,” treasury of words. So you treasure or store something up. So the more the unbeliever rejects the grace of God and the more he refuses the turn, the more he stores up divine discipline. This isn’t talking about end-time discipline. The wrath revealed in 1:18 is explained in present time in vv. 24-32. The wrath of God which is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness, which includes the moral arrogance of the moral degenerate, is being revealed in time.

Romans 024b-No One is Good Enough.

Romans 2:5 NASB95
But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,
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Romans 024b-No One is Good Enough.
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Throughout time, from Genesis chapter three when Satan tempted Eve all the way up until the end of the millennial kingdom, as described in Revelation chapter twenty, the greatest enemy of God always proclaims the same truth: man can somehow come into God’s favor on the basis of his own good works, on the basis of his own morality, on the basis of his own ethics. We see this conflict in Genesis chapter four when, after God had taught the principle of animal sacrifice to Adam and Eve, Cain comes and instead of an animal for a sacrifice hr brings the fruit of his own effort. That was his offering to God; it was what he had done. But what Abel brought had nothing to do with his own efforts; it had to do with what God had provided. From the beginning of history there is this conflict between works and grace.
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One of the difficult things with grace on the part of the people who believe in works is that they voice the rejection: Well, if God forgives, not because of what you do but because of what Jesus did, or He just freely forgives, then what keeps you in line? They forget that God keeps us in line. That is still principle. Belief that salvation is based on faith alone in Christ alone does not mean that Christians can just do whatever they wish to do whenever they wish to do and however they wish to do it. Grace does not mean antinomianism or licentiousness.
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The focus in Romans is righteousness—the righteousness of God. And the issue in Romans is that man since Adam’s disobedience to God is not adjusted: he is not in line with and he does not conform to the perfect righteousness of God. Unless the creature conforms to the perfect righteousness of God he can’t have a relationship with God. God has standards.
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Most translations end with a comma; it should be a period. This makes sense when we study through the context. There is a shift in verse 6 that goes down to verse 16 that takes us into another direction. To understand this we need to go back to , . In 1:17 we have a statement of the theme: “For in it [the gospel] {the} righteousness of God is revealed…” His standard is revealed: man can’t get there on his own; nobody can get into heaven unless they meet His standards. If we who are creatures and are permanently flawed make one mistake, that’s it. God has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to righteousness. If there is one failure then you can’t get into heaven. You are a sinner; you are fallen; you are flawed. The only way to get in is on the basis of somebody else’s righteousness. And notice in this verse we have the word “revealed” here: “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’”
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In 1:18 we have a paragraph shift and there is this explanation that begins with the word “For”—“For the wrath of God…” This phrase “the wrath of God” is a dramatic way of expressing the harshness of divine judgment. God has provided the solution, but if the solution is rejected—which He freely gives—then He will on the basis of His own character bring about the just punishment. “…is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Then as Paul develops his flow of thought he is going to give two different consequences that flow from that, and he expresses this dramatically by using this unusual word to express “therefore.” The usual Greek word is oun [o)un], but what we have in 1:24 and again in 2:1 is the word dio [dio]. It has the same idea of drawing an inference or conclusion from a set of premises but it tells us that in terms of Paul’s flow here in terms of the structure there is the first set of consequences or results that occur from man’s rejection of God and his suppression of the truth in unrighteousness, and then there is a second line of consequences. These two lines of consequences characterize everybody in the human race—either flowing towards the first set which is immoral degeneracy or self-righteousness, which is moral degeneracy. Paul recognizes the basis principle here that there are those who are so arrogant and so filled with a sense of their own morality and so he says they who judge and condemn out of self-righteousness are without excuse. The self-righteous moral person is just as guilty of failing to live up to God’s standard as the immoral licentious person.
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The point of verse 4 is at the end of the sentence: “the kindness [goodness] of God leads you to repentance?” Goodness is part of the essence of God. He is good to us, He is not mean or vindictive; He is a good God and He will do the right thing because He alone is righteous. So what Paul points out here is that God, by not lowering the boom on us when we are disobedient and sinful, not only gives us time to see how bad we can be and to experience the negative consequences of our bad decisions, but also He is wooing us, as it were, through His kindness and His goodness to turn back to Him. So God’s ultimate goal is that we turn to Him and have a relationship with Him. He is not sitting up there looking for opportunities to bring judgment upon us. But the self-righteous person despises that. He thinks that he is okay because God hasn’t really taken him through any extreme consequences for sin, and that he is moral and ethical and everything is fine with him. However, God is giving him time so that He can lead him to repentance. Repentance basically means to change your mind and to change your mind about God. Repentance also (from the Old Testament) has the idea of returning to God.
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If we structure Romans with a break in verse 5 then repentance is in the context of divine judgment in the first section. Repentance is only used once in the book of Romans and it is not ever used by Paul in the context of justification. The word is only used about eight times in all of Paul’s thirteen epistles. The words believe and repent are not synonyms.
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NASB “But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” In the previous verse God has been forbearing, longsuffering, giving time to come to the right decision. But if there is continuing rejection of Him what we have in verse 5 is that that there is a storing up of wrath in the day of wrath. If we read that superficially it is easy to think that this is talking about a future day of judgment. But the way Paul uses the term “wrath” in Romans is not talking about future judgment in the Tribulation or eternal condemnation. He talks about it in the present tense; cf. 1:18, “the wrath of God is being revealed.” This is the judgment or the discipline of God upon rebellious mankind, both as a whole and individually, during history. Literally in the Greek here it doesn’t say “in the day of wrath,” it says “in a day of wrath”—no definite article there.
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We see that there is a similarity in 1:18 to 2:5. This is like bracketing in literature. The similarities of vocabulary indicate that 1:18 starts the section and 2:5 ends the section. The word “wrath is used” once in 1:18 and twice in 2:5. Both verses use the word “revelation.” Chapter 2:5 talks about the righteous judgment of God with a different word. Righteous judgment has to do with diakrisis [diakrisij] which is a combination of dikaiosune [dikaiosunh] krisis [krisij], and this is expressed by the concept of the wrath of God being revealed in 1:18. is really the conclusion of this particular section, and Paul is talking about a temporal judgment.
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The next verse starts anew. The way most translators handle this is to put a comma at the end of verse 5, take the relative pronoun that is found at the beginning of verse 6 and translate it as a dependent relative clause that goes back to what Paul has been saying in vv. 1-5. But verse 5 really ends the discussion that began in 1:18. This makes sense because if we think about the Paul lays down the principle of the wrath of God being revealed in 1:18-23, and then he gives the first consequence of suppressing truth in terms of immoral degeneracy in vv. 24-32. That is the immoral person. Then he gives the second example of the moral degenerate in 2:1-5. Then in v. 6 he shifts to talk about the end time consequences of disobedience to God and rejection of Him. He is now moving in a new direction and from v. 6 to v. 16 the focus is going to be on the final judgment of the unrighteous.
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Who is Paul talking about when he is focusing on those from 1:24 down through 2:5? Christians or non-Christians? He is focusing on the wrath or judgment of God on those who reject the evidence of His existence in . He is not talking about Christians at this point, he is focusing on unbelievers—the negative consequences, judgment in time of unbelievers for their rejection of Him. Coming out of verse 5 is the idea of what about those who have done well and those who have not done well? What about God’s final, ultimate judgment in terms of the moral people and the immoral people that we have just talked about?
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People can get very confused in this next section because of the language. NASB “who WILL RENDER TO EACH PERSON ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.” The first word should be translated as an independent clause where the relative pronoun is used as an independent pronoun. It should be translated “He.” “He WILL RENDER TO EACH PERSON ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.” Paul starts this next section with a reminder of the principle that God’s judgment on mankind is going to based on works. This goes all the way through Scripture. The Greek word is ergon [e)rgon] and this is used again and again.
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NASB “And lovingkindness is Yours, O Lord, For You recompense a man according to his work.”
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NASB “If you say, ‘See, we did not know this,’ Does He not consider {it} who weighs the hearts? And does He not know {it} who keeps your soul? And will He not render to man according to his work?”
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NASB “For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and WILL THEN REPAY EVERY MAN ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.” He is talking about the second coming at that point. This judgment takes place actually after the Millennium at what is referred to as the great white throne judgment. This is described in NASB “And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is {the book} of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.” See also .
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The problem that people have is that they make the mistake of thinking that Paul is somehow talking here of actually being able to become saved on the basis of works. But remember , NASB “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, {it is} the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” NASB “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” It is God’s work that saves us, not ours at all. NASB “knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.”
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In 2:6 and 2:11 we have another bracket in terms of the concept. Verse 6 begins, “He WILL RENDER TO EACH PERSON ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.” Verse 11 reminds us that He can do that because with God there is no partiality. So this next section is bracketed by a reminder of the character of the judge. Now Paul says, NASB “to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life.” If you did it and you did it perfectly you’d get eternal life. The catch is, the moral person didn’t do it. That is what he is saying in verse 1. The moral person is just as guilty.
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NASB “but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation.” Everybody comes under that category; nobody qualifies under verse 7.
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NASB “{There will be} tribulation and distress for every soul of man [every life] who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek.” Who does evil? Everybody. All Paul is saying in these verses is that God judges according to works. [10] “but glory and honor and peace to everyone who does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” But nobody measures up. [11] “For there is no partiality with God.”
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NASB “For all who have sinned without the Law…” That is a reference to the Gentiles. They don’t have the Law of Moses. “…will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law.” How about those people who have never heard? Paul says they may not have that level of revelation but they did have some level of revelation. Explanation: [13] “for {it is} not the hearers of the Law {who} are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified.” It is not enough just to hear the Torah, you actually have to fulfill everything in it; not just some, but all. Paul later explains that the Law was nor designed to save people but to make them aware of their sinfulness.
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NASB “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves.” What Paul is saying here is that there is a sense of right and wrong among those who have never received the Law of Moses. Every human being has a conscience. They inherently have a value system that tells them some things are right and some are wrong, and if they violate that they know they are guilty. So even the Gentile knows he is condemned because he has not lived up to whatever value system he has. [15] “in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.”
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NASB “on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus.” That is the great white throne judgment. What we have seen in our study is that the righteousness of God is going to be revealed in history as well as at the end of history. The evidence of God’s existence is clear to everybody and most people have a negative reaction. They are going to go in two directions. They are going to reject that truth and either take a high dive into immorality or stay up on the high board, look down at everybody and say they are better than everybody, therefore God will let me into heaven just because I am ethical. What Paul shows is that that is arrogance. That means that everybody has failed.

Romans 025b-No Special Privileges or Passes. Romans 2:17-25

Romans 2:17 NASB95
But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon the Law and boast in God,
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Romans 025b-No Special Privileges or Passes.
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Our lack of righteousness, our sins, are all imputed to Christ on the cross and when we believe in Him His righteousness is then given to us; it is a free gift. We are given that righteousness so that God’s justice in heaven declares us to be righteous, and because He is looking at the righteousness we possess in Christ He is free to bless us with salvation.
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At the great white throne judgment unbelievers are not judged for sin. Sin was judged at the cross. NASB “having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” That happened historically in AD 33. People are not sent to the lake of fire for their sin. What are they sent there for? The question arises every now and then: What about these statements that a person dies in their sins?
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In John chapter eight Jesus had been teaching in the temple and has been in another conflict with the Pharisees. Jesus said to them, v. 21 NASB “I go away, and you will seek Me, and will die in your sin; where I am going, you cannot come. [22] So the Jews were saying, “Surely He will not kill Himself, will He, since He says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’? [23] And He was saying to them, ‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.’” He is talking about source: they are earth-bound; they are creatures; He is from heaven. [24] NASB “Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am {He,} you will die in your sins.” There is a difference between dying for your sins and dying in your sins. What does the phrase “in your sin” mean?
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NASB “and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” Paul is talking to believers here, the Corinthians who had trusted in Jesus but were saying they were not sure they believed in the resurrection anymore; is it really necessary that there is a physical bodily resurrection of Jesus? Paul’s answer is talking about something that is positional, but this phrase “in your sins” is not clarified yet. It becomes clarified in Ephesians chapter two. actually expresses a number of dependent clauses. The main clause is found in verse 5, “[God] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), [6] and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly {places} in Christ Jesus.” Before he gets to what God did he has to create this contrast so we can understand how great it is that God did this. So he begins with a number of subordinate clauses in verse 1.
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NASB “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” In the NKJV the words “He made alive” are added, but in italics because they are not there in the original. That is because the translators went down to verse 5 and pulled that out so that they could put it at the beginning of verse 1 for English readers to make some sense of this by having the main verb at the beginning. What does Paul mean when he says “you were dead in your trespasses and sins”? If we take out the word “trespasses” and just say “you who were dead in your sins” we have the same phrase as in and . It is an idiom for spiritual death. To be dead in your sins means that you are spiritually dead—in every one of these places. It is not saying you are going to die for your sins, which is how some people think it will turn out at the great white throne judgment. It says, “you were”—a present participle but it has a past sense of “you being dead (previous to being made alive) in your trespasses and sins.” So it refers to a state, it doesn’t refer to a cause of punishment. So “dead in your sins” doesn’t mean dying for your sins eternally, it refers to a state of being spiritually dead. If we go back to what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees is, if you don’t trust in me you will die in your sins, you will continue to be spiritually dead. If we look at Paul is saying that if Christ isn’t risen your faith is futile because you are still spiritually dead.
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There are three basic problems that have to be resolved before anybody can get into heaven. The first is that the legal penalty assigned by the Supreme Court of heaven for sin has to be paid for. That legal penalty is spiritual death. That penalty was assigned by God to Adam the instant he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; he died spiritually. As a result of his spiritual death, his new condition, every human being who has been born since then (with the exception of Jesus) has been born spiritually dead. So the first problem we have is the problem of the legal penalty in and of itself.
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The second problem we have is that we were born spiritually dead. There has to be a change. Even if the penalty is paid the reality of our spiritual death has to be changed. The problem of our spiritual death, being “in our sin (spiritually dead),” is resolved by NASB “even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)”—regeneration.
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The third problem is that we lack righteousness, and that has to be changed. We have to be changed from –R to +R. The problem of our lack of righteousness is resolved by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.
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So the three problems are solved by three acts of God. The first act that solves the sin penalty problem is that Jesus pays the penalty. The second problem, which is our condition of spiritual death, is resolved only when we believe in Christ. NASB “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” God changes us; we become a new creature in Christ. The third problem, our justification: NASB “nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.” This is his conclusion, what Paul is driving toward, and in he will say NASB “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.”
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In we see that the moral person, the person who is righteous in his own eyes, is not righteous all the time even in his own eyes and that there are times when he does exactly what he condemns in other people. Even in his own eyes he knows he cannot measure up, even to his own standards. In 2:6-12 Paul isn’t saying that people actually get saved because they can completely and perfectly obey the Word. God will render according to your work, and no one measures up. So theoretically, if you were perfect you couldn’t get into heaven without believing in Jesus. The standard is absolute perfection.
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In verse 12 Paul begins to talk about the human race in general which would focus primarily on non-Jews (Gentiles), and now he shifts to talk about Jews because Jews had a privileged position (); but it is a privilege that is not going to get them saved, it is a privilege of knowledge but not a privilege of salvation. Just because they are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob doesn’t mean they are automatically saved. In these they have easier access to special revelation and they have been given special revelation that no one else has. That special revelation was called the Torah. If we think of the Torah as instruction on how the people of God were to live to reflect God’s character—because He said to them, “Be holy as I am holy”—then we get another slant on the Mosaic Law. It was designed to teach and instruct them as to how to live. “For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law.” The word “perish” is apollumi [a)pollumi], the same word that is used in . Most of the time this refers to eternal judgment. In the second part of the verse, “who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law,” brings in the verb krino [krinw] which means to separate, discern, judge, consider, and also translated in a number of places “condemn”—as it is in , .
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NASB “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge [condemn] the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” Condemnation, krino judgment, has to do with the Supreme Court of God and the decision He makes so that those who are without righteousness will perish. So condemnation has to do with the decision, the verdict and the penalty; perishing is the consequence, the penalty itself. The purpose of the first advent wasn’t judgment, it was deliverance. [18] “He who believes in Him is not judged [krino]; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”
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NASB “for {it is} not the hearers of the Law {who} are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified.” It is not just enough to go through the back door, go through the external ritual of going to church or Bible class and sit there and be exposed to the teaching of the Word. There is a spiritual imperative that comes with the Word and that is to put it into practice. To be a doer of the law (James) just means to be an applier of what one hears. The word for “just” in the first line is the noun dikaios [dikaioj] which means just or righteous, and in the second line is the verb dikaioo [dikaiow] which means to be justified or declared justified, which is a forensic or judicial statement that comes from the bench.
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NASB “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively [in light of how God made them] the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves.” That is not quite right. Law unto themselves has the idea in our culture of writing one’s own law, making one’s own standards. It is really the idea of “they have their own law,” and that law is this internal sense of right and wrong which God embeds in every creature who is in His image. Everybody on the planet has a sense of right and wrong. The standards may get messed up. Some may think murder is not wrong and others may think beating your wife is not wrong, others may think that theft—at least at a lower level—is not wrong; but at some level they know some things are wrong and some things are right. Without the Law Gentile nations and tribes have standards that imitate the Word of God. They know it is wrong to commit murder, etc. Every Gentile culture is going to have aspects that reflect the Torah.
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In verse 17 Paul shifts to talk about the Jewish claim of fulfilling the Mosaic Law. From v. 17 to v. 25 he is going to lay out the argument that the Jewish people can’t claim their relationship to Abraham, or to Moses and the Law, as a basis for getting into heaven. They have favor from God in many ways but it wasn’t a favor that automatically got them into heaven; they were not born with a ticket punch, they have to make a decision like everybody else as to whether or not to trust God.
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NASB “But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon the Law and boast in God.” In the subsequent verses he is going to describe what that means. The first characteristic is to rest or relax on the Law. Just because you have the Law means your ticket is punched and you’re going to go to heaven. Second, you boast in God because God has a special relationship with Israel and that means you are in. Third, you know His will. [18] “and know {His} will and approve the things that are essential [because you have revelation], being instructed out of the Law”—because you have been instructed [katecheo/katexew] out of the Law”—katecheo, from which we get our word “catechism,” and it implies line by line, precept upon precept, etc. In other words, you have been drilled in the precepts of the Law. Fourth, [19] “and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness.” Isaiah said the Jews were to be a light to the nations, a guide to those who were in darkness. But they failed to do that. [20] “a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth.” Just because you have the structure of knowledge and truth from the Law you think you can teach everybody. [21] “you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal?” Are you practicing what you are preaching? Are you doing what you say you do? [22] “You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? [23] You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God? [24] THE NAME OF GOD IS BLASPHEMED AMONG THE GENTILES BECAUSE OF YOU,” just as it is written.”
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Verse 25 looks at ritual as a way to get them past disobedience. They had the right ritual, the right external observance, but what was going on on the inside didn’t matter. What Paul is pointing out is what is on the outside is not relevant, what is relevant is what is going on on the inside, and if we disobey God then we violate the Law. You are just not qualified; none of us are qualified. We have a need, and that is the argument here. Everybody needs righteousness; nobody can manufacture it on their own. Our hope is in Jesus Christ because He is the only way and He provides that righteousness for us.

Romans 026b-Spiritual Circumcision.

Romans 2:25 NASB95
For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.
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Romans 026b-Spiritual Circumcision.
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What does Paul mean when he uses the term “Jew”? What is a Jew? If we go through the New Testament the term “Jew” is used with several different meanings and it is important to understand the different senses and the different meanings that we find. Here are several terms that are used in the Scripture that are used to the Jewish people. They are referred to as Hebrews, as Israelites, and as a Jew—ioudaios [I)oudaioj]. The term ioudaios in the Greek has its etymological derivation from the name of the founder of the tribe of Judah. Judah was one of Jacob’s twelve sons. Because it is the largest tribe in the south it becomes identified with the southern kingdom after the division of the kingdom. In the period of the united kingdom the nation is referred to as Israel. In the divided kingdom Judah was the southern kingdom and Israel was the northern kingdom. After the demise of the northern kingdom in 722 the term “Israel” is used a few times to refer to the southern kingdom but it is still referred to primarily as Judah, and then in the Roman period of the New Testament it is referred to by its Roman credential name of Judea. The term “Jew” comes from the first syllable of the word Judah and was applied by the Jewish people to themselves as a common term that was used as a reference to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
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Today we have a number of different terms that derive from that and they have to be distinguished. We have the terms “Jew, Jewish, Jewry, Judaic, and the Judaism.” Judaism is really an interesting thing to get our hands on because what is going on with the Pharisees and Sadducees who believed different things at the time of Christ is not the same as modern Judaism. Pharisaism is a sort of Granddaddy of modern Judaism but it is not quite the same. Everything shifted with the destruction of the temple in AD 70. The Sadducees, because they are really the religious liberals, are a lot like modern liberals; they really don’t believe that God is i9nvolved in human affairs or human history, they are just the religious rationalists of that era. They don’t have anything in their theology or beliefs that enable them to survive the destruction of the temple. But the Pharisees do, and it is the Pharisees who come together in the AD 90s at the Council of Jamnia to answer the question: How are we going to survive in terms of our religious beliefs in an era when we don’t have an ark of the covenant, an altar on which to sacrifice, or a temple to worship God? They restructured their beliefs so that the Jews in the diaspora could survive and go forward, and that is the groundwork that is laid for modern Judaism. The survivors of the Jewish rebellion are the Pharisees and their theology.
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Historic Orthodox Judaism dominated from the Council of Jamnia up to the mid to late 1700s and it is at that point when there was the first break-out away from Orthodoxy in Judaism, and that becomes known as Reformed Judaism. Reformed Judaism is equivalent to liberal Protestantism, it is a rejection of the idea that God could speak to man, a rejection of objective truth, and completely influenced by Enlightenment rationalism. So it rejects the historic traditions of the Jews, rejects Orthodoxy, and they go all the way to the left hand of the spectrum. There were some in the early 1800s who weren’t happy with Orthodoxy but they didn’t want to be as liberal as Reformed Judaism. They come back about halfway and are called “conservative.” They are not conservative in relation to Orthodoxy, they are conservative in relation to Reformed; they are not as liberal as Reformed. When we look at these terms like “Orthodox, conservative and Reformed” in terms of how they are used in an evangelical Protestant tradition they have a completely different meaning. Conservative Protestantism holds rigorously to the inspiration and infallibility of the text. When we use the term “Reformed” in Christianity we refer to those who followed the thinking of Calvin, Zwingli, of the Reformation, especially as it played itself out in Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, etc., so that is still a very biblically orthodox tradition. So these terms have completely different nuances when applied to Judaism.
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In the first century it is a conservative view of the text but it is one that is somewhat similar to what we see in Roman Catholicism—the Scripture plus tradition. Whenever we look at the authority of Scripture and add something to it, whatever we add to it ultimately dominates and takes over and controls Scripture. So when we say it is Scripture plus some sort of mysticism, Scripture plus tradition, Scripture plus reason, whatever is plus takes over and ultimately changes Scripture alone. That is why in the Reformation one of the slogans was Sola Scriptura, meaning by the Scripture alone. It rejected the Roman Catholic view that the tradition of the early church fathers gave an oral tradition that had equal authority to the written teaching of the Scripture and that the written teaching of the Scripture, that authority and revelation from God, continued through the papacy and through the church fathers so that their traditions could be used to reinterpret what the Scriptures said.
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That was the same kind of thing that they had in Judaism in the first century. They had tradition that had built up after the return from the captivity in Babylon and this tradition has the initial acceptable goal of trying to preserve and protect the people from going back into idolatry. But immediately that does what every human-based religion does, it forgets to trust in God, rejects His authority alone, and sets up human traditions and guidelines as the ultimate authority. That is what led to the development of Pharisaism some time around the middle of the second century BC to the middle of the first century BC. And they were the religious conservatives, the religious moralists in Judaism. So when we think of what it means to be a Jew it is important to understand those distinctions because they do play a role in how that term “Jew” is used by different writers ion the Scriptures.
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In the Bible the term “Israel” becomes identified with the northern kingdom. First of all the term “Israel” comes from God as a name or title that He gave to Jacob at Peniel because he wrestled with God and then came to be one who was a prince with God. It is interesting that when Jacob is referred to as Israel the text is usually focusing on his more positive spiritual attributes, and when the text uses the term “Jacob” it is usually referring to his function on the sin nature apart from God. The term “Judah” applies to the southern kingdom and stays with that after the Babylonian captivity. Following the Babylonian captivity the term Judah or Judea referred to those inhabitants of Judea and it was shortened to Jews. Israel was the formal and preferred name but Jew was the common self-designation.
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Each Gospel writer gives us the term a little differently. Mark and Luke don’t really use it much, other than the title for Jesus as the King of the Jews. Matthew is more consistent with a rabbinic preference, using the term “Israel” as the more formal name and the use of the term “Jews” as a more common one for the people.
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In some cases the term “Jews” is also used for the Jewish people as a whole but in other contexts only those Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. It was not just simply an ethnic or regional term, it also was used to refer those of Israelite descent who had rejected Jesus. John is the one who uses it most. Thus that term becomes associated with post-temple Judaism. That term begins to put down roots in the second century in Christian writings.
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The term “the Jews” is also used to refer to the religious leadership of the Jewish people who are steadfastly committed to the Pharisaical traditions of the people. John refers to it that way a number of times and it is not used in an ethnic sense at all.
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Paul uses the term to refer sometimes to the ethnic descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, e.g. in Romans chapter one, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” In that sense he is using it as an ethnic term but in other places he uses it simply to refer to those who hold to the religious viewpoint of those who rejected Jesus as the Messiah by emphasizing the traditions of Pharisees as the means of salvation and acceptance with God. That is how he begins to use the term in .
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In Paul starts driving home a set of five rhetorical questions. He is asking each question in order to make a point. NASB “you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself?” No, you are not teaching yourself, you are really ignorant of the meaning of Scripture. “You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal?” Implication: Yes, you do steal. [22] “You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?” Implication: Yes, you do. “You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” Yes, you do. The idea there was that they robbed the temple in that they robbed the temple of the glory of God because they substituted human works for divine dependence. [23] “You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God?” Example: Mark chapter seven.
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The context of is one of conflict over authority with the Pharisees. Starting in verse 6 NASB “And He said to them, ‘Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME.’” Hypocrisy is when we have an external standard that we don’t ever apply internally, and that is our official position. It is lip service. It is going to a worship service and reading through the Scripture without ever thinking about what it means or thinking yes, I really believe that; it is just going through the motions. [7] “BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.” We can think of numerous Christian denominations that fall under the category of hypocrisy because what they teach as commandments is the tradition of men; they are no longer teaching Scripture; they are no longer teaching the Word of God as the ultimate authority; they have fell into the same authority trap that the Pharisees fell into, i.e. they are putting their authority on human tradition, not the Word of God. [8] “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men. [9] He was also saying to them, ‘You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.’” Jesus sets this up: it is either the Word of God or tradition, it is not both.
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“For Moses said, ‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER’; and, ‘HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER, IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH’; [11] but you say, ‘If a man says to {his} father or {his} mother, whatever I have that would help you is Corban (that is to say, given {to God}),’ [12] you no longer permit him to do anything for {his} father or {his} mother; [13] {thus} invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.” Jesus cites from these two mandates to point out the Scriptures are extremely serious about the command to honor and respect parents and to take care of them as they get older. Notice how Jesus goes back and forth” “You say,” but “Moses said”—the contrast between the Scripture and tradition.
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Corban was a loophole. The Pharisees developed all kinds of loopholes in the way they interpreted the law. Let’s say you have money and your parents are really going to suck up a lot of that money if you have to take care of their medical bills. You could say you had promised my estate to the church, so you really can’t help them. That was the idea here. They would dedicate all of their money to God and say they really couldn’t touch that money to help their parents. So Jesus said they no longer permitted that person to do anything for his parents. They basically undercut the Law and were making the law of God of no effect through their tradition which they handed down. Because of this the Word of God is really being blasphemed because people think that tradition is what the Bible says. It’s not but that is what they think because your claim is that this is biblical. That is Paul’s conclusion. NASB “For ‘THE NAME OF GOD IS BLASPHEMED AMONG THE GENTILES BECAUSE OF YOU,’ just as it is written.” He is drawing this from NASB “Now therefore, what do I have here,” declares the LORD, “seeing that My people have been taken away without cause?” {Again} the LORD declares, “Those who rule over them howl, and My name is continually blasphemed all day long.” Little Paul says in these chapters is new. He is basing this on what is said in the Hebrew Scriptures, he is not inventing theology.
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He is going to give an explanation of this. NASB “For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.” It begins with “For,” the Greek word gar [gar] which always introduces an explanation. Then it has the un-translated word men [men] which has a couple of functions. One is to indicate that there is something else coming, so it creates a level of expectation in the reader. It is the idea that on the one hand this but on the other hand that. The word “if” is a third class condition, which means maybe you do [keep the Law] and maybe you don’t. Usually the third class condition is weighted a little more towards the positive: you probably will. So he is assuming that they will keep the Law; it is the more likely. He says circumcision is profitable, there is value to it. But then he says but if you are a breaker of the Law, assuming that to be true, then your circumcision has become uncircumcision.
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He is talking about circumcision because in Pharisaic Judaism circumcision as a ritual had been identified as that which was a sine qua non (without which nothing) for getting into heaven. If you weren’t circumcised you couldn’t get into heaven. So if you just go through the external ritual you are okay. It is not any different from people who say that if you just get baptized you’ll make it into heaven, and that it is just that external ritual that gets you into heaven. Circumcision was a sign of the Abrahamic covenant, and it was a ritual that had a spiritual teaching point. The spiritual teaching point was that in terms of justification and our relationship to God there is a severing of our relationship with the flesh. So the severing of the foreskin from the flesh is a picture that Paul develops in Romans chapter six that when we are saved we are no longer under bondage to the sin nature; we are set free. That is the spiritual implication. The ritual has no meaning unless there is a spiritual reality.
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NASB “I also was acting with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies—or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humbled so that they then make amends for their iniquity…” Circumcision represents a spiritual reality, something that has to do with the soul, something that is removed; and it is related here to humility and accepting guilt, recognizing personal sin. There is a command in NASB “So circumcise your heart [your soul], and stiffen your neck no longer.” When God commands the Jews to be circumcised He recognizes that every one of them needs this. (Modern Judaism says there is no such thing as total depravity) In NASB “Moreover the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live,” that is, before the kingdom comes, before God establishes the kingdom and restores the Jews to the land of Israel. This is the new covenant. NASB “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God.”

Romans 027b-Circumcision.

Romans 2:25 NASB95
For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.
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Romans 027b-Circumcision.
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The focal point of Paul’s discussion here comes down to circumcision, and that is because in second temple Judaism the rite of circumcision had become a symbol of one’s identification with Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant which was viewed as salvific. They believed that if they were in right relationship to God through the covenant with Abraham then they were saved. The were counting on obedience to the Law to get them into heaven. The mistake that is made is that they are identifying a position of privilege in relation to knowledge about God and God’s revelation as equivalent to a position of salvation. Yet all of those blessings that God gave the Jewish people were designed to teach them about God so that they could then have salvation. Those privileges in and of themselves did not save them.
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Then we have seen that Paul focused in on circumcision. NASB “For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law…” It is not the circumcision, it is the keeping of the Law that makes it profitable because in the next sentence he says, “… but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.” It’s as if the external did not apply.
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Circumcision is an external physical procedure. There is a lot of parallel between the Jewish reliance on the external action of circumcision and the Christian reliance on the external ritual of baptism. The idea in both cases is that if I have participated in this external ritual then that is what is effective or efficacious in justifying me or saving me; and it is putting the emphasis on what I do rather than on what someone else does on my behalf. We need to pay attention to is how within second temple Judaism there is clear evidence of an understanding of some key doctrinal principles related to salvation. It is interesting how this appears but it becomes covered up and lost in the confusion, so to speak.
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The significance of circumcision is that it was the external sign of the Abrahamic covenant, just as water baptism is an external sign of being a Christian. It is not what makes one a Christian and if you are not baptized you are still justified or saved. The last part of the sixteenth chapter of Mark is frequently debated over its textual veracity—whether this is part of the original Gospel of Mark. The Majority Text as well as Textus Receptus both include this ending. NASB “He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved…” People look at that and say you have to be baptized in order to be saved. But the clarification comes in the last phrase: “…but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.” It doesn’t say he who has not been baptized will be condemned. The basis of condemnation is not believing. Cf. . Baptism was inserted in because it was assumed that person who believed in Jesus Christ as savior would be baptized as the external sign, just as in the Old Testament if one was a Jewish male or converted to Judaism then one would need to be circumcised. The issue isn’t the external issue, the issue is the internal reality of faith in the promise of God to save through Jesus Christ’s substitutionary atonement on the cross.
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The ritual of circumcision was introduced when God established or cut a covenant with Abraham. NASB “This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your descendants [seed] after you: every male among you shall be circumcised. [11] And you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you.” Note it doesn’t say anything about justification or salvation. ( NASB “Then he [Abraham] believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.” That is the basis for relationship with God: imputation or accrediting of righteousness to someone. Not their righteousness, it is a gift God makes.) Abraham was justified and trusted in God years before. Then God promised him a covenant and the formal, ratified ceremony does not occur until Genesis chapter seventeen. Circumcision is a consequence of the covenant; it is not a cause of the covenant. It is not the basis for blessing; it is a sign of being in a relationship with God on the basis of this covenant. This teaches us that circumcision was never designed a basis for relationship with God; it is a sign that one is already in that relationship with God. So it is a sign of the Abrahamic covenant, not the Mosaic covenant. The sign of the Mosaic covenant was the Sabbath.
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NASB “And every male among you who is eight days old shall be circumcised throughout your generations, a {servant} who is born in the house or who is bought with money from any foreigner, who is not of your descendants. [13] A {servant} who is born in your house or who is bought with your money shall surely be circumcised; thus shall My covenant be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.” The covenant is an everlasting covenant—not because a person is circumcised but because that is God’s will. It was a gift given, a possession, a title deed that is non-refundable, non-reversible. A sign that one owned that was that he was circumcised. [14] “But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant.” That meant to be removed by death—it was a death penalty.
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Circumcision doesn’t originate with this. It had been practiced by different cultures, different peoples, at different times long before Abraham. There is evidence among Egyptians and among most of western Semitic people. It was often a practice that related to puberty but it didn’t have a spiritual significance. God takes a practice that is already present (as He does with baptism; other religious groups baptized) and assigns it a particular meaning and significance in relation to His plan.
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We need to understand how second temple Judaism understood circumcision. That way we can understand a little more about why Paul is saying what he is saying in , as well as Galatians, Colossians and other passages. The first temple was Solomon’s temple, dedicated approximately 966 BC and destroyed in 586 BC. When it was destroyed, that was the end of the first temple period. Then when the Jews returned under Zerubbabel, beginning in approximately 537 BC, they began to rebuild the temple and finally completed it in 516. That is referred to as the second temple and it was not destroyed until the Romans under Titus destroyed it in AD 70. Herod came in approximately 25 BC and decided to completely renovate the temple back to its glorious days of Solomon. That was still the second temple because the sacrifices never ceased. Second temple Judaism refers to how the Mosaic Law was interpreted after the exile and it became the predecessor for modern Judaism. It is second temple Judaism that is the basis for Jesus’ confrontation with the Pharisees and Sadducees.
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Encyclopedia of Judaism (Jacob Noister): Article on circumcision. He goes to a passage in Ezekiel:
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NASB “Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, [2] ‘Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations [3] and say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem, “Your origin and your birth are from the land of the Canaanite, your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. [4] “As for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water for cleansing; you were not rubbed with salt or even wrapped in cloths. [5] No eye looked with pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. Rather you were thrown out into the open field, for you were abhorred on the day you were born. [6] When I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood, I said to you {while you were} in your blood, ‘Live!’” This is the grace of God calling out Abraham, nurturing the nation through the period of the patriarchs and then bringing them eventually out of Egypt. “Yes, I said to you {while you were} in your blood, ‘Live!’ [7] I made you numerous like plants of the field. Then you grew up, became tall and reached the age for fine ornaments; {your} breasts were formed and your hair had grown. Yet you were naked and bare. [8] Then I passed by you and saw you, and behold, you were at the time for love; so I spread My skirt over you and covered your nakedness. I also swore to you and entered into a covenant with you so that you became Mine, declares the Lord GOD. [9] Then I bathed you with water, washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil [analogous to the Abrahamic covenant].’”
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From the article: Regarding he says, This is cited prominently in today’s prayer at the Bris service but it occurs also in second century [AD] sources [which shows it obviously reflects the thinking preceding that, i.e. the period during the time of Christ] within the context again of an anti-Christian polemic.” So the context found in the prayer book has been modified from what it was so that it is set against what Christianity had come to teach at that time.” Then he cites the verses here and comments, “It’s significance in the context of the debate on the efficacy of works over faith is evident from the following second century Midrash.” In other words, what he is saying is that by the early second century within Judaism we have come to understand that the Christians are saying that faith alone is all you need, and we are saying it is works—God is going to be impressed by what we do.
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Here’s what we have in the second century Midrash: “Rabbi [………..] used to say, Behold it says, I passed by you and looked at you and saw it was a time of love [].” How is he going to interpret that? “This means the time had arrived for God’s vow to Abraham to be fulfilled, namely that He would save His children.” He has cast this totally within the context of salvation. “But as yet they had no commandments to perform by virtue of which they might merit redemption. As it says, ‘Your breasts were fashioned and your hair had grown but you were naked’”—meaning that they were naked of all commandments. Where do we see that in the passage? We don’t. This is what happened by the time of late second temple Judaism; this sort of non-literal interpretation had set in so that it was no longer interpreting it within a framework of a literal interpretation. The idea of not having commandments isn’t present in the chapter at all. “God therefore assigned them two commandments, the sacrifice of the Pascal lamb and circumcision, which they were to perform so as to merit being saved.” So how do you get saved? By observing the Passover and by being circumcised. “As it says, ‘I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you {while you were} in your blood, Live!’ One could not obtain reward except by these.” Reward is by works but salvation is a free gift. He goes on to say, “As the Ezekiel exegesis demonstrates, the central symbol of the circumcision ritual was its blood. Regularly, therefore, we find reference not only to the salvific nature of the rite in general but more specifically to the saving merit of circumcision blood.” See what is going on here? There is an understanding that there must be the shedding of blood in order to have salvation. It’s just that it is misplaced in terms of the circumcision ritual. “Nowadays a blessing accompanies the symbolic placing of wine on the lips of the baby boy just after the circumcision wound has been cauterized.”
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In Judaism as in Christianity wine symbolizes blood. “At any rate the symbolic value of circumcision as an act of salvation is evident throughout our second century sources. It is the sign of the covenant that saves.” As we have seen, Abraham was already saved. He had been given the promise of the covenant long before there is any circumcision. Circumcision was the sign of something already accomplished just as baptism for the Christian is a depiction of something that is already accomplished, not the means to get salvation. “The blood drawn in the act is equivalent to the blood of the Pascal lamb” (What Christianity understands is that the Passover lamb is a picture of Jesus Christ. This is what John the Baptist indicated when he said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”) that the Israelites smeared ion the door posts to warn off the angel of death [there’s no angel mentioned in Exodus; only God] on the night the firstborn Egyptians were slaughtered. It is a paradigmatic salvific example of a good work practiced in every generation from Abraham on. As such it has commanded the universal allegiance of Jews throughout history.”
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What about modern times? Things have changed. He writes: “Again in our time the issue has been addressed, this time on different grounds. Nineteenth century opposition to circumcision within the Jewish community was rooted in evolution…” Interesting! They don’t believe there is a God anymore, they don’t believe in objective revelation; so within reformed Judaism they’ve thrown out the objective truth and the reality of God’s commandments—something that just sort of got cobbled together in their tradition—and so they don’t need it anymore. “… as from the assumption that a mature Judaism could safely tear away this dysfunctional ritual of its use. For many, therefore, circumcision now is hardly the central act of faith that it once was. Almost no one anymore is aware of the salvific symbolism it once contained: the blood that saves (the parallelism between the circumcision blood and the Pascal lamb), the very real hopes once invested in the child as a potential Messiah or the ritual symbolism of sacrifice that dominated centuries of rabbinic thought. But the rite still maintains its hold on the popular imagination, at least in most circles.”
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NASB “Then Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.” He obeys the command. The next time we have circumcision mentioned is in NASB “Jacob’s sons answered Shechem and his father Hamor with deceit, because he had defiled Dinah their sister. [14] They said to them, ‘We cannot do this thing, to give our sister to one who is uncircumcised, for that would be a disgrace to us. [15] Only on this {condition} will we consent to you: if you will become like us, in that every male of you be circumcised, [16] then we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters for ourselves, and we will live with you and become one people.’” They don’t really mean that but they are setting up a military strategy whereby they massacre all the males in Shechem.
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The next time it is mentioned is in , the circumcision of Moses’ son. NASB “Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death”—because he hasn’t circumcised his son. The reason this circumcision has to happen is because it is a sign that the descendents of Abraham have been distinguished or set apart, from the rest of humanity. It is their positional sanctification, so to speak, just as in the New Testament baptism is a picture of our positional sanctification and being set apart in Christ. [25] “Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and threw it at Moses’ feet, and she said, ‘You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me.’ [26] So He let him alone. At that time she said, ‘{You are} a bridegroom of blood”—because of the circumcision.’” Now it is okay for Moses to go about his task because he had to be one who was obedient to God.
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Next is in in relation to the first Passover. The uncircumcised could not eat the Passover meal. NASB “but every man’s slave purchased with money, after you have circumcised him, then he may eat of it. [48] “But if a stranger sojourns with you, and celebrates the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near to celebrate it; and he shall be like a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person may eat of it.” God is serious about this. You can’t participate in these rituals unless you have become positionally set apart—indicated by circumcision.
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, gives us some of the details of circumcision. “Speak to the sons of Israel, saying: ‘When a woman gives birth and bears a male {child,} then she shall be unclean for seven days, as in the days of her menstruation she shall be unclean. On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.’”
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But then we start getting to the spiritual significance of the physical act in . This is the chapter that outlines the various stages of divine judgment upon Israel for their disobedience. NASB “I also was acting with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies—or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humbled so that they then make amends for their iniquity, [42] then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land.” This is in the middle of the fifth cycle of discipline. The only way they can get back on the land is if [v.40] they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers and their unfaithfulness. The issue is their mental attitude, their spiritual relationship to God; not the physical—physical was to demonstrate a physical reality.
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This is confirmed by the next use which is in NASB “So circumcise your heart, and stiffen your neck no longer.” It is not physical, it is spiritual. “Stiff-necked” is an attitude of rebellion and arrogance towards God. The issue is obedience and submission to God.
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God promises that there will be a time when He will bring them back to the land. NASB “So all these curses shall come on you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you would not obey the LORD your God by keeping His commandments and His statutes which He commanded you. [46] They shall become a sign and a wonder on you and your descendants forever. [47] Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things…” So they are going to come under judgment. But the hope is then defined in chapter thirty.
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NASB “So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call {them} to mind in all nations where the LORD your God has banished you, [2] and you return [shub] to the LORD your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, [3] then the LORD your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will gather you again from all the peoples where the LORD your God has scattered you.” But there has to be an internal change. [6] “Moreover the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.” This is the new covenant. This is related to what is stated in where God says in relation to this future time NASB “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. [26] Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” The picture of circumcision is the removal of flesh. That’s the sin nature. [27] “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. [28] You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God.”
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, NASB “but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me [not ritual but personal relationship], that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the LORD. Behold, the days are coming,” declares the LORD, “that I will punish all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised”—people who were physically circumcised but not circumcised in their heart.

Romans 028b-Circumcision. Romans 2:25-3:6

Romans 2:25 NASB95
For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.
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Romans 028b-Circumcision.
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We have been on the doctrine of circumcision—understanding the spiritual significance of circumcision. The ultimate issue here if we want to subsume this into a broader category, the broader category is understanding the difference between grace and works, understanding the difference between a God-performed and supplied and freely-given salvation and a salvation that is merited or earned by the individual. Circumcision itself became the focal point of the battle that occurred between the Jews who accepted Jesus as messiah and those who didn’t. Paul never says circumcision is wrong; there is nothing inherently wrong with it. He says, NASB “For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the
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Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.” The focal point here is on the issue of keeping the Law or breaking the Law. That is what makes the difference: it wasn’t circumcision; it was orientation to the Law. If a person could keep the Law one hundred per cent then that was the issue. If he broke the Law it didn’t matter if they were circumcised or not because the issue was their relationship to the Law which was the basis for the exhibition of righteousness. So Paul says circumcision is profitable if you are completely keeping the Law. It doesn’t mean you get saved, it just means that it has spiritual profit, spiritual benefit as a Jew. But if you are a breaker of the Law it doesn’t matter what ritual you do you are still a law-breaker and under condemnation.
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The point we need to be clear on is that the Old Testament makes it very clear that it is not overt physical circumcision; that was just a symbolic act to help understand an abstract doctrine such as the circumcision of the heart. What Paul says in down through the first part of chapter three isn’t different from the Old Testament. He goes to the Old Testament to show that the Hebrew Scriptures emphasize an uncircumcised heart; it is not the physical ritual, it is a spiritual reality that matters. And this is a result of understanding the righteousness of God, which is the theme of Romans.
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Acts chapter seven is the longest sermon recorded in the book of Acts, and that tells us something because obviously God the Holy Spirit wanted all of this material recorded and that it was not just a summary or an abridged version. We have to understand it to understand the significance of circumcision within the context of Stephen’s message. The context is that Stephen is accused of blasphemy, of being an enemy of the Law, in the last part of chapter six. We are told in 6:8 that he is full of faith and power, he is spiritually mature, and he was one of those who were designated as apostolic assistance in the first part of the chapter. He performed miracles as credentials of the message and yet he had opposition. NASB “But they were unable to cope with the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking.” So no matter how clearly we present the gospel, if people are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness they are going to hate you. They are going to react to it, they will misrepresent you, they will ridicule you, they will revile you; they will not accept what you say. It is not because you haven’t presented a good argument, the better your argument the more they might despise you. The bottom line is volition; they don’t want to believe the truth. The more you convince them that the truth is rational and correct the more their conscience will be pricked and the more they will hate you for exposing the fact that they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Stephen becomes a victim of this misrepresentation and in order to gain their way what they do is induce certain men to perjury, which is in violation of the tenth commandment! NASB “Then they secretly induced men to say, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and {against} God.”
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NASB “The high priest said, ‘Are these things so?’” Does Stephen answer the question? No. Don’t always answer a question. Politicians don’t answer question, they have their agenda and they get their message out! Our message is the gospel. Stephen has his message and he is not going to answer the question because the issue isn’t whether or not he has said this. What he is going to do is go with the Bible, and he is going to demonstrate biblically a pattern. And he doesn’t start from Genesis chapter one. We see later on that when Paul confronts unbelievers, and they are Gentiles, he goes to Genesis chapter one because first they have to understand the creator God. But that is not a problem with the Sanhedrin and with the Jews who already have an understanding of —at least at that point. Stephen starts with Abraham and he moves forward from him. And the first thing he points out is that the foundation for everything in the Hebrews Scriptures is God’s call of Abraham. Then he goes through the descendants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons.
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Now we get the reaction. Eleven of the sons just couldn’t care less about God or spiritual things and are as pagan as the Canaanites, and then there is Joseph, the chosen one. He is not the eldest but he is the one God has chosen, so they hate him, they are jealous of him, they despise and reject him. It is the first example of where God’s chosen person is rejected by his brethren who oppose him.
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Then he goes to the second example, which is Moses. Moses is God’s chosen leader but the Jewish people also rejected him. When Moses was up on Mount Sinai the people became bored and turned to idolatry. In this Stephen mentions the temple of Moloch. NASB “YOU ALSO TOOK ALONG THE TABERNACLE OF MOLOCH AND THE STAR OF THE GOD ROMPHA, THE IMAGES WHICH YOU MADE TO WORSHIP. I ALSO WILL REMOVE YOU BEYOND BABYLON.” This set up a pattern that was played out through the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures up to the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, and again and again when God sent a prophet they killed him. And his point as he is talking to the Sanhedrin is that they have a pattern of always rejecting God’s messenger. When God has a message related to grace, you kill the messenger, you despise the messenger, you reject the messenger. He is pointing out that they always reject God’s grace. As a result of that God brings judgment. NASB “But God turned away and delivered them up…” That is the same concept that we have in Romans chapter one. “… to serve the host of heaven…” This is a reference to the fact that these gods and goddesses that they worshipped in the pantheon of the Canaanites were associated with the stars and with nature. Paganism always worships the creation, always worships nature. The modern form is environmentalism, a manifestation of the same nature worship that has been a problem down through the centuries ever since the family got off the boat with Noah. “… as it is written in the book of the prophets, ‘IT WAS NOT TO ME THAT YOU OFFERED VICTIMS AND SACRIFICES FORTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, WAS IT, O HOUSE OF ISRAEL?’”
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Then he drives the point home. NASB “You men who are stiff-necked [arrogant] and uncircumcised in heart…” He is applying what Moses said in Deuteronomy and nailing them with it, indicting them with it, right there. Stephen knew Deuteronomy. “… and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did.” He added something: you covered up your ears; you don’t want to know the truth. What Stephen is doing here is what Peter said to do in . He is giving them a defense, and answer for the hope that is in them. He is just giving classical biblical apologetics. He gives them a rational argument, but notice he doesn’t answer their question. He just skewers them with the pattern that goes down through history. He doesn’t yield to their assumptions as he is presenting the truth. “Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One [the suffering servant of Isaiah; they killed Isaiah], whose betrayers and murderers you have now become; [53] you who received the law as ordained by angels, and {yet} did not keep it.” They think that they have been keeping the Law, and what Stephen and Paul say is no, you are not; and you know that. They don’t want to be told that they are not keeping the Law, because if they are not keeping the Law then they know they can’t ever please God.
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This becomes a problem later on in the early church. It is a problem in the first place that Paul went on his first missionary journey, Galatia. The Galatians who were originally saved because they understood the gospel and understood grace, fall away from their understanding of grace and get sucked into a false gospel. This is why Paul is so harsh with them at the beginning of the epistle. NASB “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!” Why? Because if you don’t believe the right gospel you don’t get saved. Then he goes on to talk about his own experience and his call to becoming an apostle, that previously he had conducted himself well in Judaism. [13] “For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it; [14] and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.” That zeal became hyper-zeal and he did everything he could to destroy every person who was a Christian.
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Then he went to Jerusalem. NASB “But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised.” The apostles understood that circumcision wasn’t necessary for salvation. So chapters one and two of Galatians deal with the question: Is there any ritual that has to be performed to gain merit with God? Paul’s conclusion is none whatsoever, and he clinches this with his great statement in 2:16 NASB “nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.”
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Then there was another problem. Not only were they confused about getting saved or justified by circumcision but now they were going to say they may not get justified by circumcision but they were going to be sanctified by circumcision, the world of the Law. So in , NASB “This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” You can’t start on one basis and shift mid-stream to another basis; it doesn’t work. It begins by the Spirit and continues by the Spirit or you don’t have biblical Christianity.
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NASB “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO HANGS ON A TREE”— What Paul has showed is that the Law can’t do it. The Law wasn’t given to show people how to be saved; the Law was given to show people that they can’t do enough to be saved, and that is a curse.
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NASB “For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness.” Hope is an expectation of a future reality. It is not a strategy for improving government or society, it is a mental attitude. So it is by faith, not circumcision, that we wait for the hope of righteousness.
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NASB “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything [it is not the physical ritual], but faith working through love.” He is not talking about justification here; he is talking about spiritual growth, faith working with love—spiritual growth. It is what is happening on the inside, the circumcision of the heart, not what is happening on the outside.
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Then in verse 7 he goes on to talk about the significance of love and that in this section it is love rather than the Law that is the fulfillment of what the Law is really trying to focus on. He references circumcision again, [11] “But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished.” He says when you get circumcised there is no more opposition; the Jewish opposition would evaporate. The offence is the cross, and the reason it is the cross is because at the cross works are dead; human merit ends. We can’t bring anything of value to God.
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NASB “and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands…” That connects it back to . It has to be a circumcision that is spiritual, not physical. “… in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ…” This is where we see the real spiritual symbolic meaning [sound runs out] …..

Romans 029b-No Hope In Human Works.

Romans 2:25 NASB95
For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice the Law; but if you are a transgressor of the Law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.
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Romans 029b-No Hope In Human Works.
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As Paul comes to the end of chapter two we see that he is reinforcing the principle that he has been teaching, that man on his own is unable to do that which meets God’s standard of righteousness. God can only have intimacy and fellowship with those who are equally righteous and in His grace He has provided a way to meet that righteousness. The problem with mankind is that ever since Genesis chapter three and the fall of Adam the point is that people just try to be righteous on their own. The problem with all works based systems. All religions seek to somehow provide a moral pathway to God by doing certain things, serving certain rituals and upholding a high standard of conduct that somehow we are going to measure up to the standard of God’s perfect righteousness. But the problem is that when we sin it is a violation, an infraction, of God’s righteous standard and there is nothing that can be done to compensate for that.
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What Paul is going to show in 2:25 to the end of the chapter is that real circumcision, the circumcision that matters, isn’t a circumcision that is external. It isn’t the ritual circumcision of the Mosaic Law, it is in internal circumcision, a spiritual removal of the flesh, i.e. the sin nature. This is embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament. ; ; . In the New Testament Paul emphasizes and develops what is already in the Hebrew Scriptures and he explains what it means to have a circumcised heart or to have humility as opposed to the arrogance of setting one’s own standard and thinking that somehow we can do that which pleases God.
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Paul begins to give the Philippians a warning in NASB “Beware of the dogs [Judaisers who opposed Paul], beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision.” These Judaisers were Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah but had added something, and that was that there also had to be the observance of the Mosaic Law. So it wasn’t faith alone in Christ alone, it was faith in Christ plus observance of the Law. They were evil workers because of what they taught, because of their doctrine. The “false circumcision” is a harsh way of referring to those who are demanding that for someone to be truly saved they had to also submit to physical circumcision. [3] “for we [believers] are the {true} circumcision [spiritual, of the heart], who worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.” He is referring clearly to no confidence in both observance of the moral law in the Torah or the ritual of the Law.
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There is a new school of Pauline interpretation that has reared its nasty, ugly head in the past twenty years called “the new perspectives on Paul.” One of the key figures in this group is N.T. Wright who is now teaching in one of the universities in Edinburgh. His a former bishop in the Anglican church. He is a brilliant man and this is one of the things that make it difficult to refute him, because he has mastered a host of disciplines related to biblical study. He has a skill in Greek and Hebrew that is surpassed by very few. He has mastered patristic literature, the literature of the early church fathers. He has virtually a photographic memory so that in any kind of debate he can just recall facts in minutia related to grammar and exegetical points that would drive most people back to their resource books to check out. He is able to just machine-gun this material at people both in terms of his verbal skills as well as his written skills. In this “new perspectives of Paul” what they say is that when Paul is arguing against the Law, that we are not justified by the works of the Law, he is really talking only about the ritual aspects of the Law, not the moral aspects of the Law. So he concludes that, yes there are some who may be saved because they have followed the moral law. He has two ways of being saved; justified by faith alone in Christ alone or observing the moral teachings of the Law. The problem is that Paul never does distinguish between the moral and the ritual. The term “flesh” in verse 3 covers everything, both ritual and moral.
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Then he goes on to say that this was what he once emphasized in his own life. NASB “although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more.” The point is that if anybody has the right to think they can get to heaven on the basis of their morality, their observance of all of the Law, both the ritual and the moral Law, it would be him. Then he begins to list his spiritual resume according to the value system of the Pharisees. [5] “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; [6] as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.” Paul says there is a righteousness in the Law. It is not the absolute righteousness of God, it is a human righteousness, a relative righteousness; and he says according to that lower standard of righteousness he was blameless.
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NASB “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.” In other words, everything that was of value in his priority system, under the works system of the Pharisees, is just loss for Christ; it has no value whatsoever. [8] “More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.” .
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NASB “So if the uncircumcised man keeps the requirements of the Law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision?” The theme of Romans is how does God demonstrate His righteousness in relation to the human race? And it demonstrates that God is indeed righteous in all of His dealings with the human race and that His requirement of every human being is to measure up to His righteousness. And God is so gracious that what He does is provide the righteousness for us because we cannot do it on our own. Paul asks this rhetorical question: “will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision?” Remember what Paul said in verse 25. Therefore isn’t an uncircumcised man who keeps the righteous requirements of the Law superior to a circumcised man who doesn’t keep the Law? So the person who really demonstrates circumcision isn’t the one who is physically circumcised but the one who is truly obedient to the Law because that demonstrates humility rather than arrogance. That is the essence of the circumcised heart.
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NASB “And he who is physically uncircumcised, if he keeps the Law, will he not judge you who though having the letter {of the Law} and circumcision are a transgressor of the Law?” He is thinking hypothetically here. Isn’t somebody who isn’t circumcised keeps the Law 100 per cent superior, and don’t they have the right to judge you who, even though you are circumcised, fail to keep the Law? The answer would be yes, emphasizing that it is the righteousness in character, not the overt act of circumcision that is of significance.
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NASB “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh.” What really makes you Jewish, he says, isn’t that you have been circumcised physically; what makes you a Jew is what also takes place internally. There is a physical requirement in that you are not a Jew unless you are a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but that only makes you a Jew outwardly, not inwardly. So the true Jews on the Old Testament were the Jews like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses Aaron, Joshua, Gideon, Caleb, David, and all of the other believers in the Old Testament who trusted in God, who were humble before God. These were the true Israelites because they had an external circumcision as well as an internal one.
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NASB “But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God.” Paul doesn’t make this up. He got it from Moses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, from Isaiah, from Jeremiah; all of these passages in the Old Testament talk about a circumcision of the heart. And it is by means of the Spirit. It is the same thing that we see in other passages related to walking by the Spirit, being filled by means of the Spirit. It is not by the external observance of the Law.
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NASB “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision?” The issue: If circumcision doesn’t get you into heaven, if it doesn’t solve the righteousness problem, then what value is it? On what basis do you get into heaven? How are you going to solve the righteousness problem? That is a question that everyone has to ask. Paul’s answer is that circumcision was never designed to be the answer to the righteousness problem. He uses two different words here as he asks this question. “Advantage” is the Greek word perissos [perissoj] which as a meaning of something more, something in addition, something beyond the norm, and it is used to refer to something that is extraordinary or advantageous. We could translate this “what more, then, has the Jew.” Or, “what is there left for the Jew?” If circumcision is nothing then what more does a Jew have? Nothing. The word translated “benefit” is opheleia [w)feleia] which means advantage, gain, benefit, help, sometimes value. The answer: There is much advantage; they had a lot of advantages. It doesn’t mean that they are justified or that those advantages solved the righteousness problem because they still have the problem of breaking the Law. That is why they had the sacrifices.
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NASB “Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.” The first advantage was the Scriptures. Literally this is the words of God, the Greek word logos [logoj] in the plural. It was through the Jewish people that God entrusted His revelation. What Paul is saying in this verse is that the value for the Jew is that he had information about God given to him that the Gentiles did not have. God has revealed Himself to the world through the Jewish people. This is affirmed in the New Testament in NASB “This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness together with the angel who was speaking to him on Mount Sinai, and {who was} with our fathers; and he received living oracles to pass on to you.” , NASB “For I could wish that I myself were accursed, {separated} from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the {temple} service and the promises.”
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NASB “What then? If some did not believe, their unbelief will not nullify the faithfulness of God, will it?” The words translated “not believe” here is the Greek apisteo [a)pistew], the same word that is used in verse 4. The point is not belief versus unbelief, it has to do with being entrusted with something or faithful with the text. It should really be translated “What if some were not faithful?” What if some of these Israelites were unfaithful, i.e. in the task of preserving the oracles of God. Would their unfaithfulness make the faithfulness of God without effect? Or, abolish it—katargeo [katargew], abolish or nullify. In other words, would man’s failures nullify God’s faithfulness and His righteousness? Paul says, absolutely not.
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NASB “May it never be! Rather, let God be found true…” The focal point is that God is true, the one who is perfectly righteous, and He is the one who is going to maintain that righteousness over against man who is not. Paul introduces the concept of truth here, alethes [a)lhqhj], which is parallel to being faithful. And what does that parallel? Being righteous. He is connecting the truthfulness of God to the faithfulness of God to His righteousness. “… though every man {be found} a liar, as it is written, ‘THAT YOU MAY BE JUSTIFIED IN YOUR WORDS, AND PREVAIL WHEN YOU ARE JUDGED.’” If we take this and compare it to it will be noted that there are some differences. That is because the Bible that the apostles carried and had with them and used in the Greek culture was the LXX. The differences are that in in the LXX it is worded a little differently than it is in the Hebrew text. It may not be accurate in translating the Hebrew text but it is still true because God the Holy Spirit in the process of inspiration had the apostles quote from the LXX, which may not be an accurate translation of the Hebrew, and it becomes inspired at that point. NASB “…So that You are justified when You speak And blameless [vindicated] when You judge.” In the LXX the word “blameless” is the word nikao [nikaw], victory. It really has the idea of being vindicated or victorious. In other words, this is a vindication of God’s justice as it uphold His righteous character.

Romans 030b-God's Righteousness Condemns All.

Romans 3:1 NASB95
Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision?
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Romans 030b-God's Righteousness Condemns All.
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This is one of the most important chapters in relation to understanding the nature of man and why the human race is under condemnation from God. Theologically the term that is used to describe this is “total depravity,” but this is a term that is often misunderstood by many people. Total depravity doesn’t mean that everybody is as bad as they could be. The term “total” means that every aspect of our being has been affected by the corruption of sin so that there is nothing that we can do that merits the approval of God, the judicial blessing of God. It does not mean what it is often presented to mean—especially within Calvinist or Reformed circles—total inability. Under the definition of total inability what Reformed theology man is completely incapable, not just of doing anything to please God, which we would agree with, but man does not even have an inclination toward God; he can’t even exercise positive volition toward God; because in a strict Calvinist system volition itself is meritorious. And in that system faith is meritorious. That is why in Reformed theology faith is taken to be a gift.
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In Paul is brining to a conclusion what he has been arguing for and building his case for since . That introduced the concept of the wrath of God. In 1 Thessalonians wrath is still future, still within history but is speaks of the Tribulation. But in Romans the term “wrath of God” is not a future event in terms of the Tribulation, but it is the judgment of God within human history. It can be individual or in terms of a group, a nation; but the wrath of God is the outworking of God’s judgment. And it can be either active or passive. By active means that God brings active, specific discipline and judgment on a group or a nation or on an individual. For example, when God brought the neo-Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar to the kingdom of Judah that was God’s active judgment, the wrath of God on Judah. But when we look at what was going on within the kingdom of Judah during the two or three hundred years prior to that as they went into spiritual decline and degeneration they experienced a host of problems, and all of that was a natural consequence of sinful decisions. That is God’s passive wrath. A lot of the discipline that God brings into people’s lives is simply allowing the natural consequences of their sinful decisions to work itself out so that they experience the bad consequences from bad decisions. So in Paul begins to lay down this concept that the wrath of God is revealed ongoing through history from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. He is not revealing it against those who aren’t suppressing the truth. Those who are believers and are growing are not considered truth suppressers, but those who are rejecting God’s revelation are truth suppressers. Then in the rest of Romans chapter one and the first part of Romans chapter two he shows that the wrath of God works itself out on those who are licentious, those who are immoral, and then on those who are moral—both fail to live up to His righteous standard. Then starting in 2:17 he shows that God’s righteousness also condemns the Jews because even though they were given great privilege and revelation, nevertheless they still violated the Torah.
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As we come to 3:1 he introduces this with a series of rhetorical questions designed to get his audience to think about the implications of what he has said. Having dealt with the issue of circumcision Paul then begins with the rhetorical question: “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision?” These are the first two of ten rhetorical questions that are stated in this section.
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NASB “But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is He? (I am speaking in human terms.)” This lays down another objection and it is related to the idea that if our sin reveals the righteousness of God well let us go sin some more; the more we sin the more His righteousness will be revealed. This apparently was a common charge against Paul. (This is often a charge among people who teach grace) Then he raises the next question which develops the argument even more: Is God unjust who inflicts wrath? The implication of the first statement would be that God would then be unjust by bringing any form of discipline or judgment upon the disobedient believer. The protasis is a first class condition, which means it is assumed to be true. So he is stating a true principle and that is that our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God. When we sin God’s righteousness is brought to the forefront. His righteousness is His absolute standard and because God is righteous He must condemn unrighteousness. When mankind is unrighteous God’s righteousness comes into effect and His justice has to bring judgment, so our unrighteousness does display the righteousness of God. But it is an invalid conclusion to go on to say we must just continue to sin so that His righteousness is made evermore present. Paul phrases these questions in a way that indicates the answer. Man’s unrighteousness shows God’s righteous character and that demonstrates God’s own right to be the judge. This is talking about judgment in time, in history.
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NASB “May it never be! For otherwise, how will God judge the world?” Jewish theology made it very clear that there was a future judgment; God would judge the world. ; ; ; . What Paul has done here in a very logical manner is point out that God can’t judge the world unless He is righteous. He explains that even further [7] “But if through my lie the truth of God abounded to His glory, why am I also still being judged as a sinner?” This is a continuation of the thinking of the objector. [8] “And why not {say} (as we are slanderously reported and as some claim that we say), ‘Let us do evil that good may come’? Their condemnation is just.” That is the essence of this argument. Paul crystallizes what this objection is: is nothing more than an end justifies the means argument, i.e. a right thing done in a wrong way is okay. Ethically a right thing can only be done is a right way. In this verse Paul shows the irrationality of this argument. Paul’s words have been twisted; his teaching on grace has been twisted into the idea that he is teaching licentiousness. He doesn’t even refute it, it is so obvious, so self-evident that the idea that we can do evil that good may come is wrong.
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Then he moves into the conclusion. He raises two questions. NASB “What then?...” What conclusion are we to arrive at? What is the result of this string of thinking? “… Are we [Jews] better than they [Gentiles]? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin.” He says that Jewish people aren’t inherently any better than Gentiles; both are condemned. Jews had a privileged position but it wasn’t a position that brought them salvation. So Paul asks: What is the implication of this argument. The word translated “under” is the Greek word hupo [u(po] which has the sense of being under something but in a variety of contexts it has the idea of being under control or the dominion of something. That is the idea: all are under the control of sin. This is what Paul will develop further in Romans chapter six when he is talking about sanctification—prior to salvation we have no choice but to sin, we are in bondage to sin. Then he is going to strong together a series of verses from the Old Testament to substantiate that this isn’t just something that he has come up with but that this is the teaching found in the Hebrew Scriptures.
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NASB “as it is written, ‘THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; [11] THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD; [12] ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.’” The last line says there is none who does good, not even one. Most of what Paul says here comes from . But where in the Old Testament do we find the statement in verse 10 that there is none righteous, not even one. You will look in vain and you will not find it. But Paul says, “As it is written.” How can that be? Remember the four ways that writers of the New Testament quote the Old Testament. The first way is literal prophecy quoted as having been literally fulfilled—e.g. cf. . Then :”Out of Egypt have I called my son” cf. which was a different kind of usage. Hosea refers to the historical event of the Jews coming out of Egypt and is not prophetic at all. But it is taken and applied as a type, a picture of what will be fulfilled by the Messiah. The third use is when there is a historical event that doesn’t quite match the fulfillment event but there is one element that is similar, and what the writer of the New Testament is saying is that this event is like that which happened before. E.g. when Jeremiah speaks of the mothers of Ramah weeping for their children. The original context of that statement was that the mothers of Ramah were weeping as they saw their sons being led off into captivity to Babylon. But the context of is that the mothers in Bethlehem are weeping because their babies have been murdered by Herod. There are many details that don’t match up but the one thing that is similar is the weeping of the mothers. So it is an application. The fourth use is when it says in that Jesus will be called a Nazarene. That is not found anywhere in the Old Testament. But the people who lived in Judea had a rather low opinion of the intellectual capabilities of anyone up in Galilee, and Nazareth was in Galilee. Nazareth was just a backwater and nothing good could come out of it, and so anyone who came out of Nazareth just had a room temperature IQ. They didn’t have any respect from anyone in Judea, and so it was a sort of proverbial statement that somebody wasn’t really bright or that they were backward. It is a summary. The Old Testament taught that the Messiah would be rejected, despised, and His people would not accept Him. So this is summarized by Matthew into the idea that He would be called a Nazarene. This is what Paul has done in . He has summarized the teaching of , and he summarizes it in the statement, “There is none righteous, no not one.” The first three verses of are repeated verbatim in . Again and again in the Old Testament it is stressed that man does not do good. . The teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures is that mankind does not do righteousness.
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“There is none that understands”—no in-depth spiritual understanding; “none who seeks God”—the Greek word indicates a more intense seeking; “all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one.” In the introduction is the statement, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” If you say there is no God you are a fool. Unbelievers know internally, inherently, that God exists—, “For even though they knew God… [22] professing to be wise, they became fools.” So is stating the qualifications to be a fool. A fool rejects God’s revelation of Himself in His creation and in the Word. states “They are corrupt.” Who are the “they”? Is that all mankind? No. It is the fool who has rejected God. So he is not talking about those who have exercised positive volition toward God and want to know more about God, he is talking about those who have exercised negative volition toward God and have rejected Him completely and don’t want to know anything about Him. When you reject God you have lost the basis for any kind of absolute system of morals or ethics, and the natural end result of that is pure moral relativism; you have no basis for other than some sort of pragmatism and an ethical system is yours only if it works for you. Whenever something else comes along you are tempted to go with another system because there is no external reference point, no external absolutes. What characterizes people who have rejected God? They are corrupt, they’ve done abominable works, there is none that does good.
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NASB “The LORD has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men To see if there are any who understand, Who seek after God.” The conclusion is that there are none who understand and none who seek God. The text does not say there are none who can understand and none who can seek God. There is a big difference. But the way Reformed theology and Calvinist theology reads this is to say none who can understand and that there are none who can seek for God. There is a huge difference between the two. All this verse is saying is that the normal default position here is that they don’t understand and they don’t seek God. But we have to balance that with what Paul said earlier in , : that the know God. There is understanding of God and a knowledge of God at one level, but at a profound level that affects the orientation of their soul there is not that knowledge/understanding of God.
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Then we have to look at the word to “seek” God. The Calvinist will say no one seeks God and they point this to positive volition. The Calvinist will say the unbeliever can’t even exercise positive volition and he can only seek God if God gives them gives them the ability to do that. That is their argument, but that is not what the Scripture teaches.
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NASB “But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find {Him} if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.” This is an expression of positive volition.
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NASB “Seek the LORD and His strength; Seek His face continually.” This is a command.
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NASB “As for you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve Him with a whole heart and a willing mind; for the LORD searches all hearts, and understands every intent of the thoughts. If you seek Him, He will let you find Him; but if you forsake Him, He will reject you forever.” This is a universal principle here. The Lord searches all hearts—believer and unbeliever—to see if there is positive volition there.
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NASB “and he went out to meet Asa and said to him, ‘Listen to me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin: the LORD is with you when you are with Him. And if you seek Him, He will let you find Him; but if you forsake Him, He will forsake you.’” This is restating the same principle related to positive or negative volition.
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, NASB “Glory in His holy name; Let the heart of those who seek the LORD be glad. Seek the LORD and His strength; Seek His face continually.” This is a command. You can’t have a command that is real unless the person who hears it can respond.
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, NASB “Seek the LORD while He may be found; Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way And the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return to the LORD, And He will have compassion on him, And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon.” If the wicked and the unrighteous couldn’t change, couldn’t exercise positive volition, then this would be meaningless. So even the unregenerate can exercise positive volition because it is non-meritorious. Because he wants to know God, God then will provide the solution; and it is God who is the one who grants repentance and gives the blessing of salvation. God is the one who regenerates us, we simply exercise non-meritorious faith in God’s promise of salvation in Jesus Christ.
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, NASB “Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find {Me} when you search for Me with all your heart.”
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NASB “I will go away {and} return to My place Until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me.”
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, NASB “For thus says the LORD to the house of Israel, ‘Seek Me that you may live….Seek the LORD that you may live, Or He will break forth like a fire, O house of Joseph, And it will consume with none to quench {it} for Bethel.”
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Seeking is not a universal negative. When Paul says there is none who seeks this is not saying the no one without exception can have positive volition. (It comes out of the context of where it is talking about the characteristic of the person who says there is no God.

Romans 031b-Total Depravity.

Romans 3:9 NASB95
What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin;
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Romans 031b-Total Depravity.
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NASB “What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin.” The Jews were in a privileged position because God gave them an unconditional, irreversible covenant through Abraham. God was going to bless them, give them the land, and then through them He was going to reveal the Scriptures and they would be the custodians of the Scriptures. There were many other ways the Jewish people were blessed by God and they had information and revelation that was not available to the rest of mankind. But through them it would become available to all mankind, which is why God told Abraham: “Through you all nations will be blessed.” So though they had a privileged position it wasn’t a position that gave them privilege in terms of being justified, it did not make them more righteous.
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Starting at this point the apostle Paul began to go to various Scriptures in order to emphasize his point that this is exactly the testimony of what the Torah is. NASB “as it is written, ‘THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; [11] THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD; [12] ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.’” The clause “there is none who seeks for God” is not an absolute stating that there is no such thing as positive volition and that no one can seek God whatsoever. The Scriptures clearly attest to the fact that man can seek God.
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One question comes up at this point, especially if there has been influence from Calvinistic teaching. Remember the basic teachings of salvation in Calvinism are summarized in the acronym TULIP. T = total inability, which in high Calvinism means man can’t do anything. He can’t even exercise positive volition; U = unconditional election. That means that God chooses people without any condition. (Question: Just because a condition isn’t expressed in Scripture doesn’t mean there is no condition. Condition can be the fact that God chooses people on the basis of faith alone in Christ alone. In His omniscience He always knows who that will be) In strict Calvinism this is purely arbitrary; He just chooses some for heaven and the rest are passed over; L = limited atonement. Since God only chose X number of people to be saved Christ only died for those; the rest are just out of luck. I = irresistible grace. This is taught as meaning that since under total inability you can’t do anything to get saved, can’t exercise positive volition, and under unconditional election you are part of the elect or you are not, that means that those who are chosen can’t do anything to even express a desire to know God, then God has to reach out and draw them to Himself—and they can’t resist it; they will have to yield. That is called irresistible grace.
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The main text that people go to is NASB “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.” This relates to seeking. The high Calvinist position is that you can’t even seek unless God first is drawing you, and then that drawing is irresistible. But in there is clearly a promise of assurance that if you come to Christ He will raise you up at the last day. That is resurrection. But what is this first statement, “unless the father draws him, no one can come to Him”? How does the Father draw him? What the Calvinist people do is con people because they just go to and ignore verse 45 which tells you how God draws you. NASB “It is written in the prophets, ‘AND THEY SHALL ALL BE TAUGHT OF GOD.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.” There is no mention of the Holy Spirit anywhere in here. It doesn’t say God the Holy Spirit is going to reach down and irresistibly pull you into the lifeboat of salvation. John says, “it is written in the prophets.” So he is going to show and apply a passage from Isaiah: “‘AND THEY SHALL ALL BE TAUGHT OF GOD.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.” To understand verse 44 we have to start with the end of verse 45. How do we learn from the Father? Contextually, they shall be taught by the Father. How are they taught by the Father? NASB “All your sons will be taught of the LORD; And the well-being of your sons will be great.” It is a teaching of the Scripture. It is the proclamation of the Word of God that is what draws people. So in the principle is laid down that everyone is taught by God. There may be an intermediary teaching the Word but ultimately it is God who teaches us; and so anyone who has heard and learned Scripture is hearing and learning Scripture from the Father, and they hear the message and come to Him. It is through the Word of God that the Spirit of God draws us to the Father and to Christ. So it is not something that is apart from Scripture and it is not something that is done apart from human volition.
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“ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE,” . Who is it that has turned aside? This is a quote from , so it is the fool who says there is no God. This is just a poetic way of talking about suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They have together become unprofitable, useless. How did they become unprofitable? Because they have rejected God. Paul’s conclusion, also from : “THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.” This word for “good” is the Greek word chrestotes [xrhstothj]. There are other words the Greek uses for “good” but this is a word that has already been used by the apostle Paul and the previous use was in . There Paul talked about the attributes and the character of God. Remember the ultimate reference point in Romans for anything is the character of God. NASB “Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?” Goodness there is chrestotes, so chrestotes is an attribute of God. We don’t normally conclude that in our list of the attributes of God. God’s goodness sort of combines elements of His righteousness, His mercy and His love into the concept of goodness. So none one does good. That doesn’t mean we don’t do relative good. Jesus told His disciples: “You being evil know how to give good gifts to your children.” That kind of goodness is only relative; it doesn’t measure up to the qualitative intrinsic goodness of God. No human being is able to perform at the level of the goodness of God.
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From verse 12 we go into another chain of references that quote from different passages in the Old Testament. When dealing with Old Testament quotations in the New Testament the writers of Scripture are usually quoting from the Bible that had the greatest use in the ancient world, the Septuagint [LXX], so when Paul quotes from the Old Testament he is not using a Hebrew text. The reason that some of the quotations are different from the Old Testament is because they are quoting from the LXX. That raises another question that people have and that is if the LXX mistranslated the text of the original Hebrew, which is inspired? Only the Hebrew was inspired by God but if it is a mistranslation it may not be stating something false, it is just not accurately translating what was there in the original. So God the Holy Spirit still uses it and incorporates those verses under the process of inspiration into the New Testament. At that point it becomes inspired and inerrant truth because God the Holy Spirit has given it the stamp of approval. That is not to say He approves the translation but that what is stated is accurate and without error.
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NASB “THEIR THROAT IS AN OPEN GRAVE, WITH THEIR TONGUES THEY KEEP DECEIVING…” This quote comes from . Psalm five is a lament psalm where the author is in an extremely difficult set of circumstances; they are under adversity. Many times they are under attack from their enemies. There are people who are always against you, especially if you think of yourself as a Christian within the context of what the Bible describes as a warfare—cosmic warfare between the forces of the fallen angels against God and the elect angels. We are in this unseen spiritual warfare that is going on around us and within that context we can expect opposition. The great thing about it is that the Bible reveals this to us and the Psalms teach us how to pray in the midst of adversity. What these psalms tell us is that we need to stop thinking about the adversity and the circumstances and start thinking about the God who is over the circumstances, the God who is able to control the circumstances and is able to give us aid and strength in the midst of those circumstances. In David is under verbal assault from people who truly do wish him harm and wish to destroy him. We don’t know what the circumstances were. Many times in our life we fell like we are in the same kind of situation. We are under assault, under attack, and our circumstances overwhelm us. So these lament psalms have a tremendous amount of meaning for us. We need to read these and to think of them in terms of our own circumstances.
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Notice the methodology. The first three verses are typical in a lament psalm: an address to God and an appeal to God to listen. NASB “Give ear to my words, O LORD, Consider my groaning [meditation]. [2] Heed the sound of my cry for help, my King and my God, For to You I pray.” In other words, recognize my prayer. And he recognizes he is not dictating to God, he is expressing his orientation to God’s authority. He is appealing to God on the basis of the fact that He is God, the King of Israel, and this is a statement of David’s allegiance to God. [3] “Heed the sound of my cry for help, my King and my God, For to You I pray.” This was a morning prayer. There were morning prayers and evening prayers at the tabernacle.
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Then starting in verse four we have a focus on God and His attributes. Notice the order and think about this in terms of your own prayer life. Focus on God. God is in charge; I’m not. And there is an appeal to God to solve our problem. That doesn’t mean that God is going to take the problem away. Sometimes the problem stays but God fortifies us, He gives us the strength, the resources to handle the problem. That comes from the focus of verses 4-7.
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NASB “For You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness; No evil dwells with You.” So in this section he is not only going to focus on God’s attributes but he is also going to give a rationale, a sort of laying the foundation for a rationale for his appeal to God to give him aid. Notice the synonyms he uses here to describe sin: wickedness and evil. This is the point that Paul has been making. If you have a righteous God He can’t have fellowship, any kind of relationship with something that is evil. Evil is not defined in Scripture as being as bad as we can be. The essence of evil in Scripture is not defined by the specifics of what is done, it is defined in terms of rejecting the authority of God. That is what makes evil evil. A lot of good things are done in rebellion against God and God says they are evil.
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NASB “The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do iniquity.” We have these words like love and hate for God in contexts like this; they are not words that talk about emotion. These are idioms that are used to express acceptance and rejection. God is not sitting up in heaven exercising personal hatred for people. God is righteous; personal hatred doesn’t fit with righteousness.
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NASB “You destroy those who speak falsehood; The LORD abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit.” So we have a whole series of sinful acts here that define the person who is hostile to God. Ultimately in David’s thinking you are either submissive to God—which comes under the category of being righteous—or you are hostile to God and are wicked, boastful, evil, etc.
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NASB “But as for me, by Your abundant lovingkindness I will enter Your house, At Your holy temple I will bow in reverence for You.” He expresses his own position. David is not saying he is coming into God’s house because he is righteous. The word there for “temple” is the Hebrew word hekal which is also used, for example, in ; to refer to the house of God. It is the tabernacle. Hekal is the word that is normally used for the temple, but the temple is not built until Solomon and David writes this long before the temple is built, so this is a reference to the tabernacle. We come into God’s presence not on the basis of who and what we are—that is being boastful, arrogant—we come into God’s presence because we know that there is nothing we can do that is going to give us credit with God. So how do we get the kind of righteousness that God can have a relationship with? This is what Abraham did: . Abraham believed God and it was credited/imputed to him as righteousness. How do we get the kind of righteousness we need to come into God’s presence? By trusting in the promise of God to provide us salvation. After Jesus came that is focused on Jesus Christ.
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NASB “O LORD, lead me in Your righteousness because of my foes; Make Your way straight before me.” He is asking for God to deal with the situation, handle the circumstances and lead him forward in the midst of the opposition that he faces.
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NASB “There is nothing reliable in what they say; Their inward part is destruction {itself.} Their throat is an open grave; They flatter with their tongue.” This is the verse that is quoted by Paul. The verse focuses on the characteristic of the unrighteous, the one who opposes David. The part that Paul quotes is just the last part. The LXX translation: “Their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit.” We can see that follows the LXX. The organ is the throat and what it produces is the words, language, slander, malice, bitterness. It is much more vivid to say their throat is an open grave than it is to say they speak lies. What it produces is death, not life. In this first quote the focus is on sins of the tongue. Not only does he say there is none righteous, etc., now he is going to give specifics. He points out that everybody has committed sins of the tongue.
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“THE POISON OF ASPS IS UNDER THEIR LIPS”. Paul expands on this in . NASB “Rescue me, O LORD, from evil men; Preserve me from violent men [2] Who devise evil things in {their} hearts; They continually stir up wars.” Notice the words used here to describe the unrighteous: evil, violent, they plan evil things in their hearts. It is not just a matter of overt sin; it is a matter of mental attitude sin. They are violent, destructive. NASB “They sharpen their tongues as a serpent; Poison of a viper is under their lips. Selah.” Where is the first place that we see “serpent” mentioned in Scripture? Genesis chapter three where the serpent deceives Eve. So when David says they sharpen their tongues, that means preparation. You sharpen an instrument of war to do damage. They are going to be deceptive just as Satan was. The poison of vipers: what comes forth is going to have the destructive death producing quality of an asp. The picture that he is painting here is of the destructiveness of this language.

Romans 032b-No Human can be Righteous. Romans 3:14-20

Romans 3:14 NASB95
“Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;
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Romans 032b-No Human can be Righteous.
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NASB “WHOSE MOUTH IS FULL OF CURSING AND BITTERNESS.”
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speaks of the wicked. It is a psalm wherein David as the psalmist is calling upon God to intercede in the midst of adversity in his life. The way this psalm begins is to articulate two questions, questions that are commonly asked by people we know and there are times when we ask these questions. As we go through life we face injustice—from people, from systems that are unfair and unjust. So we ask questions related to the fact that it seems like there’s no justice, and where in the world is God with all this injustice going on? So these two questions express the fact that we all ask where God is in times of difficulty.
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NASB “Why do You stand afar off, O LORD? Why do You hide {Yourself} in times of trouble?” That doesn’t mean that God hides or that He is not there, it just seems that way to us because we do not always understand what God is doing in our life. And as we go through various circumstances and situations we think God ought to be there doing something, we shouldn’t be going through this. Scripture teaches that we do go through difficult times; we expect that. We live in the devil’s world, a fallen world; life is not what God intended it to be; life in not what it ought to be because of sin.
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In vv. 2-7 David pictures the characteristics of the wicked person who oppresses the righteous. He uses very graphic terms to express this, terms like proud and boastful, people who are blasphemous, arrogant, careless about God, deceitful, destructive; and he paints an extremely dark but accurate picture of the basic orientation of the human heart. NASB “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?”
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The negatives in . The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor. [2] “In pride the wicked hotly pursue the afflicted; Let them be caught in the plots which they have devised.” Every verse in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament that indicts the culture for failing to take care of the poor and the widows and the orphans is indicting not the government but the individuals. The Bible emphasizes that it is the responsibility of the individual, the responsibility of the family unit to take care of the poor and the orphan and the widow, and that it is not the responsibility of the government. The wicked here is talking about an individual and in his arrogance he persecutes the poor, and David prays that they may be caught in the plots that they have devised.
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This brings in an interesting idea that is found in a number of psalms called imprecatory psalms—a psalm where David is petitioning God to bring judgment upon his enemies. Some people say we can’t do that today. Why not? What is wrong with it? As we have seen in Romans chapter thirteen the Old Testament principle is quoted: “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” The idea of vengeance isn’t the idea of personal vendetta, getting personal revenge. The core meaning of the Old Testament word translated “vengeance” has to do with the execution and application of justice. And in these imprecatory psalms that is exactly what David is doing. He is calling upon God in His justice to bring judgment and discipline upon those who are in rebellion against Him. It is not some personal vendetta.
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He explains further why he is calling upon God to allow the wicked to be caught in their own traps. NASB “For the wicked boasts of his heart’s desire, And the greedy man curses {and} spurns the LORD.” He is boastful, arrogant; his heart’s desire is wicked. Greed in is tantamount to one form of idolatry. It is worshipping the things that money can buy rather than worshipping God, so it is a violation of the first commandment in the Torah. [4] “The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek {Him.}…” He is hostile to God, negative toward God. “… All his thoughts are, ‘There is no God.’” God is in none of his thoughts, he never thinks about being grateful to God. We need to thank God for everything that we have and to focus upon that and be grateful for what He has given us. [5] “His ways prosper at all times…” This is the sense of injustice that David has. The wicked seem to be getting away with it. “… Your judgments are on high, out of his sight; As for all his adversaries, he snorts at them.” That is, You are so far away he doesn’t experience divine judgment. No matter how people try to deal with this wicked person, no matter what enemies there are they never seem to be able to take him down and he just looks down upon them. Then we see the motivation of his mental attitude. [6] “He says to himself, ‘I will not be moved; Throughout all generations I will not be in adversity.’” He thinks he is above it all.
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is the quote we have in Romans. “His mouth is full of curses and deceit and oppression… ” When Paul quotes “His mouth is full of curses and bitterness” he is not just saying “his mouth,” this is what rolls off the end of his tongue—a manifestation of the arrogance and the wickedness of his heart, which is what is the focal point of vv. 2-6. So when Paul talks again about the sins of the tongue here in verse 14 he is talking not only about the overt sins of the tongue but also about his mental attitude state. The word for cursing here is a word that can be used in a positive sense or a negative sense. Here it is used in a negative sense where he is probably using God’s name in an invalid way in relation to some sort of oath, so his mouth is full of this wrong oath-bearing, as it were, and bitterness. That is the content of his speech. It is always bringing forth bitterness. “… under his tongue is mischief and wickedness”—a metaphorical way of saying that this is what he produces as a result of the sins of the tongue. So again, we see that Paul develops the indictment of the wicked, i.e. who is not righteous—all mankind.
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NASB “THEIR FEET ARE SWIFT TO SHED BLOOD, DESTRUCTION AND MISERY ARE IN THEIR PATHS, AND THE PATH OF PEACE THEY HAVE NOT KNOWN.” This is a quotation from Isaiah. is focusing again on the indictment that God is bringing through Isaiah to the southern kingdom of Judah because they have rebelled against and disobeyed God. He is announcing that if they do not turn from their idolatry, their arrogance and self-centeredness and turn back to God in terms of obedience then God is going to bring judgment on them and He will eventually remove them from the land. Earlier in Isaiah he goes through a number of the different judgments, including the prophecy that they would be destroyed by the Babylonians. Here as he comes to the close of his prophecy he brings this reminder of their sinfulness.
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NASB “Behold, the LORD’S hand is not so short That it cannot save; Nor is His ear so dull That it cannot hear.” His focus initially is on the character of God, on who God is. God is always the standard, so we have to step back and think about who God is. The first phrase “the Lord’s hand” is a negative way of saying that God’s power is not limited; the hand of the Lord represents His power. His omnipotence is no limited so that He cannot save. In other words, he is saying through the use of these negatives that God’s power is still capable of saving. “Nor is His ear so dull That it cannot hear.” In other words, it is not that God isn’t listening.
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There is a point that is clear from the Scriptures; it is clear from the psalms. NASB “If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear.” Think about this. This is a passage that comes out of the Old Testament Scriptures; it is a clear statement of David that if a person regards sin, if they are the wicked and not the righteous, then God doesn’t hear their prayers. It doesn’t mean that God isn’t aware; in His omniscience He is certainly aware. It means that God is not going to efficaciously listen to that prayer. It is a prayer that will be known to God on one level but God will not respond to that prayer. There is only one prayer that God responds to from the wicked, the unrighteous, from the unbeliever, and that is a prayer that God would give them more knowledge about Him so that they could have a relationship with Him.
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That is what God is saying here in . It is not that God isn’t listening but He is not listening to you because of your sin. NASB “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, And your sins have hidden {His} face from you so that He does not hear.” This is what Paul is talking about in . Because of sin every one of us is separated from God. It happens legally from the moment we are born. We are born spiritually separated from God and every human being is born in that state. Only the grace of God can change that status, and it can only be changed by God as the one who removes the barrier. That barrier is composed of sin. Sin is what separates us and without that problem being solved we can’t, as unrighteous, be in the presence of righteousness.
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Then we have an explanation. NASB “For your hands are defiled with blood …” This is an overt sin related to violence and murder; they are responsible for death one way or the other. “… And your fingers with iniquity; Your lips have spoken falsehood, Your tongue mutters wickedness.” The fingers stand metaphorically for the things that you have produced, the things you have done in your life. All of these different body parts—fingers, lips, tongue—come together to represent the totality of a person, and they have all yielded sin, iniquity, the violation of God’s laws. [4] “No one sues righteously and no one pleads honestly. They trust in confusion and speak lies; They conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity.” There is in the culture not a concern about righteousness. There is a false concern about righteousness. Among some religious people in different religious communities they are hyper-sensitive to righteousness and morality and are just up tight in trying to get into everybody else’s business and dictate a strict moral code. That is the other extreme. There is one extreme of licentiousness and the other of legalism.
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Over the last fifty years the judicial system has become so focused on the rights of the criminal that they have ignored justice for the victim. It has swung the pendulum bar to the other extreme. We all recognize that it is better to let a guilty man go free in some cases than to punish an innocent one. That is true in a theoretical sense, but we have gone far beyond that and let criminals go on the most inconsequential minutia instead of punishing them. Punishment is now built on a concept of rehabilitation rather than punishment and so that fails as well. As a result there is a massive explosion within prisons. We are not concerned about justice for the victim, we are concerned about a pseudo justice for the criminal.
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“No one sues righteously and no one pleads honestly [for truth].” We live in a culture that has rejected the concept of truth, a culture that says there is no truth. Your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth, so let’s just all let one another go and live their life however they think it ought to be lived. If everybody’s truth is truth then how do we know that that is true? That is a self-refuting syllogism; it is just pure irrationality. This is what was happening in Israel.
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“They trust in confusion and speak lies…” This is typically what happens every year in an election cycle. Most people in the country are going to trust in empty words of politicians and the lies of politicians. It is amazing the things that are said by politicians that are knowingly said and known to be untrue when they are said. This says something about the population of the nation that is gullible. It will believe what it wants to believe as opposed to what is right or true, because they have lost any sense of absolute truth or absolute knowledge. “… They conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity.” Conceiving evil has to do with the mental attitude state; bringing forth iniquity is the overt sin, sins of the tongue.
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Again, relating it to the serpent. NASB “They hatch adders’ eggs and weave the spider’s web; He who eats of their eggs dies, And {from} that which is crushed a snake breaks forth.” It is using the imagery of viper’s eggs and a spider’s web to indicate that which produces disaster within the culture and brings death to the culture. [6] “Their webs will not become clothing,…” You can’t dress yourself up in a cloak that is like the emperor’s robe that doesn’t exist. You can’t manufacture a fantasy world and then go live as if it is true. “… Nor will they cover themselves with their works; Their works are works of iniquity, And an act of violence is in their hands.” What they are engaged in is insufficient because.
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Verse 7 is the first of the quotes in . NASB “Their feet run to evil…” This indicates a propensity to evil, a desire to be engaged in evil, an attraction to evil that is not restrained through self-discipline. “… And they hasten to shed innocent blood; Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, Devastation and destruction are in their highways.” The apostle Paul picks up two phrases: “they make haste to shed innocent blood,” which has to do with overt sin and bringing violence, murder into the life; “wasting and destruction are in their highways” is the result of this. It brings emptiness, it is a waste of resources and it destroys the life.
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NASB “They do not know the way of peace, And there is no justice in their tracks; They have made their paths crooked, Whoever treads on them does not know peace.” So Paul pulls from this. In he draws from the first part of , and in v. 16 he draws from the second part of . Then in he draws from the first part of . “They do not know the way of peace.” It destroys inner tranquility; it brings emotional turmoil. One of the reasons we have seen such an increase of emotional problems and so-called psychological problems in our culture over the last fifty or sixty years is not because we are more aware of it, it is because with the removal of moral absolutes and a concern for justice and a concern for truth, which brings with it the teaching, instruction and inculcation of self-discipline and self-control. When that is removed then because there is moral instability in our thinking there is a loss of absolutes and the result is that it brings emotional trauma into the soul. That can only be reversed by bringing those controls back into life the way it is. One of the results of a sinful path () is the destruction of personal peace. Peace in the Scripture, with only a couple of exceptions, speaks of the opposite of violence. Peace is the opposite of worry, anxiety, mental instability, fear.
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NASB “THERE IS NO FEAR OF GOD BEFORE THEIR EYES.” This last quote comes from NASB “Transgression speaks to the ungodly within his heart; There is no fear of God before his eyes.” The last part is picked up by Paul in his string of Old Testament quotations. When we think about this phrase “fear of God” what we should think of is Proverbs. Again and again in Proverbs and in Psalms we have the statement that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, of knowledge. We can’t go anywhere in life in terms of wisdom and knowledge unless that is grounded on the proper acknowledgement of and respect for the authority of God. That is what the phrase “fear of God” relates to. It is not fear in the sense of waking up in the middle of the night and thinking somebody has invaded your home and now you are in a panic. It is fear in the sense of having a healthy respect for authority, a proper respect for authority and for the consequences that come when we violate that authority.
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So the fool has no fear of God. This is characteristic of the fool in Romans chapter one who has rejected God, who has professed himself to be wise. He has become a fool. He has rejected the truth of God and the wisdom of God, and this is the standard orientation of the human heart as Paul said in Ephesians chapter two: we were born dead in our trespasses and sins. But Paul is not going to stop here because this just paints that negative picture. He is going to go on, starting with verse 21, dealing with the fact that even though we are hopeless and helpless in achieving the kind of righteousness that God demands, God has provided the solution. He has a way to give us righteousness. And it is a free gift, and the only way we can ever be right before God is to accept His free gift of righteousness which comes when we put our trust in Jesus Christ as our savior.

Romans 033b-No Human Can Be Righteous.

Romans 3:14 NASB95
“Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;
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Romans 033b-No Human Can Be Righteous.
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This entire section from 1:18 to 11:36 deals with God’s gift of perfect righteousness and it is related to understanding the need for righteousness, which is because God Himself is righteous. Because God is righteous He condemns all members of the human race and this demonstrates the need for every human being to acquire God’s righteousness. So Romans starts with an expression of the need. Why do we need to have righteousness?
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Sometimes there is a discussion that goes on about gospel presentation and whether or not a person needs to understand that they are a sinner. It is not in the sense that we are focusing on sin and emphasizing that as the issue, but to understand why there is a need for righteousness; we have to understand that we lack righteousness. This is exactly how Paul sets this up. The more he talks about the gift of righteousness and how we get it he explains why there is a need for righteousness. That is developed in chapters one through 3:20. Because God is perfect righteousness and He is perfect in His judgment He cannot have a relationship with that which is anything less than His standard of righteousness. Any creature that doesn’t measure up to that is unrighteous by definition.
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This is how Paul develops this. In 1:18-32 the point is that God’s condemnation of the human race is based on the fact that human beings have rejected God and this leads God to delivering them over to their own desires. This ends up in the rest of chapter one focusing on the fact that when man is left to his own desires he is going to drift in two directions. Chapter one focuses on the drift towards idolatry and licentiousness. That is the idea that there is no ultimate authority because man has done away with God as the source of absolutes and so man becomes his own source of absolutes and whatever he wishes to do. It is a downhill slide ethically, morally and spiritually.
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In 2:1-5 the focus is on those who are moral. Just because man is a sinner it doesn’t mean he always sins. It doesn’t mean man is as bad as he can be, there are many good and wonderful things that people can do; but they just don’t measure up to the standard of God. In 2:6-16 there is an emphasis on the universality of human failure which will be demonstrated when God judges everyone on the basis of works. None of those who are judged at the end will be able to measure up in the basis of their own works, their own efforts, their own morality.
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Then there is a shift from dealing with all of mankind, especially in terms of the Gentiles, to a focus on the Jew. This is because in the Jewish tradition the emphasis was on the fact that since God had blessed the Jewish people this gave them a special standing before God. It did but not in a soteriological sense, not in the sense of giving them justification, not in the sense of giving them righteousness. It just gave them more knowledge for which they were accountable. So in 2:17 to 3:8 God also condemns the Jew because of his trust in religious externals and human effort rather than depending exclusively on God’s grace to provide righteousness. Therefore he concludes in 3:9-18 on the basis of several quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures that all are under sin, both Jew and Gentile.
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This leads to the conclusion that in the application of the Law, the Scripture, all the world is guilty before God and that the Law is not the source for justification but the means for exposing the fact that we are all sinners.
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The next section begins in and it explains the reality or the fact of justification, what justification is. Basic definition: justification relates to the imputation of God’s righteousness that is acquired by all who believe in Jesus Christ. Justification is essentially a legal declaration from the Supreme Court of God that we are declared to be righteous. It doesn’t make us righteous, it doesn’t make us moral, it is a legal declaration because we possess the righteousness of Christ.
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NASB “Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God.”
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“Now we know…” This is the Greek word oida [o)ida] which indicates not coming through a process to knowing something but emphasizes more the arrival, having arrived at this point of knowledge and understanding. Many times this word is used in relation to the knowledge of God because God is omniscient, He doesn’t acquire knowledge. When it is used of humans it indicates knowledge that has already been arrived at, and this is emphasized also grammatically because it is in the perfect tense. The significance of the perfect tense grammatically is to emphasize completed action. This could be translated “now we have come to know.” We have come to know his conclusion because he has taken us step by step through a logical chain of argumentation to reach this conclusion.
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Then he indicates the first principle. “… that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law…” When he uses the word “law” here, both is the first line and the second line, in the Greek there is the article with the noun. That is important. The presence of the article here is not just talking about law in general, not law in principle, he is specifically talking about the Hebrew Scriptures. The Greek phrase translated “under the Law” is the preposition en [e)n] with the articular form of nomos [nomoj]. Often in Greek if there is an articular noun, like “the law,” and you are going to say “under the law” or “in the law,” often it will substitute the preposition and drop the article. That is important because if the article is there it means the writer is including the article for precision and to make sure we get the point that he is still talking about the same law that he spoke of in the previous clause. He is being very clear here; he doesn’t want anyone to think that somehow he is slipping over into another nuance of the word “law.” He is not saying those who are under law, as a principle, he is still talking about those who are specifically subject to the Mosaic Law. The Mosaic Law was given to the Jewish people by God through Moses on Mount Sinai when God brought the Israelites out of Egypt. The Mosaic Law was to define the life of God’s people in the land that God was going to give to them.
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God did not give the Law to all of the Gentiles. When we examine the Old Testament Scriptures God never holds the Gentiles accountable to anything that is specific to the Mosaic Law. When God condemns the Jews in the Old Testament and warns them of coming judgment it is because they specifically violate the Ten Commandments. The violate the first commandment through idolatry; they violate the Sabbath commandment and so they are going to be removed from the land for so many years to make up for the sabbatical years violated. When we look at all of the of the condemnations on the Jews we see it is all traced back to specifics of the Mosaic Law. But when God condemns the Gentiles He condemns them for violations related to things not just specific to the Mosaic Law—idolatry was not condemned just in the Mosaic Law, it was wrong prior to the giving of the Law based on the Noahic covenant. So the basis for judgment of the Gentiles was not the Mosaic Law.
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So the principle that Paul is making here is that the law he is speaking of is not law in general but the Mosaic Law which was specifically given to the Jewish people, and by not living up to the Mosaic Law he demonstrates that they are under condemnation for breaking that law.
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“… so that every mouth may be closed…” The word translated “closed” is the Greek word phrasso [frassw] which means to be silenced. The context of this is a courtroom scenario. The significance of this is that someone may claim they are not guilty, that they meet the standard. They marshal arguments to show they are not guilty, that they have enough works and can be declared righteous. The principle that Paul is using here is saying that because you have violated the law you are left defenseless. The defendant has no argument to support his claim that he is righteous. “… and all the world may become accountable to God…” Now he moves to all the world: Jew and Gentile. All are guilty before God. NASB “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”
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NASB “because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law {comes} the knowledge of sin.” What is interesting is that in the English the word “Law” is translated with a definite article, but in the Greek it is ergon nomou [e)rgwn nomou]; there is no article. This emphasizes the quality of the principle of the law, and in context it goes right back to the reference to to the law that he has made in the previous verse. The word “justified” is the same word that is translated “righteousness.” We could translate this for clarity’s sake. “therefore by the works of the law no flesh will be declared righteous in His sight.” It is a judicial or forensic term. So the term that has been used to describe the kind of righteousness that we need to get into heaven is forensic righteousness. It is a legal righteousness. Because we have been declared legally unrighteous because of sin we have to be declared legally righteous. How do we get that declaration? This is what Romans is all about: this gift of declaration of righteousness. It is not a legal fiction, it is accomplished by virtue of a substitution; we get it on the basis of someone else’s qualification. But Paul is simply drawing the conclusion here that by the works of the law (related to Gentiles as well as the Mosaic Law), no matter what kind of morality we try to generate, it is not enough to measure up to God’s standard.
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“… for through the Law {comes} the knowledge of sin.” This is one of several clear statements in Scripture that indicate that the purpose of the Law of Moses was not to give a stair step to heaven, where if they follow these principles they can eventually get enough Brownie points to get into heaven, but to show that under no condition can we ever get enough Brownie points. The Law’s purpose wasn’t to show how to become righteous; it was to show that we can never become righteous. The Law reveals or exposes sin.
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What exactly does the phrase “works of the Law” mean? It is a phrase that occurs eight times by Paul and it is a term that is at the center of a debate that has developed in the last 20-30 years. The idea here is that when Paul talks about the works of the Law he is using it only in a sense of condemning certain Jews who were saying that of you really want to see the blessings of God you have to become Jewish; a Gentile could not be blessed and be saved or given righteousness unless he became Jewish. So what they have done is try to restrict the meaning of it to something that is related only to certain rituals within the Law, not morality or trying to achieve righteousness from the Law.
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The first two occurrences of this phrase occur in this context of : in verses 20 and 28. is a conclusion and is also in conclusion. Verse 28 NASB “For we maintain that a man is justified [declared righteous] by faith apart from works of the Law.” As Paul introduces the opening paragraph of the next section he says, NASB “But now apart from the Law {the} righteousness of God has been manifested…” There it doesn’t say apart from the works of the Law but what Paul means is apart from the works of the Law. Throughout this he is talking about the works of the Law. He talks about the Law but he is assuming it is the works that derive from the Law as the basis for righteousness.
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Then in Galatians. Galatia was a Roman province and the area where Paul went on his first missionary journey was to southern Galatia. Then on his second missionary journey we are told in Acts that he went back and revisited those churches before he headed off to the north-west and eventually to Greece. But when he went to these cities the first thing he would do was go to the local synagogue and begin to teach that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. Eventually there would be some opposition from those who did not accept Jesus as Messiah. There were some who tried to come between the two views and blend things and they said it was great to accept Jesus as Messiah but you have to also keep the Mosaic Law. These were the Judaizers; they tried to make the Gentiles become Jews in order to be saved. In that sense, at a minimal level, when this new perspective on Paul comes along and people say that all works of the law means is that he is just dealing with it at that level they are right in that that is part of it. But they want to restrict it to that, and that is where they are wrong.
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Then there were others who said no only can you not become righteous unless you are circumcised and enter into the covenant with God as a Jew but that also is the basis for your spiritual growth and life afterward. So there were those who said that salvation was faith plus works and there were those who said that sanctification or spiritual growth was faith plus works. As Paul concludes his first argument he comes to NASB “nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.” This is one of the greatest statements in all of the New Testament on justification. He makes it very clear that the works of the Law, following the Mosaic Law in any way, shape or form, is not the means of acquiring righteousness.
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Then in he starts to deal with the second issue which has to do with obedience to the Mosaic Law as the means of spirituality or spiritual growth. NASB “This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?” The answer, of course, is by faith. [5] “So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?” These are contrasts, it is either faith or works of the law. In these passages it is very clear that he is talking about faith, but what he means by the works of the law is more than just simply saying that you had to enter into a covenant relationship with God via Judaism in order to experience either the blessing of salvation or the blessing of spiritual growth.
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Jesus refers to this in when He is being attacked by the Pharisees. NASB “Did not Moses give you the Law, and {yet} none of you carries out the Law? Why do you seek to kill Me?” He was pointing out that even among the Pharisees they couldn’t keep the law.
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So we have the statement: NASB “because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law {comes} the knowledge of sin.”
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Just to summarize this we have to understand the meaning of “works of the Law,” and this involves a grammatical phrase in Greek called a genitive construction. Is this works produced by the Law or works that derive from the Law? The trouble with the genitive construction is that it can pass several different nuances, some of which are a little opposite of one another. There is what is called a noun of action. We usually think of a verb as being action but there are nouns that describe verbal action. Love is a noun of action. We can love someone (verb) but when we talk about the love of God the noun “love” is describing the action of love on God’s part. The love of God can be understood as God’s love for people. “The love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit” is talking about God’s love having been made manifest in us. God is the one the love is proceeding from and that is what is called a subjective genitive. But in other passages the love of God is a phrase that means the love directed toward God. So this Greek phrase has to be understood within the context and it can either be love from God or love to God. If it is love from God, God is the subject performing it; if it is love to God, God is the object receiving it. So it is one or the other.
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The really strange thing is that in our world of anything can mean anything in hermeneutics today or in interpretation, whatever you want it to mean, there has developed a new category in grammar called a plenary genitive. That means that it means both: two opposite things at the same time. That is like saying well it is white and it is black at the same time. It is irrational; it is either one thing or the other. It is important to understand this.

Romans 034b-No Human can be Righteous - Part 3.

Romans 3:14 NASB95
“Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;
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Romans 034b-No Human can be Righteous - Part 3.
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Romans is talking about the righteousness of God. The phrase is first used in —verses 16 and 17 should be read together NASB “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.’” That sets the theme of Romans. Chapter 1:18-11:36 focuses on God’s perfect gift of righteousness through faith alone in Christ alone. The first subdivision in that section is 1:18-3:20 which we have concluded. God’s righteousness condemns all members of the human race and this demonstrates the need for every human being to acquire God’s righteousness. You can’t just get into heaven on your own. We have to have the righteousness that fits God’s standard.
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The first thing Paul says is that God’s condemnation of the human race is based on the rejection of Him by the human race and this leaves God in His justice to delivering the human race/mankind to His own desires. We suffer the consequences of our rejection. The second direction humans move toward is emphasizing their own morality. In one sense they go towards licentiousness or antinomianism and then in the first five verses of chapter two, which is the second point, there are others who move in the direction of morality, thinking that somehow they can be good enough. They recognize that morality is necessary to have a productive, stable society. The third point that Paul makes is that the universality of human failure will be demonstrated when God judges everyone on the basis of works. All will fail; our works aren’t good enough. Fourth, God also condemns the Jew because of his trust in religious externals. The Jews thought that because they were given the Law, that they had the covenant with Abraham signified by circumcision, that this meant that they had an automatic get-out-of jail free card. But it didn’t do that, it just gave them a place of privilege but it didn’t get them saved. Therefore Paul concludes in 3:9-18 that all are under sin, Jew and Gentile alike. He gives a conclusion: the application of the Law is that all the world is guilty before God and that the Law is not the source for justification but is the means of the full knowledge of sin. The next section is the fact of justification—3:21-5:21. Justification will be defined and explained and it is the imputation—the crediting of God’s righteousness that is then acquired by faith alone in Christ alone.
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For those who think that somehow we can get righteousness, or for the Jew who thinks that somehow they can get righteousness through the Law, we have statements from the Torah. In Solomon says there is none righteous, there is not a righteous man on the earth who does good and sins not. Isaiah in 64:6 says all we are like an unclean thing and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.
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Paul builds on this and in verse 20 as he concluded that section stated NASB “because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law {comes} the knowledge of sin.” This doesn’t refer to simply the externals of Jewish ritual. The term refers to obedience to all of the Law and an emphasis on morality. The Law wasn’t given as a means to get righteousness but it is to show that we can’t do it on our own. Man is helpless, hopeless and it is impossible for us to do anything whatsoever to save ourselves.
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There are those who have been influenced by the theology that is called “the new perspectives on Paul.” We have to understand a little about the spasms are of the day so that as we are out there in the world and talking and interacting with people we can understand some of the things that are going on. One of the elements in this new perspectives of Paul idea is that Paul really wasn’t talking about condemning all morality here, he is just condemning by the works of the Law, the idea of ritual of the Law only. But that is not true. The phrase refers to all human efforts, and that is clear from many passages that we have seen.
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NASB “And do not enter into judgment with Your servant, For in Your sight no man living is righteous.” This is a blanket condemnation from the Torah that everyone is guilty of sin. Then in NASB “In truth I know that this is so; But how can a man be in the right before God?” In the context of Job has lost everything. His three friends come to encourage him. They look at him. And the knee-jerk reaction of most people is if you are going through this kind of suffering you must have done something to deserve it. There is this thought in the mind that somehow if a person goes through intense adversity then God must be punishing them for something that they have done. Of course, the flip side would be that someone who isn’t apparently going through any adversity must be richly blessed by God. And that, too, is a wrong and superficial judgment.
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So Job and his three friends start talking. There is this dialogue that goes back and forth between each of them and there is about three series or sets of dialogue where one will take his position, then the other will give his view, and then the other. They are all manifestations of the view that that if God is taking you through this, if He is letting this happen you must have done something to deserve it; you are basically at fault. In a previous dialogue in Job chapter four when Eliphaz, one of his friends, says, “Can mankind be just before God?” He is basically saying no one can be just before God so you deserve this. Job is questioning that, and in NASB “In truth I know that this is so; But how can a man be in the right before God?” That is really the 64,000 question. How are we righteous before God? And that is what Paul answers in Romans and tells us how we get this gift of righteousness.
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Job and his three friends wrestle with the question of why these horrible things have happened to Job. Job questions how he can sit down and reason with God face to face about why this is happening. And he is saying you can’t. Finally, when we get toward the end of Job God begins to speak to Job and answers Job’s question—sort of. He answers him by giving him about a hundred questions and never really explains why it is that Job went through what he went through. The conclusion is that God is omniscient and understands all the billions of elements that go into any event, and we can’t comprehend five of them at the same time. And this is what God is pointing out to Job: where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Where were you when I created the sun, the moon? It is all to point out that God’s magnificence, His omnipotence, His wisdom and knowledge of everything and how puny, limited and finite and restricted our knowledge is that we can’t understand what He is doing; all we are left with is trusting Him. Job says: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” That is not an empty faith, not a leap of faith; it is a faith that is based on the content and the object of the person of God and His character.
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These passages emphasize, though, that no one is righteous before God. This is the continuous testimony throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.
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NASB “But now apart from the Law {the} righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.” The opening phrase “the righteousness of God” is the same phrase we have in 1:17. What does that mean—the righteousness of God? Most of the commentaries take it to refer to the imputed righteousness of God to man. It is not talking about God’s own righteousness but it is talking about the righteousness that God has given to us.
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Quotations: The man who wrote this first one was a colleague of Dr. Chafer’s, for many years the librarian at Dallas Seminary. What he wrote in the Bible Knowledge Commentary on is a little confusing:
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This righteousness is not God’s personal attribute. However since it comes from God [from the source of God] it is consistent with His nature and standard.
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A.T. Roberson:
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A God kind of righteousness. In response to faith this righteousness is imputed by God in justification and imparted progressively in regeneration and sanctification, culminating in glorification when standing and state become identical.
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He has drawn a distinction between the righteousness that is imputed and the righteousness of God’s character. What is wrong with that? The righteousness that we are given according to Scripture is the righteousness of God. These writers aren’t clear on that. The righteousness that is imputed is not something that is quantitatively given to us. And this is one of those areas that is really confusing.
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In Roman Catholic theology they believe (under the doctrine of imputation and justification) that the righteousness that we have as a Christian at salvation is a moral infusion of God’s righteousness. What that means is that you are changed morally. According to Roman Catholic doctrine there is a moral shift that occurs because you are actually given quantitatively the righteousness of God. They would translate, you are made righteous.
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When Martin Luther came to a saving understanding of the Scriptures he did so by reading Romans and he came to understand that this Roman Catholic view of infused righteousness was wrong—that we are not made righteous. The idea that Paul is talking about is that we are declared righteous; we are not actually given anything quantitatively. We are credited with Christ’s righteousness so that the Supreme Court of Heaven declares us to be righteous. The point to be made here is that we can’t distinguish between God’s attribute of righteousness and what is imputed to us. It is legally imputed to us but it doesn’t make us righteous.
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“the righteousness of God is revealed…” There is a second element here that is important for understanding that this isn’t talking about the ongoing imputation of righteousness. That is the verb there that is translated “revealed,” the same word that we have in . The verb that is translated “is revealed” is a perfect tense verb in the Greek. The perfect tense means that the action of the verb is completed action, completed and over and done with at some point in the past. The writer uses it to either emphasize the present ongoing results of that completed past action or he is talking about the completion of the action—emphasizing the fact that is was completed—in a former time. E.g. My mortgage is paid. Present tense “is” but that would reflect of a Greek perfect tense—that it was paid off in the past with the ongoing results so that today I can relax, I don’t have a mortgage to pay off. It seems that the verb here, “is revealed,” is a perfect passive indicative, indicating that the revelation of this righteousness is something that was completed and over and done with in past time so that we are experiencing present on going results. It is a fixed, final past tense idea. That can only apply to the character of God, not to imputation unless people are no longer receiving that righteousness. It is completed.
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The context also indicates this because there is a contrast between verse 17 and verse 18. Verse 17 talks about the righteousness of God and verse 18 talks about the wrath of God. The wrath of God is a figure of speech that is describing the application of God’s justice. So again it is talking about an attribute of God just as righteousness of God must be talking about an attribute of God.

Romans 035b-Getting God's Righteous.

Romans 3:14 NASB95
“Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;
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Romans 035b-Getting God's Righteous.
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As we go down from verse 22 to verse 25 we are talking about basically the same thing. This is the heart of Paul’s explanation of how a person is justified. In these verses we have imputation, justification, redemption and propitiation. In 3:22-5:11 we have the key elements, the focus of justification by faith—how does a person become justified. We pick up the context in verse 21 NASB “But now apart from the Law {the} righteousness of God has been manifested …” There is a lot of debate over what this means, and it is best to understand this as God’s own righteousness. It is a revelation, an unveiling of God’s own righteousness so that we come to understand His righteousness as He possesses it as one of His attributes. “… being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.” Those two terms together are a way that the Jews had of referring to the Old Testament.
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In verse 22 we have this phrase “even {the} righteousness of God,” and we ought to translate that so we understand it—“God’s righteousness,” or maybe even “God’s own righteousness.” Then the next phrase “through faith in Jesus Christ.” This is a dia [dia] preposition in the Greek which indicates the intermediate means of receiving something—“through faith.” It is not because of faith but faith is the means by which we appropriate what Christ did. Faith in itself is non-meritorious. What that means is that in contrast to Calvinistic teaching (not all Calvinists), in contrast to high Calvinists who teach that saving faith is a gift from God. But faith is faith; the merit isn’t in the faith, it is in the object of the faith. It is Christ who died, we are saved on the basis of what we believe; not the kind of faith we have. There is nothing in Scripture that indicates that there is a faith in Christ that doesn’t save because it is not the right kind of faith, or any kind of faith is the right kind of faith. We are saved through faith toward Jesus; He is the object of our faith. “…for all those who believe.” This references the doctrine of imputation. How do we receive the righteousness of God? How does that come to us?
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Historically in Christianity there have been two different ways of explaining this doctrine of imputation. The basic words are interesting. The Greek word for imputation found twice in (accounted, reckoned), 4 (counted) is logizomai [logizomai]. The word in terms of the basis definitions in the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology are to reckon, to think, or credit. The word “reckoned” is a basic old English word for thinking or counting. Arndt and Ginchrich: “It was primarily a mathematical and accounting term.” This is a word that accountant would use as they are working through their credit and debit sheet. Since the word “reckoned” used in comes out of a quote from we also have to look at the Hebrew word, which is chasab and means to think, to make a plan, to make a judgment, imagine, count, impute, calculate, value, regard, think, plan. So we see it is a thought word. It has to do with what you think about something, appraising the value of something. Oxford English Dictionary: the verb impute means a) to “attribute something to someone.” When you attribute something to some one you are assigning a value to them, not necessarily giving them someone or making them something; b) in theology (Oxford says) it means to ascribe righteousness or guilt to someone by virtue of a similar quality in another. “Reckon” in the Oxford English Dictionary has similar ideas: to calculate, to be of the opinion of something, to regard something in a special way. The origin is from the Old English and it originally meant to give an account of items received. So it is an accounting term.
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When we look at the verb to credit something, also in the OED, it means to publicly acknowledge someone as a participant in the production of something, or to credit someone or ascribe and achievement or quality to someone. That is important.
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Two words to consider here: impute and impart. With imparting something I have a glass and I am going to impart water to a cup so that there is now water in the cup. Some concrete substance has actually placed inside the cup. That is the Roman Catholic view of imputation. It is not that you are credited with the righteousness of Christ but the Christian is made righteous. In making someone morally righteous they are morally changed. Imputation as Protestant have understood it means to credit something, for God to forensically or judicially declare a person to be justified. They it why in Roman Catholic theology they never know if they are good enough to have eternal life because the righteousness is imparted each time they participate in a sacrament. Eventually you accumulate enough righteousness to become righteous. That is a very different concept than what the Protestant view was of a forensic or judicial declaration of righteousness. So it is the difference between assigning or ascribing a value to someone—and they don’t change internally but are said to be something. There is no internal change, it is a judicial declaration by God.
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We don’t trust in Jesus and have some sort of internal change that moves us from being unacceptable to being acceptable to God. What happens is we are covered by the death of Christ. We are credited with His righteousness so that we are declared righteous not on the basis of who we are or what we have done but because we are covered by the righteousness of Christ.
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This means for the definition of imputation: It is the action of the justice of God whereby either condemnation or blessing is assigned, credited or attributed to a human being. It is a legal act, a legal declaration, not an actual transformation. There are two categories of imputations: real imputations and judicial imputations.
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L.S. Chafer: There are three major imputations set forth in the Scriptures: (a) the imputation of Adam's sin to the race, on which fact the doctrine of original sin is based; (b) the imputation of the sin of man to Christ, on which fact the doctrine of salvation is based; and (c) the imputation of the righteousness of God to those who believe on Christ.
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These three imputations all relate to what takes place surrounding justification.
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Imputation may be real or judicial. That which is real is the reckoning or imputation or crediting to one of that which is antecedently his…
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That is a difficult verbiage for a lot of people to understand. What is basically means is that there is an affinity or an attraction between what is imputed and to whom it is imputed—like sin to the sin nature. That is what makes it a real imputation.
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…while a judicial imputation is the reckoning to one of that which is not antecedently his.
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For example, when our sin is imputed to Jesus Christ on the cross, because He is not a sinner, there is no affinity or correlation between those two things. He is pure, our sin is sin, and those don’t go together. So that is called a judicial imputation.
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Had the trespass mentioned in been imputed to those mentioned (as naturally it would have been) it would have been a real imputation. That means there is an affinity there. The trespasses were their own and the reckoning of those trespasses to them would have been no more than an official declaration of their accountability. Over against this when the apostle said “Put that to my account he referred to a debt that was not antecedently his own. One that was not related to him. It will be seen, however that the imputation of human sin to Christ is, since it could not be under any circumstance His own, is a clear instance of judicial imputation. Likewise, the imputation of the righteousness of God to the believer, while it provides a ground so equitable that God is said to be just when He justifies those who believe on Christ, does not bestow upon the believer anything which is antecedently His own. In other words, there is no affinity between Christ’s righteousness and our corrupt nature. We are getting something we don’t deserve. This imputation is also easily identified as being judicial in character.
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The principle of imputation is thus seen to be one in which certain realities are reckoned from one thing to another thing. The story is complete as represented in the three major imputations. Man’s need is indicated in the imputation from Adam to his posterity—his sin to all human beings. Man’s salvation is secured in the imputation of man’s demerit (our debt)… our indebtedness is nailed to the cross … and man’s eternal standing and felicity are established through the imputation of the righteousness of God to man when he is placed in Christ by the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
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It is conceded that there are slight differences to be noted in certain particulars when these three major imputations are compared. These are largely developed by the truth that two are judicial imputations and one is real.
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That is tough stuff to try and think your way through and sadly seminary students (at Dallas at least) are no longer exposed to reading through something like that. That is important to develop the thinking skills of a pastor because he needs to be able to understand that well enough to be able to break it down and explain it to people, and not just echo it or parrot it. When we get into words like “it is not antecedently his” what in the world does that mean?
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Pastor Thieme developed this a little further and added a couple of things that were significant. He had four real imputations. Remember that a real imputation means that there is an affinity between what is imputed and the target. So the first is Adam’s original sin to the sin nature of each human being at birth. Pastor Thieme added eternal life to the human spirit, and that is appropriate. Eternal life is imputed to the human spirit—, . But the next two really relate to future events, not justification per se. Blessings in time are imputed to the righteousness of God. Blessings in eternity are then given to the resurrected believer. It is important to understand that concept: the blessings are imputed to the righteousness of Christ. We don’t get blessed because of who we are, the blessing comes to us because of Christ’s righteousness. If it is based on who we are then it becomes works; we get blessing because of what we do. In a sense that is true, but not in a meritorious sense. The way to understand this is that God has already determined all the blessings that He is going to distribute to each one of us in time and in eternity. But whether it is actually given or distributed depends on whether or not we have the maturity to handle it. God is not going to give us something that would destroy us or something that we couldn’t handle. As we grow as believers God distributes blessings to us that He has already given us, but He doesn’t distribute them unless we are mature enough to handle them. That is why it is not based on works but they are given by grace.
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In terms of judicial imputations, which is what we are really focusing on in justification, the first judicial imputation is where our personal sins are assigned or ascribed or credited to Jesus Christ on the cross. He who knew no sin became sin for us. He doesn’t then become a sinner but He is judicially assigned our sin so that He is separated from the Father on the cross. He is separated from the Father during those three hours because He is judicially guilty. He is not actually guilty because He doesn’t become a sinner. But He is judicially guilty because He is being assigned the guilt and the penalty for our sins.
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Then when we are saved Christ’s perfect righteousness is then ascribed or credited to us. We are no more moral than we were before we were saved or better than we were before we were saved. We still have the same qualitatively evil sin nature that we had before we were saved. The sin nature that we have is simply the capacity to evil, the same capacity to evil that Satan has. The only difference is he can actuate his sinful desires in ways we can’t even dream of because he has so much more power and ability than we do.
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1. A judicial concept means to attribute something to a person as a judicial or meritorious reason of blessing or condemnation, reward or punishment. It is what is attributed or imputed to us that is the basis for our blessing or, in the case of Adam’s original sin condemnation and judgment.
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2. To impute sin, e.g. Adam’s original sin, means to credit or assign the guilt of sin to all of Adam’s descendants. Because he is both our federal head as well as the seminal head. Federal headship simply means he is our designated legal representative. Adam’s decision was our decision. Whether we think that we would have made that decision or not is not the point. He is our legally designated representative. Because he sinned that guilt is assigned to all of his descendants. It is not only assigned to all of his descendants legally but the corruption itself is passed on genetically from father to child from generation to generation. Seminal means that there is a physical connection to Adam and a legal connection. So the sin nature is passed on genetically and when we are born God immediately imputes to that sin nature the guilt of Adam’s original sin.
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3. Imputation is very different from impartation. We don’t become righteous. There is character transformation that takes place after salvation as a result of spiritual growth but that is not imputation and justification.
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NASB “But if he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to my account.” This is one example of where Paul uses the word logizomai in a non-theological context, and he is talking about Onesimus the slave who has run away from Philemon. There is a debt, and Paul is saying to Philemon the owner, if he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that, or reckon that to my account. Paul hasn’t done anything against Philemon, so that debt would be assigned to him even though there is nothing on his part that deserves that. That would be an example of a real, as opposed to a judicial, imputation.
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also utilizes a lot of these concepts related to imputation. NASB “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— ” That is the imputation of Adam’s sin. [13] “for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.”
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NASB “namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting [imputing] their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.”
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NASB “How blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity…”
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NASB “BLESSED IS THE MAN WHOSE SIN THE LORD WILL NOT [impute] TAKE INTO ACCOUNT.” This has to do with the fact that we are not judged and condemned for our sin. We are condemned because of Adam’s sin. We are born corrupt. The basis of our judgment isn’t personal sins, the basis of our judgment is Adam’s sin.
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This concept of imputation as the basis for justification is illustrated by concerning Abraham. It is a parenthetical statement that refers back to a previous time than the events in , and it should be translated “At a former time he had already believed in the Lord and he [the Lord] had reckoned [imputed] it to him as righteousness.” That is the basis for Abraham’s justification. Abraham believed God, that He was able to provide a savior, and God imputed to him His righteousness.
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The best illustration we get from this in the Old Testament is from . This is a heavenly scene. Zechariah is the one who is speaking and he is speaking about God. [1] “Then he [God] showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD [2nd person of the Trinity], and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. [2] The LORD said to Satan, ‘The LORD rebuke you, Satan! Indeed, the LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?’”—someone destined for condemnation but has been saved. [3] “Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and standing before the angel.” This is a picture of the high priest who has on his contaminated, defiled garments just as we are born contaminated and defiled by sin, and there is going to be a removal of that. [4] “He spoke and said to those who were standing before him, saying, ‘Remove the filthy garments from him [the payment of the sin penalty at the cross].’ Again he said to him, ‘See, I have taken your iniquity away from you and will clothe you with festal robes’”—the covering of righteousness. Joshua doesn’t change but he now becomes externally cleaned, which is comparable to the imputation of righteousness. [5] “Then I said, ‘Let them put a clean turban on his head.’ So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments, while the angel of the LORD was standing by.” This is a physical depiction of what happens in this somewhat abstract concept of imputation of righteousness.
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NASB “even {the} righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe…” Notice: believe plus nothing. [23] “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” None of us can measure up to God’s standard. The glory of God is His integrity—His righteousness and His justice. [24] “being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus”—if we are justified through redemption, what happened first? Redemption, the payment of the price.

Romans 036b-Redemption and Propitiation. Romans 3:14-20

Romans 3:14 NASB95
“Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;
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Romans 036b-Redemption and Propitiation.
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We are in Romans chapter three. The last couple of lessons we've gone through . "But now the righteousness of God," that is, God's own righteousness. I have belabored this point in terms of understanding the genitive construction in the Greek. Is this righteousness from God or is this God's own righteousness. I believe it is God's own righteousness that is given to us. This speaks of His own righteousness, His essence. "Apart from the law it is revealed." That which is His character now is revealed or disclosed. "Being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets" - that indicates that this is revealed through the Word. The Law and the Prophets relates to the Old Testament Scripture. Verse 22 "even the righteousness of God (the same righteousness, has to be His essence), "through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe." "To all and on all who believe. For there is no difference". The phrase in the English "to all and on all who believe" is a textual variant - it is simply "to all who believe" in the Greek. The other phrase is probably not in the original. "For there is no difference".
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We talked about this last time. How do we get the righteousness of God? We get it through imputation. This is so important to understand that we as fallen human beings have no righteousness on our own. Even the best that we can do does not measure up to the high standard of God's perfect righteousness. says "But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags." I keep emphasizing this - He does not say unrighteous deeds but righteous deeds. The best that we have to do is just garbage in God's sight. So we cannot do anything to make ourselves righteous.
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Then we have the righteousness of Christ on the cross. Our sins were imputed to Him, credited to Him. I pointed out last time that this is what is called a judicial imputation because there is no natural affinity between our unrighteousness and His perfect righteousness. So it is a judicial assignment of our sin to Christ as a substitute. In the same way, His righteousness then is going to be credited to us. , "For He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." So that we are declared righteous - that is what it means.
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It is so important to recognize this issue that it is a declaration of righteousness - we are not made righteous. You see the little cliche that shows up on a bumper sticker "I'm a Christian. I'm not perfect, I'm just forgiven." There are so many people who do get the idea that if you are a Christian, then that means that somehow you are just morally better than everybody else. And indeed within Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, this is their view. It is what they also call infused righteousness. It is not a declaration of righteousness: it is that God actually transforms the individual Christian so that he is not unrighteous anymore. He becomes righteous, so that he is morally changed. This is not what the Scriptures teach; that is not the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. The emphasis is on a forensic justification that Christ's righteousness is judicially assigned to us in the same way that our unrighteousness was assigned to Him. So that just as He did not actually become a sinner on the cross but He bore the penalty for us, so we do not actually become righteous, but His righteousness is assigned to us. When God the Father looks at us, He sees the righteousness of Christ that covers us and declares us to be righteous.
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Last time I pointed to the imagery that we have back in the Old Testament in that is so important to understand. Zechariah sees the vision of Joshua the high priest, not Joshua the general, after the return from the Babylonian captivity standing before the Angel of the Lord. That has got to be the preincarnate Christ because all the way through the Old Testament, the Angel of the Lord is viewed as full deity and is clearly seen as a different personage and person than the Father. Joshua worships the Angel of the Lord, offers sacrifices to the Angel of the Lord, calls the Angel of the Lord Yahweh. The Angel of the Lord is seen as fully divine but distinct from Yahweh.
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This is also seen, as a matter of fact, in where the Angel of the Lord answers and speaks to the Lord of hosts. So there is a conversation between the Lord of hosts (Yahweh of hosts, Yahweh Sabaoth). The term "sabaoth" is what you sing in "A Mighty Fortress is our God." It is the Hebrew plural word for armies. Hosts is just an antiquated English word. And so in , the Angel of Yahweh answers and says, "O, Yahweh Sabaoth, how long will You not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah." And the Lord answered him. So you see in that there is this conversation between two divine personages. Now we understand that from the lens of the New Testament that that is God the Father and the preincarnate Son, Jesus Christ. In the first few verses of , when you have that imagery of Joshua the high priest standing before the Angel of the Lord, it is the Angel of Yahweh who is being challenged by Satan as to how God can accept Joshua the high priest because his garments are unclean. This is a picture of the fact that he is a sinner. His filthy garments are removed and clean garments are put on him. This is a great picture, a great visual image of what imputation is and the declaration of justification.
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Try to think in these terms when we think through these basic doctrines. They are all prefigured in the Old Testament; they are all taught in the Old Testament. So when you think of imputation and justification, you ought to think of and the clothing of the high priest, and you ought to think of Abraham in . We will see that redemption is tied to the Exodus event, and propitiation is tied to the ark of the covenant. If you just keep these images or historical events in your mind, it helps to understand what these abstract things are. It is great to see how in the process of revelation, God started off in the Old Testament giving pictures and taking historical events and assigning certain significance to them as also a symbol of what He does. When we get into the New Testament trying to understand more abstract doctrines, then we already have these pictures there to help us to understand what is going on. So there is a declaration of righteousness and that is what we mean by justification. The blessing of God then flows to us not because of what we do but because of the righteousness of Christ which we possess.
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states "even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ". It becomes ours through faith in Christ "to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference". Then verse 23 is really a parentheses within the main line of thought - the verse we have all learned, hopefully - "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". The "glory of God" is often a term for the entire essence of God: all that God is. The main line of thought is "even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe, ... (skip down to verse 24) being justified". That is really a causal participle, a present participle, and it should be understood with a causal sense "to all who believe because they are justified freely by His grace." So justification is the free gift ("justified freely by His grace"). "Freely" is not an adverb; it is the word for gift, dorian. They are "justified as a free gift by His grace through redemption." So what comes first? If you have a statement saying that you are justified through redemption, what comes first - justification or redemption? Redemption comes first. Redemption establishes the foundation upon which justification can take place.
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I want to go back into the Old Testament and look at what it means to be redeemed. Here is where I want to go with this. There are three things that have to happen in order for any person to be able to get into heaven. The first thing that has to happen is the sin penalty has to be paid. In God said that if Adam ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, he would immediately die, he would certainly die. That was a legal penalty (separation from God) that the whole human race is under condemnation because of that. So there is a legal penalty problem. The second thing is that as a result of that legal penalty being enacted upon Adam, all of Adam’s descendants are born spiritually dead – that is the consequence of that penalty. That is a personal reality as opposed to a general, legal reality. Every person that comes into this earth, except for Jesus because of the virgin birth, is under condemnation, has a sin nature, and is spiritually dead. A spiritually dead person can’t get into heaven.
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The third problem is that they are unrighteous. Now we have already seen how the unrighteousness problem is solved - by faith. But the spiritual death problem is also solved by faith because when we trust in Christ, then God the Holy Spirit makes us alive again. That is called regeneration: we are born again. But only those who believe in Jesus are born again, and only those who believe in Jesus are justified. The first problem, the legal problem, is something that is solved for everybody. The sin penalty is paid for everybody; everyone is redeemed. God is propitiated for everyone. Those are really two sides of the same coin. One is manward - redemption pays the price for man. Because that price is paid for man, God's righteousness and justice are then satisfied. So redemption is sort of a manward event that occurs for all, and propitiation is a Godward event that relates to every human being. That just pays the legal penalty. The penalty is paid, but what is the problem? You are still spiritually dead and still lack righteousness. If those two problems are not repaired, then you are still under condemnation and still go to the lake of fire, not for your sin, because that is paid for, but because you have rejected God-s solution. That is the thrust of : "He who believes in Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed (not because you have sinned because the sin is paid for) in the name of the only begotten Son of God."
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So now these are the two words that you find in the Old Testament related to the concept of redemption. Each one has a little different nuance. The first one is gaal." "Gaal shows up throughout most of the Old Testament and emphasizes the fact that God redeems through a kinsman redeemer. This is depicted in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament where Ruth-s husband has died, her father-in-law has died, and she is left with just her mother-in-law. She is not Jewish; she is Moabitess, but she is a believer. She aligns herself with her mother-in-law Naomi, and she goes to live in the land with her. God is going to provide for her through Boaz who is her goel, her kinsman redeemer. It depicts the fact that to be redeemed, we have to be redeemed by someone who is like us. An angel cannot redeem us, a God cannot redeem us as a pure deity, but an human being has to redeem us.
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The word padah has the meaning to purchase or to ransom. Now the one thing that ought to come into your mind every time you hear the word redemption is the payment of a price. That is the fundamental idea. Redemption means to pay a price, the sin penalty. Imputation is to credit somebody with righteousness. Justification is to declare someone righteous. Propitiation is to satisfy the justice of God. So connect those words together. Now padah has the idea of paying a ransom or paying a price to set someone free from a state of slavery or from being under some legal penalty. The end result is that they are set free.
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There are about seven words that are used for redemption in the New Testament, and they each have a little different emphasis. The first six words on this slide are all built off of a root syllable in the Greek, lu. Its core semantic meaning is to release something. It is used of divorce in 1 Corinthians. In the form of these words on this slide, based off the noun lutron [lutron], you can add prefixes such as antilutron [a)ntilutron] or apolutrosis [a)polutrwsij]. These slightly change the emphasis of the word. The verb is lutroo [lutrow]. Each of these has a different sense to it, but the main idea is deliverance by the payment of a price. If you look at (d), the verb lutroo [lutrow] means to pay a ransom price, to liberate somebody from slavery or imprisonment, but it always has the main idea of paying a price. The noun lutrosis [lutrwsij] refers to redemption. The noun lutrotes [lutrwthj] refers to the redeemer, the individual who does the redeeming, the one who pays for redemption. antilutron [a)ntilutron] (anti is the preposition for substitution) emphasizes the substitutionary sense of the payment. Emphasis in all these words has to do with paying a price on behalf of someone else in order to set them free.
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Then there is a second word group from the root agorazo [a)gorazw] or agora a)gora]. The agora in Greek was the marketplace. So again it has this idea of a purchase, to buy something in the marketplace. The verb agorazo means to purchase something. exagorazo [e)cagorazw] means to purchase something out of the marketplace and was used for purchasing the freedom of a slave or liberating a slave. The main idea of redemption has that idea of paying a price to remove a penalty. That relates to removing the sin penalty from the human race.
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It is used in a number of important passages. , "He (God) will redeem (padah, emphasizing the payment of a price) his soul from going down to the Pit ("Sheol") and his life shall see the light." So instead of death, there is life because of redemption. speaks to God in prayer. "Arise for our help, and redeem us for your mercies' sake." Emphasizing that redemption is based on mercy, not based on works in the Old Testament but ultimately on God’s mercy.
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Now one of the first places that we find an emphasis on redemption in the Old Testament is in Exodus. The picture of redemption (and I reference this all the time when we have the Lord's Table) is grounded in the Exodus event. When the Israelites are redeemed or freed from slavery, that becomes the picture in the New Testament of how God liberates us, redeems us from the slavery to sin. In we read "Therefore say to the children of Israel (God is speaking to Moses): 'I am the Lord; I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, I will rescue you from their bondage; and I will redeem (there is the word gaal, indicating it is going to be accomplished through a kinsman redeemer) you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.' " Then we have in (after the Exodus event, the plagues and deliverance through the Red Sea) "You in Your mercy (loving-kindness) have led forth the people whom You have redeemed; You have guided them in Your strength to Your holy habitation." What is the basis in this verse for their redemption? Is it because they were such good, wonderful people? No. Is it because they obeyed the Law? No. The Law had not been given yet. What is the basis for their redemption? Their redemption is based on the loving-kindness of God - His chesed, His free grace, His faithful, loyal love to His covenant. So it is on the basis of his loving-kindness that He led the Israelites out of Egypt; He redeemed them. He redeemed them on the basis of "with an outstretched arm," which always refers to His omnipotence, His power, and "with great judgments." The redemption is accomplished through the judgments that God brings upon the Israelites which culminates in the last judgment which is the Passover, Pesach. The Passover is a picture of the lamb that dies who is the redemption price for the firstborn. When the lamb is sacrificed, the blood is applied to the door face. The Lord passed over the house, and the firstborn did not die.
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and 15:13 speak of redemption. It is used a lot in Deuteronomy. In Moses says "Because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers." Notice it is not "because you are such wonderful people or obeyed the Torah or because you have done righteousness." That’s not the reason God redeemed them. He redeemed them first of all because He loved them. Second, because of the oath He swore to their forefathers. It is based on God’s character, not on what man does. Never, ever in Scripture is man redeemed on the basis of human works or human effort.
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Continuing in "The Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage." "I prayed to the Lord, and said: 'O, Lord God, do not destroy Your people and your inheritance whom You have redeemed through Your greatness.' " God is the one who redeems them. We don't redeem ourselves. also speaks of "God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of bondage." "You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore, I command you this thing today." So again and again, God is the one who redeems. Redemption becomes one of His major characteristics, one of the major identifiers of God in the Old Testament. "Your people Israel, whom You have redeemed." is another one.
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In Yahweh is described here. " 'Fear not, you worm Jacob, You men of Israel! I will help you,' says the Lord and your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel." This is one of the major titles for Yahweh in the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah. He is the goel, which emphasizes that He has to be a kinsman. There is an implied prophecy here that the one who comes to redeem must be a human being. You have passages like the prophecy of that He would be born of a virgin. also indicates that the Redeemer would come as a human being. "Thus says Yahweh, your Redeemer (your goel), the Holy One of Israel." "For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand of one stronger than he." It is always God who performs the work of redemption - from his grace, His chesed or His loving-kindness, from his mercy. That is redemption.
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The New Testament has the same idea. It describes salvation from the viewpoint of the legal penalty of sin that is paid for by Christ on the cross. Redemption looks at the human race as being shackled by sin, shackled as a slave to sin, under the penalty of sin; and Jesus is the one who pays that redemption price.
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When you think of the way this passage is structured in "being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." The redemption price is paid, and it is on that basis that God then can justify us. So redemption is for all; justification is for those who believe.
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develops this further. Verse 24 "Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is Christ Jesus, (25) whom God (the whom refers to Christ Jesus) set forth." Jesus Christ is set forth, put on display by God "as a propitiation by means of His blood." Just a couple of things to remind you of in terms of how we understand this verse. When we read passages that talk about the blood of Christ, it is not that His physical blood is that which pays the penalty. The term "blood of Christ" is a figure of speech to describe death, just as in the Noahic Covenant. The shedding of blood is a term, an idiom, for causing death, and it indicates a violent death. In the Noahic Covenant, it is murder. In , it is Jesus "set forth as a propitiation by His blood."
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Words such as imputation, justification, propitiation, and redemption are not found in a lot of the newer, more modern translations. Some of these words are found in the NASB. NASB, I think, is aimed at the 9th or 10th grade level for reading. The KJV is for the 12th grade, but I don't know too many 12th graders or too many others who can understand it. NASB is modernized; the NKJV is modernized. But these usually are more advanced, a little more difficult to understand because of the vocabulary. So you have the popularity of a lot of not only translations but also paraphrases. The difference between a paraphrase and a translation is in a translation the translator is sitting down with the original Greek or Hebrew in front of him and translating it from the Greek or Hebrew into English. A popular paraphrase is the Living Bible.
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I remember going to camp back when I was a little kid, and we were encouraged to buy the first one that came out - the Living Letters, the epistles of Paul. That is great if you just want to read but not good to study. If you are just reading to get the gist of what is being said, a paraphrase is good. It gets it down into a little more everyday language. Ken Taylor, who was a Dallas Seminary graduate and who did the Living Bible, started this because he was reading to his children when they were little, and they couldn't understand the KJV. He would write out what he was going to read to them at night and put it into words that they could understand. So he is not working from the original languages; he is just paraphrasing the translation and putting it into a little more useable vocabulary for a younger audience.
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I remember when I was a senior in college, I realized I didn't know the Old Testament that well. I did not have a NASB until after I graduated from college; I still had the KJV. I would try to read through the Pentateuch, and you would just get lost. It was hard to read it just to get a gist of who's who and what's what and where's where and how to understand it. So I went down to a little Bible bookstore and gift shop that was around the corner from the campus. I was looking at Christians books, and they had this little thing called "A Digest of the Old Testament," a sort of Reader's Digest version of the Old Testament that was taken from the Living Bible. It was abridged and condensed, but it was still large and had most everything in it. It put everything into chronological order so that you were not reading things that were out of order. I remember it took me a couple of months to read through the whole thing. It was the first time I had a grasp of what was going on in the Old Testament. I was not reading it to study; I was reading it to get an understanding of the flow of history, of people, and of events so that I could have a better grasp of the Old Testament. That is very helpful.
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We have lost a generation today who can't think theologically for a lot of different reasons, one of which is they have a dumbed-down Bible with dumbed-down vocabulary. These words like redemption and propitiation are not new. I remember sitting in first semester Theology Proper in the Spiritual Life at Dallas Seminary. There was a guy sitting next to me that was about 43 or 44 and a retired Naval commander. He had just gotten out of the Navy and had come to seminary. He was looking at words like omniscient, omnipotent, immutable, and his brain was turning inside out. He had not been taught well in any church, which happens with a lot of guys in the military because they move around so much. He just was not exposed to any kind of technical biblical or theological language. So he was just as lost as he could be and having so much trouble getting through his theology lessons.
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This is a problem today. We have taken these words out and put in more user-friendly words. Then later on people do not move from childhood to adulthood in terms of their reading and never learn these words. It is very important to have a vocabulary so that you can think clearly and precisely in any field of endeavor. So often today that is sort of looked down on especially when it involves the Bible. Yet most people go to a doctor who tells them the kind of cancer they have and what the treatment will be. They have never heard any of those words before, so they write them down and then look everything up on the Internet. They do not have a problem learning that vocabulary when it really matters to them. But the Bible does not matter to them, so we are not going to learn those big words. We will go down the street to some other church.
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"God set forth (Jesus) as a propitiation by His blood" - that means by His death. Propitiation is a word that basically means satisfaction. The justice of God has to be satisfied. So we paraphrase this as "God set forth Jesus as a satisfaction by His death." His death satisfies the justice of God. Then He says "through faith to demonstrate His righteousness." So that the fact that Jesus goes to the cross to die demonstrates that God is righteous. God just cannot say, "Well, you have sinned; you have made a mistake. You can do better tomorrow. We are not going to have any serious penalty." There is a serious penalty involved, and it has to be dealt with. God cannot compromise His own integrity by reducing the payment, the legal penalty for sin, unless it is paid. That is the purpose of propitiation: it is directed towards the justice and the righteousness of God.
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The first word that is involved is the Hebrew word kaporeth, and that relates to the mercy seat that is on the box that was the ark of the covenant. The basic Hebrew word for atonement was kaphar. This is where we get the term Yom Kippur. Starting tomorrow night at sundown on the Jewish calendar, all your Jewish friends will be going to synagogue for Kol Nidre, the evening service before Yom Kippur on Saturday. In Judaism, this period of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called the Days of Awe or the High Holy Days. It is a time for reflection upon your sins, seeking God's forgiveness on the basis of whatever your good deeds are, and hoping that you have performed enough good deeds so that your name will be inscribed in the Book of Life. Yom Kippur is a heavy day in Judaism; it is a day of soul searching and trying to make penance to God for one’s sins in preparation for the coming new year, so that you will be begin the year with your name inscribed in the Book of Life.
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That is not how the Day of Atonement began in Exodus; that is how it was transformed under the influence of Pharisaic theology coming out of the 1st century after the destruction of the temple in AD 70. What we are focusing on is the original meaning assigned to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Kpr - those are the three consonants that are at the root of kaporeth. You have an ending eth, but the root is kpr for atonement. Kaporeth refers to the mercy seat; it is the place where ritual atonement took place annually for the nation where they are cleansed.
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There has been a lot of interesting work done on the meaning of this word over the last 30-40 years. In a lot of our Bibles, the word group kaphar is usually translated with the English word atonement, which was a word that was made up or coined to explain this word. You do not find atonement anywhere in the New Testament. It is the English word "at-one-ment." It really sounds more like reconciliation. What is interesting is the word that shows up more in the Septuagint as a translation of kaphar is katharizo, which means cleansing. It has to do with the cleansing of sin. At the end of the year, there is a sacrifice made on the Day of Atonement by the high priest, and the nation is cleansed of its sins, the unintentional sins. The intentional sins are left in the hands of the grace of God, but the unintentional sins are cleansed. It takes place when the high priest brings the blood of the lamb from the atonement and places it on the mercy seat.
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So God's instructions are given in . The word for mercy seat is the word kaporeth. "You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold." Now it is interesting that the box for the ark of the covenant is made out of acacia wood, which is very hard, dense wood not prone to rot or to any kind of corruption. When you are in Israel, you can see a lot of acacia trees. I understand in California and the West, there are places that have acacia trees. It is a great picture of the humanity of Jesus Christ that was sinless. It is covered with pure gold - a picture of His deity. So you have a combination of the gold and the wood which depicts the hypostatic union: the undiminished deity and true humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The mercy seat itself is pure gold. It is 2-1/2 cubits long (which is about 45 inches; a cubit was about 18 inches) and 1-1/2 cubits wide (27 inches). On top God said, "You shall make two cherubim ("im" is the Hebrew plural) of gold; of hammered work you shall make them at the two ends of the mercy seat." (19) "Make one cherub at one end, and the other cherub at the other end; you shall make the cherubim at the two ends of it of one piece with the mercy seat." (20) "And the cherubim shall stretch out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and they shall face one another; the faces of the cherubim shall be toward the mercy seat." That is really important because something is going to happen on that mercy seat once a year. That is where the cleansing, the atonement takes place for the nation.
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I picked up a couple of interesting new books on the temple that were written by a couple of rabbis that have come out just in the last two years. They are fascinating. The full color artwork in these books is unbelievable. They have detailed pictures of the joints and how every little detail was made. If you remember from our study in Hebrews, there is some discussion as to whether or not the altar of incense was just outside the veil separating the outer holy place from the inner holy of holies. Based on the prepositions used in Hebrews, some say it was just inside the veil where the high priest could part the veil a little bit and deal with the incense without going inside the holy place. In both of these books written by Jewish writers different from anything else I have ever seen, they stick the altar of incense at the entryway to the holy place. So the very first thing you encounter as a priest as you walk into the holy place is the altar of incense. Then there would be the table of showbread and the menorah. One thing I would like to find out about is why do they move it? Maybe it is because it is based on a rabbinic tradition that developed that is post-biblical. Both books are based on not only what the Scripture says but what the later rabbis taught.
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In , God says "And there I will meet with you (speaking in relation to the high priest), and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of the Testimony, about everything which I will give you in commandment to the children of Israel." Here is a picture of the mercy seat and the two cherubs overlooking it. Now what is the problem with the artist's depiction here? It is not one piece. The cherubs were to be all one piece. Most other depictions that I see are like this one where their wings touch at the top, completely covering the mercy seat. This is where the action occurs.
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Cherubs in the Scriptures are always associated in context related to the righteousness and justice of God, or His holiness, which is usually thought of as a combination of His righteousness and justice. Inside the box originally, or some think just in front of the box, there was the table of the Testimony (the 10 commandments, the tablets that had been broken by Israel), Aaron's rod that budded (speaks of the rebellion against the leadership, the priesthood that God provided), and a pot of manna. Some think that the tablets were the only things inside the ark, and the others were set out in front of it. We have gone through all that in our study of Hebrews.
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The picture is that the high priest would bring the blood from the sacrificed goats. There were two goats taken - one is killed, and the one who has the sins identified with it is taken out into the wilderness. He is taken far, far away so that he cannot wander back, picturing the fact that our sins are completely removed from us. Then the blood from the sacrificed animal is placed on the mercy seat as a picture of our sins being atoned for, being cleansed. It used to be that people would say the meaning of the word "kophar" is covered. In some places you have a synonym or homophone. In , Noah "kophar’d" (covered) his ark with pitch. But pitch is not the idea we have in other places, so that is considered to be a separate word now. This word that is used here is understood to emphasize cleansing.
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Jesus Christ, therefore, is displayed publicly as a propitiation. He is the mercy seat. The Greek words hilasmos [i(lasmoj] and hilasterion [i(lasthrion] are two forms of the Greek word for propitiation or the mercy seat. Jesus Christ is pictured as the mercy seat; He is the one who makes atonement. At the cross, God solved the problem of His righteousness and justice, so it is Jesus who is the propitiation with God. "Whom God set forth (displayed publicly) as a propitiation by His blood through faith." This was to demonstrate God's righteousness because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed.
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The sins that were committed in the Old Testament are passed over by God. The payment has not actually been paid yet; it is paid in AD 33. But what about all the sins committed from the time of Adam until the cross? God passed over that knowing that at the cross, they would be paid for. It is not as if their salvation was ever in doubt, as if it was uncertain that it would be paid for, because God in His omniscience knows exactly what will take place. Until those sins were actually paid for, the Old Testament saints did not have access to heaven.
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That is why Jesus between His death and resurrection goes to Sheol and Abraham's bosom and announces His victory, makes the victorious proclamation that He has paid the penalty for sin (the defeat of Satan). Then he takes Paradise, Abraham's bosom, to heaven. Once the sin is actually paid for on the cross, then the Old Testament saints have direct access to heaven. Jesus Christ is viewed as the Priest who makes propitiation. "Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren (concept of kinsman redeemer, the goel) that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people." We are told the extent of this in "And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins (believers), and not for ours only but also for the whole world." So that the propitiation and redemption are actually taken care of for all people. The issue is not their sin; the issue is faith in Christ because only by believing in Christ are you born again and receive imputed righteousness and justification. "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Again, the motivation is the love of God, not who we are or what we have done.
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Back to "Whom God set forth (Jesus) as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness (God's righteousness has to be satisfied) because in His forbearance (His patience) God had passed over the sins that were previously committed." There had to be judgment for sin, and that is what took place on the cross.

Romans 037b-Righteousness, Justice and Love

Romans 3:25 NASB95
whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed;
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Romans 037b-Righteousness, Justice and Love
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We are in . Last time we got through the basic part of . We are going to go back and pick up a couple of ideas, cover a few things I sort of skimmed over at the end last time. As we go through the rest of chapter three, I want to pick up on some key ideas that are presented. This is really a tremendous text, and as we look at this, one of the most significant passages in all of the Scripture for understanding the character of God is and on into 26.
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Verses 27-31 just provides us with a good review and transition into the next chapter, which gives an illustration of justification through Abraham. Always try to think what does the Bible use for a major illustration to teach the point? It usually uses some concrete, historical event from the Old Testament; an object, like the ark of the covenant, the Day of Atonement, the mercy seat; or an event in a person’s life to teach truths that to many people can be pretty abstract.
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speaks about Jesus “whom (personal relative pronoun) God set forth as a propitiation by means of His blood,” which is a reference to His spiritual death on the cross. “…through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed.” Last time I spent most of my time looking at two key doctrines mentioned in verses 24-25. Redemption – payment of a price, payment of the penalty for sin, the legal penalty God assigned. Propitiation – satisfaction that was accomplished on the cross, that Christ’s death satisfied the righteous demands of God and satisfied His justice. Then God would be free to save us because God was not going to compromise His righteousness and His justice in order to bring us to salvation. This is a very important passage to understand what God does in terms of His justice, righteousness and love.
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We live in a culture today that has a major problem with understanding righteousness and understanding absolutes. As a result of that, then has a tremendous difficulty understanding love. It is obvious to most of us that there is a major problem with parents understanding parental love. There is tremendous problem with adults (in many cases using the term only in terms of their chronological age, not in terms of maturity) understanding love. Because if love is based on integrity and integrity is based on understanding the concepts of righteousness and justice, we will not understand love if we don’t understand righteousness and justice. Those three things really do go together in some remarkable ways in the Scripture. Because for God to bring us to salvation, that which moves Him, that which is the ground of His actions, so to speak, is love. “For God so loved the world (in such a way) that He gave His only begotten Son…”
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That love is not what the average American usually thinks of love; he thinks of love in terms of some sort of sentimentality. Because we have a shallow view of love, we have a shallow view of God. It is also difficult because we have a relativistic moral standard. Real love has to be based on something that has real stability, real integrity. If we do not really understand integrity because we believe in a relativistic standard of morals, then we cannot really have love. Look at family breakdown, marriage breakdown, breakdown in all kinds of relationships.
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Then we have this new factor that comes in that really exacerbates the whole problem. That has to do with what has occurred in terms of the technological revolution with all the social networking over the past 10 years or so. Now kids from very young ages to teenagers are getting these smart phones. You will see them in a crowd just texting one another. There is loss of the ability to have a personal relationship because they are focusing so much on all of this stimulation that comes from the quickness and speed and glitz that goes with an internet or virtual environment. All of these different things just work together, so it is an extremely complex problem.
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People say, “You can solve the education problem by just paying teachers more.” The education problem is really the symptom of the breakdown of the home, breakdown of a lot of elements in culture. There is not enough money in the world to throw at it to solve the problem. It is related to a virtue problem, a love problem, standards, breakdown in the home. The only way to solve it is if there is a return within a culture to something that gives stability to everything. And that can only be God – the immutable, eternal God of the Bible. If we are away from that, there is nothing on which to base anything. It is just building a house on shifting sand. Now that is sort of the introduction, and I will come back to that before we are done.
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“God set forth (Jesus) as a propitiation by means of his blood.” The propitiation is done by means of His blood, not the setting forth. It is through faith that the propitiation is then applied or realized in individual relationship to God. But this is done “to demonstrate His righteousness.” Now we have this same kind of phrase back in verse 21 “But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed,” and we have it back in , which also talked about the unveiling of the revelation of the righteousness of God.
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As I pointed out, this is not something secondary to God, not something God gives that is separate from His character. It is talking about the quality of His very own righteousness, His character. Righteousness here is the Greek word dikaiosune [dikaiosunh]. When you take that ending sune [sunh] and put it on the noun dikaios [dikaioj], it talks about the quality of something. So it is talking about the quality of being righteous. What God demonstrates here is His integrity. The word that is translated “to demonstrate” is a Greek word, endeiknumi [e)ndeiknumi], which indicates something on the order of making an experiment.
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You go into a chemistry classroom, and when you make an experiment, you should know what is going to happen before you do the combination of chemicals or whatever you are going to do. An experiment is not doing something to figure out or to see what will happen. That is how many people use the word experiment in everyday language. You may go into the kitchen and try this and do that and see if it works. But in a science setting when we do an experiment, we are trying to prove or demonstrate something that we already know to be true. We have proven it through the use of formula and other things.
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What God is doing is putting on a visual demonstration or a visual proof, giving visual evidence of His righteousness. God is saying at the Cross, “This is how righteousness and love work. I am showing you this because this is the prime example for that.” He demonstrates this at the Cross. Then we go on to read in “Because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed.” The word here that is translated forbearance is the Greek noun anoche [a)noxh]. It is an interesting word because it is translated correctly as forbearance.
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Forbearance in English and anoche in Greek are both words that are used in a legal context to describe what happens when, for example, a banker or someone who is owed money abstains from enforcing or collecting the payment of a debt. Sin is described in a couple of places as a debt, and the sin penalty is a debt owed to God. What we see here is that God puts off or holds back on fully enforcing the penalty of sin in terms of divine discipline, divine judgment in the period of the Old Testament from the time of Adam’s sin up to the time of the Cross. He chooses to not fully judge (within time) sin because it hasn’t been dealt with yet on the Cross. He chooses to abstain from collecting the debt payment from everybody from Adam to Christ because He knows the solution and the debt payment are going to be made when the 2nd person of the Trinity enters into human history and goes to the Cross and pays the penalty.
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Forbearance is a significant term – it is used the same way in the Old Testament. In in a passage that is addressed to God, we read “Look down from heaven, and see from Your habitation, holy and glorious. Where are Your zeal and Your strength, the yearning of Your heart and Your mercies toward me?” Then there is the statement “Are they restrained?” The same word that is used there indicates the putting off of something.
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In Romans 1:23-32, I pointed out as we went through this study that the righteousness of God condemned the immorality and the licentiousness of man. In , there is the condemnation of the moral man. Righteousness is saying neither achieves or lives up to His righteous standard. At the conclusion of that section (the break really occurred between 4-5 and not 5-6 as some Bibles have it), in verse four we read “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness …” Goodness is more than just His righteousness. It is sort of like the expression of His righteousness. It is somewhere between talking about the righteousness as the standard of His character and grace as the expression of that standard. Goodness is a form of the expression of that righteousness and that grace. “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering…?” All three of these nouns are objects of the term “riches.” The riches of His goodness, the riches of His forbearance, and the riches of His longsuffering.
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God has postponed the punishment of sin from His volition because He knows that full payment will be taken care of at the Cross. Forbearance is related to God’s patience. God is patient because He understands the timeframe; He doesn’t look at time the same way we do. It is not that God is permissive towards the sin of humanity from Adam to Christ. It is not like he winked at sin, not like He said, “They just don’t know any better.” There is no sense of the reduction of His standard in order to be good and kind to the human race.
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What happens in our finite human relationships – and I am applying this a lot to parental relationships – is parental permissiveness and the reduction of an absolute standard of behavior and expectation of children living up to the standard because parents want to be kind. There is this failure in our culture to understand that love for someone is expressed both in terms of providing them with wonderful things in life, as well as well as bringing just punishment on someone.
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Whenever I teach on the love of God and how we are to be gracious to others, forgive others just as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us, some people have difficulty hearing that because they don’t look except in one direction. It is like the person who says, “We cannot execute the criminal.” They completely fail to understand that executing the criminal is an act of love for society and for the victim. If you do not execute the criminal, you are not loving the society as a whole because you are letting evil run rampant without punishment. If you do not execute the criminal or punish him according to the crime, you are not loving the victim. You are letting someone get away with abuse, with theft, with crimes on innocent people, so you are treating it lightly. You have reduced the standard of righteousness in a culture for the sake of love.
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These are not mutually exclusive when you think of it in terms of Scripture. A love that is not righteous is not love. A righteousness that is not loving is not righteous. They are not mutually contradictory. In human viewpoint, that is often presented that way. This is the classic argument that is often expressed in terms of Satan’s accusation against God, “How can a loving God send His creatures to the Lake of Fire?” The real question is “How can a loving God NOT send His creatures to the Lake of Fire?” We have such a diluted and impotent view of love because we have a diluted and impotent view of righteousness. The two things go together.
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This passage is teaching that God, though He passes over or postpones the punishment, chooses not to lower the boom fully on the Adam-to-Jesus dispensation. He never reduces the standard of His righteousness. That standard is going to be satisfied at the Cross when Jesus Christ, the 2nd person of the Trinity, receives the full judicial punishment for all the sins from everyone in the Old Testament to all the sins after the Cross. All are poured out on the Cross, so that God’s righteousness, which is the standard of His character, is going to be fully satisfied. He does not have to compromise His standard. His justice, which is the expression of that standard, is also completely consistent with His righteousness. It does not have to change, it is not diluted, it is not reduced in force in any way because it is fully satisfied at the Cross. Because righteousness and justice are then both fully satisfied at the Cross, God’s love is free to flow in providing salvation for everyone in the human race.
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As I was reflecting on this, it hit me how profound the essence of God is. We just do not take enough time to really meditate on these dynamics and then to think about how they really impact relationships that we have. We live in a world of such superficial relationships where people just have such a difficult time understanding these things. When you talk about forgiving others, people ask “Does that mean the person who has wronged me?” When you go to the passage in when Peter asks the Lord, “How many times should we forgive?”, the Lord says, “Seventy times seven.” When people hear the word forgive, what they mean is that I’m just supposed to rip open my shirt, throw open my arms, put the dagger in his hand, and say “stab me again.” That is not what the Scripture says. An act of loving someone who is an abuser is that they go through punishment and suffer the consequences of their abuse. Someone who is a criminal should suffer the consequences of their criminal action.
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You can get involved in mental attitude sins – vindictiveness, anger, maligning – and that destroys the integrity of your motivation. When God punishes, He does not punish from this position of self-righteousness. He punishes from a position of integrity. We have to recognize that in expressing love and forgiveness to someone who is a criminal, someone who has maltreated us, or someone who has abused us, real love means “I forgive you.” This means two things. Negatively, it means I am not going to cave in to bitterness, vindictiveness, hatred, or mental attitude sins in how I deal with you. On the positive side, I am going to do what is right for you, which means that there are consequences that you must endure because of the wrong actions that you have committed.
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You do not reduce the standards of right and wrong in order to love someone. Forgiveness is an action and expression of love. But we live in a culture that has juxtaposed love and righteousness in such a way that you either love someone or you hold up a high standard - you lower your standard and elevate the love or lower the love and elevate the standard. The two go together. They are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually dependent. When someone says they love you and has no integrity, it does not mean anything if they say they love you. They are just expressing a shallow sentiment that has no enduring quality to it because it has no integrity. When someone says they love you and has integrity, you know that means something, and it is not something that is frivolously communicated.
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In , we have this demonstration of God’s righteousness at the Cross. Verse 26 goes on to say that “to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness.” This is all about the demonstration of God’s righteousness. It is a visible picture for all of humanity to understand what love, righteousness, and justice are and how they work together without compromising one another. So the Cross is “to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness (the character of God), that He might be just (God will remain just without minimizing or compromising that in any way) and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” What Paul is indicating here in this rigorously logical development is that not only does God remain just in the way He deals with sin at the Cross in the fact that “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” (), but He is able, without sacrificing any measure of partiality, to provide a justification for every single member of the human race.
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We know that people are born in different conditions. You have the obvious distinction in this passage between the Jew and the Gentile. The Jew, we have already seen in chapter two, is born in a position where he enjoys certain privileges that are the result of God’s blessing to Israel. They have nothing to do with how he relates to God. He is given certain privileges, certain promises, the Word of God, prophets, a covenant relationship with God, but that doesn’t get him any closer to salvation than any Gentile in the farthest reaches on the earth. It only means that God has blessed them in some way. Just as there are some people who will be born in Athens, Egypt, or other places in the world. Some are born to aristocracy, blessed with certain position and privilege in life, and others are born at the lowest rung of the social strata and have nothing. In terms of how the justice of God deals with each one, they are all equally condemned because of Adam’s original sin. The solution for all is the same, which is trust in Jesus Christ, and they all have equal ability to trust in the Gospel. That is the point of the text showing that God blesses them without distinction and other passages that talk about the fact that there is no partiality with God.
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In , we read “Even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference.” Because salvation is totally dependent upon God’s character and His integrity and justice, and His justice is completely impartial and treats every human being the same way; it has nothing to do with their individual circumstances – some having more and some having less. God is able to provide a perfect salvation.
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Think about how that whole concept applies to understanding the operation of justice within the judicial system of a nation. It indicates that for justice to operate in a nation from the top down viewpoint (this is how the founding fathers thought), it doesn’t matter whether those who come before the bar of justice are rich or poor, educated or uneducated, or black, white, yellow, brown. Those circumstances are irrelevant. What matters is that there is an objective standard that is imbedded in the legal statutes and that it is applied equally by a judge. That is an objective view of the law.
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Once you start getting away from a firm belief in absolutes (set standards that never change), either as an individual or family or culture, then what happens on the judicial bench within the legal system of the U.S. becomes subject not to what happens above in terms of those external standards but becomes dependent on what is happening below in terms of the circumstances that surround the individual who is standing before the bar of justice. Once you start basing justice on the circumstances surrounding the individual who is standing before you instead of on an objective, external standard, then the application of justice becomes a farce because it becomes dependent upon totally subjective aspects rather than something that is objective that can be equally applied without distinction.
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We see the perfection here of God’s character and how it is worked out in this whole plan of salvation. In essence, we see, first of all, the emphasis on the fact that God is righteous. The Greek word is dikaios [dikaioj] for righteous based ultimately on the noun dikai. It has various forms, but that is what the root is. Righteous is a word that relates to a standard. In the Hebrew Old Testament, you had the phrase tsedeq which is the same idea. It establishes a standard. Righteousness with the suffix “ness” in English does the same thing as adding the suffix sune [sunh] in Greek, which emphasizes the qualitative aspect of the noun. Righteousness becomes the standard of God’s character. God’s character is really the standard.
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We come out of a culture and a history going all the way back to an ancient civilization in Greece where a lot of these ideas like righteousness and justice are thought of as abstract ideals. They sort of exist or hang out there in space by themselves. That is a very Platonic type illustration. We have this ideal of righteousness and this ideal of justice. We think God is righteous, so God measures up to this ideal of righteousness. That is completely backwards. What the Scripture says is what God does and how He relates to His creatures defines righteousness. Righteousness exists nowhere as an abstract ideal. Its ultimate expression is within the very Person of God. Something is righteous not because it conforms to some external quality but because it conforms to the character of God. His being defines that standard; how He does things defines righteousness.
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The second aspect here is God’s justice. God is perfect justice. Justice is the application then of that perfect standard of God’s character to His creatures. God has a righteous standard that never gets compromised; His justice always applies it without distinction. He does not give any benefit to a creature for this reason or that circumstance. The word for justice is the same word as we have for righteousness. It is dikaios in both places. We have the same thing in Hebrew. That is because the context is going to tell us whether it is talking about a standard or the application of the standard. The concepts of justice and righteousness are inseparable.
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The third point here is that God cannot compromise His righteousness or justice because He is immutable. He never changes; He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He cannot ever do anything to compromise His justice.
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We are told in numerous places in Scripture that God is also love. How do you know what love is? The same way you know what righteousness is. You can only do it by looking at God’s character. There is not this abstract ideal that sits out there in Hollywood in a romantic movie or in some novel that tells you what love is. “Love is X and God conforms to X.” That is how we treat it. Try to look love up in a dictionary, and there are usually descriptions and not definitions. Nobody gets it right – it is always an emotion. Love in the Bible is not an emotion; it is an expression of kindness from the character of God as He seeks to bring about the best for the object of His love.
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In English, you have your comparative adjectives: good, better, and best. That immediately brings in a value judgment. How do we know what is best for someone? How do you as a parent know what is best for your child? How do you as a husband, commanded to love your wife as Christ loved the church, know what is best for your wife? What you want? No, because one week it is this and one week it is that. That is awfully changeable, mutable, unstable. So it cannot be your character. It has to be based on something that has complete, perfect stability and never changes, and that can only be the character of God. For a husband to be able to love his wife as Christ loved the church, he has to constantly be pursuing an understanding of the character of God. That understanding of the character of God has to permeate his character in the process.
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So God is love. That means His very character defines what love is. The only way we can ever learn what love is is to go to the Scriptures. In the Old Testament, you have this God who shows up in and 19 and sends two angels to the five cities of the plains, among which are Sodom and Gomorrah. God has allowed these cities to live to the fullest extent of their sin nature. They are rank with open sexual sin, not just homosexuality but everything. When these two angels who appear as men come, and they are invited into Lot’s house, all the men in Sodom and Gomorrah try to knock down the door in order to be able to take one of these men and rape them all night long. It is such a horrid picture of sexual perversion. God loves the human race and Sodom and Gomorrah so much that He obliterates everyone.
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You don’t usually hear that from the pulpit of the 1st Metho-presby-bapterian Church. That does not fit our concept of love – how can a loving God do that? But how can a loving God NOT do that? As a loving God, He has to protect the rest of the human race from the cancer and the malignancy of rank perversion.
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Another example a few centuries later when the Israelites come out of Egypt, and they are headed to the Promised Land. God is going to give the land to Israel that has been occupied by the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Jebusites. But that is not fair! That is not how the UN Resolution 1-umpty-dump-1 works! We have to be fair to the people who were there before! Man has a false sense of what righteousness means because he has a false sense of what love is and vice versa. God is going to allow in His permissive will the inhabitants of Canaan to pursue the joys of their sin nature to the fullest extent. God gives them grace so that at any number of points, they can respond to the general revelation of God in creation and turn to Him, and God would revoke the plan of punishment. But they do not. Finally their sin is ripened to the point that God is going to give the land to the Israelites and is going to destroy the inhabitants of the land. That means that all the men are going to be killed – not just the adult soldiers but all the old men, young men, male babies. All the women will be killed – the grandmothers, mothers, pregnant women. I am trying to create as graphic an example of this as I can because this rubs against the value system that our culture has drilled into us.
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God tells Joshua at the battle of Jericho that they are to kill every man, woman and child – every single inhabitant of Jericho. It does not matter that they are only one or two weeks old or two or three months old. It doesn’t matter if they are 80 years old and have Alzheimer’s. Every single one has to be killed. The world says that is not loving. The Bible says that is precisely what it is. That is loving; it is not abusive. When it is motivated by sin, not by righteousness, then it would become abuse, it would become tyranny, it would become cruel.
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There comes a time when the act of love towards 95% of the human race means that 5% of the human race has to be executed in order to preserve the health of the rest of the body. Just as in cancer surgery, you are going to go in and cut out part of the body, so that you can save the rest of the body. That is where the focus is. Love focuses in two directions because God recognizes that with the perversion among the Canaanites continuing, their culture is just going to be immersed in greater self-misery. So it is an act of love to put them out of their misery. It is an act of love to protect the rest of the human race. God’s love is operating at multiple levels.
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You look at other examples down through the centuries as when God removes the Israelites from the land because He gave them the land, and then they disobeyed the Law. All throughout those passages, there is the emphasis on the faithful, loyal love of God (chesed), His love for Israel based on the Covenant. Because God loved Israel, the Northern Kingdom was defeated by the Assyrians, and the people were tortured, horribly murdered, and transported to different parts of the Assyrian empire. About 150 years later, it happened to the Southern Kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar came in three times – God brought them there.
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This is what Habakkuk had such a problem with. “Lord, you have to do something about these horrible people here in Judah. They are self-centered, they reject the Law, they are immoral and selfish. You have to do something about them.” God says, “I am. I am bringing the Chaldeans here.” “Wait a minute, Lord, you cannot bring those horrible, unrighteous, idolatrous Chaldeans here.” “Sure I can. That is love. I have to punish the wrongdoers in Judah and have to be faithful to my covenant. That is an act of love. If I am not loyal to the Covenant and execute punishment, then I have violated the Covenant and compromised my integrity.”
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All this is how we are to understand the complexities of what love is. Love is not the Hollywood version of Valentine’s Day. There is a lot more to it than that. That is part of it, but love has a lot more dimensions to it. On the one hand, love many times says, “I forgive you,” while on the other hand, you are going to suffer all of the consequences for the wrongdoing that you have committed. They are both true. To love someone does not mean you compromise righteous standards. The two have to go together, or it is neither righteous or love.
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We look at the character of God and the 10 basic characteristics: 1) Sovereignty – He rules over His creation. 2-3) His righteousness and justice – the standard of His character and the application of that standard. 4) Love – the expression of that to the human race. 5) Eternal life. 6) Omniscient – He knows all the knowable (He takes into account every single factor in every decision. There is nothing He does not already know, and there are no surprises. His knowledge is perfect.) 7) Omnipresent – present to everything in His creation, so nothing escapes His notice. 8) Omnipotent – has the power to do whatever He chooses. 9) Veracity - absolute truth. 10) Immutability – does not change.
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The three elements righteousness, justice, and love of God, along with His truth, comprise the integrity of God. They work together, and they always have to. You minimize one, you destroy the other three. They have to be in a perfect balance. What this means is that God can provide a perfect salvation offered equitably to every human being because it is not dependent at all on anything anybody does. It does not depend on one person having a higher or lower IQ, one person having a greater or lesser motivation. No human factor can enter in to create an inequitable situation.
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This is why Paul can summarize this the way he does in . He asks three rhetorical questions in verse 27 in order to drive home the point. A rhetorical question is a question that is asked without expecting an answer because the answer is apparent. So he says, “Where is boasting then?” It is obvious; it is excluded. If it is totally dependent on God, there is nothing for man to crow about. “Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law?” Now, look at this. I just saw this this afternoon, and I have to work through this and some other passages. Every now and then, you see something and say, “Isn’t that interesting?”
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“By what law?” The law of works or the law of faith? Let me ask you a question. Most of you have been around Christianity since you were a small or large child. What is always contrasted with the Law? Grace. The Old Testament is the age of law. We are in the age of grace. Again and again, it is grace vs. law. What do we have here? Faith. Is it the law of works or the law of faith? It is not works vs. grace. It is the law of works and the law of faith. There is still a law operating because the Law establishes the fact that there are external, unchangeable absolutes. It is not a law that is based on works, that is, human effort, but it is a law of faith, depending on God to provide the blessing.
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Paul comes to a conclusion in verse 28 “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” When we look at this in the Greek, we have a present with an active meaning of the verb logizomai [logizomai]. Logizomai is the word that we will run into when we get into “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” It has to do with thinking something through, reckoning something to be true, related to logos [logoj] . It is a verb form, and it is a thought word.
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It begins by saying “Therefore we conclude (we have thought through these issues and come to the only possible conclusion) that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” It is a passive infinitive – “a man is to be justified by faith apart from (without) the deeds of the Law.” He draws this conclusion demonstrating that works of the Law cannot justify anyone, so we have to be justified apart from the works of the Law. It has to be that way, for with God there is no partiality; there is no distinction with God.
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This is why in verse 29, he goes back and says the only other option is to have a God of favoritism where He is going to treat the Jews one way and the Gentiles another way. He says, “Or is He the God of the Jews only?” The implication is no, He is not the God of the Jews only. He created all human beings and is also the God of the Gentiles. Because He is the God of the Jews and the Gentiles, the plan of salvation has to be the same for all.
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Verse 30 “Since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.” Both the circumcised and the uncircumcised (the Jews and the Gentiles) will be justified by faith. That first phrase says “God who will justify the circumcised by faith.” There it uses that other phrase the genitive of pisteuo [pisteuw] , by faith. They are saying the same thing “by faith” and “through faith.” They are both based on faith.
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When he says this, we go back to the end of the last chapter. Paul had been dealing with the guilt of the Jews and uses circumcision as his point of reference. He says in 2:25 “For circumcision is indeed profitable.” There was nothing wrong with observing the Law. What was wrong was observing the Law for the wrong reason. “For circumcision is indeed profitable if you keep the law; but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.” In other words, even if you break the Law, circumcision doesn’t matter; you are as one who was not circumcised, not a member of the Covenant community. Verse 26 “Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision?” Who is more righteous? The circumcised person who completely flaunts and disobeys the Law or the uncircumcised who keeps the Law in every jot and tittle. Who is more righteous? His point is that circumcision is not what gets you the grace of God.
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That is the same thing he says in “Since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.” The principle of salvation applies equally for every human being.
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Verse 31 “Do we then make void (invalidate) the law through faith?” No, the Law had a purpose. The Law was the constitution for Israel. It was designed to show people not how to be saved by their works, but that no matter how much effort they put into it, they could never be saved by their works. By emphasizing faith, it doesn’t invalidate the Mosaic Law. On the contrary, it establishes the Law to be exactly what it was intended to be. It validates everything that was said in the Law which was to point out man’s inability, not human ability.
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That wraps his explanation of justification by faith. The illustration begins in Roman 4:1.

Romans 038b-Examples of How God Justifies Romans 4:1-4

Romans 4:1 NASB95
What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found?
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Romans 038b-Examples of How God Justifies
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We are in , which is one of the great chapters in the Scripture dealing with justification. We have been on this trajectory since . Once we got into verse 21, we got into the centerpiece of Paul’s discussion of justification. The question is how can a human being be just before the Supreme Court of Heaven? Standing before the court of God’s justice, how can we ever claim that we are righteous? Not righteous in a sense that is the result of comparing our behavior, our actions, our ethics with other people that we know. We know that in many cases when human beings compare with other human beings, we can always find enough people to make us look good. Unless you are way down on the totem pole somewhere, there are always a lot of people you can figure out are beneath you.
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But the standard is not a relative standard. It is an absolute standard related to the character of God. Paul has gone through in a meticulous and logical manner in chapters one, two and three showing that no human being, no matter how good they are, no matter how much they observe ritual can ever measure up to the standard that God sets. This is one of the hardest things to communicate to a lot of people for a couple of reasons. One is because the orientation of the human soul—that we know from Scripture—is arrogance. We believe in our own self-sufficiency – that somehow we can do it. So there is from the old sin nature this misplaced self confidence that we can somehow do enough, follow enough standards or rituals to merit God’s favor.
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This shows up in almost all religions, except for biblical Christianity. Biblical Christianity stands over against every other world religion in that the emphasis is on the fact that man cannot do it on his own, that only God can do it for us. It is in these chapters in Romans that Paul meticulously and logically lays out all of these steps.
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As we came to the end of Romans 3, I just want to summarize the last part of what Paul says there. In verses 27-28, Paul, as he builds to his conclusion, says, “Where is boasting then?” It is obvious from what he has said, it is left out. There is nothing that we can point to in our own lives as having brought righteousness to us. “It is excluded by what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith.” I pointed out when we hit this verse last time that it is an important observation here to see that there is a contrast made between a law of works and a law of faith. Normally, we contrast works with grace, but here the contrast is between works and faith.
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The issue in justification, which is how we are declared righteous before God, is are we justified by works or are we justified by faith? When we say justified by faith, we don’t just mean having faith. Everybody has faith; everybody has faith in something. It is the object of faith that is important. That is what makes the difference between a person who is going to heaven, based on the New Testament, and someone who is not. If you put the focus of your faith on the works of Jesus Christ, as opposed to our works, then we get into heaven on the basis of Him, not on the basis of what we do.
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The contrast here is between works and faith, defined as the law of faith and the law of works. Verse 28 “We conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” The focus here is on the works of the Law, which does not just mean the ritual of the Mosaic Law but describes the entirety of the 613 commandments in the Law (both the civil commandments and the spiritual or ritual commandments).
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The point is that not one person can fulfill all of those commandments and keep them the entirety of their life. As the Apostle Paul came to realize in his testimony, when he came to the 10th and last of the Ten Commandments “Thou shall not covet,” this related to a mental attitude sin. He knew he was guilty. He knew he coveted being righteous; he coveted being more successful and exceeding all of his peers in pursuit of righteousness. He knew that he could not overcome that. That was what convicted him and made him realize he could never live up to the Law. No one could live up to the Law. The point of the Law was not to show how to get righteousness, but that it is impossible for man to be perfectly righteous; therefore, God has to supply the answer. These two verses 27-28 state the principle that righteousness is through faith, not through the works of the Law.
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In verses 29-30, we see that justification by faith is a principle that applies to all people. God does not have one standard of salvation for the Jews based on the Law and following its rituals, based on circumcision and another standard for Gentiles. Paul has demonstrated that even though the Jewish people were blessed by having the Scriptures, the promises, the covenants, which put them in a position of temporal blessing (blessing on this earth); it did not get them any closer to God in terms of eternal life. None of these benefits, these blessing that they had solved the basic problem that man has which is spiritual death. Thus, the principle is that justification applies equally to Jews and Gentiles.
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In his conclusion in verse 31, he says, “Do we then make void the law through faith?” The question he is anticipating is that if it is based on faith, then that would lead to antinomianism or that we do not need the Law. We can just live whatever way we wish because if the Law does not get us into heaven and we are saved by grace through faith, then what does it matter how we behave?
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This is one of the great objections that is passed down from generation to generation as an assault against Christianity. This is what happened in the mid-17th century, following the initial understanding of salvation and justification by faith alone by Martin Luther and John Calvin. Martin Luther came to an understanding of justification by faith alone.
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On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses onto the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, which used to be East Germany. These were disputation or debating points, and he wanted a public debate in the Catholic Church. He was still a Catholic monk at that time. The essence of this was caused by the fact that a man named Johann Tetzel had been sent out by the Vatican to raise money to build St. Peter’s in Rome. They did this by selling indulgences. People could pay money and buy an indulgence which was a sort of “get out of jail free” card in terms of purgatory for any parents or ancestors they had. Tetzel had a little ditty that he sang, “For every penny in the coffer rings; a soul from purgatory springs.” He went around Germany taking all kinds of money from the poor people. Luther was just incensed about this. He had gradually come to an understanding by 1517 that God saved apart from the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. He was not crystal clear yet on justification by faith alone.
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His number two man that he influenced was Philipp Melanchthon, who had one of those rare, brilliant, theological minds. Melanchthon, somewhere between 1517-1518, was the one who very clearly brought Luther to a true grace understanding of justification. It did not matter what a person did before or after salvation. Justification was dependent on faith in Jesus Christ alone, period. He understood that separation between justification and experiential righteousness, which is part of Christian growth that comes after salvation if a person is studying the Word, applying the Word, and walking by means of God the Holy Spirit.
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John Calvin, who does not come to his own understanding of justification by faith alone until the 1520s, in 1536 wrote the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was dedicated to King Francis of France. His first edition was very small. It was 40-50 pages and was not the large two-volume work that most people think of today. In that first edition, he clearly understood that justification was not based on what a person does or what a person will do but is based solely and exclusively on what Jesus Christ did on the Cross. Through the first several editions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he clearly understood grace. By the time you get into the late 1530s and into the 1540s, there started to be the rise of the push back from the Roman Catholic Church that later came to be known as the Counter-Reformation. In the Counter-Reformation, their charge that the Roman Catholic Church brought against the Protestants was how can we keep the masses under control if Jesus saved them by grace and they do not have to be moral or have to be obedient? The accusation was that this grace doctrine that the Protestants were teaching was just an open door to rank sinfulness and immorality. If all you have to do is believe in Jesus, then why be moral or good?
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This is a question that Paul will address when he comes to the beginning of where he asks the rhetorical question “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” He says, “Certainly not!” But the first point that we have to understand is this issue related to justification and that it is by faith alone. He raises this question here in “Do we then make void the law through faith?” In other words, if all we have to do is believe God, not do anything or to obey Him, then it just invalidates the Law altogether. He says, “May it never be! (me genoito /mh genoito, which is a very strong negation), sometimes translated “Certainly not!” He says, “On the contrary, we establish the law.” He is saying the Law has a role. It is not for justification, but he will show that it is to lead a person to the need to depend upon God. The law of faith actually fulfills the mandate of the Law of Moses through imputation.
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What he is saying is that the law of faith is what establishes the Mosaic Law.
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When we believe in the promise of God of salvation in the Old Testament or now we believe in Jesus, then at that instant God imputes to us or credits to us the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. What the Mosaic Law is pointing to is the fact that no one can have a relationship with God, no one can get into heaven, unless they possess that perfect righteousness of God. The law of faith is the only way to have the perfect righteousness of God, and, therefore, the law of faith establishes the Law because it fulfills what the Law could not fulfill which is the bringing of righteousness.
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The background to all of this is understanding the basics of the essence of God as it relates to God’s righteousness. The attributes of God are His sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love, eternal life, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, veracity (absolute truth), and immutability (does not change, the same yesterday, today and forever). Scripture emphasizes and often brings together four of these attributes. His righteousness and His justice – these words in English are translations of the same word in Hebrew and the same word in Greek. In Hebrew it is tsedeq, and in Greek it is dikaios [dikaioj] . dikaios can refer to either righteousness or can refer to justice. It is also connected with love.
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What we often hear from people is an objection that has been uttered probably since the fall of Lucifer. “How can a loving God condemn His creatures?” Because in the mind of the creature, love and condemnation are irreconcilable. What I was pointing out last time is that a love that is not righteous and a righteousness that is not loving cannot exist in an eternal sense. You cannot have real love without righteousness, and you cannot have real righteousness without genuine love. These always go together and are inherently compatible. A love that is not based on righteousness and those absolutes is a shallow, superficial love that does not stand the test of time. The fourth attribute that is connected is the attribute of God’s veracity or His truth. So those four together make up the integrity of God.
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They are connected together in verses such as . is a meditation on God’s covenant with David. There is also a messianic aspect to this psalm, anticipating the coming of the greater Son of David, who is the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. When His kingdom is established, it will exhibit these attributes. states, “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne (anticipating the messianic throne); mercy and truth go before Your face.” Mercy and truth are the expressions towards creatures of God’s core character of righteousness and justice.
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Sedeqa is the word that is translated for both righteousness and justice. When the word has a sense that it is describing an absolute standard of God’s character, then it has the idea of righteousness. “Ness” ending in English tells us that it is representing the quality of something. The Greek correlation to that is the suffix sune [sunh] on the word dikaios for justice or righteouness – dikaiosune [dikaiosunh]. It is that quality of righteousness. Justice is the application of that standard to God’s creatures.
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Another verse that is similar mentioning righteousness and justice together is , speaking again of the throne of God, the position from which He brings judgment. “Clouds and darkness surround Him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.” So again and again through Scripture, we need to ask a question “Why do we continue to have this emphasis from the Old Testament all the way through the New Testament on the righteousness of God?”
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The mentality that approaches Scripture from a critical or skeptical viewpoint wants to draw a dichotomy between this God of the Old Testament – that evil, wicked Jehovah who always wants to condemn people - and the loving, kind, paternal God of the New Testament. What we find is that they go together; there is not a conflict or contradiction between the two. Righteousness and justice are expressed through the love of God. The Old Testament often emphasizes the righteousness and justice of God because it is communicating that there is a standard that God has in His dealings with mankind, and man fails to meet that standard.
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says, “He loves righteousness and justice …” He can only love righteousness and justice. God as a righteous God has no compatibility, no affinity for, no affection for that which is unrighteous. Something has to change. Since the unrighteous creature cannot change himself, it seems like the only solution is for God to be the one to provide the solution.
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We have to remember these three descriptions of righteousness, justice and love. Righteousness is the standard of God’s own character. He is righteous. It doesn’t mean that He meets an external standard. We are not talking about some sort of Platonic idealism where there is some free-floating standard of perfection out there, and God is a creature who meets it. In Greek thought, there was something called a “chain of being.” This would start with the lowest amoeba, and you would go up the “chain of being” to God. It is all part of the same chain. The only difference between man, who is pretty far up the chain behind angels, and God is a degree of difference. There is not a qualitative difference.
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In Scripture, God is not in this “chain of being.” He is the Creator and completely set apart and distinct from His creation. So God’s character defines righteousness. What a lot of people say is “That does not sound like that is really fair.” They have created an autonomous concept of fairness - this ideal. Then they want God to meet their standard of what they think fairness is. The question we should ask is, “How does a creature know enough facts to be able to establish an equitable standard of fairness?” Since God is omniscient and knows all the facts, all the hidden motivations, all the complexity of motivations that creatures have; only God can truly judge because He is the only one who knows all the facts and the only one is inherently righteous.
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Righteousness is that standard of His own character. Justice is the application of that standard to His creatures. Love then is an expression of His righteousness and justice toward His creatures, and it is not based on their merit. It is based on His own character. “For God so loved the world (in this manner)…” Not “for God so loved the world” in English indicating that God loved the world so much. That is not what it is saying. The Greek word that begins the verse, houtos [o(utoj], means in such a way or in this manner. What John is saying is “This is how God loves the world. He gave His only begotten (unique) Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” So that His love is an expression of His righteousness and justice in solving the problem that mankind has.
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Some new principles. 1) What the righteousness of God demands, the justice of God then executes through the love of God and expressed through His grace. As I pointed out last time, everything that God does is part of His love. Thinking that through is crucial for being a parent or being in any kind of relationship. We will focus on the parental aspect. Ever since Benjamin Spock came along with his human viewpoint advice on how to raise children back in the early 1950s, it gave guidelines to a whole generation of parents on how to destroy the character of your children. It destroyed the whole concept of parental training, which includes discipline: negative punishment as well as positive motivation. So love has to punish as well as to bless. That is what instills a sense of responsibility in a child, so that they can learn that there are things that they have to discipline themselves not to do because there are negative consequences in their own life and in the lives of others. It is not all about them; it is about others.
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This is part of the reason that in Christianity there is also an emphasis on service within the body of Christ because it is not all about us. Over the years, I have heard a lot of different Christians and churches talk about their spiritual life in a very narcissistic manner. “It is all about me. I just want to go to church where I can learn so I can be a better Christian.” In a sense that is true, but part of the Christian life is to learn that it is not about you and your spiritual life – that is a means to an end. The end is serving within the body of Christ.
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As Paul describes using the metaphor of the body in , “We are members of one another.” That is a concept that really rubs against American self-sufficiency and individualism, which tends to atomize the Christian body into every individual part, and we are all pursuing the same thing together rather than emphasizing the mutuality that is part of that Christian ministry. Part of the reason we have so many passages that talk about admonishing one another, praying for one another, loving one another, teaching one another, encouraging one another is that this is part of the body of Christ.
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Principle 2) What the righteousness of God approves, the justice of God will provide for through the grace of God, namely the fullness of blessing of God as an expression of love to the one who believes. Paul says in , “(God) has blessed us with every spiritual blessing…” It is a free gift; it is not something we have to earn. We do not have to go through ten different stages of growth each time we get a little something else. This happens in especially esoteric religions, the mystery religions, Mormonism. There are other modern expressions you go through – sort of an initiate phase and then you swear an oath you will not divulge whatever it is you are going to learn at the next stage. If you are deemed worthy and not expressing skepticism and doubt, then you swear another oath and go to the next stage. You get closer and closer until you get to the secret truth. Then you are in the inner circle. That goes back to Gnosticism during the time of the early church and also manifests itself in all kinds of New Age religions or mind cults. Here God gives us everything at the beginning.
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Principle 3) What the righteousness of God condemns, the justice of God judges but always in the love of God, so that the divine solution is provided through the grace of God. It is never apart from love. Love and justice are not incompatible, but in the biblical teaching, they must always go together. God can only love what is consistent with His righteousness. When love, in a more intimate sense, is not consistent with His righteousness, then in love He also has to reject. That is part of love.
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That is a tough concept for people to get. This is the one reason you have two different words for love in Scripture. You have “God loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” What did He do in love? He judged the second Person of the Trinity for our sins. You cannot separate judgment from love. The word that is used there in is the Greek word agape [a)gaph] . There is another Greek word that is used in the New Testament for love – the verb is phileo [filew] and the noun is philos [filoj]. It has to do with a more intimate affection. When the verb phileo [filew] is used, the object is always Christians. God never has a phileo type love (which is more intimate) for unbelievers; He only has agape love. Love is always involved in whatever God is doing. I am trying to challenge your understanding of love, so it is a little more biblical.
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Judgment and blessing are both expressions of God’s integrity – the totality of His integrity: justice, righteousness, love and truth.
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Paul moves us to the next level in his development and argument for justification. He is going to bring in two illustrations from the Old Testament: one related to Abraham, the other related to David. The question here that he is answering is from a Jewish objection, “How then can you demonstrate that justification is by faith? Where do you get this idea? Is this something that Paul dreamed up?” No, it is not. Paul is going to go to an episode in the life of Abraham and an episode in the life of David in order to show from the Old Testament that justification by faith alone has always been the principle in God’s dealing with mankind. In the Old Testament and the New Testament, saints are justified by faith alone.
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He says in “What then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh?” What he means by “according to the flesh” is simply “in his material existence.” When he was on the earth, how was he saved, how was he justified? Paul approaches this by giving us the alternatives: There are only two options: either he is justified by works before God, or he is not. One or the other.
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In , he states the one alternative “For if Abraham was justified (or declared righteous) by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.” The if clause here in the Greek is a first class condition, which means that Paul is assuming the truth of this first phrase “If Abraham was justified by works.” This would be more of a debater’s use of a first class condition: “For the sake of argument, we are going to assume that Abraham was justified by works.” That is all he is saying. People get confused by the first class condition thinking that it means “if and it is true.” It really is “if and it is assumed to be true.” It may or may not be true. In some cases, it is true, and in other cases like this, it is an assumption of truth for the basis of the argument. He is saying, “We will assume it is true that Abraham was declared righteous on the basis of works.”
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Then the conclusion, “He does have something to boast about.” He was good enough, but you cannot boast before God. What we just demonstrated earlier is that boasting is excluded - . We cannot boast on our efforts. The boasting itself would negate the righteousness. He implies here that there is a justification, but it is not before God; it is before man. We have lived a good life. There is nothing wrong with living a good, moral life, but it is not going to gain entry into heaven. That is the issue we are talking about.
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The word that is used here that is translated justify is the Greek verb dikaioo [dikaiow], which means to pronounce someone righteous or just. It is not making them just. A couple of weeks ago we studied this. I brought a cup up here and poured water into the cup as an illustration of the Roman Catholic view of justification, that something is made righteous. They use the term infused or imparted righteousness. If that were true, it would mean that the sin nature is somehow changed when you get saved, so that you are actually made moral: the deficit of the sin nature is changed. Now you become a good person. In Roman Catholic theology, that happens incrementally every time you participate in a sacrament. Each time you get a little bit more of the merit of Jesus Christ, called the Treasury of Merit, and it takes away a little bit of the sin nature.
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You have something that really is comparable to that within lordship salvation. In strict high Calvinism where they emphasize total inability, you often have the idea of regeneration as not being that something positive is born or created within the immaterial part of man or is added to the immaterial part of man (what we refer to as the human spirit which is part of his new nature as a believer in Christ), but that regeneration really changes and minimizes the sinfulness of the sin nature.
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I read an interesting article 12 or 13 years ago. It was referred to several times by different speakers at the Chafer Bible Conference in March 2011. It dealt with understanding what Lewis Sperry Chafer was saying on the spiritual life and the distinction between the spiritual life, spiritual growth, spiritual death, justification and how these things all go together. A classmate of mine from when I was in the doctoral program at Dallas Seminary (I think he is now teaching at the Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary) wrote an article dealing with this debate that went on between Lewis Sperry Chafer and Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield. Warfield was the dean of theologians in the Presbyterian community in the early 20th century. He taught at Princeton and was considered the greatest living American theologian at the time. Lewis Sperry Chafer was very complimentary of Warfield in many, many ways, but when Chafer wrote his book He That is Spiritual, Warfield just blasted him in a book review that was published in the Princeton Theological Review. That has been a basis of battle for years in theological debate and discussion.
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Randy Gleason wrote this article and said something in his conclusion that always struck me. He said, “The problem that Chafer had was that he had a low view of regeneration. He didn’t understand that regeneration minimizes and reduces the sinfulness of the sin nature.” It was like light bulbs went off in my head. Nobody ever really came out and said that before. In reformed theology, which is Calvinistic theology, their view of regeneration is not the positive birth of something new, the new nature given to a believer in Jesus Christ, but it is the minimalization.of the sin nature. This is why in pure lordship theology, if you are really a believer, you will not commit certain sins because your sin nature is not as bad as it was before you were saved. Chafer believed that your sin nature after you are saved is just as bad and evil as it was before you were saved. You are not made righteous; you are declared righteous. This is why we call it forensic justification.
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In the 17th century in England, people died weekly as to whether or not they understood the difference between forensic justification and infused righteousness. That was when people thought ideas really mattered, theology really mattered, what you believed about God really mattered. I am not justifying the fact that they were burning people at the stake. In England after Henry VIII died, his son Edward, a Protestant, reigned for a couple of years and died; then Bloody Mary came in for a few years, and she died; and then Elizabeth came in. One month you are on the good side, and the next month you are on the bad side, so you really had to be careful during that time.
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The point I am making is that these kinds of theological ideas and distinctions to a 21st century Christian seem like hairsplitting and irrelevant. “Let’s just go out and get people saved and do something good for the kingdom.” That just negates the witness and the martyrdom of thousands of Christians over several centuries as they were dying for the truth. And now we do not care about the truth. We do not want to think so precisely about understanding basic concepts like justification - what that means and what that does not mean.
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The idea of justification is not that someone is made righteous, but they are declared righteous by God from the Supreme Court of Heaven. The problem is how is a person going to do enough to be declared righteous by God? Especially when you have Old Testament passages like “…all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.” Same Hebrew word tzedakah – all our righteous deeds, not all of our unrighteous deeds, failures, sins. In other words, the best we can do is never going to be good enough because the best we can do is still a filthy, soiled garment that does not measure up.
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The next key word is in . Paul says “For what does the Scripture say?” We are going to go back to our illustration in the Old Testament – “And he (Abraham) believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” This is the first clear statement of this idea in the Old Testament. But it is clear from Scripture that Noah had to be declared righteous; Adam had to be declared righteous. They were all sinners. Just because you do not have a clear statement of imputation of righteousness until Abraham does not mean that Abraham is the first true believer. I have read some comments to that effect.
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This is the first time in the revelation of Scripture that God begins to give us detailed analysis of some of these things. The word covenant is not used in Genesis until chapter 9. That does not mean that what is expressed in is not a covenant, just because it is not called a covenant. It has all the elements of a covenant, so it is a covenant. Isaiah refers to it as a covenant. Today we have theologians that say if the word imputation or righteousness or belief is not there until , then you never had it before. I think that is begging the question.
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So Scripture says, “And he (Abraham) believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” This is the Greek word logizomai [logizomai], based on the noun logos [logoj]for word or logic. This word comes over into English in various forms. In the study of something – biology, zoology – that “log” comes from the Greek word logos and the verb logizomai. It means to think about something. It is an accounting term to credit something to someone’s account, which is different than putting something into someone’s account. I have used the illustration of co-signing on a loan.
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The third key word here is righteousness – “…and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” That is dikaios in the Greek and tzedakah in the Hebrew. I went through several weeks ago when we first got into this study that the basic definition of imputation is an accounting term. It is a mathematical concept where something is credited to someone’s account. It does not mean that necessarily something is put into that account. If I do not have the financial capability to buy a house, someone else can co-sign on it. Their money does not have to go into my account, but the bank will look at their credit as opposed to my credit and look in their account as opposed to my account. On the basis of what they have in their account, then I can be approved for the loan. In essence what is happening is that they are being approved for the loan.
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The Greek word is logizomai and the Hebrew word is hashab, which has fundamentally the same meaning: to think, to plan, to make a judgment, to count, compute, calculate. All these are words related to thinking and to reasoning something out. In English the word impute has the same idea. The Oxford English Dictionary, second meaning, states, “Theology: ascribe (righteousness, guilt, etc.) to someone by virtue of a similar quality in someone else.” The word logizomai is sometimes translated reckon. In English this is a little bit of an archaic term but has the same idea to calculate, to be of the opinion, to regard something in a specified way. In Old English it was an accounting term meaning to give an account for items received. It had that same idea – to credit something or to impute something to someone. The idea to credit something means to ascribe something (an achievement or good quality) to someone else.
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Imputation is then the act of the justice of God, whereby either condemnation or blessing is assigned, credited or attributed to a human being. It is a judicial declaration. We are flooded with these forensic shows today. Thirty years ago you had Quincy, M.E., and now you have CSI and CSI New York and CSI Miami and NCIS and NCIS Los Angeles - all the law and order franchises. Forensic is what goes on judicially in a courtroom and what can be presented for evidence and what cannot be presented. The word forensic is a word that ought to be understood today by anybody who watches TV, but it often is not because as soon as you talk about theology, they quit thinking. They have a brain spasm, and the brain locks up.
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But the time-honored word for talking about the Protestant view of justification by faith alone is that it is forensic justification. This means that God looks at you, the defendant, and because the defendant is covered by the righteousness of Christ, God, the judge, declares you not guilty. It does not make you not guilty; it does not change you. But you are declared not guilty because Christ paid the penalty.
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As I pointed out a few weeks ago, Lewis Sperry Chafer divided imputations into two categories: real and judicial. In the middle of that quote on the screen, he said, “That which is real is the reckoning to one of that which is antecedently his …” That is a little awkward for most people to get their understanding around. It basically means that there is a compatibility between what is imputed and the person receiving the imputation. Later he will say “man’s unrighteousness assigned to Christ who is righteous” – that cannot be a real imputation because there is no compatibility between the two. That would have to be a judicial imputation. In a real imputation, there is a compatibility between the two, such as the imputation of eternal life to the regenerate believer. There is something there that is compatible between the two.
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Chafer’s quote “That which is real is the reckoning to one of what which is antecedently his, while judicial imputation is the reckoning to one of that which is not antecedently his.” When we read in Scripture () “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…”, that is a judicial imputation. This kind of thinking is not common today in theology, but it was common in generations past because they were trying to think clearly and precisely about what is said in God’s Word.
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We have four real imputations. 1) Adam’s original sin is imputed to our sin nature. () There is a compatibility between the two. 2) Eternal life is imputed to the human spirit. () 3) Blessings in time are imputed to the righteousness of God in us. (; ) 4) Blessings in eternity are imputed to the resurrected believer because he has the righteousness of God. ()
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Judicial imputations, which is really what we are focused on in , have to do with the imputation of our personal sins to Christ on the Cross, so He is judicially judged. He is declared by the justice of God to be a sinner and to bear the penalty of our sin, but He does not become a sinner. Understanding that is essential to understanding what happens to us. Jesus never becomes a sinner – that would impact his deity and rip the fabric of the universe. He is declared a sinner and bears the penalty for our sins.
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When the next aspect occurs that His perfect righteousness is given to the believer, then we understand that we are not made perfect either. We are still a sinner; we are just judicially declared to be righteous.
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Turn with me to . This is such a crucial issue. Every time I have anybody who goes to seminary or takes any kind of Bible college courses, they always come back to this. They will hear a couple of different views. is the fourth chapter dealing with God’s relationship to Abraham. He calls Abram in and says in verses 1-3, “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
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This is a summary of the Abrahamic Covenant. At this point is Abraham saved? Yes, he is. When you get to , God tells Abraham “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” God says He will give him a son that will come through him. After He says those promises in the first five verses, then verse six says “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” It sounds like this is when he believes in the Lord, but it is not. This is really a parenthetical verse reminding the reader that Abraham had already believed in the Lord. He is not believing in Him at this point and getting righteousness. It is referring to something that happened before .
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Every time I go to this, I get the opportunity to go through and read a lot more material than I have studied in the past. I was impressed this time with the fact that a large number of commentaries make it clear that what I just said is the correct view based on the grammar of the passage.

Romans 039b-Abraham Believed ; Genesis 15:6

Romans 4:1 NASB95
What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found?
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Romans 039b-Abraham Believed ;
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Just a little bit of review. The real issue in salvation is not what is normally presented in most gospel presentations. Not that that makes most gospel presentations terribly wrong, but if you look at most presentations, they start with the question somehow related to life. “Would you like to have eternal life? Would you like to go to heaven when you die?” The issue really in salvation is not so much a matter of life, although that is definitely part of it because the major problem we have is a lack of life or born spiritually dead. The other part of the problem is that we are not righteous. How do we get righteousness? As I have pointed out before in our study of Romans, the focus of Paul is on how we get righteousness.
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Righteousness and justice are word groups that are built off of the same basic root words in both Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament. There are other words that also indicate especially justice, but righteousness relates to the standard of God’s character and justice the application of God’s standard to His creatures. It is God’s love that is the expression of that integrity to His creatures in providing a solution based on grace for the application for the gift of righteousness to people. That is really what Romans is all about.
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Sometimes I think we ought to approach an evangelism situation a little differently and ask them, “Would you like to be perfectly righteous?” See what kind of response we will get from that kind of approach. That is really what Romans is all about – how we get this gift of righteousness and what the implications are for us to have this gift we receive in salvation.
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In , Paul is going to give two illustrations to help his readers understand how we get righteousness. This is not something new. This whole idea of righteousness by faith alone, and not from works or morality or the Mosaic Law, is not a new idea. He is going to go to two Old Testament individuals in order to illustrate that it is always on the basis of faith not works that we receive righteousness.
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The first illustration is the key one, and that is Abraham. He introduces the topic with a rhetorical question in “What then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh?” When he uses the term flesh, he is talking about him in terms of his humanity. What has he found in the physical realm? Has he found spiritual righteousness, an eternal righteousness or has he just found a relative righteousness?
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Then he explains the question further in verse 2, giving the answer “For if Abraham was justified by works …” This is where we have the verb dikaioo [dikaiow], which is formed on the root dike [dikh]. That root then is modified by various suffixes to indicate different aspects of either righteousness or justification in terms of the verb. Justification is really the idea of being declared righteous. It is a judicial term, a courtroom term.
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If you have been following the Michael Jackson trial related to his doctor or some of the other trials, that is the idea. What happens in the courtroom - when a court case goes to the jury and the jury is going to return a verdict. There have been some relatively infamous ones over the last decade or two where people are convinced (we think of the OJ Simpson trial) of someone’s guilt, but the jury finds them not guilty. That is a judicial declaration. It does not have anything to do actually with whether or not the person who committed the crime is guilty. It has to do with whether or not there is the proper evidence, so that they can determine judicially that that person is guilty.
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That is a good way to understand what we have. We are guiltier than you ever thought OJ Simpson was in terms of sin and violating God’s standard of righteousness. But we are declared not just not guilty, but we are declared righteous because we are judicially given that gift of righteousness. It is not given to us in the way that makes us righteous, it does not make us moral, it does not obliterate part of the sin nature, it does not limit the sin nature so we are not as capable of sin as we were before (we know better than that if we are being honest).
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If you were saved like I was when you were young, your sin nature just did not have enough opportunity yet to demonstrate its true core capacity for evil if you were five, six or seven years old. By the time you got to be 14 or 15, it was beginning to, in Navy terms, get its sea legs and really operate, especially if you talk to your parents about the time you hit adolescence.
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The sin nature and the fact that we were born spiritually dead mean that we have this predisposition to unrighteousness. That does not mean that everything we do is bad or sinful. In a sense it is because it all comes from the sin nature, and we have no other nature from which it can come. But what it means is that in terms of God’s standard of perfection, no matter how good we are relatively speaking, we are never good enough to reach His standard of absolute perfection.
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Even Jesus when talking to His disciples recognized that mankind does good things. He says in “If you then, being evil (recognition of the fallen nature), know how to give good gifts to your children…” Human beings can do wonderfully good things; unbelievers can do good things. They are not the kind of good (qualitative intrinsic good) that is going to gain the righteousness of God. That is why points out that the problem with our righteousness or any righteous deeds that we perform is that in comparison to God’s standards, they are filthy rags, disgusting. They never allow us to reach the level of good. So how then do we get righteousness?
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In , Paul gives his example from . “For what does the Scripture say?” He points out just methodologically the issue is always go back to the Scripture. In fact, I was over at a Jewish friend’s house (he is not a believer) and was there with another Jewish business woman. The one friend was talking to her about me being a wonderful evangelical and how my church loves Israel and the Jewish people. He asked me why we support Israel, and I said, “Because the Bible says so.” Christians support Israel for a Christian reason. As an American, I might have other reasons, but specifically as a Christian, I support Israel because the Bible says so. He said, “What if the Bible said to hate Israel?” “Then I would hate Israel because the Bible is the ultimate authority.” That was not the answer he expected.
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We always have to go back to what the Bible says. Paul is demonstrating that in when he says, “What does the Scripture say?” The Scripture is the authority, so we have to go back and determine what the Scripture says.
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Let’s go back to and get the context of this significant verse. The verse he quotes is “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” That is the NKJV. This is an incredibly important passage, and its interpretation is controversial, even among those who hold to a free grace gospel.
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There are some who take this to mean that the belief that is talked about in verse six is belief in the promise that God has just now made to Abraham that his descendants would come through him and not through, for example, an adoption of Eliezer. There are others - solid on the gospel, free grace advocates and dispensationalists – who would say that verse six does not refer to what is happening right here but is more parenthetical and is a reminder of something Abraham had already done prior to this. He was not justified in the events of but was justified already – probably before . That is the view I take.
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Chapter 15 can really be divided into two sections. In verses 1-5 God is promising to Abraham a covenant, and that covenant would bring blessing to him and his seed. That is the key idea. If you want to trace the main idea through Genesis, you trace that word seed. From the very beginning of sin, God promised to Eve that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. All the genealogies in , , and the rest of the Old Testament trace the seed, all the way down to the genealogies in and in . Those two genealogies have two different purposes. People think Matthew gives the genealogy of Joseph, and they teach that is the legal claim that Jesus had to the throne through His adopted father Joseph. They say traces the genealogy (leaves in a lot of gaps) from Adam to Jesus through Mary, and that is the physical line of descent. But that is wrong.
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The reason Matthew gives a genealogy is not to show that Jesus has a legal right to the throne of David through His adopted father Joseph. Joseph was a descendant through Coniah. Jeconiah was one of the last and most evil kings in the southern kingdom. God pronounced a judgment, a curse on him that no descendant of his would sit on the throne of Israel. So no descendant of Coniah, no physical or adopted son of Joseph had a legal right to the throne of Israel. The genealogy of Matthew is to show that the seed does not go through Joseph at all. It is supporting the necessity of a virgin birth that would leave Joseph out of the line.
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You trace the whole seed line down through Genesis. Is the seed going to come physically through this man who is past his ability to father children? Is it going to come literally through him and Sarah, who is also beyond her years to have a child, to become pregnant? Or is God going to give Abraham a physical descendant? This is the focal point of this passage.
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That is the first section – God’s reiteration of the promise in when He tells Abraham to look at the stars in the sky and that his descendants would be more numerable. From verses 7-21, we have the covenant cutting ceremony, the formal ceremony, when God makes the covenant with Abram. It is concluded in verse 18 “On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates.’ ” Then he enumerates a number of the different ethnic groups that inhabited the land of Canaan.
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This prelude, the initial declaration to the chapter in these first five verses (hinge verse in verse six which is our focal point) is designed to reiterate the promise that has already been made. The covenant is not cut formally, the contract is not signed as it were, until we get into verses 7-17. The promise of giving the covenant is made as far back as . That is one reason we know that this statement of Abram’s faith in Yahweh must go back to events before an initial promise was given.
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Verse six fits as a parenthetical statement that is a reminder of the foundation for the promise. The foundation for the promise is Abram’s belief in God and the fact that God had imputed to him righteousness. Because he was now righteous, God could give him this covenant.
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The Abrahamic Covenant as it is set forth specifically in this chapter, and also in the numerous repetitions, is a distinct kind of covenant in the ancient world. There was an article that was published in the early part of the 1960s entitled “The Covenant of Grant in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East” by Moshe Weinfeld at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which was a ground-breaking study on the Mosaic Covenant and the Davidic Covenant.
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It is important to understand that there were basically two different kinds of contract forms that were prominent in the ancient Near East. Now we call it the Middle East, but whenever you study it in the ancient world, it is called the ancient Near East. The covenants we have in the Bible were probably the prototype. Who came first, the chicken or the egg? Who came first, God or man? God came first. God’s covenants with man always preceded any human covenants, so all human covenants are somehow based on what they understood as the structure of divine covenants. Then, of course, they would be developed and expanded on down through history. As time went by, mankind in different cultures would modify these covenants.
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In the ancient Near East, you had two types of covenants. One is a covenant where the king would promise certain benefits, conditioned on the behavior of his people or a client nation or a feudal servant. If you are obedient and guard my borders and are productive, then I will do these positive things for you. If you are disobedient and you do not provide enough tax revenue or enough agricultural products or protect me from my enemies, I will punish you in certain ways. That would become a very formal type of contract by the middle of the 2nd century BC (around 1500 or 1400 BC) and became known as the suzerain-vassal treaty form. That really is the pattern for the Mosaic Law, designed with a somewhat conditional sort of nature to it.
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But to a servant that had been obedient, that had blessed the sovereign, there was another kind of treaty. It was called a royal grant treaty, where one who was already an obedient servant is given an additional grace blessing based on the fact that he had been obedient. It was not because he had been obedient he would get this – it was totally at the discretion of the king. That is what we have in the Abrahamic Covenant.
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At the introduction to his article, Weinfeld writes, “Two types of covenants are found in the Old Testament. The obligatory type reflected in the covenant of God with Israel (suzerain-vassal treaty). The promissory type reflected in the Abrahamic and Davidic Covenants.” On the next page, he says, “While the treaty (obligatory type) constitutes an obligation of the vassal to his master, the suzerain, the grant constitutes an obligation of the master to his servant. In the grant type of treaty, the curse is directed towards the one who will violate the rights of the king’s vassal.”
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That is exactly what we have in . God tells Abram He is going to give him this land, so he is to leave Ur and go to the land God will show him. “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you…” The cursing in the Mosaic Law is directed to whom? To the Israelites, those who were the vassal and were disobedient. In a grant covenant, the curse is directed to those who would violate the rights of the vassal, the one who is receiving the grant.
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Weinfeld goes on to say, “In other words, the grant serves mainly to protect the rights of the servant, while the treaty comes to protect the rights of the master. What is more, the grant is a reward for loyalty and good deeds already performed. The treaty is an inducement for future loyalties.” If this is true, God is giving the Abrahamic Covenant to Abraham, and he is already entered into a relationship with God. It is not that God gives him the covenant and later he would become justified. That would not fit the pattern that we see in this type of covenant.
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We see these two sections in – God’s reiteration of the promise in verses 1-5, a reminder of the basis for the promise, the real cause of the promise in verse six, and the covenant itself being cut in the formal ceremony in verses 7-17.
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At the beginning, God promises that Abram will have an heir who is a direct physical descendant of Abram and Sarah. God appears to him and says in “After these things (which are the events of chapter 14, the rescue of Lot, and the defeat of the five kings) the word of the Lord …” It is important here that it is indicated again as Yahweh. God doesn’t really define for the Jews the significance of that name (the tetragrammaton YHWH) until Moses, but that does not mean that they did not use the name. God told Moses, “I have not identified the significance of My name.” This name Yahweh was always associated with God’s covenant and faithfulness.
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“After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.’ But Abram said, ‘Lord God, what will You give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’” We see that Abram is not quite focused on the fact yet that God is going to be able to give him a son through his own body. He shows a level of doubt there.
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I want you to note the progression of this narrative grammatically. It starts out “After these things…” There is a clear break between the events preceding in chapter 14 and the beginning of this episode. This is completely different. There is not a continuation of events, but this is something that takes place sometime later. God appears to Abram in a vision, and Abram speaks to God. In the Hebrew, it would not have to be a “but”; it could be a “then.” The vav is the Hebrew conjunction “and.” Hebrew narrative is a little bit repetitive and redundant and boring. “And this happened and this happened and this happened.” You have a vav consecutive there plus an imperfect tense of the verb. That just shows ongoing narrative: God spoke to Abram in a vision and then Abram made this statement and then in verse three Abram said which starts out in the same kind of construction.
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“Then Abram said, ‘Look, You have given me no offspring; indeed one born in my house is my heir!’ ” This was the custom of the time. A couple might be childless and would give a faithful servant (that royal grant idea again) something to reward him for his faithfulness. He would have already entered into a relationship with that family.
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In verse four there is a break in the narrative. “And behold the word of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘This one (Eliezer) shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir.’ ” It is not the normal progression of the narrative with a vav consecutive. There is a break there.
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Then you have this same grammatical construction in verse five “Then He brought him outside …” You have “the word of the Lord came to him” and then “He brought him outside and said, ‘Look now toward heaven, and count the starts if you are able to number them.’ And he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ ” This happens and then this happens and then this happens. Then verse six says “And he believed in the Lord…” But that is not what it says in the Hebrew. In the ongoing narrative, it is a vav plus an imperfect tense of the verb, but here you have a vav plus a perfect tense of the verb, which means that the action is completely thrown off. It shows that verse six is not a continuation of the story that the events of verse six follow verse five. It shows that there is a break in the writer’s thinking, and he goes off on a tangent. The grammar here indicates that verse six is not the next logical step in the progression, but there is a break in the action. That would indicate, just on the grammar at that point, that what happens in verse six is taking us to some other event.
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Let us look at the grammar here in . The first verb is he’emin, which is the hifil perfect of the verb to trust or believe. All the others were imperfect. It is important here because it makes us realize that God is not promising a covenant to Abram and then Abram gets saved because he believes it. This gracious gift of this promise to Abram is being given to one who is already a member of the family, already a believer. We are being reminded of this – “Now, remember, Abram had already believed in the Lord, and it had already been imputed to him as righteousness.” What the writer Moses is saying here is remember what the foundation for the promise is. It is the grace of God in giving Abram righteousness on the basis of his faith.
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I put up here on the screen three different translations. The first is the NKJV “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” The next is from the Tanakh, which is the Jewish Publication Society translation of 1985, which is a little more modern. The third is from the JPS Tanakh from 1917. Tanakh is what the Jews called the Old Testament. It is an acronym for the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim – the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. They just take those initial consonants and make the word Tanakh.
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The Tanakh 1985 version “And because he put his trust in the Lord, He reckoned it to his merit.” The word for merit is tsedeq. It really does not have to do with merit as much as it has to do with righteousness. That throws it off target a little. The Tanakh 1917 version “And he believed in the Lord; and He counted it to him for righteousness.” A much better translation. The Jewish Tanakhs are not any
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different than English Bibles. I could put up five different English translations, and you would find these kinds of little differences in the way the translators handled some things. Too many translators want to add their interpretation into a translation, rather than just simply translating it.
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John Sailhammer, who wrote the commentary on Genesis in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary series, makes a good analogy here:
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“Recognition of Abram’s faith at this point in the story, however, should not be taken as the initiation of his faith. Abram had already responded earlier to the call and promise of God’s word (12:1–3). Just as the covenant ritual of chap. 15 does not initiate God’s commitment but formally ratifies it, so the narration’s affirmation of Abram’s faith in v. 6 declares the faith Abram had
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exercised from the outset.”
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He and a number of other commentators would take the same view that I take, and that is this goes back to something much earlier. In some of the legends of the Jews, they put Abram’s belief in God back as far as the time he was 40 or 50 years of age, long before God appeared to him and called him to come forth from Ur of the Chaldees. We’re not told about that. The first time we see Abram, he is a growing believer in God’s promises for a Messiah as it was exemplified in the Old Testament.
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We are looking at this verb amen, where we get our noun amen which we utter at the end of a prayer. It is one of two primary words for faith in the Old Testament: this word and the word batach. There are slight differences in the emphasis that each one brings to the table. We’ll just talk about amen tonight.
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The root meaning of the Hebrew concept of belief has to do with stability or certainty. I believe something means that I am certain, I am assured, I am positive that this is true. It is not like what you will hear from a lot of liberal theologians and liberals in other areas that say, “This is what we know for sure, but beyond that, that is in the realm of faith.” They always do that.
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I was reading a book this morning that is a good book to wake up with, get your blood pressure going, get you all stimulated early before you ever get out of bed and get your coffee going. You are wide awake because you are mad. It is a book on the Israel/Palestinian conflict. I was writing nasty comments in the margin almost from the first paragraph. You can tell from things they say that they completely reject any value in anything that the Bible says. “That is just something of faith. That doesn’t give us any idea of what was going on at the time. You just cannot trust it at all.” It is like you can know something or have faith, but they are opposites.
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But the Bible sees faith as an element of knowledge in certainty. We have gone over this before that the way we come to learn things is one of four different ways. 1) Through the use of reason, rationalism. Plato in the ancient world and Descartes in the more modern world, the Enlightenment. It is that reason alone can lead us to truth. 2) Empiricism says reason cannot really get you outside of your own head (that was the critique of Descartes). You have to go with sense knowledge – what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Only what you can see, hear, smell, taste or touch can lead you to true knowledge. 3) Mysticism (It always follows this flow in history. First you have rationalism and that fails; then you have empiricism and that fails. You can’t get there on the basis of logic, so let us leap there in mysticism.) Mysticism always follows the skepticism that comes from the failure of rationalism or empiricism.
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What they all have in common is that they all have a belief in the ability of the human brain to properly decode and interpret data, whether it is intellectual data or external data. They are all grounded in faith. Rationalism is built on faith assumptions. Empiricism is based on faith assumptions. Mysticism is based on faith assumptions. It is not faith vs. reason or empiricism. Rationalism, empiricism and mysticism are all grounded on an assumption, a belief that man can properly interpret the data without any outside input at all.
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Over against those three we have 4) Revelation. Revelation is an authority (God) explaining or giving information to man you cannot get from rationalism, empiricism or mysticism; and man again responds by believing the content of what God has revealed. Faith is operative in every system of knowledge. It is not faith or knowledge; faith is a component in any kind of knowledge.
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That is what is emphasized in this word amen which is the conviction of certainty in your knowledge. The root meaning of the Hebrew concept is that of stability and certainty. One of the places where we get evidence of this is in this verse “At that time Hezekiah stripped the gold from the door of the temple of the Lord, and from the doorposts which Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid, and gave it to the King of Assyria [the foundational support of the pillars].”
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This is the time of the Sennacherib invasion into Judah, and Hezekiah has to pay the bribe to pay him off. Try to figure out where the word for faith (amen) is in this verse. The word that is translated doorposts really is the support of the pillars, the foundation. It is a noun form of the verb amen.
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Some of you have been to Israel before. You go down in the tunnels under the Temple Mount, and they show you the foundation stones that are put under the Temple Mount. People go to Egypt, and they ooh and aah over the fact that they managed to transport these 15-20 ton blocks of rock up to build the pyramids. But you go down under the Temple Mount, and they have one foundation stone there that they estimate it weighs 140 tons. The Jews had the engineering and ability to bring that up to the Temple Mount. When you build something on a foundation stone that weighs 140 tons, you have stability and certainty, and it is immoveable, unshakeable.
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That is why that word is used there. Faith has to do with this sense of certainty. In “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is a certainty of knowledge apart from empiricism or rationalism, but it is based on the authority of God’s Word telling us something. We believe it to be true, and it is just as real as if we had witnessed it in the laboratory, just as if we had measured and weighed it. Just because we have not seen or tasted or touched it or do not have the presuppositions to make up the major assumptions as the basis for the conclusion in a logical argument does not mean it is not just as true. It is just as true because God said it.
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There used to be a bumper sticker back in the 1970s that said, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” What is wrong with that? It should read, “God said it. That settles it. I believe it.” It is not settled because I believe it; it is settled because God said it. You always have to make sure that the authority is the Word of God. God said it; therefore, it is true. Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant.
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In the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, the writer makes the point that in the hifil stem, which is what we have here in , the verb amen basically means to cause something to be certain or sure, to be assured. This is the sense that we have for the way the word is used in terms of belief. We believe it because it is sure; there is a sense of certainty in our minds that a statement is true. The other interesting thing about amen as opposed to batach is amen is used mostly in response to something said by someone else. God makes a promise, and we amen, we believe it. As opposed to passages where you are exhorted to trust in the Lord, that would be batach. Amen expresses a person’s response to a statement or promise by God. Faith or belief then means that someone has a sense of assurance or certainty that something is true.
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We have another example of how faith is used in , which is in the middle of a conversation that God is having with Moses giving him his commission to go to the pharaoh to free the Israelites. The chapter begins with God telling Moses to go, and Moses said, “Suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice.” It is the response to a voice that comes out in that particular verse. God then gives him evidence. There is nothing wrong with basing faith on evidence. It is not a faith that is just a leap of faith. Leap of faith terminology is existential; it is not biblical. We do not believe something with no evidence. God gives all kinds of evidence in the Scripture.
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Luke tells us in , after the resurrection Jesus presented Himself to the disciples and gave them “many infallible proofs” of the resurrection. God does not say to park your brain in neutral and believe something. There is evidence.
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There are going to be signs and miracles that Moses is going to perform before pharaoh. Later on Moses says, “I just cannot talk very well.” God says He will send Aaron as his spokesperson. “So Moses told Aaron all the words of the Lord who had sent him, and all the signs which He had commanded him. Then Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel. And Aaron spoke all the words which the Lord had spoken to Moses. Then he did the signs in the sight of the people. So the people believed (amen, they believed, they trusted in God); and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel and that He had looked on their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshiped.”
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Ten chapters later in after the parting of the Red Sea, we are told “So the Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.” Faith does not necessarily operate apart from empirical data. We are not saying the empiricism is wrong or rationalism is wrong, but empiricism and rationalism that are based on the wrong starting point are wrong. God uses empirical data all the time as confirmatory evidence to validate what He has done.
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“Thus Israel saw the great work which the Lord had done in Egypt; so the people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord and his servant Moses.” Here is another interesting point: we often see fear of the Lord and belief in the Lord used in parallel constructions in numerous passages. So that in those passages, fear of the Lord goes beyond simply awe or respect for God. It almost becomes a synonym for believing God because He is in authority.
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Abram believed in the Lord. To believe something means to agree that something is true. It is intellectual. Sometimes you will hear people talk about the distinction between head belief and heart belief, but we do not believe with our heart, in terms of a physical organ. When you use those metaphors in Scripture of head or heart, it is not in the context of this head vs. heart theology: “That is intellectual, but you have to believe with your emotions.” The Bible does not make those kinds of distinctions anywhere. Belief itself is an intellectual or mental activity. When someone says, “I agree, I affirm, I assent to the fact the “x” is true.” Some people say, “That is a pretty superficial kind of faith in you – just to assent to the fact that something is true.”
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Let me see. Something we all do every year that is rather disagreeable is to fill out our income tax returns. When we finish them and sign them, you are saying that you agree that the numbers that are in your return are true and accurate. You agree that it is true and then sign it and quit working on it. If you did not agree that it was true, you would keep working on it. When we agree that something is true, that is all there is to it. We believe it and stop working on it. To say it is intellectual assent is not a wimp-out or shortchanged view of faith, which is what many Christians want. They have to add works to it somewhere. They have to bring it in the backdoor, the side door, bring it in through the attic – they have to introduce works into it. Faith is simply believe – you don’t believe with your finger or your toe or your elbow. You believe with your brain, your mind which is between your ears. You think through a concept and say, “Is this true or not?” If you say, “Yes, it is true. Jesus died for my sins,” that is faith.
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When Abram heard the promise of God, he had no idea how God would pull this off. But he knew God and knew God’s character, so he trusted and believed in the Lord literally. “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” This is another interesting word – chshv. In this construction, it is actually cheshbeha. It has this “ah” suffix which is a feminine suffix. It means “it” so it is a feminine “it” which means it has to refer to a feminine noun. Righteousness, which is the next word, is a feminine noun tsedeq. So it does not say, “Abram believed in the Lord, and He accounted IT to him for righteousness.” It says, “…He accounted IT, righteousness, to him.” It is appositional. The righteousness defines the pronoun it. There are places where you have that kind of construction.
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A couple of verses that talk about imputation are “…Do not let my lord impute iniquity to me…” “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity…”
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, , and are among a number of verses that are cited in the grammars for the exact kind of grammatical construction that we have here in , where you have a verb “He imputed” with a suffix on the end which is a pronoun. “…she saw him, the child…” Saw, the verb, would have the pronoun suffix added at the end of that verb, and then you have the noun explaining who the pronoun describes. “…you shall burn with fire that in which is the plague.” The it refers to “that in which is the plague.” “…and boiled their flesh.” You have this pronoun suffix at the end of the verb and then you have the noun. is almost an identical type of raw syntactical construction.
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should be translated “And he had already believed in Yahweh.” The object of his faith is God as the one who is the guarantor of the promise. “…and He (the Lord) accounted (imputed) it, righteousness, to him.” It is clear that the imputation of righteousness is a result of faith, not of works, not of the Law. Abraham precedes Moses by over 400 years, before there is any covenant. It is based solely on faith.
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We will come back next time and look a little more at the meaning of tsedeq, righteousness. This is a really important word and really important within Judaism today because they have added this notion of merit and morality to it. But it is foundational within the Old Testament, and the New Testament translations of dikaios [dikaioj] and dikaiosune [dikaiosunh]. This helps us understand that we are saved not because there is anything in us. We are given a gift of righteousness that covers us like a cloak, and it does not matter what is under the cloak in terms of our salvation. What matters is that God looks at the cloak that is over us (Christ’s righteousness), and on that basis, God says, “I judicially declare you righteous.” That is what justification by faith alone is.

Romans 040b-Abraham’s Faith ; ; Psalm 32:1-2

Romans 4:3 NASB95
For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
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Romans 040b-Abraham’s Faith ; ;
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is the chapter where Paul is illustrating the principle from the Old Testament that justification comes from the grace of God. It is by faith alone and is not on the basis of works: it is God’s grace in operation. The focal point is on these two illustrations – one from Abraham and one from David. He does this because he is following the principle laid down in the Mosaic Law that there should be two or three witnesses of any event. He is choosing two absolute lines of evidence from the Old Testament – one from the Torah written by Moses and one from the Psalms written by David, who is also referred to in the Old Testament as a prophet. He did not hold the office of prophet and was not considered to be a prophet like Nathan, Gad, Elijah or Elishah, but he did have the gift of prophecy.
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In , Paul says, “For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ ” If you look at your Bible, you have a “for” at the beginning of verse two and a “for” at the beginning of verse three. These both represent the same word in Greek, but they are used with a slightly different sense.
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Verse one begins with a somewhat rhetorical question “What then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh [his physical life]? “For …” at the beginning of verse two is an explanatory, and it sets up the condition “if Abraham was justified by works…” It is a first class condition there because he is setting it up like a debater. He is setting forth his first premise as if it were true, but it is not true. Sometimes when people have learned about the different conditions in Greek, they think that the first class condition means “if and it is true.” But it does not mean that. It means “if and the writer/speaker is assuming it is true.” It may not be true.
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Here it is not true that Abraham was justified by works, but it is assumed to be true for the sake of argument. Verse two “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.” And then Paul uses that same Greek word gar again, which is translated “for”, at the beginning of verse three. Here it is used in a much more argumentative sense. I do not use the word argument in the sense of two people getting into a disagreement with each other. I am using it in a technical/legal sense as a defense attorney or prosecutor in the courtroom is summarizing his evidence to make a point. He sets forth an argument driving toward his conclusion. The “for” here is used in this kind of an argumentative sense in order to set up or present the first line of evidence which comes from . Paul quotes it here from the Septuagint “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”
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Let us go back to to look at the context. There are a number of theologians, scholars and exegetes who take the position that follows from the promise that God makes to Abram that his descendants, his seed will be more numerous than the stars in the heaven and the dust of the earth. This promise is what Abram is believing in verse six. But that is really not the case. What happens in verse six is a summary statement that Abram had already believed God, and it was accounted or imputed to him for righteousness. This cannot be the time when Abram receives the imputation of righteousness because he has already been given the Abrahamic Covenant even though the formal ceremony is not set forth until verse seven and following.
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In the beginning of , God has already made the promise to him. He has reiterated the land promise in , and He reiterates again in , . These promises get restated again and again by God. They are just not formalized in a formal covenant ceremony until the last part of . This cannot be when Abraham is justified.
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Furthermore, the grammar of this passage is very different from that which surrounds it. In the verses before, you have a standard Hebrew narrative construction. When you start off in beginning Hebrew, you read Genesis and other narrative literature because it is very simple type of Hebrew. The way it is written would not be good English. “This happened, and he said, and he said, and they did this, and they did that.” It almost always begins with the Hebrew vav consecutive which is the “and”. That is not how we write in English, but that is how they write in Hebrew. It would be followed by usually a verb in the imperfect tense. Suddenly when you want to change and get out of the flow of events and break that pattern, then you change from an imperfect tense verb to a perfect tense verb. What that means is that now all of a sudden this new structure of the conjunction plus a perfect tense verb throws that verse into a different timeframe. The sense of the perfect tense has to do with completed action.
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We think of tenses in English as being a time oriented thing. Present tense is now in the present time. Past tense is that which happened prior. Future tense is that which happens in the future. When we think of past, present, or future tense in English, it is time oriented. In many languages, tense has nothing to do with time. It has to do with what grammarians call the aspect of the action.
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In Greek, you have both at play. In some moods you have time present, but in most of the moods, it has nothing to do with time. It has to do with the action as a summary (aorist tense) or as continuous action (present tense or imperfect tense) or as completed action. In Hebrew, time is almost not present; it is almost completely absent in their verb structure. An imperfect tense represents ongoing action, and a perfect tense indicates completed action.
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When you have this kind of a structure with a vav plus perfect tense, it indicates completed action. Because it is out of order, out of sync with the flow of the events here, it tells us that verse six is not describing something that happens as a result of verses four and five, but it is taking us out of this flow of events and reminding us of something that had already taken place. That Abraham had already believed in the Lord, and it was already accounted to him as righteousness. The perfect tense can either emphasize the fact that it was completed in the past or can emphasize the present ongoing results from a completed past action. That is how, I believe, it is being used here. It is emphasizing that this is present results of an action that was in the past.
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So Abraham is still believing God. He still has imputed righteousness from that completed event that occurred in the past. The reader is being reminded of this. This timeframe, when Abraham believed God, had to have preceded the events of even . God says to him in verses 1-3 “…Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing [you are to be a blessing – it is a command]. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you [will curse harshly those who treat you with disrespect]; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
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When you look at this promise from God, it is not given to Abraham as an unbeliever but as a believer. God is giving him a reward for faithful service. One reason we know that is if is parenthetical, the next thing that is said is verse seven. “Then He said to him, ‘I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit it.’ ” God is reminding Abram of what had occurred in . This shows that the event of verse six goes back to an earlier time and precedes God’s bringing Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. It is a timeframe from verse six that goes back to the time when Abram originally became a believer. We do not know when that was. There is some Jewish tradition it was around 50, but it could have been much earlier. It is uncertain. We do know that by the time he was 75, the beginning of verse 12, he was clearly a believer and already justified.
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The first word we looked at last time was that word believe – not only the grammar but the sense of the word. It is a hifil of the verb amen. In that stem, it has that idea of belief, faith or trust in something. The root core meaning is the word for doorposts. It is used that way in the episode in when Hezekiah takes the gold off the doors and the foundation stones of the temple doors. Those foundation stones were enormous. The form of the word amen was used to describe those foundation stones because it is emphasizing the concept of stability and something that is immovable. The idea of faith has this idea at its core of certainty, of confidence, of something that is assured beyond any shadow of doubt. That is what belief is: it is that unshakable trust in the Lord, even if it is unshakable trust like a mustard seed.
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The second word hashab - “…He accounted [or imputed] it to him for righteousness.” I pointed out from various passages, like , that has very similar construction. “And He accounted it” – the “it” there is a feminine singular suffix that must relate to a feminine noun. Righteouness, tsedeq, is a feminine noun, so it should be translated “He accounted it, righteousness, to him.” It is an appositional type of construction. By stating it that way “He accounted it, righteousness, to Abram,” there is sort of a double emphasis there on what is given to Abram. Abram receives and is given this righteousness.
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Think a minute about the structure here because this is what Paul is going to appeal to. Abram is called somewhere around 2100 BC. We do not know exactly what the date was. There is a lot of debate over how to handle the chronology in the Old Testament. Even the standard, traditional, conservative chronologies are being challenged by various conservatives, all of whom take the numbers to be fully inspired in the Scriptures.
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In trying to correlate these events with extra-biblical events, we have run into some problems. There are a number of conservatives who are working on these issues, and they tend to push things back maybe as much as 150-200 years. I do not want you to get the idea that somehow they are discovering thousands of years. We are talking about small, triple-digit numbers, maybe a century or two extra than the traditional chronology between the Flood and the Exodus. I have even seen some conservatives put the Exodus as far back as the first decade or two in the 1500s. This is almost 80 years prior to the time we would normally assign to it which is 1446 BC.
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Someone might say, “Over in 1 Kings it says that 420 years before Solomon dedicated the temple, we had the Exodus.” Yes, but in their reconstructions, the dedication of the temple is not the traditional date of 970; they moved that to about 10 something. So they are messing with all the dates. We do not know exactly when this was, but it was somewhere around 2100 BC.
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The Mosaic Law is not given until when? Approximately 1445 BC (1446 is the Exodus) when God gives it to Moses at Mt. Sinai. The Torah is not finalized until 1404 or 1405, just before the Israelites go into the land. At that time, Moses is taken to be with the Lord. The Mosaic Law sets down certain legal, moral, ethical, spiritual parameters about sacrifices and other things, but it certainly cannot be the basis of justification because Abraham was justified some 500-700 years before the Law was given.
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Circumcision is not required of Abraham until later on in as the sign of the Abrahamic Covenant. Circumcision certainly is not the basis for his justification. Abraham who precedes the Law cannot be justified on the basis of the Law. He has not been circumcised yet, so that cannot be the basis of the justification. Paul will argue that his justification is based solely on the fact that he believed or trusted in God.
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In Judaism and in the teaching of the Pharisees at the time of Jesus, they taught that Abraham’s justification was based on the fact that even though the Law had not been given yet, Abraham completely fulfilled the Law. He was justified on that basis. How did he even know what the Law was to obey it?
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This is the same problem you have in Roman Catholic theology. You have a written text, and then there is a belief that there is a second oral tradition that got passed down. This oral tradition then is the basis for their interpretation. Who made that up and where did that come from? Any kind of an oral tradition that is separate from the text that is then used to judge the text suddenly becomes a false basis for authority because no one can validate it.
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The classic example for the use of the word imputation in the Old Testament is in .
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“For what does the Scripture say?” Paul’s authority is the Word of God. That is the only authority in our lives. We always have to ask the question, “What does the Scripture say? Does something fit the Scripture?” People say, “That kind of fits the Scripture. That seems to be biblical.” Someone reads something about psychology, economics, politics or philosophy of life and then says, “That is biblical.” What do we mean by biblical. That is an important question to think about.
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That should mean, and historically is meant, that it is derived from the Scriptures, not that somehow it has similarities to the Bible. Similarities to the Bible are great. There were a lot of things that the serpent said to Eve that were similar to what God said. It was the things that he did not say that were the problem that messed up the similarities. That is the issue. Just because something utilizes some biblical principles does not mean it is biblical. There are other things that are part of the mosaic in any philosophy or view of economics or life that do not come from the Bible. It is not what is said that is right that gets us in trouble; it is what is said that is wrong that gets us in trouble. We all have a tendency to be selective readers and hearers.
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We hear somebody who is saying a lot of good things. They are critiquing something like a politician, a political view, some economic or legal view. They say, “This is a real problem,” and we say, “Yes, you are right; I’ve been waiting for someone to say that is a problem.” Just because someone can identify the problem correctly does not mean they have any better solution. There are many people who get sucked in because they have finally found somebody who understands the problem! But they still do not have the right solution.
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We have to think about the solution, and it has to not just be similar to Scripture, but it has to come from Scripture. Paul says, “What does the Scripture say? () ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ ” In my Bible, they make a paragraph break between verse four and five, which I do not think is correct. I think verse five is a reverse statement of four – the two verses have to go together.
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In Paul sets up an illustration “Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. (5) But to him who does not work…” On the one hand you have the one who works, and on the other hand you have the one who does not work. Those two concepts have to go together. He is giving an illustration: on the one hand and then on the other hand. In my NKJV, they break it between the two. You lose the continuity of what he is saying. On the one hand you have a person who works; he puts forth effort. “…the wages are not counted as grace but as debt.” In verse five “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.”
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Now let us do a little exegesis here. “Now to him who works…” is a present middle passive participle from ergozomai [e)rgazomai] a deponent verb), which means it has an active meaning even though it has a middle passive form. Sometimes I throw things out like that not because I think you really understand it, but now and then I have to throw goodies out to those who are trying to apply this to the Greek they know. Last week I got an email about 11:30 pm that said, “How come in one interlinear it says the middle voice and then in another interlinear it says it is a passive voice.” The answer was there is only one form for middle or passive; they are identical, so you have to judge it from the context.
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Ergozomai is middle passive, but it is the form of a word that always has an active meaning. The active form dropped out of usage, so it just has a passive form. It is a basic word for working, laboring, the one who does something. Then it says, “…the wages are not counted as grace but as debt.” Wages is the Greek word misthos [misqoj] that can mean reward, punishment, recompense, idea of giving someone something on the basis of what they have done. They have done something that calls for a certain recompense or a certain reward or punishment. They have done one thing, so that is why they should get something else. In this situation, there is someone who labors, and they then earn something. This is considered not grace, not a gift, but is something owed. Opheilema [o)feilhma] is the Greek word here that does not necessarily mean debt but has the idea of that which is under obligation, obligated to be paid, is owed. You work for 8 hours and are paid $20 an hour, then you should be paid $160 for your labor. It is something you earned by way of your effort. It is not a gift.
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Grace has the idea of something that is unmerited favor and is done without expecting anything in return. This idea within the Greek word charis [xarij] goes all the way back to Aristotle. Grace means to do something without any expectation of return or response. You just do it because it is the right thing to do because it is a good thing and a kind thing to do for someone. Grace is something that is unearned or undeserved by definition.
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It is amazing how many people have lost that sense of grace because in many Christian denominations and all other world religions, the favor from God is always given on the basis of what people do. They have do get enough Brownie points. They have to do enough things, observe enough things, participate in enough rituals so that God will ultimately give them favor. That is something that is earned. I have had people say to me, “You are really earning a lot of grace.” That is like fingernails on a chalkboard. This is how Satan attacks vocabulary, and the truth gets distorted because as the meaning of words gets lost, then the concepts and the doctrines get distorted.
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The wages are something that are earned; therefore, they are not grace. That is the key point. Grace means no expectation of return, unearned, unmerited. “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly…” What do we see there? We see Paul making a very strong contrast between work and faith or trusting in God.
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We look at certain verses that say “The one who believes is the one who does what the Father says.” The idea of work or obedience or doing something is there. Every now and then you get pinhead theologians who get wrapped around the axle over the idea that, as in “But to him who does not work but believes on Him…”, that belief is also a work. Yes, you do something – you believe. That is doing something, but it is not meritorious. This is the critical passage to show that difference. One is not trying to acquire merit by what they do – by their ritual, by their morality, by their spirituality. They are not trying to somehow gain something from God through their own meritorious efforts.
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“But to him who does not work but believes on Him…” That is the contrast – belief is clearly contrasted by Paul with work, with doing something. Faith has to be understood as something that is non-meritorious. It does not have any value in and of itself. The value has to do with the object of faith – what one is believing, not the act of believing itself.
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Within several forms of Calvinism, faith is viewed as a gift. There is a difference between everyday faith and saving faith. If you are going to be saved, you have to have the right kind of faith. That is especially true in forms of lordship salvation. If you do not have saving faith, then you will not have the right kind of works to validate your faith.
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The passage they usually go to is where Jesus has done many miracles and comes to Jerusalem for the first time after he has begun His public ministry. says “Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs which he did.” Verse 24 says “But Jesus did not commit (entrust) Himself to them…” You will hear lordship types say, “See, if they were real believers, Jesus would have trusted them.” I do not know about you, but I do not trust someone just because they are Christians. They are a lot of Christians that I know that are not very trustworthy. Some of them are in political office or in business. One of the toughest things to deal with if you are trying to witness to people is if they have been defrauded by an unscrupulous Christian businessman. There are many people like that. They think their morality is much better than the morality of Christians because of this particular kind of incident.
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is completely distorted by people because Jesus understands that even though they may have believed and accepted Him as Messiah, they have not learned enough yet to recognize that He is not coming to establish a political kingdom. He is not going to entrust Himself to them because they still have a political agenda for Him and not a soteriological agenda for Him. He is not going to get sucked into their agenda. It has nothing to do with whether or not they are saved.
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In “…many believed in His name…” you have the verb pisteuo [pisteuw] which is used 97-98 times in the gospel of John and always followed by a prepositional phrase with the preposition eis – believe on His name or toward His name. Believing in Christ, in Him, pisteuo eis [pisteuw e)ij] is used all through the gospel of John to express the condition for salvation. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him (pisteuo eis) should not perish but have everlasting life.” That is the same thing that the people in did. They believed in Him (psteuo eis). If that does not get them saved, then how can we be sure how anybody is saved? This is the problem with lordship salvation.
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They want to bring a second kind of faith in. John MacArthur, one of the most widely known proponents of lordship salvation, says you can have a faith in Jesus that does not save. Really? That is not what it says in my Bible. They are saying that the kind of faith that saves is a gift of God. They also mistranslate, misunderstand, misinterpret which says “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God…” The “that” in the Greek is a neuter singular pronoun, and “grace” and “faith” are both feminine nouns. There is a lot of debate over that, but the “that” refers to the whole idea. The whole phrase “For by grace you have been saved through faith…” is not of ourselves. “It” (salvation by faith through grace) is the gift of God and not from the source of works.
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This is the same thing that Paul says in “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly…” Here he uses a different preposition than the Apostle John uses in the gospel of John. He uses the preposition epi [e)pi] which means in some cases to put something upon something and in some cases it almost has the idea of resting on something, placing something on top of something. Somebody standing on the sand of the seashore is an example. The idea is that you are putting your faith upon, you are resting it upon Him, that is God the Father, who justifies the ungodly. He is the one who declares the ungodly to be just.
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What does that word ungodly mean? Ungodly is one of those words that has come into popular Christian English vocabulary, where we do not use it the way the Bible does. We look at some Christian and say, “Look at that ungodly behavior.” The term ungodly is used in Scripture to refer to unbelievers exclusively. It is a technical term for unbelievers. We see it in verse five “…Him who justifies the ungodly…” The godly are justified; they do not need to be justified. It is the unsaved who need to be justified. The term ungodly is a term that is equivalent to unbelievers. God is the one who justifies the ungodly. We see it again in “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.”
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When I go to Kiev, Ukraine in January, we will show the brand new series I’m recording on Jude. The word asebes [a)sebhj] (word for ungodly), used in and 5, is used twice in Jude. If ungodly can refer to carnal believers, then you end up having some real theological problems, especially in Jude. The term ungodly always refers to unbelievers. There is one time () that is talking about Sodom and Gomorrah. The present day false teachers that Peter is warning about are practicing the ungodly behavior of Sodom and Gomorrah. What that means is that they are acting and behaving like unbelievers. It is the behavior of unbelievers in that passage. But all the other passages are pretty clear, like , that Christ died for the ungodly, for those who are unsaved.
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In “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly…” There is nothing about them that renders them savable. There is nothing good there. “…all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.” God justifies the ungodly; it is his faith that is accounted or reckoned or ascribed for righteousness.
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In , we shift to the second example which comes from . “Just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.” Here the focal point shifts. It is about the blessedness of the one to whom God imputes righteousness. That word blessedness (the Greek word is makarios/makarioj) does not really mean happiness. Sometimes it has been translated that way. The blessed person is the person who has experienced the unmerited favor of God. When we look at somebody and their life seems to be going well, we say, “They are really blessed by God.” It is a word that is related to the application of grace.
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are taken directly out of . This is one of those penitential psalms. It is a psalm of forgiveness where David is expressing his joy at the fact that God has forgiven him for his sin with Bathsheba. is the psalm of confession. He says in “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven…” This is the Hebrew word barach. Not Barack as in either the name of our President or the former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak. In Arabic, Hebrew, and Semitic languages, that refers to lightning. Barach, like in the Valley of Blessing (Berachah), is the word that is here.
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“Blessed is he whose transgression (pesha, which means a violation of the law) is forgiven…” The word for forgiven is the Hebrew word nasa’. This is an interesting metaphorical use of this word. The noun is nasa’ which refers to a physical burden. It is used many times to refer to the physical burden you put on a camel or mule, the burden you carry on your back. Then it comes to refer to an emotional burden.
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Moses is complaining a little bit about the Exodus generation and called them a burden to him in the first chapter of Deuteronomy. Dealing with all their problems in that Exodus generation was a problem, a burden to Moses. There are other passages that talk about the burden of guilt. Feeling guilty for your sins or not experiencing the forgiveness of God is a burden, like having a heavy load on your back. Forgiveness (nasa’) is God removing the burden of that guilt from us. It came to mean forgiveness and the removal of the burden. Very similar background to aphiemi [a)fihmi](forgiveness, cancelling of a debt, removal of a problem), the word Paul uses in .
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David says in “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” This is another word that is used - kasa (covering). It normally refers to the cover over something, like you put a cover on your bed. In a few places, it is used like here in parallelism with forgiveness, so it has that idea but only in poetry. This is an important point to make that words do not mean the same thing in poetry that they do in the Torah. By that I mean that the Torah is law or legal literature. If you are writing a legal contract, a word has a tighter range of meaning, a more technical range of meaning than it will in poetry. When you are writing in poetry, there is poetic license. They are not as rigid in their meaning because the writer is looking for words that have a similar sound or similar cadence to fit in there that has a similar idea. We give writers of poetry a little more freedom of movement. When you are doing word studies in the Scriptures, it is important to look at the kind of literature where the word is being used.
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I like to make this point because someone may read a word in a hymn and think it does not sound quite right. It would not be right if we are in Romans, but it is fine if we are in the Psalms. We are singing a hymn that is poetry, and poetry uses more figures of speech, uses a lot more similes than metaphors, and words are used in a less rigid way than they are in legal literature. You are going to read a real estate contract quite a bit differently than you are going to read a Shakespearean sonnet. You are not going to expect the words to have the exact same kind of meaning because they are different kinds of literature. The same is true in Hebrew.
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The word here for covering is used just as a way in which the sin is forgiven. It does not mean that God is somehow covering it up. That is not the idea. It is used in this sense as a synonym for forgiveness and not a cover-up.
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“Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.” The original context of is the context where David as a believer has sinned. So it is dealing with his personal sin. Paul is applying it in a little different way in . He is not talking about forgiveness of a believer; he is talking about the imputation of righteousness.
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In , he is talking about unbelievers not having their personal sins imputed to them. There are two categories of sin for which we are condemned. We have Adam’s original sin which is the basis for our condemnation. Then we have personal sin. The focal point here is on personal sin, and the one who is blessed is the one to whom God does not impute or credit their personal sin. He is not going to be judging them on that basis. The sin has been paid for on the cross through the sacrifice.
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In “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.” He is quoting from the Septuagint.
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In verses 9-12, he is going to develop this argument more by going back to Abraham. He says in verse nine “Does this blessedness then come upon…” That tells us that the focal point is really on blessedness, even though uses the word for imputation or reckoning.
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“…just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.” It is the one who receives grace. That is what blessing is: the one who has experienced the undeserved favor of God. That is his whole argument here that justification does not come from something we deserve but is the undeserved favor of God.
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In verse 6 David describes the blessedness of the man. Verse seven begins “Blessed are those…” Verse eight begins “Blessed is the man…” Verse nine begins “Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also?” So what is he talking about? The word that he has used four times in three verses – blessing, unmerited favor. Does this unmerited favor come upon circumcised, those who have done something only, or upon the uncircumcised also?
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He introduces another argument in “…For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness.” He is reminding them of the point that he has made. Verse 10 “How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised.” Circumcision does not come in until .
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Verse 11 “And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also.” Circumcision was a post-salvation sign of what had already taken place and was not a sign of his justification but of the covenant God made with him in relation to his seed. His argument here is bringing to a conclusion what he started back in chapter two: Are only the Jews who are circumcised justified? No. There are those who are circumcised that are less righteous than those who are uncircumcised. So is God going to justify the one who is less righteous because he has not been circumcised? No. The issue is faith whether he is circumcised or not, or obedient to the law or not. That was the argument at the end of chapter two.
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In “And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised…” And in verse 12 he says, “and the father of circumcision [Abraham because he is the first, the father of circumcision] to those who not only are of the circumcision [the Jews who are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob], but who also walk in the steps of the faith [who follow Abraham in faith, trusting God for righteousness] which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.”
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His application in verses 9-12 is that if Abraham is justified long before he is circumcised, circumcision is a consequence and a sign of something that has already taken place. What is the basis for justification has nothing to do with circumcision, nothing to do with the Mosaic Law; it has to do with simply believing in the promise of God and only on the basis of believing the promise of God.

Romans 041b-Abraham's Tests of Faith; Cause or Result of Justification.

Romans 4:13 NASB95
For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith.
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Romans 041b-Abraham's Tests of Faith; Cause or Result of Justification. , ,
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is the chapter where Paul gives two examples from the Old Testament that support what he has been saying since the middle of chapter two. Man cannot justify himself; it is impossible. He cannot do it by being moral or by being obedient to the Law. Within Judaism at this time, the focus was on circumcision as the indicator of one’s spirituality. If you are Jewish and circumcised, you were in. Yet Paul argues against that in chapter three, showing that that is not enough. He explains it in terms of the doctrine in chapter three, and then in chapter four, he gives two illustrations. We have looked at both the illustration of Abraham and of David.
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Paul quotes from and says in “If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted [reckoned] to him for righteousness.’ ” In , the blessing that God has promised to Abraham (promise of descendants more numerable than the stars in the sky) would not come through Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, but through Abraham himself. “This one shall not be your heir, but one will come from your own body shall be your heir. Then He brought him outside and said, ‘Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.’ And He said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ ”
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This is a promise but not the promise that Abraham exercises faith on in verse six. “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” It should actually be translated “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it, righteousness, to him.” The key word is the word for believe, amen, which means to trust in God, complete reliance on God, bringing in nuances of stability and certainty. Almost every time this word is used, someone is responding to something that someone else, usually God, is saying, as opposed to the other primary word for faith, batach, which is usually used to describe when someone is trusting God. Amen is used when someone is responding to a promise or statement by God and believing Him at that point.
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is a paragraph break. “Then He said to him, ‘I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit it.’ ” What we see here is that time in which Abraham was justified was really this time when he was still in Ur of the Chaldees. I pointed out that the grammar of shifts to a perfect tense verb from the standard narrative flow of imperfect tenses. The statement that “he believed in the Lord” is completely out of sync with flow of the story, so it should be understood as a parenthesis. What the narrator Moses is doing is stepping in to remind the reader that Abraham had already believed in the Lord, and it was at that time that righteousness was imputed to him. The next verse refers to that time which is in Ur of the Chaldees.
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What I want to look at tonight is another question. Are Abraham’s tests of faith the cause or the result of justification? The doctrine of justification by faith alone is a doctrine that was lost or obscured for much of the history of Christianity. By the end of the 3rd or 4th century at the latest, the doctrine of justification by faith alone began to be obscured by the introduction of sacramentalism within what later became known as Roman Catholic theology. The idea that by doing things, by participating in these various sacraments, Christians gained grace from God. That did not become really established in a doctrinal sense until well into the Middle Ages. The idea of the doctrine that we are justified by simply believing God and nothing else – do not have to reform our life, become moral, become spiritual in order to be justified by God – has always been under attack.
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Grace is never understood. Human beings just do not want to believe that God is going to give them something for free. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church taught that justification was not something that happened once in a moment of time when a person trusted in Jesus as Savior, but it was something that happened over a long period of the individual’s life. You never knew really knew if you were justified because you did not know if you had received enough grace. You receive grace by participating in the Mass and various other sacraments. Each time you did, you got a little more grace. It is doled out to you a little bit at a time and was a process. You only knew if somebody was justified and on the right path by looking at their works, at how moral or good or religious they were. We often hear how that even gets into the vocabulary of people who are grace oriented because you often catch yourself looking at someone and saying, “I just do not how they could be saved.” Why? Because they do not live like they are saved, we think how could that person be saved. But we do not know. That person could have trusted Christ by hearing the gospel as a child in a Good News Club or Vacation Bible School or Sunday School. With some people there is a pretty good likelihood that they never did hear the gospel or understand it, but you cannot know for sure.
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I have personal acquaintances and friends who clearly understood the gospel and were saved when they were teenagers, but when they went to college, they got confused and gave up on Christianity altogether. Today you would not know by what they say, believe, teach or how they live, that they ever had a clue what Christianity was all about.
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This idea that we are justified totally apart from works was recovered during the Protestant Reformation. The first person to recover that was a theologian by the name of Martin Luther. In his Commentary on Galatians, Luther wrote, “It is necessary that we should have imputation of righteousness which we obtain through Christ….by faith.” That is the benchmark of the Protestant Reformation. Luther clearly came to understand that. He did not really have it totally focused on October 31, 1517 when he nailed the 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. But as he continued to study the Word, it not only became focused for him, but he had a protégé by the name of Philipp Melanchthon. He was the brilliant mind who systematized Luther’s theology and helped him understand the true grace of the gospel and of justification by faith alone.
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Luther went on to say that “[the] doctrine of justification is this, that we are pronounced righteous and are saved solely by faith in Christ, and without works.” Remember this is exactly what I have been teaching – justification is that we are declared righteous by the Supreme Court of heaven. It has nothing to do with anything that we do; it has nothing to do with our character or sincerity. It has only to do with the fact that we possess the righteousness of Christ. At the instant of faith alone in Christ alone, God the Father imputes or credits to each of us the righteousness of Christ, so that when God the Father looks at us, He sees not our sin because that is covered, as it were, by the cloak of Christ’s righteousness. Underneath it we are still the dirty rotten lousy sinner that we always were. We are declared righteous – it is a judicial declaration.
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Luther understood it and so did John Calvin. Calvin later on was pressured, as others were, during the Reformation by the response of the Roman Catholic Church and the Counter-Reformation: “If you are saved by grace, there is no reason for you to be moral. What is to restrain all the peasants from being immoral and rebellious? You have to have some emphasis on works.” They brought in this idea that while you are saved by faith alone, the faith that saves is never alone. By that they meant if you have true, genuine saving faith, then it will not be alone – it will necessarily produce good works. They would distort the statement by Jesus in “Therefore by their fruits, you will know them.” and say, “If the works are not there, it was not the right kind of faith.” So you have to have the right kind of faith.
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I have gone over the details where the Bible never qualifies the word faith. It never says you have to have genuine faith, true faith, real faith, sincere faith, or any other kind of faith. It is only faith in Christ, only believe in Jesus. It does not say sincerely believe, truly believe, strongly believe, consistently believe. It is just believe, and that is all that is necessary.
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It was not long before even among the reformers the doctrine of justification by faith got muddled. I am going to give you three examples from different confessions of faith. That is what they called doctrinal statements back then. The first comes from the next century, the middle of the 17th century, from the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the standard doctrinal statement for Presbyterian churches. If you are Presbyterian - not modern, neo-orthodox, quasi-liberal - and trying to be biblical, your standard is the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) which states, “Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth….by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ.” This is a test. Is that right or wrong? It is Christ’s righteousness that is imputed, not His obedience, not His satisfaction – that is propitiation, which is Godward. Christ satisfied the righteousness of God on the cross. It is not His righteousness that is imputed to us. Why? “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world [unbelievers].” Westminster Confession of Faith was written by Presbyterians in England who believed in limited atonement – Christ died only for the elect. The “obedience and satisfaction” propitiation is restricted only to the elect. This is wrong. It is Christ’s righteousness that is imputed, not His obedience or satisfaction.
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Then we have the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) from the German reform, Calvinistic area in the western part of Germany which states, “Yet God, without any merit of my own, out of mere grace, imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ….if only I accept this gift with a believing heart.” Outside of the word satisfaction, it is not bad. It is “without any merit of my own, out of mere grace…” That is right. “God Imputes to me the perfect…righteousness and holiness of Christ.” Holiness is usually thought of as a combination of His justice and His righteousness. “…if only I accept this gift with a believing heart.” It is on the basis of faith alone. So that is not bad.
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Then there is The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord. This is the ultimate Lutheran confession of faith. It had two parts, and the longest part was the Solid Declaration (1577). “The word justify here means to declare righteous and free from sins, and to absolve one from eternal punishment for the sake of Christ’s righteousness which is imputed by God to faith.” Still a little fuzzy. Justify does not mean that we are free from sin; we are still a sinner. The language has changed since then. They might have meant something a little different, but they get the idea right – to declare righteous. That is the key. Not free from sin – that is forgiveness. Forgiveness has to do with the removal of sin, and justification is based on imputation which is the addition of positive righteousness. Forgiveness is not part of justification. It is important, but justification has to do with receiving the positive righteousness that is the basis for the declaration of our justification.
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Now the doctrine of justification is still under attack. The recent twist on this attack has come from a well-known, well-educated, erudite, articulate Anglican bishop by the name of N.T. Wright. There are people in this congregation who have friends and relatives who go to some doctrinal churches where the pastors have been seduced by the error and heresy of N.T. Wright. We have to be prepared to understand what it is that he is teaching. He is a preterist, which means that he believes that all the prophecy in the New Testament, except for , was fulfilled in AD 70 when Jesus returned in the clouds of judgment. So we are in the millennium. I’m in the ghetto of the millennium, I guess. It obliterates the distinction between Israel and the church, and, of course, rejects dispensationalism.
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He also has an obscure view of justification which obliterates the legal, forensic doctrine from Luther and substitutes works in its place. In one of his articles he wrote in a symposium called Justification in Perspective, he said, “[Justification is] on the basis of the entire life a person has led in the power of the Spirit – that is, it occurs on the basis of ‘works,’ in Paul’s redefined sense.” He plays this fast and loose game – the old shell game of “where is the pea?” The guy has it in his back pocket. He redefines a lot of terms. When Paul says we are not justified by the works of the Law, he is talking about the entirety of the Mosaic Law and trying to gain God’s approval by being obedient to the Law. Whereas N.T. Wright and those influenced by him (called the New Perspectives on Paul) believe when Paul said “works of the Law,” he really meant the ritual of the Law, not the whole Law, not the morality of the Law. So Jews can be saved by being moral.
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He continues, “And….it occurs in the present, as an anticipation of that future verdict.” The verdict of justification does not come until after our life is long gone. “Justification is not ‘how someone becomes a Christian.’ It is God’s declaration about the person who has just become a Christian.” You become a Christian by works. Sounds awfully Roman Catholic. He has taken lordship salvation to the next step. Guess who is doing the most work to refute this guy? The lordship salvation people. But he has turned the gospel upside down, and so people are dreadfully confused about the gospel.
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In , Paul said, in reference to the imputation of Abraham’s righteousness, “How then was it accounted [imputed]? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised?” When did this occur in Abraham’s life? The Jewish contention is that if you are circumcised according to the Law, then you are in. That is the key. But what about Abraham - was he circumcised or uncircumcised when he was justified? He makes it clear that it was not while he was circumcised but while he was uncircumcised. Paul then goes on to say in verse 11, he received the sign of circumcision which was not the sign of the Mosaic Law but was the sign of the Abrahamic Covenant. Every covenant has a sign. The Noahic Covenant has the sign of the rainbow; the Abrahamic Covenant has the sign of circumcision; the Mosaic Covenant has the sign of the Sabbath. Paul says, “And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe [Jews and Gentiles; not believe and are circumcised, not believe and follow the Law], though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also.”
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Everyone has the opportunity to receive this gift of imputation of righteousness. In verse 12, “And the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision [Jews], but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.”
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I want to review this for you because this is important. Here Paul talks about the steps of faith which Abraham had while still uncircumcised. The steps of faith indicates a process, but there is a point where those steps begin. The action of references the first action when Abraham believed God, and at that time, it was accounted or imputed to him as righteousness. As a result of that, Abraham is regenerated and then begins to grow through various tests of faith. This is what James is referring to in that we are to count it all joy when we encounter various tests because we know that the testing of our faith produces endurance, and endurance will have its maturing result.
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We need to understand what this concept of steps of faith refers to with Abraham. is the very beginning of the story of Abraham. This is so important to understand and to think our way through Abraham’s life. When I taught through Genesis several years ago, I identified 14 tests that Abraham went through. Not long ago, I was reading a Jewish commentary (an anthology of various Jewish rabbinical writings and studies on Genesis), and rabbis came up with 10 tests. I think there were 14 because they are all related to specific commandments related to promises that God had for Abraham. The issue for him was whether he was going to trust and obey God or not.
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establishes the fact that at that event in the past (that perfect tense verb that refers to an event that has been completed in the past with ongoing results) sometime before he left his native Ur of the Chaldees, he believed God, and God in a moment in time imputed to him righteousness and declared him justified. Because he is already justified and is a growing, maturing believer, God then began to test Abraham in some special ways.
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The first test we know of occurs in . God says to Abraham, “Get out of your country. Leave everything behind.” Is Abraham going to be able to trust God and leave everything behind – all his family, his relatives, everything that is familiar – and get out of his comfort zone and take off to where God is going to lead him, not knowing where that is going to be? God gives with this command a promise. He will take him to a land that He will show him (1st part of the promise), will make him a great nation and bless him (2nd part is descendants). The key word that Moses uses all the way through Genesis is “seed.” The seed of the woman will crush the seed of the serpent. All the genealogies trace the seed line, and it ends with Jesus, as we will see.
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The 1st test is “get out, leave, go, depart.” Then he gives him the promise of the Abrahamic Covenant – the promise of the land, the promise of the descendants or seed, and the promise of blessing. They all become developed later on in additional covenants – the Land Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the New Covenant. What is important here is to focus on these first two – the land and the seed promise. The blessing promise plays a big part of this too, but the primary foundation is God says, “I am giving you this land, and I am giving you seed from your own loins. Are you really going to believe me?” Abraham is already saved, already justified. This has to do with his spiritual growth.
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So the question I asked initially is, is justification the cause or the result of these tests of faith? It is the cause. First we are justified, and then God begins to work in our life to mature us and to test us.
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So the first test for Abraham was to get out. And then there is a reiteration of the promise in . The Lord appeared to Abram again. This time Abram has left home, gone up to Haran in N. Syria for a little while, and finally made it to the Promised Land. As he is on a recon mission checking everything out, he comes to Shechem, which is in about the middle of the land and now in the area of Samaria just north of Jerusalem about 50 miles. He builds an altar to God, and God makes a promise to him and says, “To your descendants, your seed, I will give this land.”
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But with the promise comes a test, and the test is the famine test which comes in . There is a famine in the land, the land that God promised to give to Abraham. The test now is a test of sustenance. Are we really going to trust God when the going gets bad? Are we going to trust God when our experience tells us that we really need to go somewhere else to find the basic things to sustain life, especially food and water. Abram fails this test; the first test he partially passed. He took his father and Lot with him (he was to leave everybody). They have to stop off awhile in Haran before his father dies, and then he finally comes into the land. All these tests are pass or fail – you do not get graded A, B, C, D or F. He gets a P-. He passes mostly but not fully.
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On this famine test he fails miserably. Instead of trusting God to sustain him in the land, he goes down to Egypt. Then he goes into a little Operation Deception where he tells the pharaoh that Sarah is really his sister, and he does not mind if he takes her into his harem. The problem here is that this puts her into a position that if she is bedded by the pharaoh, then it threatens the seed from Abraham’s loins. It is always a test related to the seed promise.
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In we have a 3rd test. The 3rd test is a test of personal conflict – a people test. There is a test of grace orientation. Now Abram is back in the land and is with Lot, and God is blessing them. Lot’s herdsmen and Abraham’s herdsmen are fighting because there does not seem to be enough room for both of them in the land. So it is a test as to how Abraham is going to handle this in relationship to Lot. Is he going to be gracious to Lot or is he going to be selfish? He is going to trust God that God has promised him the land, so he can be generous with Lot. He says, “Lot, you take your pick first, and I will take what is left over.” He puts it in the Lord’s hands that God is going to fulfill the promise, and it is not up to him to manipulate the circumstances. He passes the test, and God restates the promise in “For all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever.” So he passes the 3rd test.
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We have the 4th test which is a test of trusting God for protection and to fulfill his responsibilities as the kings of the East come in and attack. We have the kings of Shiner, Ellasar, and Elam; and Tidal king of nations. They just pillage their way through the Middle East. The come to Sodom and Gomorrah and capture a lot of slaves and plunder, and then they head north. Abraham gets all of his servants (about 150) and goes after this army. He has to trust God that He will give him the victory. He does have victory and rescues Lot and recovers a lot of the plunder. He relies upon God for protection and passes the test.
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Then comes the 5th test. It has to do with how is he going to handle this prosperity? Now that he has won, is he just going to sit back with all the great booty that he has? He had become much wealthier and had all these people and could have a lot of slaves. But instead of focusing on himself, he focuses on God and shows grace and gratitude – gracious towards those he has rescued and does not keep all the booty for himself but gives 10% to the Lord as an offering of gratitude through Melchizedek, who is the king-priest of Salem. He passes the 5th test – the prosperity or victory test.
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He has passed 3 ½ and blown 1 ½ tests. In we get the 6th test, which comes as a result of command in verse 1 “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” Reward, remember, has to do with inheritance, so he is talking not about salvation which is a free gift but a reward for service. There is a difference between those two. is the context of the promise in . Abraham says, “Are you going to do this through Eliezer, my servant?” And God says, “No, I am going to do it through your own loins. He will be a descendant from your own body.” The 6th test is “do not be afraid,” and Abraham is going to trust God. He has already trusted God in the past, the basis for justification, and he will continue to trust God. God is going to grant him a covenant.
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In , Abraham says, “Lord God, how shall I know that I will inherit it?” Notice I said at the beginning, God says, “I am your great reward.” The terminology shifts in verse 7 where the Lord says, “…to give you this land to inherit it.” Once again we are back to the land promise. The other promises had to do with protecting the seed, and now it is the land. They go back and forth between these two major parts of the Abrahamic Covenant. Abraham says, “….how shall I know that I will inherit it?” And God does not say, “You stupid idiot, you asked a question. Sit down and shut up and listen to Bible class.” It does not say that. He gives him an answer.
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God makes a covenant with him – a one-sided contract, a unilateral covenant. So the animals are laid out, which is a standard procedure for this kind of serious covenant. They are sacrificed, split in half. God tells Abram that He is going to bless him, but his descendants are going to be out of the land for awhile, the land God promised them. He will bring them back eventually, and when they come back, God will bless them. While He goes through the covenant ceremony, He has Abraham fall asleep. Normally the two covenant partners walk through together. If you have ever bought a house, you go to the mortgage company, and they give you a stack of contracts where you have to sign your name 347 times.
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In that day, the two covenant partners walk between the halves of the sacrifices. That is equal to a signature. But God caused Abraham to fall asleep, and God walked through it because it is unilateral. God is going to guarantee the covenant. It is not conditioned upon Abraham; it is conditioned solely on God.
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In “On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given this land…’ ” Land, land, land – all the way through here, and seed, seed, seed. Whenever you see the word descendants in the NJKV (I do not know what the NASB says), it is “seed” in the original.
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gives us the next test which is the 7th test, and it is the power of God test. Can God really bring life where there is death. Abraham is an old man, and it is still not time to have the son. He is about 86 years old at this time, and he is infertile. So is Sarah; she is too old. The issue is not just are they going to be able to procreate but are they going to be fertile and have children. Is God more powerful? The point I am making is when we have a problem, do we really believe that God is more powerful than our human solutions. No matter what the human solution may be. We have great technology, we have great wealth, and we have great material gain. We have many different skills today that we have honed with great sophistication. But do we really believe that God, and God alone, is enough?
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That is the issue with Abraham. Is God going to be able to do all that He needs to do to change and renew Abraham and Sarah’s sexual organs. I heard an ob-gyn talk about everything that God needed to do so that Sarah would be able to have a baby again. He had to change the uterus and do all kinds of things. It is amazing all the different things that had to be renovated in both of them just so they could have a child again. So God has made this promise, but they get impatient with God. (I know none of you get impatient with God.) So Sarah comes up with Plan B which is Hagar. We are still suffering from the consequences of Plan B because she did get pregnant and had a son named Ishmael. Abraham obviously failed that test.
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The 8th test comes in . “God, you want me to cut off what!?” It is the test of circumcision. For somebody who is 99 years of age, this would be a test. “Lord, I am sort of attached to all my body parts. I do not care how useful they are or not.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant.” And so God reiterates all of the promises again and reminds Abraham of the covenant. He gives Abraham and Sarah new names. He restates the promises of numerous descendants and the land. Then comes this test. Are you really going to trust me and have a little self surgery here? Ladies, talk to your husbands about that. It is a test.
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Some people think trusting God is folding your hands and just waiting on God passively. This is a great example that trusting God not only means to believe what God says is true, but it entails doing something. What it entails doing may not be what we want to do. It may not be something that is going to make us feel better. It may not be something that will make us happier. It may be something that is painful, difficult, and goes against our whole nature. But we are going to trust God and do what God says to do. There is a passive side to faith which is trusting God alone and an active side which is we are going to do what God says to do because God is faithful. That is what is happening in all these tests. Abraham is learning that God made a promise, and the more impossible it seems that that promise can be fulfilled, the more Abraham has to learn about trusting God. He realizes that God really can do what He says He will do, and he can trust him no matter what his experience tells him. When you are 99 years old, I would assume your experience tells you, you are not going to have any babies.
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In we are told that Abram is 99 years old. It has been 13 years since the Ishmael-Hagar disaster. Now they have a 13-year old to deal with in the house. In we get two tests. The 9th test is a test of grace and humility. Three visitors show up: one of them is God, and the other two are angels. One is the Angel of the Lord, probably the Lord Jesus Christ, 2nd person of the Trinity. It is a test of Abraham’s graciousness to these visitors. It is also a test of his belief because God tells him in verse 10 “I will certainly return to you according to the time of life, and behold, Sarah your wife shall have a son.” Sarah laughs when she overhears what God has said. She just does not believe it. She knows that there is no way that body is going to have a baby at all. She chuckles, so that is why they get the name Isaac, meaning laughter, for the son.
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Then we have the 10th test. Is Abraham just going to fold his hands and trust God when he finds out what God is getting ready to do (as we say in Texas, fixin’ to do)? Is Abraham just going to say, “Well, it is God’s will.” Or is he going to be gracious and show love and concern for Lot and intercede with the Lord for Lot. This is a phenomenal passage that you do not hear a whole lot of discussion about. As Abraham learns that God is going to bring judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain and just completely wipe them out and destroy everybody, he approaches the Lord and intercedes on their behalf. He begins to set up a case for what he is going to do. The Lord informs him, and Abraham begins to negotiate in verse 23. This is like prayer, sort of asking God questions. “Lord, are you going to destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there were 50 righteous – would you still spare it?” Then he works down from 50, down to 20, down to 10. He is just seeing where is the line of demarcation here.
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As he is doing this, he makes a very important point at the end of verse 25 “…Shall not the Judge of all the earth be right?” He recognizes God is just, and what God is going to do is going to be the right thing. He may not understand all the data that goes into God’s decision or what God is doing. We look at a situation like this from human viewpoint. God goes in and completely annihilates all the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain; and modern man looks at this and says, “This is a horrible God.” But this is a just God who is operating on the basis of His justice. That is not incompatible with His love because God’s love operates not only for the criminal but also for the victim. The human race would be victimized if Sodom and Gomorrah would continue to be allowed to survive and to spread their perversion, so God’s love for the human race means that He has got to annihilate the Sodomites.
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Abraham understands that this is justice. Because God is just and righteous, He will do the right thing at the right time. We may not always understand all the things that go into that, but we can always rely on the fact that God is just and is faithful. That is what Abraham is learning.
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The 10th test is to test Abraham’s concern for his enemies, which would be Lot. The 11th test comes in . This is the test again of protection of the seed. Abraham again is faced with a problem with water. He goes to seek a little protection from Abimelech, the king of the Philistines. Again he gets into the same kind of situation he was in down in Egypt. He says, “This woman is really my sister.” Once again, the seed now is being threatened because if Abimelech were to actually take Sarah in as his wife, then that would threaten the seed promise of God. Abraham fails this test, and God intervenes. All this shows to Abraham that God really can do what He promised to do. Abraham is finally learning that God can actually fulfill His promises.
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In , Sarah conceives and gives birth to Isaac. Then there is another test. Abraham, like a good daddy, wants to keep all the children in the house, but Sarah and God both understand that Hagar and Ishmael have to go. God tells Abraham in verse 12 that he needs to let them go because the seed promise goes through Isaac, not Ishmael. Abraham obeys God and out go Hagar and Ishmael. This is the 12th test.
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The 13th test is another people test that is a conflict between Abraham’s servants and Abimelech over water rights and wells. He deals with Abimelech in grace. Remember part of what he was supposed to do was to be a blessing to all. So he is going to be a blessing to Abimelech. He passes this test.
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His final test comes in when God tells him to take his only son – the seed, the one he waited for for so long – to Mt. Moriah and to sacrifice him. Abraham believes God can bring him back to life. We do not know how he learned that, other than God brought Abraham’s sexual reproduction ability back to life and Sarah’s sexual reproduction ability back. God can bring life where there is death. Abraham does not bat an eye, and he packs his bags. He gets Isaac and the mule and off they head to Mt. Moriah, which is believed to be where the Temple Mount is in Jerusalem now. There he sets up everything to sacrifice Isaac. tells us that he concluded “…God was able to raise him up, even from the dead…” He is not going to commit murder because he is obeying God, and God is not going to destroy the life of Isaac. He fully understands that and passes this test with flying colors. God stopped him at the last second.
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“And He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.’ ” In this passage, fearing God often comes very close to being a synonym for trusting God. It adds an element of respect and awe that is part of it, but also a major part of the meaning of fearing God is trusting Him. Verse 13 “Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son.” It is a substitutionary sacrifice.
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This is the picture of what happens with Jesus Christ at the cross. He dies like that ram on our behalf so that His righteousness can be given to us. He takes upon Himself our sin and pays the penalty for Adam’s original sin and for all personal sins, so that with the penalty paid, His righteousness is free to be imputed to anyone who believes in Jesus Christ.
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“And the father of circumcision [Abraham] to those who not only are of the circumcision [Jews], but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.”
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I want to close by looking at a parallel passage in Galatians. Galatians was written before Romans and was the “Romans” in Paul’s early thought. In , Paul starts off talking about the redemption, the objective payment of the price at the cross. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us [substitutionary aspect] (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’) that [for the purpose; He died on the cross on or near Mt. Moriah there in Jerusalem] the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” What did God promise Abraham? That through him all nations would be blessed.
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“Brethren, I speak in the manner of men: Though it is only a man’s covenant, yet if it is confirmed, no one annuls or adds to it.” In any covenant, once it is signed, you do not come along later and say, “Well, I really want that interest rate to be a point lower.” You have to come up with a whole new contract. You cannot just change it because you want to. That is what Paul is saying here: no one annuls or adds to it.
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Verse 16-17 “Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made; He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘And to your Seed,’ who is Christ. And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, …” [Inspiration extends down to singulars and plurals.] The Law is 430 years after Abraham is justified. His justification did not have anything to do with his circumcision, which was at least 15 years later after the statement was made in and at least 30 years later in terms in the actual difference between the time he was initially justified and the time he was circumcised. Here Paul says it was 430 years from Abraham to the giving of the Law. So Abraham is not justified by either circumcision or by the Law; therefore, it has to be on some other basis. It is faith.
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He says in verse 17-18 “…the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect. For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise.”
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This sets us up for what Paul says in “For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.”

Romans 042b-Neither Ritual nor Moral Law Can Justify.

Romans 4:13 NASB95
For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith.
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Romans 042b-Neither Ritual nor Moral Law Can Justify.
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As we get started in Romans 4:13, I want to know if anybody here can tell me where the first time justification is mentioned in the Bible. I will give you a hint: it is in the oldest book in the Bible. Which one is that? It is in Job.
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I was reading this morning. This is a verse that every school teacher ought to be put up on their bulletin board and over the door. It is . There is a word in here that many parents have told their children never to use. God the Holy Spirit used the Hebrew version of it, and in almost every translation, they translate it the same way because that is what it means in Hebrew. “Whoever loves instruction loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.” I thought that was a nice insight from Proverbs.
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“Then Job answered and said: “Truly I know it is so, but how can a man be righteous [justified] before God?” A couple of interesting things about this: The context is that he is responding to one of his friends who has laid out a case for why he has gone through the suffering that he has. That is what he has responded to. The question he asks really gets to the heart of the matter: How can a creature that is a fallen creature be justified before God?
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Just out of curiosity, I looked this up in the Jewish translation (JPS, Jewish Publication Society, 1917) to see how they handled the concept of justification in the Old Testament. The 1917 JPS translation is usually referred to as the Tanakh {TNK – Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim – 3 divisions of the Hebrew scripture). They translated it very similarly – “Of a truth I know that it is so; and how can man be just with God?”
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What is interesting is the 1985 Tanakh translation changes it. Over the history of Judaism, there have been little minor changes here and there on the way they translated some scriptures because they do not like the Christian implication in some passages. and really do emphasize this concept of justification – justification is by faith.
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The 1985 Tanakh translated this verse “Indeed I know that it is so: Man cannot win a suit against God.” It is taking it within the context of a judicial setting, but it changes the thrust of the whole verse. The Hebrew word that is used here is the verb sadeq, and this means to be just or righteous. I put an annotation here from HALOT (The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament), which is the most recent, most scholarly and accepted Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon. It is not a Christian production; it is just a lexicon of Hebrew that anyone would use. It does not have theological orientation per se in terms of Christian or Jewish. HALOT says that sadeq in means to be in the right or be right. That shows that the Tanakh translation massages the English text so that it loses the implication that is there in the original. I am not picking on the Jewish translation here. There are numerous English translations done by Christians who manage to massage the text so that it does not mean what the original language means at all.
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In the Old Testament, the masculine sadeq occurs 118 times and the feminine sadeqa occurs 156 times. That is over 270 times that there is a reference to righteousness or justice because the word can mean either one depending upon the context. This is the most dominant word for righteousness or justice in the Old Testament. The two forms do not differ in meaning at all and both carry the same idea of conforming to an external norm or standard or external absolute. The word is frequently used in the context of a courtroom related to the operation of a judge, especially when it speaks of God as the supreme judge of the universe. This whole idea of righteousness and how a human being can obtain righteousness and righteous standing before God is foundational in the Old Testament.
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When we come to the New Testament, we also see that justification is the predominant way in which our salvation is described. In we have reference to propitiation. Propitiation is only discussed four times in the entire New Testament, and that is an important doctrine. In , we will get into reconciliation, and reconciliation is only covered in five passages in the New Testament. But justification is covered in many, many more. The adjective dikaios [dikaioj] is used 81 times in the New Testament. The noun dikaiosune [dikaiosunh] for righteousness is used 92 times in the New Testament. The noun dikaiosis [dikaiwsij] for justification occurs 2 times. The verb dikaioo [dikaiow] meaning to be declared righteous, to be righteous is used 39 times. The noun dikaioma [dikaiwma] is used 10 times. The adverb dikaios is used 5 times. This just shows you how pervasive this doctrine is in the New Testament. It is the foundational doctrine for understanding the application of the work of Christ on the cross.
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On the other side, there is another word that we have only seen once in Romans so far in relation to the work that Christ did on the cross, and that word is redemption. There are six or seven Greek words for redemption. Redemption relates to the payment of a price, so that has to do more with the objective work that Christ does on the cross in terms of paying a price; whereas, justification is the application of that to each individual when they believe or trust in Christ and accept Him as their Savior.
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Looking at the Greek word, the one thing all of those six forms have in common is the first three letters dik. Many scholars believe that the original root of the word that all of these forms are built on was the Greek word dike. They believe that the root meaning going back seven or eight centuries was probably something related to custom or right, and over time, these words gained a more precise meaning. By the time you get to the 1st century, the focus is on rightness or justice.
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Leon Morris, who is a Calvinist and holds to a pretty much lordship salvation, wrote a classic work called Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, which we had to read in a soteriology class at seminary. He was very good in his analysis of all the different words and elements related to the cross. He makes the comment in his work that this word group for righteousness does not indicate something arbitrary but something in conformity with some standard of right. The righteous man is one who is judged right by such a standard, and righteousness indicates a state of having attained to the standard in question.
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As I have talked about justification, I want you to understand that these are not definitions that I use that I have generated on my own. I want you to understand the doctrine of justification as I have taught it is one that is grounded in the history of Christianity going back to its clear systemization and its articulation coming out of the Protestant Reformation. In the current discourse on justification, it is said that we hold to the Lutheran view of justification. That is exactly what it is – it was the view that Martin Luther articulated at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
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It is simply the fact that a person is declared, not made, righteous by the Supreme Court of heaven because at the instant of faith alone in Christ alone, we are given, imputed the righteousness of Christ. So we do not change. It is not an infused righteousness. This is the idea you get in Roman Catholic teaching that righteousness is infused, sort of parceled out as you participate in the various sacraments. It is a progressive thing. Justification and sanctification are both progressive. But we believe that justification happens at an instant in time when a person believes that Jesus died on the cross for him. At that instant, God simultaneously imputes to the individual believer the righteousness of Christ and then declares him to be justified because he possesses the perfect righteousness of Christ. It does not change us, but it is the basis for our eternal salvation.
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Last time as we looked at Abraham in the section dealing with circumcision in Romans 4:9-12, I raised the question “Were Abraham’s 14 tests of faith that God took him through the cause of his justification or a result of his justification?” I want you think about that. It is like asking the question, “Are you a sinner because you sin or do you sin because you are a sinner?” We sin because we are sinners. We are born with a corrupt nature, we are fallen, we receive the imputation of Adam’s original sin; and so when we come out of the womb, we are a sinner, and the result is that we commit personal sins.
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When it comes to understanding justification with Abraham, Abraham was first justified. talks about a previous event in Abraham’s life based on the grammar. Sometime previous to that when he was in Ur of the Chaldees, he believed God, and God imputed His righteousness to Abraham. The tests are tests that God brought into Abraham’s life to test his faith and to encourage him to grow. He did not pass all of them, but you and I do not pass all of them. The tests of faith that we encounter and the ones that we pass are not the cause of our justification. Our justification comes when we believe Jesus died on the cross for our sins.
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We think about this question “Are we justified before God by faith?” Then the growth that appears afterwards is distinct from that act of justification. We will get into this more when we get into and talk about the spiritual life. But what happens in Roman Catholic theology, as well as lordship theology and this new Perspectives of Paul theology (N.T. Wright), they all confuse justification with ongoing sanctification, so that there is an overlap. The way you really know a person is justified is because their life is going to show it. They misquote the passage in “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.” That is talking about identifying false prophets. The fruits are the words that come out of their mouth. How do you identify a false prophet? His fruit, what he teaches or says, does not conform to Scripture. It is not an inspection criteria for determining whether someone is saved.
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Someone is saved because they trust in Christ as Savior. They may commit mass murder afterward, they may commit any number of vile acts and offenses, they may be pedophiles, they may be thieves and robbers, they may be extremely violent, they may not keep any law, they may be completely antinomian; but if they believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins, they are saved. It is not on the basis of some change in them that is the basis for salvation; it is because they possess the perfect righteousness of Christ which is given to them.
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One of the ways to express the major theme in Romans is how do we receive righteousness as a free gift? That is what Romans is all about – the reception of righteousness as a free gift. It is not something that is worked for; it is not something that is earned.
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The conclusion of this section we looked at in states that in relation to Abraham he was “…the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision [Jews], but who also walk in the steps of faith [Gentiles, a separate category, those who follow Abraham in faith]…” The point that Paul is making is that circumcision did not have anything to do with Abraham’s justification. He was circumcised 15 years after the event, but his justification actually occurred sometime before the events of . Abraham might have been 50-60 years of age or even 30-40 when he was justified. It is not until , when he is 85-86 years of age, that he is circumcised, and you have the ratification of the covenant at that time through the sign of circumcision.
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In , Paul is making the point that circumcision could not be the cause of his justification. Why all this emphasis on circumcision? Because at this time in Judaism, the rabbis, the Pharisees specifically, taught that if a man was circumcised, then that was equivalent to becoming a party of the covenant, and he was saved.
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We also went over last time. Galatians was Paul’s first epistle. He wrote Galatians in maybe 53 or 54 AD. This is 11 years before he wrote Romans. Galatians is his first clear articulation of the whole doctrine of justification by faith. When you get to Romans, he takes almost everything he taught in Galatians and is much more precise and detailed when he explains everything. , he concludes by saying “And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect.”
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A couple of things I want you to notice about this verse that helps us to understand what is going on in . When Paul starts off, he says, “And this I say, that the law…” What law is he talking about? He does not say the Mosaic Law. Every time he talks about the Mosaic Law, he does not always identify it as the Mosaic Law. How do we know that he is talking about the Mosaic Law? “…the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later…” What law came 430 years after the Abrahamic Covenant? The Mosaic Law. So it is obvious this is the Mosaic Covenant from the context. “…cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ…” What covenant is that? It is the Abrahamic covenant that was confirmed by God in Christ with Abraham. He is indicating that the whole Trinity is present in the cutting of the covenant in .
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Then he says the Mosaic Law “….cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect.” What promise is that? In , the issue is circumcision and that it was enough to get them saved. But if you look at verse 13, the issue shifts to the Law. Circumcision was one aspect of the Law, and then Paul changes from just talking about circumcision. In verses 9-10 “Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness. How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised.”
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When we get to , it begins in the English with “For the promise…” The focal point in verses 13-17 is on the promise. That is the key word. Verse 14 “…the promise made of no effect.” Verse 16 “…so that the promise might be sure to all the seed…” It is related to the Law as a whole. has these ideas. In , Paul concludes by saying, “For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise…” This was written many years before he wrote Romans. The problem he faced with the Galatians was that early in his ministry on his first missionary journey, he, Barnabas and John Mark first went to Cyprus and then up to south central part of what is now Turkey. It was considered the Roman province of Galatia. They went to Derbe, Lystra and Iconium, and afterwards, they went back and visited the churches they had established. Then they went back to the home church in Antioch in Syria.
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While they are back there, this issue comes up as to how are Gentiles related to the Law? This was a major issue for the early Christians. That is why Paul is writing this epistle to the Galatians to tell them that Gentiles are not required to come in under the Law and not required to be circumcised. He is dealing with the same kind of issue as he is correcting the Galatians. They had been seduced by the teaching of these false teachers that would come to be known in history as Judaizers. They said, “Jesus is fine, but he is not enough. You also have to get circumcised and come in under the Law [basically a Jewish proselyte], or you will not really be saved and not have everything that God has for you.”
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In , Paul says the same thing he is going to say in that if inheritance is from the Law, if you get the possession.. . What does this word inheritance mean? In the Old Testament which is the framework for understanding inheritance, inheritance does not have the idea of somebody dying and you read the will and get something passed down from whatever your parents had left or from your great great grandparents from generation to generation. That is not the main idea of inheritance in the Old Testament.
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It has to do with possession, ownership of property. A person had an inheritance even if no one had died. That term is used a lot in relationship to the apportioning of the land of Canaan. The individual Jews in different tribes were given land allotments, and that was their inheritance, their possession, their property. That is the idea in this word, not so much something that you are going to get in the future because someone dies, but that this is a possession related to the promise that God made to Abraham.
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This is the terminology and the foundation for understanding that we are getting ready to get into. Paul says the same thing here in Galatians in a shorter way about inheritance, participation in the promise that God made to Abraham. That promise had two applications: one was related to the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Jewish people and the blessing and the plan God had for them. Then the fact that that blessing God promised to Abraham and his descendants would bless the entire world. So it has a global or worldwide application to it. The inheritance relates to that promise to Abraham and the realization of that. What Paul is saying is if the inheritance is from the Law, if possession realization of the blessings of the promise come through obedience to the Mosaic Law, then it is no longer the result of promise.
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He is contrasting law and promise because the promise was the promise of a gift. Do you do anything to earn a gift? No. A gift is something that is freely given. If it is a real gift, there are no strings attached. It is not like one of those calls you get that say, “You have just won a survey, we just drew your name, and we have a special prize for you.” But you have to listen to a 4-hour real estate spiel in order to get the prize. That is not a gift; that is just trying to bait you into coming out so they can try to sell you something. This is a real gift. It is the gift of a promise that God is going to bless Abraham not based on works or something earned but freely given.
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Paul says in if that inheritance, the realization of the promise that God made to Abraham is from the Law (something you work for or earn), then it is no longer a promise. It is either one or the other. They are mutually exclusive. Then he said, “…but God gave it…” That is the key word, the grace word. It is didomi [didomi] in the Greek and means to give. It is etymologically related to the verb forgive, and all those words are related to grace. God gave it to Abraham. How? By promise. The key is understanding that promise in Romans is always shorthand for the promise that God gave freely to Abraham. Nothing was done to earn it.
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continues the thought that Paul has developed already. He is going to expand on it and start emphasizing promise instead of circumcision and the Law rather than circumcision. It begins with that initial word “for.” There are a couple of different words in Greek that are translated “for.” This is the Greek word gar [gar]. It is introducing an explanation or further information about something that has already been brought into the discussion. So he is going to give a further explanation, grounds for something, or reason why he has said something. That connects it to what has gone on before. Verses 13-17 are further development of what he has been saying in 9-12. You cannot just separate them as completely different topics.
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When we look at it in the Greek instead of the English, it has a very different word order. That is for emphasis. If I were to translate it in the same word order as the Greek, we would see what the emphasis is. The first phrase in the Greek is “For NOT through the law…” Once again, you see that Paul is being very emphatic here at the very beginning that this is not through the Law. He does not start out talking about the promise; he starts off “For NOT through the law the promise…” That is his first statement just as he said in . And that explanation “for” makes us understand that he is continuing the same line of thought.
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Paul’s logic is really tight. When Paul gets into some of these sections, he is just very rigorous in his use of logic. He says (following the Greek order), “For NOT through the law the promise that he would be the heir of the world.” That does not make a whole lot of sense in English, but you see what he is emphasizing by the word order in the Greek. That is the thing about the Greek word order – you can take each of these phrases or clauses and mix them all up because of the syntax of Greek. It is always going to be translated the same way into English, but if you put certain phrases or clauses up front, that tells you where the emphasis is.
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We look at in the NKJV “For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.” In the English you lose the emphasis. What does the promise say? That he would be the heir of the world. Where did God promise that to Abraham in the Old Testament? Nowhere. Go back to what we have learned in our study on how the Old Testament was quoted in the New Testament. There are four different ways in which the writers in the New Testament quote from the Old Testament. 1) Literal prophecy, like . The Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and in , He is born in Bethlehem.
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2) Typology. Something happened historically, as the Jewish people were brought out of Egypt. This is used as a type or a picture that is applied to Jesus and His family when they returned to the land coming out of Egypt. Also in . That is just an historical statement “Out of Egypt I called My son.” The event in the Old Testament was not prophetic, but it is used as a type or representation and is then applied to Jesus.
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3) Old Testament statement that is just similar to something that is happening in the New Testament. The writer in the New Testament is applying it by virtue of principle or something of that nature to an event that occurs in the Old Testament. This example also comes out of that the mothers of Israel wept after Herod killed all the infants. Joseph, Mary and Jesus had already escaped because they had been warned by the angel. The quote comes out of . When Jeremiah originally stated it, it was not a prophecy. He was talking about the fact that the mothers of Judah in 586 BC were weeping over the fact that their sons were being taken away as captives to Babylon, and they would never see them again. It happened north of Jerusalem in Ramah and did not happen south like Bethlehem which is . It involved sons that were being taken away and not being killed. Everything is different. The only thing it has in common is mothers grieving because they will not see their sons again. It is a point of application.
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4) Summary. Matthew says that Jesus’ family, Mary and Joseph, moved back to Nazareth because the Old Testament said He would be called a Nazarene. It never says that anywhere in the Old Testament. Nazarene was kind of a negative, pejorative term. “That person is from the hills of Arkansas. You cannot expect much from them. Not too bright.” I am not picking on Arkansas. Up in New England, they used to say if somebody crossed the border into Maine, their IQ dropped 50 points. Every place has some area that they do not think those people are very bright.
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That is what we have here in – just a statement that summarizes everything that was covered in the Abrahamic Covenant. God makes the covenant with Abraham, and there are three elements to it. God promised a specific piece of real estate – the land. He said that blessing would come through the seed, which can be singular or can have the meaning of a large group – his descendants. And worldwide blessing. Each of these is further expanded in subsequent covenants.
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God promised the LAND to Abraham and reiterated it many times in the rest of Genesis -- ; ; , ; . The SEED – ; ; ; , ; ; . The promise of WORLDWIDE BLESSING – ; ; .
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That is the promise. We have the phrase here – Abraham would be the heir of the world. We just talked about inheritance, so what does heir mean? Heir means ownership. He is the one who owns something. Did Abraham ever own the land? No, he was a traveler the whole time; he was a sojourner the Scripture says. But he is not only going to have ownership in the land in the kingdom, but it says here, he is going to own the world. What in the world does that mean?
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By the time you get into later passages in the Old Testament, there are a number of passages that speak of the future ownership and elevation of rulership of Israel, elevation of priority over all the nations. In , the Messiah is going to come back and rule over all the nations. All the nations are going to come to Jerusalem to worship at the temple – ; ; ; , ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; . All these Old Testament passages speak of Israel at the forefront, the foremost nation in the millennial kingdom.
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Second Temple Judaism - the period that begins with the return of the Jews after the Exile in 538 BC and they rebuild the temple in 516 BC when Zechariah is the prophet. Not long after that by 440 BC, the Old Testament is closed. There is this silence from 440 until the New Testament period at the beginning of the 1st century. During that time, the Apocrypha was written. The books have value, not spiritually or doctrinally, but they tell us a lot about what went on during that time period. They tell us a lot about the history, the Maccabean Revolt, what went on with Antiochus Epiphanes, and a lot of other things. In Second Temple Judaism, they sort of synthesized all of the Abrahamic promises into this idea that Israel was going to rule the world under the Messiah, and that Israel would basically be the heir of the whole earth. This is seen in a couple of passages in one of the apocryphal books, Jubilees. In Jubilees 22:14, it states, “And may He cleanse thee from all unrighteousness and impurity [speaking of Israel looking forward to the time of the kingdom, that there would be a time of total cleansing], that thou mayest be forgiven all the transgressions; which thou has committed ignorantly. And may He strengthen thee, and bless thee. And mayest thou inherit the whole earth.” This is written about 250-300 BC, so they are synthesizing, summarizing the Abrahamic Covenant that Israel will inherit or rule the whole earth.
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Another passage is Jubilees 32:19 “…that they shall get possession [ownership, inheritance, heirship] of the whole earth and inherit it forever.” This idea when Paul speaks of Abraham being heir of the whole world, this is a term that summarizes the fulfillment, the full realization of all of the Abrahamic promises and blessings. This applies to Abraham even though you do not have a specific statement in the Old Testament. This was clearly understood by Jewish readers at that particular time.
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This concept of being an heir of the world is going to be further developed in . It is a quote from . “(As it is written, ‘I have made you [God speaking to Abraham] a father of many nations’)…” Abraham is not just the father of the Jewish people but of all nations (Jews and Gentiles) who follow him in faith. There is this connection between being the heir of the world (all the nations) and being the father of many nations. Paul ties those ideas together in this particular passage.
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“For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law…” A promise was a gift that God gave to Abraham. That means it is not through the law but is through the righteousness of faith. What Paul is saying is that the promise is not going to be realized by the law, by observing the ceremonies or the morality of the law. The reason that I am making that distinction is those who are followers [a couple of doctrinal churches where we know people who have family members there] of N. T. Wright, the former Anglican bishop and now head of the theology department at one of the seminaries in Scotland, have been seduced by this error. He is teaching a false view of justification.
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When Paul says we are not justified by the works of the law, he is not making this kind of division that N.T. Wright says he is. It is OK to be moral, but Paul was rejecting the Jewish nationalism of that day which was the idea of circumcision or ritual observance. Paul was rejecting all the Law; there is nothing you can do in the Law that can gain righteousness. The promise comes by faith alone through the righteousness of faith, the righteousness that comes by believing in Jesus Christ and receiving the imputation of His righteousness.
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“For if those who are of the law are heirs…” He uses the same particle “for”, a further explanation. He is going to give an illustration from logic. He uses a first class condition because he is assuming this first part is true: you become an heir through the Law. If that is true, he is saying, then faith is made void, and the promise made to no effect. Why? Because Law and gift are mutually exclusive. Working for something is the Law; being freely given something is the promise. They are mutually exclusive, so if those of the Law are heirs, that just wipes out faith and promise. They are not necessary. His main assumption is if heirship (position of his opponents) comes through the Law and you are going to benefit from the blessing of the promise, then faith is nullified and so is promise. They are irrelevant and no longer significant, necessary or important. Then what he indicates (not really saying this but it is imbedded within his logic) is that if neither faith nor promise have been nullified, the promise then must not be through the Law. He does not state that, but that is the implication of his logic. Since faith and promise are both important still, then the promise must not come through the Law.
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So in his conclusion, the contrast he has been making is between righteousness by Law and righteousness by faith. This is from . His ultimate conclusion is that if the blessing comes by Law, then neither faith or promise have any significance. If you are going to talk about faith and promise, then you have to recognize by virtue of the imbedded logic here that Law is no longer relevant.
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“For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect, because the law brings about wrath; for where there is no law, there is no transgression.” When you read that verse, what you thought you heard was that where there is no Law, there is no sin. But sin and transgression are completely different ideas. Paul is not saying where there is no Law, there is no sin. He is saying where there is no Law, there is no transgression (a violation or transgression of the Law).
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is a difficult verse to understand. A lot of theologians and commentators just ignore it. He says that if the promise comes by the Law, the reason it invalidates faith and promise is because the Law brings wrath. The Law brings wrath because the Law cannot be obeyed. Not one person can fully obey the Law. When you violate the Law, you are going to bring wrath. What does wrath mean? We go back to where I showed you that throughout Romans, this term wrath does not refer to end time eternality in the Lake of Fire. What wrath refers to is the judgment or divine discipline of God on people who are disobedient to Him in time, in history. The Law brings about wrath because when we disobey the Law, God will bring discipline or judgment upon people who have failed to obey the Law.
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His next point is that if there is no Law, then there is no violation of the Law. His key point is that the promise is for those who obtained it by faith alone in Christ alone because all that the Law is going to get you is discipline and judgment from God. The Law is not designed to bring blessing. The Law was designed to show that we cannot obey the Law, and when we do not obey the Law, the result is divine discipline and judgment.
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That brings him to his conclusion in verse 16 “Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace…” This is his tremendous conclusion. If it is not of faith, then it violates grace. The phrase “according to grace” means according to a standard, and the standard is God’s grace. Faith is related to grace. Law is related to works.
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“Therefore, it is of faith…” What is the “it?” There is actually no statement of a subject here – it is probably “the promise or the blessing of the promise comes from faith, so that it might be according to the standard of grace, so that the promise might be sure [or certain or confirmed] to all the seed…” That is going to be the Jewish seed that responds by faith as Abraham did. “…not only to those who are of the law [Jews], but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham…” So using those two phrases to contrast the Jews who were given the Law and the Gentiles who were not given the Law but follow Abraham on the basis of faith. And then a reference to Abraham’s fatherhood of all believers at the end of the verse.
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I want to give you some observations on grace.
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1) Grace is based on God’s character, specifically His love. Whenever you are gracious to somebody, you should not base it on your character but on God’s character. Your character is still not so hot, even on a good day. Same with me. When we have to love someone as Christ loved the church, we still need to base that on God’s love and not on whatever has developed within us. It has to be based on a certain foundation.
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2) Grace though is not an attribute of God. Love is the attribute; grace is an expression of that attribute. That is important to understand. Sometimes get the idea that God has to deal with us in grace. God does not have to do anything with any creature in grace. He did not deal with Satan or the fallen angels in grace. There is no redemption solution for the fallen angels, no plan of salvation. He chose to deal with human beings in grace.
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3) Grace is a volitional act by God toward His creature. There is not a necessity in God that he has to, to be true to Himself, deal with His creatures in grace. It is an expression of His love. He has to be loving, but He does not have to treat everyone the same in grace because grace is different for everybody. It is not identical to everybody. Common grace – God brings the rain on the rich and the poor, the believer and the unbeliever, the righteous and the wicked alike. But some righteous do not get as much rain as other righteous, especially if you are in Houston. And some wicked get more rain than other wicked. God’s grace is not an attribute; it is an expression of an attribute.
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4) Grace is also contrasted with works in Scripture. We see it in “Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted [imputed] for righteousness.” “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” The one who works deserves a reward or a wage, but grace is a gift, something that is undeserved, unmerited, and freely given. The promise was freely given to Abraham.
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5) Grace completely negates or removes any human contribution. If you try to do any little thing, ½ of 1/10th of 1% wipes out grace completely. It is all or nothing. All relying upon God’s grace. That is the Reformation watchword phrase - grace alone, sola gratia. Faith alone – you do not add anything to faith. In Christ alone – it is not faith in Christ and the church, faith in Christ and works. Grace alone. Those three have to be alone.

Romans 043b-Neither Ritual nor Moral Law Can Justify

Romans 4:13 NASB95
For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith.
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Romans 043b-Neither Ritual nor Moral Law Can Justify
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Since about , we have been spending a lot of time on justification. I hope that everybody here could give a pretty good explanation of what justification means and could at least describe it in more than one sentence and hopefully go to two or three different passages in Scripture to do so. So we will start here on the front row and just go one by one! I remember the Teen Class when Pastor Thieme used to do that to the teenagers. “OK, you stand up. Last week I covered such and such. Now tell me what I said.” So you always felt like you had to be prepared. That was excellent training.
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Sometimes I think that we hear things so much that we sort of put our mind in neutral, and we think we have heard and understood something and really do not. I remember about 10 years ago I was down from Connecticut teaching a class at a black church, and I was teaching on fundamentals of Greek exegesis. This one individual is who associated with our congregation came. After we got through looking at , he said, “I always thought I really understood justification, but having gone through this in detail, I am just amazed at how much more I have learned.” That is how we grow and come to understand the Word.
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I want to start tonight in Philippians 3. I want to go to other passages of Scripture to correlate what Paul says elsewhere on justification with what he is saying in Romans. Last time I went back to (NASB) “Truly I know it is so, but how can a man be righteous before God?” That is really the question. I think we live in an era today when the average person is so surrounded, especially if you are younger, with so many stimulants. By that I do not mean drugs or alcohol, although that is certainly one area of a problem. But I mean media in terms of Facebook, Twitter, email, internet, all of the things that constantly barrage people. People generally do not have time to stop and reflect and just think about some things.
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There are many people in life who never want to look at this question, part of it is because of what says that they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. If there is a God and I have to stand before that God, how can I hope to make a claim to righteousness? Do I need to make a claim to righteousness? What would be the basis for saying that I am righteous? That is the term that the Scripture uses. It does not use the term in the sense of “are you good enough?” It is “are you righteous enough?” I think in the process of talking to people about the gospel and about Christianity, it is important for us in to express our thinking in these biblical terms. “Have you ever really thought about how you can be righteous enough to get into heaven? What does righteous mean?” You are expressing the idea that this is an absolute standard related to the character of God.
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As says, “…how can a man be righteous before God?” How can we meet that standard? Can we do it through ritual? There are only a few answers that have ever been offered down through history. One is that we accomplish it through ritual. Another answer is that it is accomplished through doing as good as you can. But doing as good as we can when that is measured against an absolute standard, such as the righteousness of God, is not going to be enough. Yet man constantly tries to convince himself that God is somehow going to overlook the negatives in his life, the failures, the sin, the immorality, the disobedience to God because that is who God is.
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But we think of how the Scriptures describe God as the Everlasting Judge. As Abraham put it in “…Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” There is a standard that God has as a judge that He will evaluate every person by. How can people do it? One option is ritual. Another option is personal morality or trying to live up to some sort of religious code. A lot of people in America are prone toward self righteousness and so they want to come up with some rigorous standard or code of conduct that they abide by. But where do they get that code of conduct? That is a good question to ask people? “Well, I think I am good enough.” That implies that you have a comprehension of a standard by which you are measuring good. What is that standard and where did you get it? What does God say about that standard?
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Those who reject the standard idea just leap into antinomianism or licentiousness, and they just try to ignore the whole thing. That group is more prone to understanding the grace of God. This is why Jesus had such a response from the people that He spent most of His time ministering to. The prostitutes, the outcasts of society, the tax collectors – those who were the social pariahs, the unlovable segments of Jewish society at the time that Jesus came. Not because Jesus was justifying or rationalizing in any way their sin; it is that they understood they were sinners, as opposed to the religious groups (the Saducees and the Pharisees) who thought that because of their position, education, money, ritual, obedience to the Law that meant God should accept it.
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This was the mentality that the Apostle Paul had which he expresses in “Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord [This is as Paul goes into the last section of this epistle]. For me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe. Beware of dogs…” Notice his language here; it is not politically correct. He is not talking about collies, German Shepherds, Yorkshire Terriers, Cairn Terriers, and all of the other cute little household domestic pets.
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The term dogs was a pejorative, an insult that was used in relation to Gentiles and those who had not kept the Law. They were considered the unrighteous. Yet he uses that term not in its traditional pejorative sense towards the non-Jews, towards those who were on the margins of society. If you look at this context, he is applying it to those who were attempting to become righteous by obeying the Law.
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“Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the mutilation!” What does he mean when he uses this term to “beware of the mutilation”? He is referring to those who are insisting that for a man to be saved, to begin to obey the Law, he had to first be circumcised. Paul is very strong in the language he uses as he expresses this because those who are insisting upon this have created such division and trauma among all these different churches Paul had established. By the time he writes Philippians, he is under house arrest in Rome. It is one of those prison epistles: Philippians, Ephesians, Philemon and Colossians.
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He is attacking them because by insisting upon circumcision and insisting upon observance of the Mosaic Law as part of what needs to be observed in order to be justified, it has caused great division. The dogs, the evil workers, and the mutilation (the Judaizers who were insisting on the observance of Torah as a means of gaining God’s approval) are all referred to in this same group.
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In contrast, in verse 3 he says, “For we are the circumcision…” He is contrasting “we,” meaning the Philippian Christians and including himself within that group. He is talking about spiritual circumcision. We have not gotten quite into that verse yet in , where we begin to get into the spiritual circumcision which is another way of talking about the baptism by means of God the Holy Spirit. When we believe in Jesus Christ, trust in Him and are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, the power of the sin nature is broken. It is that removal of the power of the flesh Paul calls it in that is what we have in Christ. He does not mean the physical flesh, but what it stands for, which is the sin nature. Being of the circumcision is not referring to the physical circumcision but is talking about spiritual circumcision which takes place at salvation.
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“For we are the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” What he says there is that we are not to boast in the flesh; we are not to have confidence in anything we do that originates with our own efforts, whether ritual or morality. Then in verse 4, he says “Though I might have confidence in the flesh.” He is going to use himself as an example. If anybody could work their way to heaven, he could. Then he begins to go through his resume. He was just obsessed with fulfilling every jot and tittle in the Mosaic Law.
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He reminds them of his accomplishments in the flesh () “Circumcised the eighth day” according to the Mosaic Law. A male child should be circumcised the eighth day, so by saying that, he is pointing out that he was not a proselyte, he did not come into Judaism later. From the very beginning of his life, he was obedient to every detail of the Law. “Of the stock of Israel” – he is fully, genetically Jewish. “Of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews” – he is just stating that no matter how you categorize or classify what it means to be Jewish, he surpasses all those qualifications.
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“Concerning the law [the Torah and its interpretation], a Pharisee” We as Christians tend to come to 1st century Judaism or Second Temple Judaism period with sort of slanted or biased view. We look at the Pharisees in terms of their conflict with Jesus. Jesus is the good guy and the Pharisees are the bad guys. If we were going to dramatize when the Pharisees come onstage, we hear the bass notes, we see them dressed in black, and they are the evil villains. But if you were a 1st century Jew, your opinion of the Pharisees was that there was no one better. No one was more moral, no one was closer to God. If anybody could get into heaven or if anybody could gain God’s approval by their righteousness, it was a Pharisee.
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I have had some conversations with three or four different Jewish friends of mine who are not religious and not observant, agnostic at best and atheist at worst. Yet when it comes to the Day of Atonement, high holy days in the fall and Passover in the spring, I have heard them make this comment that if they go to synagogue, they will not go to reformed or conservative or even orthodox synagogue but will go to Chabad House. Chabad is ultra-orthodox, but they take the text literally. They really believe that the Bible was given to Moses directly by God. In terms of how we believe, they have the closest view toward biblical infallibility, inerrancy, and inspiration of any Jewish group. I find it interesting that here you have agnostic, atheist Jews who think if it is true, they are the ones who have the truth. People who are kind of massaging the text and making it mean whatever they want it to mean say “how can that really be true?” But the people who are taking it literally and seriously, then they must be the ones who have it right.
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I just used that as sort of a modern day analogy because the modern “Chabadniks” would be somehow analogous to the Pharisees of the 1st century. They are viewed as being the ones who if anybody has got it, they have got it. In a Jewish culture in the 1st century, the Pharisees were viewed as the super good guys. When Paul says in “…concerning the law, a Pharisee…” what you would be hearing is that if anybody could do it on their own, Paul could. He had checked off all the check boxes.
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In verse 6, “…concerning zeal, persecuting the church…” He was so zealous he was persecuting the church, and other places we know he was arresting and executing Christians. Then he says, “…concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” Couldn’t find anything wrong.
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Then in verse 7, he begins to shift. “But what things were gain to me [that which I thought was of value, would bring ultimate, lasting, enduring, eternal value] these I have counted loss for Christ.” I think he is being a little “puny” here because he uses the word hegeomai [e(geomai] which is the same word that is usually translated imputing for imputing righteousness, reckoning righteousness. He is saying “What things were gain to me, these I have imputed or reckoned or considered as loss for Christ.” In other words, all the best that we can do is loss, but he is going to expand that.
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What we have here is a chiasm, which is a kind of literary device for organizing material. If you have two basic concepts, you will have the first concept and then the second concept. Then you have the second concept repeated and then go back to the first concept. It is A, B, B, A organization. It drives the attention of the reader to the center pieces because the center of those terms is where the writer wants the focus to be. You could have a much more extended list where it goes A, B, C, D, D, C, B, A. Again, what is in the center is what the writer wants you to focus your attention on.
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Here the A term is “what things were gain.” The B term is “these I have counted loss” at the end of verse 7. Then verse 8 begins talking about the things that are counted loss and expands on that a little bit. The real focus here is what is counted loss. Verse 8 “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things…” In just this short section, you have loss repeated three times and count repeated three times.
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Then we bring in the synonym for loss, which is the word in the Greek scubala that is translated as rubbish in the KJV and NKJV. That really cleans it up – it is basically horse manure or whatever synonym you wish to use. That is how he is describing the best that he has done. Take a look at any religious order where the leadership has been involved in giving up and all this ritual – Paul says that none of that that man can do amounts to anything. It is nothing more than a pile of manure.
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We need to count it all loss for the purpose of gaining Christ. Now we are back to our original A term focusing on gain. The focal point here is on loss and what constitutes loss. Verse 8-9 “…and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him…” This is where we get into the whole doctrine of justification. It is the word heureo [e(urew] which is in the subjunctive passive – God is the one who would be doing the evaluating. The word for finding is really “being discovered under evaluation.”
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“And be found in Him [in Christ]…” Not that he would be found in the synagogue praying, in the temple praying, giving alms to the poor, but simply “be found in Him” because that is the only place that there is justification. “And be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ…” We have another use of that genitive construction that should be understood as an objective genitive “the faith directed toward Christ” because that is what he is talking about. He clarifies it even more “…the righteousness which is from God by faith.”
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The other day I got an email with a question to comment on the phrase “justification means just as if I had never sinned.” That sounds like a nice little way of remembering what justification means, but when we look at a passage like verse 9, it shows us that it is not “just as if I had never sinned” because I do not have any righteousness. If it was “just as if I had never sinned,” it would be as if I do not have sin. It is more profound than that; it is that I still have sin, but what God looks at is what is imputed or credited to my account which is the righteousness that comes from God. I am never made internally righteous. The implication is that I am made righteous and as if I have never sinned. It has nothing to do with my experience; it has to do with what I now legally possess which is a righteousness that comes from God by means of faith.
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, Paul goes on to show that getting this righteousness is not the end game. It is only the means to an end “that I may know Him…” Knowing Him is not a synonym for salvation. It is what comes as a result of salvation or justification and the process of spiritual growth. Verse 10-11 “That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
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This is a really interesting term here. The way it is expressed is a first class condition, eipos [e)ipoj] in the Greek. It indicates not an “if, maybe” I’ll attain to the resurrection of the dead. It is an expression of certainty. Paul is confident that he will attain to the resurrection of the dead. This term that we find in verse 11, exanastasis, literally means the out resurrection of the dead.
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For a long time, I thought of this as a rapture synonym, but just recently in preparation for a paper that I am going to be giving next week at Pre-Trib on three central rapture passages, I recognized that there are two things that happen at the rapture. “Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” The “caught up” is the Greek word harpazo [a(rpazw] which was translated rapio, a Latin word in the Latin Vulgate which is where we get our word rapture. So rapture is a biblical word.
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Who is caught up together with them? The “them” are the dead in Christ. They rise first – that is a resurrection term. The only people who are raptured are those who are alive when Jesus returns in the air. The other group is resurrected, and they receive their resurrection body because they have died. Technically, the only ones who are raptured are those who are alive when the Lord returns; everybody else just gets resurrected.
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This is why Paul uses this term. He knows that one way or the other, he is going to go up. He is close to the end of his life and is beginning to recognize that he is probably going to go through physical death, so he uses this term exanastasis, [e)canastasij] the out resurrection. He is beginning to anticipate that he will not be raptured, but he is confident he will be resurrected out from the dead when Jesus Christ returns. His confidence comes from his understanding of justification. It is not on the basis of anything he has done, but righteousness is a gift from God.
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In he starts to talk about the promise. Before that, he talked about circumcision; now he is talking about the promise because that was the focus of Abraham’s faith. Faith always believes something. Mysticism believes anything that is somehow present within the mind. We do not know where it came from. The promise tells us about a specific articulated statement of God that Abraham believed. Verse 13-14 “For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect.” Here he uses the term “of the law” to refer to those who were trying to get righteousness through the Law.
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“For if those who are of the law are heirs” – he uses a 1st class condition which assumes for the sake of argument that this is true, even though it is not. “Faith is made void and the promise made of no effect” – faith is what perceives and what grabs hold of a promise.
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In verse 15 he explains it by saying, “Because the law brings about wrath…” I pointed out last time that if we disobey the Law, we get God’s discipline. Wrath in Romans refers to God’s divine discipline in time; whereas, wrath in 1 Thessalonians also refers to God’s discipline in time, but it has a more technical sense of the judgments to come during the tribulation period. Throughout Romans, it is focusing on God’s judgment on those who reject His free gift of righteousness. The Law brings about wrath because nobody can fully obey it.
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He goes on to explain it “for where there is no law, there is no transgression.” What you hear is “there is no sin,” but the word transgression is the Greek word parabasis [parabasij], which means transgressing the Law literally. So what he is saying is that where there is no Law, there is no breaking of the Law. Even though there was no Law prior to Moses, there was still sin. We know what Paul is going to say in .
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“Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace…” Faith and grace go together, and Law and works go together. If faith precludes works and if works preclude getting the promise because receiving the promise is based on faith, then what Paul is saying is that faith is the only basis. “Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed…” Now he is going back to the problem he has faced with his Jewish audience that the Jews thought that because they had the Law, that gave them closer access to justification. It gives them special privileges in some areas in relation to God because they have the Law. But that did not make them less accountable; it made them more accountable. It did not give them a leg up on getting justified, but they should have understood more clearly that they could not be justified on their own.
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Verse 16 “…not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham…” So here the phrase “of the law” refers to Jews, and “of the faith of Abraham” refers to those Gentiles who are following in Abraham’s footsteps. Abraham is described as the “father of us all.” This plays an important role because what Paul is showing here is that the promise was not just to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants, but there is a blessing promise in the Abrahamic Covenant that is for everyone – Jew and Gentile alike.
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Verse 17 “(as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations’) in the presence of Him whom he believed – God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.”
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The original quote is from . This is where God gets specific with Abraham and Sarah about when they are going to have this child. This is where we have the circumcision sign of the covenant given. Abraham at this time is in his late 90s. God has waited until it is very clear to Abraham and everybody else that there is nothing natural about this process of Sarah’s pregnancy.
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In , God articulates the promises that go with this covenant. “As for Me, behold My covenant is with you, and you shall be a father of many nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham [Father of a Multitude]; for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.” He continues to go on and explain the promise that he has given to Abraham.
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In , He makes it clear that this child is going to be through Abraham and Sarah. “Then God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. And I will bless her and also give you a son by her; then I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall be from her.’ ” Verse 17 “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed…” Sarah is not the only one who laughed. We often think of Sarah laughing because she is hiding around the corner. Because she chuckled, God said “You will name him Isaac, which means laughter.”
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Based on , Abraham finds this so incredible that he laughs. He says in , “…’Shall a child be born to a man who is one hundred years old? And shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’ ” Abraham is still trying to work the angles and solve the problem on his own and in verse 18-20 “And Abraham said to God, ‘Oh, that Ishmael might live before You!’ Then God said: ‘No, Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac; I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his descendants after him. And as for Ishmael [God had a different plan], I have heard you; Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly. He shall beget twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.’ ” Ishmael is not viewed as a bad guy. He receives the grace of God, and I believe Ishmael was probably saved. He receives a blessing from God. It is not the blessing that goes to the Jewish people and is related to the Abrahamic Covenant.
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Verse 21 “ ‘But My covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this set time next year.’ ” Now they have a specific time. Verse 24-27 “Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. And Ishmael his son was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. That very same day Abraham was circumcised, and his son Ishmael; and all the men of his house…” They fulfill the covenant because circumcision is part of the Abrahamic Covenant.
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“(as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations’ [] ) in the presence of Him whom he believed [verse 16] – God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.” When God’s promise to Abraham “I have made you a father of many nations” is made, it is expressed through a perfect tense verb. These perfect tense verbs are really important because they emphasize something that is already completed and emphasizing the present results of a past completed action. The determination related to Abraham has already been made by God and there is no more discussion about it; and even though it has not actually happened yet, the decision has been made by God, and it is spoken of in the present tense as a present reality.
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Verse 17 “…in the presence of Him whom he believed…” This kind of cleans up the translation a little bit. Some of the translators have gotten a little too wordy here. It begins in the Greek with an adverb that is really a combination of two prepositions, and it governs the genitive case. The only noun in the genitive case is God, and God happens to be separated by three words from this adverb. In Greek you can do that without having to put English in between. So it is really “in the presence of God.” The “of” indicates a genitive case. Then you have a relative pronoun “whom he believed.” It is a real clean, crisp translation. “…in the presence of Him whom he believed – God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.” That is the NKJV translation which is better. The NASB shifts it for some reason “calls those things into existence that did not exist.” In the Greek, it says “calls those things that did not exist into existence.” It is a much stronger statement of ex nihilo creation, creation out of nothing. God brings life where there is death.
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Think how many times you read through the Old Testament and had this juxtaposition between life and death. Moses tells the Israelites as he gets ready to leave them “You need to choose this day between life and death.” Joshua does the same thing before he dies. “You need to choose life or death.” When you get into the prophets and you read especially in Kings, many times God is referred to as the Living God. How many times did we see episodes and miracles with Elijah and Elisha where those who died are given life. There is a healing related to life. Even when Elisha dies and is in the grave, a person is thrown into the grave who is dead, and he is healed just by his contact with Elisha. I am not sure all the aspects that God is trying to communicate, but one of the things is that He is a living God and is the God of life and brings life where there is death.
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This is what Abraham understood. We recognize because of that Abraham finally got it by when God told him to sacrifice Isaac that God was going to fulfill His promise. Even if he killed Isaac, God could raise him from the dead. According to Romans, as early as , Abraham is finally getting the picture that God is the one who is going to bring life where there is death, so he just needs to trust Him.
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expands on that. “Who, contrary to hope…” which is a decent translation. Para [para] plus the word elpis [e)lpij] and that indicates the idea of contrary to or against hope. We say hope against hope, which basically means that in spite of everything that we understand and is available to our knowledge, we are still going to hope. But our hope against hope is just a belief in the irrational. Whereas, this is not. The Greek word for hope, elpis [e)lpij], really emphasizes a confident expectation. Abraham has a certainty in saying “contrary to hope.” That first hope in verse 18 is that uncertainty that man has based on human perception. “Contrary to hope [everything that man thinks is normal], in hope [in a confidence in God], (Abraham) believed...” He is not just having faith in faith; he believes the promise of God.
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You hear today in all kinds of evangelical circles that “we just need to believe God.” But what exactly are we believing is what I want to say? “Well, just trust God that this will happen tomorrow.” I do not recall anywhere that God promised that X would happen tomorrow. I can trust God to sustain me, to give me wisdom in the midst of whatever circumstances present themselves so that I can apply the word to that, but I cannot just believe that God is going to do whatever I would like Him to do. It seems a little bit presumptuous and arrogant, if you ask me.
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But here that is not what Abraham is doing. Abraham has a specific promise from God to him. That is one of the most important things in claiming promises: Make sure it is a promise that you can claim. Make sure that you are not reading your neighbor’s mail. That is what happens a lot of times with some Old Testament promises because it is a promise in a particular situation to a particular group of people in a specific historical set of circumstances. We sort of grab it because it is a nice promise and say, “Well, that relates to me.” The trouble is that it was addressed to your next door neighbor, the Jewish people, and not addressed to the church. You have to make sure that a promise really is for us, and then when it is, we can claim it. We see the dynamics of what it means to claim a promise in these verses.
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“Who, contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that [with the result that] he became the father of many nations…” He trusted in God, and God fulfilled His promise. It boggles my mind to think about everything that God had to do to bring about that pregnancy. As we age, your skin loses its elasticity, and that particularly applies in a pregnancy. If you think about what happens after menopause with the reproductive organs inside of a woman - they lose everything that keeps them vibrant so that it could be a place where life could be generated and nurtured during the nine months of pregnancy. God has to change all of that inside of Sarah. We are not just talking about the literal, physical act of procreation. It seems to me when you start breaking down all the other aspects of what is involved in a pregnancy, that is the easy part. The hard part is getting it to where the woman has a healthy pregnancy and all the things change inside of her so she is able to carry and nuture and biologically provide all the needs for that embryo and fetus inside of her womb. Abraham just trusts God, and whatever it is, God is going to bring it about.
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In , he is not being weak in faith, and it is not that faith is viewed here as being in grades – a little faith or a lot of faith. It is simply that he was not weak in faith. It is a positive way of saying that he was strong. In verse 20, the English translations usually mess it up a little and say that he was fully persuaded. You are either persuaded or not persuaded. Fully does not enter into it – there are no gradations of persuaded. If I tell you that it is raining outside, you either believe me or you do not believe me. You do not say, “Well, I believe you a little bit.” (That is like being a little bit pregnant.)
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The Greek word that is used there does not present a gradation of confidence either. It is a certainty. He is not weak in faith, which is just another way of saying, he was strong in faith. “…he did not consider his own body…” That word for consider is the Greek word katanoeo [katanoew], which means simply to observe, to notice, to contemplate. He kind of looked at himself like some of us have as we have gotten older and thought “I guess my football playing days are over.” It is just not going to happen anymore. He looks at his own body and just does not take that into account. The promise of God is more real to him than what he sees, how he feels when he wakes up in the morning, what has been going on for the last 20 years – none of that matters. The promise of God is more real to him than any experience, which is the way it should be for any of us.
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Verse 19 “…he did not consider his own body, already dead [incapable of sexual reproduction] (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb.” They are both incapable. Verse 20 “He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith…” He was either strengthened by means of faith, or God strengthened his faith. I think his conviction was strengthened by means of faith, by means of what he understood to be true and what he believed that God was doing.
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“He did not waver…” That has the clear idea that he did not doubt or hesitate. The Greek word is diakrino [diakrinw], but it is used as an idiom of a person who is striving with himself. They are not really sure what kind of a decision to make. It is used in the context like this that he was not indecisive about “the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in [by means of] faith, giving glory to God, (vs. 21) and being fully convinced …” Fully convinced is the Greek word plerophoretheis [plhroforhqeij], which has the idea of just being absolutely certain, absolutely assured of a specific set of results. It is not fully convinced; it is just convinced. How much more convinced do you need to be than just being convinced? If you are filling out your income tax return and you have double checked all of your figures and are convinced you have done it right, do you need to be any more convinced? No. Just like faith – faith means you believe something is true. There are no grades of faith; you do not have to have more faith or less faith. You just need to trust. When we trust, we know that something is certain.
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In Abraham is “convinced that what He [God] had promised He was also able to perform.” He has finally understood omnipotence and God’s faithfulness. If God promises something because He is righteous and just, He is going to fulfill it. He cannot go back on His promise. If He has promised it, He can bring it to pass because of His omnipotence. Abraham is convinced finally that God is really God.
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Verse 22 “And therefore it was accounted [imputed] to him for righteousness.” We have gone over the doctrine of imputation that it is reckoned to him as righteousness. This is an application now of that that because he believed God, he was credited with righteousness.
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In verses 23-25, Paul is now going to summarize what he has said in terms of application for his audience. He has gone through all this Old Testament analysis, and he says in verse 23, “Now it was not written for his sake alone…” This is not just dusty old manuscripts in ancient history; it is not legendary myth. He says it was not just for Abraham’s sake alone that it was imputed to him but also for us. “…It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.” Notice the object here is in the Father, believing the promise of God in relation to Jesus Christ as our Savior. Jesus is identified as the one who was raised from the dead.
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Verse 25 “[Jesus] who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification.” We have two interesting phrases. Both of them translate the same Greek preposition. The first word which is translated “delivered up” is the Greek word paredothe [paredoqh], which is an aorist passive indicative, indicating that he receives the action of being given up. That word paradidomi [paradidomi] is the same word that is being used of betrayal, Judas betrayed Him. It has the idea also of being arrested and taken into custody by the Roman soldiers.
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He is “delivered up because of our offenses.” This is where it gets really interesting in terms of understanding the Greek here. In this first use of this preposition dia [dia], it indicates that he is delivered, arrested, taken to the cross because of our offenses, because He has to pay the price for our sins. It is very clear that that is the statement related to accomplishing the work that is necessary for our justification. But the work that is done for our justification, payment for our sins, was completed at the cross, not the resurrection. Some people get confused when they read the next clause “and was raised because of our justification.” The resurrection did not have anything to do with the soteriological work of Christ on the cross. But this is the same construction that we have in the previous causal phrase. Both of them have a dia plus the accusative.
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The second use should probably have the sense that He was raised on account of our justification. In the sense that it was a necessary effect of the payment of sin to express God’s approval of what had been accomplished on the cross. Because the payment for sin was complete, it was then necessary for God, as a consequence, to raise Jesus from the dead. So it has a little different sense, a causal sense, than the first use. One writer has called the first one “a perspective reference” in the sense of because of the need to or for the sake of. It is the idea that Jesus was raised with the view to or for the sake of our justification because the payment for sin had been accomplished already on the cross.

Romans 044b-Justification Summary

Romans 4:13 NASB95
For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith.
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Romans 044b-Justification Summary
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I want to give you a brief report on the Pre-Trib Rapture Study Group meeting – what we did, what we covered, what it was like. We are going to have to make this a team presentation because unfortunately I had to miss a few events, and Pastor Dan Inghram from THE National Capital Bible Church is here. Dan is going to report on the parts I did not attend.
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For those of you who do not anything about the Pre-Trib Rapture Study Group. This started in December 1991, and this was the 20th Annual Pre-Trib Rapture Study Group. It was the result of the combined forces of Dr. Tim LaHaye and Tommy Ice. Tommy and I and Charlie had actually talked a lot about and dreamed a lot about having a dispensational think tank back in the late 1980s as more and more seminaries and theologians and other groups came up attacking dispensationalism. There needed to be some sort of academically-oriented organization that would work specifically on defending the pre-trib, dispensational rapture doctrine and our view of prophecy. Sadly, one of the reasons for that was because the seminaries that had historically stood for dispensationalism were beginning to drift off course. Dallas was beginning to shift into progressive dispensationalism in their theology department. Talbot was. Other schools were spending a lot more time talking about psychology, counseling, and other types of new techniques to somehow stimulate people spiritually. All, in my opinion, were works of the flesh. They were leaving out theology, especially this pre-millennial, pre-tribulational dispensationalism. There were a lot of attacks.
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It has just increased over the years. People you would never have thought would depart from dispensationalism have departed and become covenant theologians, or they shifted from amillennialism to postmillennialism. I went to visit Judy in the hospital the other day, and she was reading an old classic by Charles Feinberg, who was a Hebrew professor at Dallas Seminary back in late 40s-early 50s. He had been brought up in an orthodox Jewish home, trained from a young age to be a rabbi, discovered Yeshua as his Messiah in his late teens, and went to Dallas Seminary. He was unbelievably brilliant in the Old Testament Scriptures in Hebrew. He wrote a book called Millennialism, which came out in the late 40s and just dealt with amillennialism and premillennialism because, as he said in his forward, postmillennialism is dead. Postmillennialism resurrected itself in the 70s. A lot of publications attacked dispensationalists and the pre-trib rapture and made all sort of fraudulent claims that have been demonstrated to be false. Even a scholar with the reputation of John Gerstner (a well-known scholar who is with the Lord now) wrote a book on dispensationalism in the early 90s, and well over 50% of the things he said dispensationalists taught and believed were not true.
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There needed to be answer, so the Pre-Trib Rapture Study Group met. Initially it was just pastors, academics, seminary professors, and some popularizers – Hal Lindsey was at the first few. The idea was to bring the scholars and the popularizers together so that hopefully the popularizers would get straightened out by the scholarship of the others. Maybe the scholarly ones would learn how to communicate a little more at the popular level by listening to the other guys.
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By the late 90s, Tim LaHaye decided it might be a good idea to invite non-professional Christian workers to come to sit as observers, so that we could get the word out and have an impact at a broader level. Now, rather than just having that small group of about 40-60 academics there, there has been as many as 500. Two or three years ago, they hit that high point of 500. With the recession, most conferences of this nature have shrunk about 25%, so there were over 300 in attendance this year. It was a conference where everything related to the rapture itself. Not just to other issues related to dispensationalism or prophecy, but everything this year, in honor of the 20th anniversary, was related specifically to understanding the pre-trib rapture.
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Tommy Ice gave the first paper which was an overview of the rapture in church history. It has been almost 200 years since John Nelson Darby, who was the first to articulate a systematic view of dispensationalism. He was considered the originator of the doctrine of the pre-tribulation rapture. As a result of the encouragement, scholarship, background of the Pre-Trib Study Group, there have been a number of discoveries in the last 20 years of earlier pastors, theologians, and writers who have obviously held to a pre-trib rapture position. Though we have always believed that this was true, you have to have documentary evidence that it is true. There have been a number of discoveries made going back into the early church. The earliest of which was the writing by a man who called himself Ephraem the Syrian, which was just a pseudonym, so he was called Pseudo-Ephraem. It was clear that he believed that the rapture preceded the tribulation.
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Some people had the tribulation as only 3 ½ years. They were not making a mid-trib position; they just had only a 3 ½ year tribulation. Darby, according to what Tommy has discovered, held to only a 3 ½ year tribulation just during his initial studies for maybe 6 months or so before he realized that Daniel’s 70th week identified it as a 7-year period.
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In that presentation, Tommy identified a number of different people. Morgan Edwards was a Baptist and the founder and first president of Brown University in Providence, RI. It is arguably the most liberal university in the country. I read a study when I was in Connecticut that there were no conservatives or Republicans on the faculty and were probably a handful in the student body. When Tommy went there one time looking to find writings by Morgan Edwards, they did not have anything that he had written, and they did not care. Like many of those schools founded in the East originally to train pastors, they are so liberal now that they are embarrassed by their heritage.
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John Hart spoke next and is a professor at Moody Bible Institute. I have read several things by him that have been quite excellent. He wrote a paper defending the view that in Matthew 24:36 ff, it shifts back to talking about the rapture as a signless event. Probably the majority but not all (there is a lot of disagreement over this among pre-trib dispensationalists) believe that it is all about the 2nd coming. There are a number, like Arnold Fruchtenbaum, Hal Lindsey and a number of others, who think that in verse 36 there is a shift that occurs back to once again talking about a signless event. John did an excellent job presenting his view.
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I spent about two hours on the phone today with Dr. Michael Rydelnik, who is the head of the Jewish studies department at Moody Bible Institute. He graduated from Dallas in 1983 and has written a number of fabulous works related to the Old Testament. He takes the same view that Hart does. They got a lot of their argument from Craig Glickman, who is a professor at Dallas when I was a student there.
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(Pastor Dan Inghram gives an overview of the afternoon sessions.)
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The third presentation was Dr. Paul Wilkinson. Tommy and Paul met in England, and he has come to the last three Pre-Trib conferences. Each time his presentation has been exceptional. This time he talked about the rapture and evangelism. He talked about various ministers, pastors, and evangelists and how their focus and emphasis on the rapture has had an impact on their ministries and has caused them to be motivated to evangelism. He said that the pre-trib belief gave them an urgency for witnessing to their friends and acquaintances. I would really encourage you to listen to that because he gave an interesting story about Ribbentrop and how he came to know the Lord during the trials at Nuremberg. He was a high-ranking German officer, who was one of the strongest advocates of the Holocaust and the extermination of the Jews, helping to set up the concentration camps.
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There was an army chaplain who was assigned to the Nuremberg trials, and I think he made the comment that every day the prisoners had to attend a chaplain service. Ribbentrop was kind of standoffish at first, but as they went through the trials, he became more approachable. He was one of the three that were sentenced to death by hanging. He accepted Christ as his Savior prior to his execution, and when he stepped up to the hangman’s noose, he turned to the chaplain and said, “I’ll see you again.” He was a believer as he went to his death.
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The fourth presentation was Dr. Tim Demy “The History of American Pretribulationism.” He talked about dispensationalism coming to America really by way of John Nelson Darby. He talked about Dwight L. Moody and how he became a very strong predispensationalist. As a matter of fact, it was Moody who made the comment, “There is nothing between me and the rapture.” He also spoke about James Hall Brookes, William E. Blackstone, C.I. Scofield, Arno C. Gaebelein, and Charles Ryrie.
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Dr. Ed Hindson spoke to us at the banquet. He spoke briefly about the Pre-Trib Conference and how it got started, and then he gave a very interesting presentation about being a pretribulationalist and dispensationalist. One of the things that he emphasized was that he teaches Revelation at Liberty University, so he had some of the background from Revelation there as well.
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The fifth presentation was by Dr. David Hocking on the rapture in the book of Revelation. A lot of his focus was on . He spoke about the 24 elders. We know that in the first three chapters, there is an emphasis on the church. I think the word ekklesia is mentioned something like 16 times. It is not mentioned at all in chapters 4-19, and then it is mentioned again when we get to chapter 22. One of the comments he made about the 24 elders is that when we talk about elders, we normally think of that word being applied to the church. It was his position that the 24 elders are a representation of the church. He gave a presentation on “And they sang a new song, saying: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll, and to open its seals [speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ]; for you were slain and have redeemed us [and who is this “us” that are singing – he believes that is the 24 elders]…’ ” This is the representation of the church in heaven at that time singing this to the Lord. The rest of the verse “ ‘…out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and have made us kings and priests to our God; and we shall reign on the earth’ ” If you are following in your translation, there are a lot of challenges, different manuscripts that apply to those verses. He spoke about that and how the different manuscripts might apply to that because not every translation has “us” and “we” in those verses.
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In the next presentation “Jesus and the Rapture, Dr. Andy Wood spoke about . He did it in three parts. He talked about some preliminary observations on the reason for the rapture being found in and then gave an excellent exegesis of those verses. Then he talked about answering the non-rapture arguments for that passage.
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The next presentation was on the three major rapture passages by Dr. Robert Dean. We had just had a presentation on , so he amended that to two rapture passages. He spoke about and also .
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Dr. Wayne House spoke on the topic “Is the Rapture Found in ?” The crux of his presentation was whether in we have the word apostasy, apostasia – do we have a definition of a transliteration or do we have a translation with the word being “departure”? The departure in that verse would the be the church being raptured instead of an apostasy occurring in the world at that time. His position is, of course, going to be departure. So the rapture is in that verse.
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Then Dr. Mark Hitchcock gave an overview of the pretribulational argument. What he essentially did was he took an acronym PRETRIB and talked about the arguments and positions that we have for pretribulationalism.
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The final presentation came from Dr. Tommy Ice. He talked about John Nelson Darby and the rapture. He said that Darby is considered to be the individual that has had the most impact, the most influential person at least in the last 300 years as far as dispensationalism and pretribulationalism are concerned. One of the comments he made was that Darby came to the United States many times, but in his travels, he did not simply speak about dispensationalism and pretribulationalism, but he actually established quite a few churches. Tommy said that somewhere in the vicinity of 1,500 churches might be able to be accredited to him as far as those church plants were concerned. He talked about the fact that Darby was not influenced by the Irvingites and or by Margaret MacDonald. He is accused of that all the time. His detractors like to say that Darby got his ideas from the Irvingites and MacDonald. That is not true.
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(Pastor Dean speaks again.)
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That is important to understand that Darby got the rapture from studying the Bible. He was injured in an accident with a horse that pushed him up against a fence post and broke his knee. He had to convalesce for several months. He was a little depressed, and all he could do was read his Bible. He had been postmillennial. As he read through his Bible again and again, he not only became premillennial, but he came to understand the rapture.
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Dan mentioned Margaret MacDonald and the Irvingites. The Irvingites were sort of a proto-charismatic type of group that was not looked upon with much favor. That is a real insult to say that Darby got it from the Irvingites or from this prophetic utterance that Margaret MacDonald actually gave. If you read the account of that utterance, it is actually post-tribulational.
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A lot of these criticisms that people float out there for the pre-trib rapture have been debunked historically, exegetically, and biblically.
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I want to review and then clear up some things at the end of Romans 4. I think it is important to contextualize what is being said here. Context is everything. Remember you take the “text” out of the “context,” and you are left with a “con” job. Do not just look at verses in isolation.
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Here is a rough outline of what we have looked at in so far.
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Four Parts:
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Intro, 1:1–17
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Doctrine of Justification, 1:18–11:36
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1. The Need of it, 1:18–3:20
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a. Down and Outer, 1:18–32
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b. Moralist, 2:1–4
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c. Jew, 2:5–3:8
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d. Therefore all are under sin, the world, 3:9–20
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2. The Fact of it, What it is
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a. The Explanation or Fact of it, 3:21–31
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b. Illustration, 4:1–25
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The introduction goes down through verse 17, the key verses being verses 16-17. Verse 16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it [the gospel] is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.” It is not up to us; it is not up to our abilities to persuade, to convince, to argue. It is to clearly explain the gospel, and God the Holy Spirit uses that. The “first” is not chronological – it has to do with priority. Some people think when you start witnessing, you ought to go to Jews first and then go to Gentiles. It is not saying that. Jews have the priority because they are the ones to whom God revealed Himself and who have the promises and the covenants. They have the priority in terms of their position within history, not priority in terms of chronology or order.
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Verse 17 “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith [phase one faith when we are justified] to faith [phase two when we are growing and progressing]…” Notice how righteousness of God is revealed in phase one when we believe Jesus died on the cross for our sins and also in phase two spiritual life as we grow. That is important for what I am going to say about some verses at the end of chapter four.
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Then we get to that next section in that establishes the need for justification. The need for justification is basically as Paul summarizes it in 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So you have the explanation of the immoral one who rejects the revelation of God in creation, and then you have the person who thinks he can become righteous through his own morality in 2:1-4. In 2:5-3:8 (there is a clear break there in the grammar), you have the Jew. The emphasis there is on the Jewish claim. This was distinct to this period of Judaism – the claim that the men had to be circumcised to enter into the covenant, the blessings of God, and salvation.
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One question always nagged at the back of my mind. I asked Arnold Fruchtenbaum at Pre-Trib. How was it in this circumstance where you had these Judaizers coming in? Some of them may have been Christians, but they were emphasizing the Law that it is great to trust in Christ, but you do not get it all. They are sort of early charismatics. Charismatics say you do not get it all when you trust in Jesus; you have to have a second step. They were kind of two-steppers like that. You get something with Jesus, but to get it all, you have to be circumcised. How did the women hear that? How does that relate to women?
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Arnold gave me his answer, and I was not quite satisfied with it. Not that it is much different from the answer that I am going to give you, but that was one reason I called Dr. Rydelnik. I asked him the question, and I think he does a better job of explaining some of Arnold’s answers than Arnold does. He had basically the same answer.
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In the synagogue at that time, the men were on one side, and the women were on the other side. The men were first class citizens, and the women were like third class citizens. They were not concerned about the women. There were two ways that you became a convert to Judaism or you became a proselyte. It did not matter what else they did, but the men had to be circumcised. And then both men and women had to be ritually immersed (sort of the predecessor of the believer’s baptism in a cultural sense) in the mikveh. We have seen pictures of those outside the southern gates of the temple. That was how they entered into the covenant.
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Arnold’s first answer was you have to understand the difference between a rabbi and a mohl (often a rabbi but is the one who performs the act of circumcision). He said, “A rabbi gets paid a salary and the mohl gets the tips.” Just seeing if you are still awake.
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First century Judaism as opposed to later development of Judaism, the emphasis was really all on circumcision. That was not true 200-300 years later, but it was at the time of Christ. When Paul is speaking of circumcision, he is not just specifically speaking of that, but it really stood for the whole works/righteousness system that was there in Judaism.
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In that section (), he deals with the fact that Jews had great privileges because God gave them the covenants and the promises, but that did not get them righteousness. Righteousness for the Jew or the moral person or the immoral person only comes by faith alone in Christ as a gift from God.
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He begins to explain what justification is in . Verse 27 “There is no boasting, there is no works, there is no Law, except the law of faith.” Verse 28 “There we conclude that a man is justified [declared righteous] by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” Any legal obedience is irrelevant. Then Paul expands that that this applies not just to Jews because God is not the God of Jews only but also the God of the Gentiles (vs. 29). Verse 30 “Since there is one God who will justify the circumcised [Jews] by faith and the uncircumcised [Gentiles] through faith.” It is through the law of faith, not works, that we are justified.
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gives two illustrations – one from Abraham, one from David. I have not emphasized this before. There are two phases of salvation. Phase one is justification. It happens at an instant, a moment in time when a person believes in Jesus as their Savior. God imputes to them righteousness, and the Supreme Court of heaven declares them righteous, not because of anything in their life, not because of any transformation, but because they have received the imputation, have been credited with Christ’s righteousness. But that is not the only type of justification there is in the Bible. There is a justification related to phase two – ongoing, progressive in terms of obedience that brings about an experiential righteousness, which is where we go at the end of chapter 4.
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At the beginning of chapter 4, Paul is talking about phase one justification, but by the time we get to verse 16 ff, he is shifting to phase two. Let me give you 12 points of summary on verses 14-25.
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1) Verse 14-15. The Mosaic Law brings divine discipline because no one can obey the Law perfectly. Verse 14 “For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect.” It is either the Law, or it is faith in the promise. Verse 15 “…because the law brings about wrath; for where there is no law there is no transgression.” What he means is that the law brings divine discipline because no one can obey the Law perfectly. Disobedience brings discipline or judgment from God.
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2) Where there is no written law, there is no transgression of a written law. You remember I pointed out that when we read the end of verse 15, what you are hearing is that where there is no Law, there is no sin. That is not what it is saying. The word transgression is the word parabasis [parabasij], which means a violation of a written precept. He is being very clear – where there is no written law, you cannot violate the written law. There is no transgression. Back in , Paul made it very clear that even the Gentiles who do not have the Law, still violate the Law in their conscience and are under condemnation. So he is not saying where there is no Law, there is no sin. He is talking about Abraham now (430 years before the Law) and saying Abraham needs to be justified even though he never violated, transgressed the Mosaic Law.
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I pointed out that what he is saying is the Law cannot be obeyed; the result, therefore, is wrath. If there is no written law, there is no violation of the Law. His point here is that the promise is for those who obtain it by faith alone. God makes a promise, and the faith is directed not just to the promise but to the one who makes the promise as the one who is able to perform it.
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The conclusion from those two points is that if obedience to the written Law cannot lead to life, then life must be based on grace rather than law. It is either one or the other; they are mutually exclusive.
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3) Verse 16 “Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law [the Jews, he earlier called them the circumcision], but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all [those who have faith].” So what do the two justified groups have in common? Faith. So there is the contrast – it is either by grace through faith, or it is by works through Law. Those are the two: law/works vs. faith/grace.
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4) “All the seed” includes all those who follow Abraham’s example of faith in God. Abraham’s righteousness was not based on obedience to the Law, because he was 430 years before the Law, and he was declared righteous years before he was circumcised. (Four hundred thirty years ago, the North American continent of the western hemisphere was still barely known to the Europeans.) He was not circumcised until many years after he was saved.
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5) Abraham is both the physical father of many nations through his son Ishmael, his grandson Esau, and other sons that he had (the Midianites through his wife Keturah), but the father of all believers (Jew or Gentile). “(as it is written, [] ‘I have made you a father of many nations’ [spiritual, not physical] ) in the presence of Him whom he believed – God…” Whom did Abraham believe? He believed God. Was it the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit? It does not say. It is the triune God. There is not a distinction there among the persons of the Trinity.
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Then he defines the one he believed – “God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.” What that meant for Abraham had to do with resurrecting his ability to sexually procreate and to father a son. It has other applications because God can give life where there is death. He believed the promise of the God who gives life to the dead.
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Verse 18 goes on to say, “Who, contrary to hope [human viewpoint], in hope [confidence in God] believed, so that he became the father of many nations [physical], according to what was spoken, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ ” Who spoke that? God the Father. “As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you, and you shall be a father of many nations [physical descent].” That is the promise.
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You believe a promise. You do not just believe something amorphous and nebulous. You believe something that is stated – a promise.
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6) We also know that Abraham is the spiritual father of all who believe. It does not matter what their ethnic background is. “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness [].’ Therefore know that only those who are of faith [believing the right promise from God] are sons of Abraham.” That is why Paul said not all Israel is Israel. Physical descent is not enough. We also have to follow Abraham in terms of spiritual descent. That is the real key.
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Verse 8 “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, ‘In you all the nations shall be blessed.’ ” That is spiritual descent and spiritual faith.
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7) Faith always focuses on a promise by believing it to be true because ultimately of the one who makes the promise. The promise is no good if the person behind it is impotent or a liar. “And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead … and the deadness of Sarah’s womb.” The point here in verses 19-20 ff is that Abraham’s experience was “It cannot happen - she is old and I am old.” But God’s promise was more real to him than his experience. Our faith gets strengthened when we start believing that God’s word is more real to us than our experience.
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8) reinforces the reality of Abraham’s trust in God’s promise to give him a son through the natural procreation process even though both he and Sarah were far too old to have children. Abraham believed God could do whatever He promised. He finally gets to a growth point. He has been justified phase one since before he left Ur of the Chaldees. But all through these different tests, his faith is growing and strengthening. Verse 20 “He did not waver [doubt] at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith…” That is not phase one faith. This is phase two growth.
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What has happened? Paul has made a transition. In the first part of the chapter, he is talking about phase one justification. Now he is talking about phase two and the growth of the believer and the growth of Abraham. Verse 21-22 “And being fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform. And therefore [Paul is applying the same verse to phase two] ‘it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ ” So he is getting experiential righteousness imputed as he is growing spiritually.
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9) At this point Paul has shifted away from discussing what Abraham believed initially for justification salvation (phase one) to ongoing faith for imputed phase two righteousness. We have to understand there are these two justifications.
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10) This is my first line of argument. The application of this in verse 24 is to “us” – those who have already believed in Christ for justification. Do believers in Jesus Christ need to be justified? No, we are already justified – phase one.
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11) He says in verse 23, “Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him [that follows the Greek in the Septuagint], (verse 24) but also for us [believers]. It [His righteousness] shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.” Who are we believing in in that phrase? Are we believing on Jesus who died on the cross for our sins? No. What is the gospel? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Is the object of belief in this verse the Lord Jesus Christ? No. Is the object of faith in this verse the cross? No. It is not talking about phase one justification; it is talking about phase two justification. The object of faith here is not Jesus and his death on the cross for our sins but on God the Father who is the one who can bring life where there is death.
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We are not spiritually dead anymore, but we have a lot of carnal death hanging around. We have to have the abundant life, so this shifts to phase two. Paul is beginning his transition from talking about justification in these verses to when he is going to be talking about sanctification starting in chapter 6.
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Just as Abraham believed in a resurrecting God (not when he is getting justified, phase one), so we also believe in a resurrecting God. By the time he finally gets to and God says, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering…” Hebrews tells us that he did it because he knew that God could raise him from the dead. Now his belief is not in God for justification salvation; it is in God in terms of his spiritual growth and sanctification.
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We know this because of James 2:21 ff which talks about a second kind of justification. Verse 21 “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar?” You are either justified by faith, or you are justified by works, but to get into heaven, it is either one or the other. James is not writing about getting into heaven; he is writing about spiritual growth. He is not talking about being justified in this whole section of . Abraham had a second kind of justification related to his phase two spiritual growth. Verse 25 uses Rahab as an example. “Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?” She was already a phase one justified believer.
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We have a second justification which is a vindication of faith. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect [brought to completion]?” It is brought to completion because it starts with phase one, but then it is matured through phase two.
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Verse 23 “And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ And he was called the friend of God.” That verse identifies as phase one justification, but when he lives out his spiritual life, he grows spiritually, has experiential righteousness, and comes to maturity.”
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Verse 24 is a badly translated verse. “You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.” This communicates that you have to have works and faith. That is lordship salvation. What is the issue here? When this is translated, the word “only” in the English text modifies “faith.” The word faith is a noun and the word only is an adverb. An adverb does not modify a noun; an adverb modifies a verb. The verb is left out because it was stated earlier.
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What the verse really says, “You see then that a man is justified by works and not justified [it is left out – ellipsised] by faith only [or only justified by faith].” Since adverbs modify verbs, when we supply the ellipsised verb, we see it is “not justified by faith only.” Now only is in the wrong place because only is at the end modifying the noun faith, and we really need to move it up, so that it reads – “You see then that a man is justified by works and not only justified by faith.”
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This indicates that it is not that you are phase one justified by works and faith, but that there are two different kinds of justification. A justification by faith alone is how you are declared righteous at phase one, and a second justification comes in phase two as a result of trusting in God. How do you summarize the Christian life? “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” It is very simple – only two things. That is what Abraham is doing. His faith is being strengthened, and he is being declared righteous (ongoing phase two righteousness).
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This is reiterated in “By faith Abraham, when he was tested [phase two], offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, ‘Isaac your seed shall be called,’ concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.” He was trusting God and was already justified saved, but in his ongoing faith, he has experiential righteousness and that is imputed according to .
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12) Jesus died because of our sins, and then because we have justification secured, He was raised. “Who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification.” There are two phrases there that use the same grammatical construction which would be translated “for our” or “because of our” or “on account of our” offenses. The object of that prepositional phrase is different. “Because of our offenses” is a negative. Sins are negative things. “Because of our justification” is a positive thing. So they need to be understood a little bit differently.
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Jesus died because of our sins; that is why He had to go to the cross. The second one is because justification has been accomplished, He is raised from the dead. That is God’s vindication of His work on the cross. Justification phase one is by faith alone, but there is also ongoing justification by faith in phase two. James is saying the same thing that Paul is saying. You pick up 90% of the commentaries on James, and they say they disagree. That is because their presupposition is lordship, not free grace. Because they do not understand free grace, they never get it right. They always introduce works by the back door.

Romans 045b-Peace and the Prince of Peace

Romans 5:1 NASB95
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
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Romans 045b-Peace and the Prince of Peace
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The first 11 chapters of Romans focus on the doctrine of justification. The major problem that every human being faces is the lack of righteousness. In order to get into heaven, we have to have righteousness. We are also spiritually dead, we are under the condemnation of Adam’s original sin, and there is a sin penalty that has to be paid. That objective sin penalty was paid for every human being at the cross, but that does not change the status of each individual.
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Every person is born spiritually dead and without righteousness. The only way to move from spiritual death to spiritual life, from unrighteousness to possessing perfect righteousness is to trust in Jesus Christ, who was the promised Messiah from the Old Testament and the second person of the Trinity, the eternal God who entered into human history, took on full humanity, and then went to the cross to die for our sins.
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Four parts, Intro, 1:1–17
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Doctrine of justification 1:18–11:36
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1. The need for righteousness, 1:18–3:20
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a. The immoral rejecter of God, 1:18–32
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b. The moral, works-oriented rejecter of grace, 2:1–4
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c. The Jew, relying on the Mosaic Law, 2:5–3:8
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d. Therefore all are under sin, the world, 3:9–20
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2. The explanation of justification
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a. The explanation or fact of it, 3:21–31
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b. Illustration, 4:1–25
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c. The benefits of justification, 5:1–11
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At the instant that we trust in Jesus Christ as Savior, God the Father imputes to us or credits to our account His perfect righteousness. Then when He sees that perfect righteousness, He declares us to be just. It does not change us, but now we possess that righteousness. It is on the basis of Christ’s righteousness that we are saved. Not by works but through the gift of righteousness.
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“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This verse sets up the focal point of the next 10 verses. Verse 2 “Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” So we have peace in verse one and hope in verse two. We have a progression that develops in verses 3-5 that culminates in hope. There is a connection here between the fact that we have been justified and therefore we have peace, and peace develops hope (confident expectation) in the future.
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This is an important opening in verse one because Paul is developing the consequences of our justification. “Because we have been justified” he is going to say. “Therefore” draws that conclusion from all that he has said before. We need to skip to the main verb in the main phrase “we have peace.” That is the main thought. Other things that are said are secondary and circumstantial to this main thought that we have peace with God. The verb is a present active indicative. In most English translations, we just do not catch the real emphasis that is there in the Greek.
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When the Greek participles are translated into English, they have a range of meanings. You have to identify what those meanings are. If you were an original Greek speaker, you would understand it. Just as you have idioms in English and when people say certain things, you know exactly what they mean, but someone for whom English is not their native English, they scratch their head trying to figure out what that means. It is important to draw these things out and come to understand what they mean.
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When you have a sentence that has a main verb and a participle, the action or time of the participle is related to the time of the verb. If you have a present tense verb and then have an aorist tense participle, which is what we have here (we do not have an aorist tense in English, but in Greek that is your general past tense), the action of the aorist tense comes before the action of the main verb.
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In order to have peace, Paul is saying something happens logically prior to having peace. That is justification. He uses the same word he has been using all through the discussion since chapter three for justification which is the verb dikaioo [dikaiow], which means to declare righteous. It does not mean make righteous because we are not made perfectly righteous at salvation. We are only declared to be righteous because we have been given the righteousness of Christ. So you still have the same rotten, nasty sin nature that you always had, and that is not going to go away.
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Justification is simply that declaration, judicial statement made by the Supreme Court of heaven that a person has the righteousness of Christ, and they are declared righteous. Dikaioo means to declare righteous or to declare just before God’s Supreme Court. If you look at the basic grammatical form of the word, it is an aorist passive participle. The aorist tense means it is past action, so in relation to the main verb, the action of justification comes before peace. It is passive because we as human beings do not do anything to make the action take place. We receive the action of justification; we are declared to be just. It is a plural because he is talking about we who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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It should be translated “therefore, because we have been declared righteous by means of faith or through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is through faith and faith alone that we are declared righteous. Again and again, Paul makes this statement that we are declared righteous, and justification is by faith alone. He says in “…that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.” We know that there is nothing we can do to make ourselves savable or justifiable. “…and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags…”
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This first benefit of our justification that Paul talks about is that we have peace with God. This is a very significant statement to pay attention to. People can get confused about some doctrines and twist and reinterpret some teachings in Scriptures within their own experience rather than paying attention to the context. Especially at Christmas time, when you have all of the different Christmas specials, so that we hear about peace in the world and the quotation out of context of the angelic announcement to the shepherds – “peace on earth to men of good will.” It is misunderstood and interpreted in terms of world peace, absence of war and is not understood within the context of Scripture. It is an extremely important phrase. It is not something Paul plucks out of the air here, but it has a history that goes all the way back into the Old Testament.
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To understand New Testament concepts, we do not have to go to Greek for the background because Greek is not the background language for the Old Testament – Hebrew is. The core word for peace is shalem. You know of it because you hear the word shalom, which is used in Hebrew as a greeting. It means peace, use it to say hello or goodbye, just a greeting-like blessing. It has a wide range of meanings. In fact, the word shalom is used over 250 times in the Old Testament.
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Unfortunately in modern American culture, when we talk about peace, the first thing that comes to a lot of people’s minds has to do with the context of war – not being at war or not being in a conflict. That certainly is one of the nuances of the word shalom, as well as the word eirene, which is the Greek word used in the New Testament.
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LXX (70) is the Roman numeral that stands for Septuagint. The legend is that 70 rabbis in 70 days translated the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) from Hebrew into Greek somewhere around 250 BC. In their translation, they used generally one of three different Greek words to translate shalom. The word they used the most was peace, but they also used the word sozo [swzw], salvation, and teleioo [teleiow], to become complete or mature. That fits the core idea of shalom, which means to be complete or whole, healthy or sound, fulfilled. In many contexts, the idea of teleioo would certainly fit a translation of shalom. Shalom has a wide range of meanings just as the word peace can have in English.
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The first meaning in the Old Testament that is probably the most common is used over 50 times to refer to the absence of war, conflict or strife. (There were many wars in the Old Testament between the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom, between the Southern Kingdom and the Syrians.) But it is more than just not having conflict or being in a state of war. It has a positive quality to it that it is a state of wholeness, a healthy relationship. It is not just that you are not arguing with somebody, not fighting with somebody, do not have mental attitude sins towards that person, or are not angry with them. It is that there is something positive in that relationship; there is a wholeness to it. It is emphasizing very positive beyond simply having an absence of conflict.
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The second meaning is that in some cases, it refers to a state of wholeness with God that is the result of righteousness. This idea that we are seeing here in that peace is the result of justification is not something that Paul dreamed up. This is often an accusation that you hear from people who do not want to interpret the Bible literally, do not want to understand its message literally because they foundationally or presuppositionally rejected the message of the Scriptures, so they have to reinterpret it.
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I got my heart rate of this morning, not by exercising, but I flipped over to MSNBC to hear what people who think of the world a little differently than I do are saying. Dan Senor was on. He is Jewish, fairly conservative, and has written a wonderful book called The Start-Up Nation, which is all about the rise of technology in Israel and the whole economy. I highly recommend that book. They were interviewing someone who was British and had had an Episcopalian background. He was talking about a new book that was out that he had written a forward to on anti-Semitism. He was talking about all the horrible things he had learned about Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. Of course, whenever I hear someone say that they did not learn that until they were much older, I am appalled at their lack of exposure to good education.
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He made this comment that there are anti-Semitic comments in the Gospels. Then somebody else said, “That is from one of the most anti-Semitic of the Gospels.” The only reason anybody thinks the Gospels are anti-Semitic is because they do not understand the Bible. They come to it from a position where they do not want to give credit to the Bible. The Bible says what it is, and they do not want to believe the Bible’s self testimony. They make it a human book and interpret its origin and development from a liberal framework. When you start from a wrong starting point, you are going to end at a wrong ending point. It was a classic example of that.
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I read a little bit about this book on Amazon, downloaded it to my Kindle, and found five factual errors in his introduction. He did not write the book, and it does look like it is going to be a very good book on the history of anti-Semitism from 586 BC to the present. A lot of people do not realize that anti-Semitism did not start with Christianity or with the crucifixion of Christ, but it has its origin with the destruction of the first temple and the destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah at the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
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When people just do not understand and do not take the time to read the Bible and let the Bible speak for itself and interpret things within its own context, then they always come away with the wrong message. This shows us that the message of Paul (he is often accused of inventing the theology of Christianity) is reiterating what is already in the Old Testament. He does not come up with anything new, except for the application to Jesus as the Messiah. What Paul does again and again is show what the Old Testament teaches that the Messiah will do and then points out that Jesus is that Messiah. That is the only thing new in what Paul is saying. He is not inventing new theology from the Old Testament.
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As we have seen in , when Paul goes back to show that the whole concept of imputation of righteousness is the basis of justification by faith, he went to Abraham () and went to David. In , he is going to talk about peace and relate it to righteousness, and this comes right out of “The work of righteousness will be peace…” It is the work of righteousness in the sense of the effect or the consequence of righteousness will be peace. But it is first and foremost about peace with God. “…and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever.” The connection of justification and righteousness to peace is an Old Testament concept.
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The third meaning refers to the peace offering in . The peace offering is designed to teach exactly what Paul is going to say in , which is the new state of peace that exists between God and sinful man because of the sacrifice that has paid the penalty of sin. This breaks down that barrier between man and God, so there can be a state of peace which replaces a state of enmity.
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There is a fourth meaning that I have not found in the Old Testament for shalom, but it is a meaning that we have in the New Testament for peace. That is peace as a mental attitude state which is in contrast to anxiety or worry. That is found in “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
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The contrast there is between a state of anxiety or worry and a state of peace, calm and stability because you have cast your care upon the Lord and are allowing Him to take care of the problem rather than taking care of it yourself. It does not mean you do not think about it. There is a sense of worry there where we run issues and situations over and over in our mind to try to work through how we are going to handle it. It is not worry in the sense that the Scripture is using this as a state of anxiety as if we are trying to control that which we cannot control.
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We have shalom in the Old Testament as a reference to peace in terms of the absence of conflict, usually military conflict, but it can also relate to other kinds of conflict. It is a peace that is in relationship to God and righteousness and then the peace offering.
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One of the most significant passages where we find the use of shalom and peace is in a Messianic prophecy in . I have some different translations for you.
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(NKJV) “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
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The translation on the right is from the JPS 1917 translation of the Tanach. JPS is the Jewish Publication Society. Tanach (TNK) is an acronym Jews used to refer to the Old Testament made up of the initial consonants in Torah, Neviim, and Ketuvim, the three divisions of the Hebrews Bible (the Law, the Prophets, the Writings). I want you to notice how the 1917 edition translates this. Christians do the same thing. We get into a theological bind, and we say “Let’s not translate it; let’s transliterate it.” The most famous example of that is transliterating baptism. The King James translators instead of translating it immersion, they just transliterated the word baptizo [baptizw] to baptism, to further cloud the issue.
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The 1917 Tanach translates it () “For a child is born unto us, a son is given unto us; and the government is upon his shoulder…” There is not much difference between how the Jewish translation runs at this point and the Christian translation in the NKJV. But then it says, “…and his name is called Pele-joez-el-gibbor-abi-ad-sar-shalom.” What does that mean? You avoid the whole issue of the Messianic titles here, and you just obfuscate the whole issue. If you are Jewish and you are reading through Isaiah, you do not understand what it is talking about. These are titles related to the Messiah and that he is born and also called God.
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Then we have the 1985 Tanach edition. “For a child has been born to us, a son has been given us. And authority has settled on his shoulders [as opposed to government]. He has been named “The Mighty God is planning grace; The Eternal Father, a peaceable ruler.” That is really different. Not only that, but if you go back in history and look at how Jewish rabbis had translated this, it is even more confusing. They cannot agree, and one of the reasons is that the Messianic implications are so obvious and the fulfillment in terms of how Christians interpret this is so obvious that they have worked quite diligently to somehow rework the text so that it does not say what the Christians say that it says.
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This is specifically true in terms of the Masoretic text. As we look at this verse in the NKJV, it is clearly stated that we have these five titles: Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace. The one we are focusing on is the Prince of Peace. This is related to His Messianic role. In the 1917 JPS transliteration, the first word Wonderful is from pele. This is a word that is only applied to God; it is never applied to man. It has to do with beauty, wonder and amazement.
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He is called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God (El Gabor). The child who is born is called Mighty God. When you just transliterate that, you lose that unless someone reads it and know Hebrew. The way it is handled in the 1985 Tanach is to translate this “The Mighty God is planning [Counselor] grace [Wonderful].” They have made these two statements about God and inserted a verb.
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What is interesting about that is the Masoretic text, which is the Hebrew text that we use, was developed by a group of scribes that were called the Masoretes. It does not reach its final form until around the 8th or 9th century AD. What has happened for the previous 800 or 900 years before the Masoretic text reaches its final form? By formal form, I do not mean in terms of the words. They are inserting vowels to preserve pronounciation, but they are also inserting accents and breathing marks in order to identify how clauses and phrases should be connected together. In other words, they are inserting punctuation, and punctuation can change the interpretation and meaning of a verse, which is what the Masoretes did.
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There are a number of examples, especially with Messianic prophecies, where the Masoretes manipulated the text via punctuation, so that it does not come across as being Messianic as it is used or quoted in the New Testament. This is an example of this. The Masoretic test inserts accents which divide the titles in a way that is even different from the 1985 Tanach. According to the accents the Masoretes put it, it should be translated “The Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God [two titles for God at the beginning] calls His name [they change where they put the verb here, so that His name refers back to the child that is born] Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” So you have two people here – God calling the child a name.
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1985 Tanach does not read anything like the punctuation the Masoretic text gave it. It does not read anything like the 1917 JPS version. If you were Jewish, you would scratch your head and say, “What in the world does this mean?” At least when you have various English translations done by Christians of different verses, they sound somewhat similar. Here they are all over the board because they are trying to avoid communicating a Messianic prediction here.
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A lot of this goes back to a 10th century rabbi who goes by the name of Rashi, who did a tremendous amount of work to change historic Messianic interpretations of the Messianic prophecies, so they referred to historical fulfillment and not future fulfillment. If all these Messianic prophecies were fulfilled by historical figures centuries before Jesus, then you do not have any Messianic prophecy for Jesus to fulfill. You destroy the whole Christian argument and defense.
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Franz Delitzsch, who was a Jewish believer and scholar in the 19th century, came up with a number of reasons dealing with the technicalities of the translation here and the Masoretic accents to demonstrate that they just did not hold water. The accents were added much later; they were not part of the original. One of his arguments was that if the first two titles were separate titles from the last two, as was handled in the Masoretic text, they would have each had a definite article which they did not have. He makes a fairly convincing case for that.
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Another thing that supports the traditional translation of and the traditional understanding of it as a Messianic passage is that an early midrash (Jewish rabbinical commentary on the Hebrew text) Deuteronomy Rabbah 1:20 states in reference to that it refers to the future Messiah. The statement is made in the midrash of God speaking, “I have yet to raise up the Messiah of whom it is written, ‘For a child is born to us.’ ” That midrash commentary was written about the 2nd or 3rd century AD. It shows that at the time of Christ and after, the Jewish community clearly understood to be a Messianic prophecy, and they translated it in way similar to the way we translate it today, not in the distorted way that the Masoretes or the modern Jewish Tanach has translated it.
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That gives us confidence that the way we have historically understood and the way it has been quoted in the New Testament to refer to Jesus as the Messiah is accurate.
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To truly understand what is going on with , we have to recognize that the claim that is made in this prophecy is that you have a child that is born, and then in parallelism, the child is then called a Son. That title of Son was understood to be Messianic, and then the titles that are applied to this born one, which indicates that He is human, are titles of deity. He is called El Gabor, the Mighty God. He is called the Everlasting Father. It should be translated the Father of Eternity indicating that He is truly eternal and has all the attributes of deity including eternality.
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He is the Prince of Peace. Why is Jesus called the Prince of Peace? To understand that, we have to go back to – the context of actually begins in . The background for understanding all of this is to understand the covenant that God made with David - and in , which is a meditation on the covenant that is given in . , which was written later but also rehearses the contents of the covenant. You have the promise of God that a Son, physical descendant of David would sit on an eternal throne. The only way you can have a human descendant sit on an eternal throne is if that human descendant somehow has the attributes of eternality, which is what you get with a divine/human Messiah.
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There are three aspects to the Davidic Covenant: an eternal house of David [eternal dynasty], a descendant who would sit on his throne forever [eternal kingdom], and his throne would be established forever [eternal throne]. This is covered in . Verse 16 “And your house and your kingdom shall be established forever before you. Your throne shall be established forever.” This is the Hebrew phrase ad (toward something) ‘olam (forever) – until or to forever.
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Another Messianic prophecy that fits and ties into this that comes later in Isaiah is one I mentioned as we came to the conclusion of . In the last couple of verses in , language is brought in that comes out of , .
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Speaking of the future Messiah, Isaiah writes in “He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief [indicating that He is rejected by His peers, his family, those He came to save]. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him [picture of rejection]; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.”
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The next couple of verses indicate the fact that this Servant who would come had a role as a substitute. Verse 4-5 “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows [He would take our griefs and sorrows upon Himself]; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God [God hates you, blamed Him for His rejection], and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions [substitution], He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace [punishment for our peace] was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.”
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Verse 6-7 “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him [substitution again] the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth [Jesus did not utter a sound until the Father imputed on Him the sins of the world, and he cried out (), “…My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me.”]; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth.”
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Verse 12 “Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong, because He poured out His soul unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors, and He bore the sin of many [idea that is quoted in ], and made intercession for the transgressors.”
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is another well-known Messianic prophecy. “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign…” Who is he talking to and is the “you” in the original a singular or a plural? That is a very important question to answer. You cannot tell from the English. “…Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son [introduction of the term Son in the context of ], and shall call His name Immanuel.” Im at the beginning is the Hebrew preposition “with.” Nu is the ending for “us.” El is God. Immanuel means God with us. This is a strict claim that the virgin will give birth to a son, but the Son is also fully divine as indicated by the name “God with us.”
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To understand what is going on, because there are those who have interpreted this several different ways to avoid the Messianic implication, we have to look a little bit at the context. The context begins in . There is conflict between the Jews of Judah, the Southern Kingdom, and the Jews or Israelites in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The year is about 735 BC, which is only 12-13 years before the Northern Kingdom of Israel will be wiped out by the Assyrians. Now you have on the horizon this dark cloud that is gathering, as the Assyrian empire is growing in strength, defeating and gobbling up other nations. They are known for their cruelty and for their love of torture of their victims. They are looking to the Middle East to come down and to raid.
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Rezin, who is the king of Syria, knows he is the next one to be attacked by the Assyrians. He entered into an alliance with Pekah, the son of Remaliah, who is the king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. They have tried to get Ahaz, the king of Judah, to join them to fight against the Assyrians. Ahaz will not have anything to do with it, so now they are turning against Judah and have entered into a military alliance to attack Judah.
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(Description of a map.) Never call it the West Bank; it is Judea and Samaria. The West Bank is just a fraudulent term like Palestinian. That is one thing Newt Gingrich got right. The first time I have heard anybody at the national level of politics have the intelligence and the facts to come out and state the truth: the Palestinians are an invented people, and it is an invented name. Until Arafat started using it around 1967, the term Palestinian always referred to the Jewish inhabitants of the historic territory of Palestine. It never referred to the Arabs until he co-opted it in the 1960s.
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Once you get an alliance of Damascus and the Aramaeans or Syrians with Israel, the Northern Kingdom, they are going to attack Judah. The idea is to take Ahaz off the throne. Ahaz is a descendant of David. What did God promise? He said, “David, you are going to have an heir on the throne forever.” It is not just an assault against the Southern Kingdom because Judah will not do what they want Judah to do. They want to wipe out the house of David. It is a Messianic assault and part of the angelic conflict. They want to destroy any hope of providing a Messiah through the Davidic line.
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“And it was told to the house of David [see how the text is bringing out this emphasis], saying [to Ahaz the king], ‘Syria’s forces are deployed in Ephraim [one of the 10 tribes in the North and often the Northern Kingdom was just called Ephraim or Israel].’ So his heart and the heart of the people were moved as the trees of the woods are moved with the wind [scared to death].” They are going to come down and invade into Judah, but the Lord has other plans.
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“Then the Lord said to Isaiah, ‘Go out now to meet Ahaz, you and Shear-jashub your son…” Why in the world is Isaiah supposed to take his boy with him; Shear-jashub is fairly young at this time. Pay attention to that. “ ‘…at the end of the aqueduct from the upper pool, on the highway to the Fuller’s Field, and say to him [Ahaz]: “Take heed, and be quiet; do not fear or be fainthearted [In the Hebrew, he is using singular pronouns and singular imperatives, which means that he is talking to Ahaz – you, you, singular] for these two stubs of smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria, and the son of Remaliah.” ’ ” A stub of a firebrand is what is about to go out. If you have ever lit a torch and the flame goes out, you are left with a few sparks and the stub – its life is almost over with. That is the point here – they are not going to last much longer.
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“Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah have plotted evil against you, saying…” It is important to notice the 2nd masculine singular. He is talking to Ahaz about Ahaz in the singular. He summarizes the thinking of the Northern Kingdom and the Syrian alliance. Verse 6 “ ‘Let us go up against Judah and trouble it, and let us make a gap in its wall for ourselves, and set a king over them…” That is their idea – let us take the Davidic king out, get rid of the house of David, and put in our own little puppet king, the son of Tabel.
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Verse 7-8 “Thus says the Lord God: ‘It shall not stand, nor shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin. Within sixty-five years Ephraim [the Northern Kingdom] will be broken, so that it will not be a people.’ ” That is important to put those two clauses together because in twelve years they are defeated by the Assyrians, but then it is going to take time for all of the resettlement and repopulation to take place when the Israelites are completely redistributed and relocated and wiped out as a people.
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Verse 9 “ ‘The head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah’s son [Pekah]. If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established.’ ” Once again, it is the offer of faith – if you will just turn back to God, that will solve the problem. But they do not do it.
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Verse 10 “Moreover the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, ‘Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God; ask it either in the depth or in the height above.’ ” Depth and height are two opposites. It is a figure of speech, like night and day, up and down, high or low. Whatever it is, covering the whole range of possibilities, God says to ask whatever he wants for a sign, and He will give it to him.
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But Ahaz is arrogant and has a little false humility and says, (verse 12) “ ‘I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord!’ ” But the Lord just asked him to do that, so he is disobeying the Lord. Verse 13 “Then he said [Isaiah speaking by the command of God], ‘Hear now, O house of David!’ ” Who is he talking to? Ahaz? Ahaz would be one person, a singular pronoun. But he is not talking to Ahaz anymore; he is talking to the line and lineage and house of David, which is plural. “ ‘…Is it a small thing for you [plural] to weary men, but will you weary my God also?’ ” He is wearying God by not obeying the command to ask for a sign.
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Verse 14 “ ‘Therefore the Lord Himself will give you [plural, not Ahaz but the house of David] a
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sign’ ” The sign is to confirm that God is going to be true to His promise to David to have an eternal dynasty and that the Northern Kingdom and Syrians are not going to wipe out the house of David. “ ‘…Behold the virgin…’ ” It uses a definite article there which indicates it is specifying a specific virgin, indicating that the Hebrew readers at that time understood that there is a connection of a virgin to the Messiah. “ ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.’ ” This goes all the way back to and the seed of the woman. The term used for a virgin there was almah, which is the term used of a young, unmarried woman who has just broken through puberty and is now of marriageable and reproductive age.
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“ ‘Curds and honey He shall eat…’ ” There a number of commentaries that will say this is the food of royalty – milk and honey. Not so. If you read verses 18-25, God describes what it is going to be like when the Assyrians come through as a scourge on the Southern Kingdom. They will destroy the Northern Kingdom, but like flood waters, they will not drown the Southern Kingdom and kill it but will just get up to the neck. As a result, it wipes out agriculture, and little is left.
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We read the description in verse 18 “And it shall come to pass in that day [when the Assyrians come] that the Lord will whistle for the fly that is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.” Bees will come and produce honey. Verse 21 “It shall be in that day that a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep [that is not much – he has lost everything else]; so it shall be from the abundance of milk they give, that he will eat curds; for curds and honey everyone will eat who is left in the land.” The eating of curds and honey is what the people who are left do because everything has been wiped out. It is like Europe after World War II. They had been devastated, and the economy has been wiped out. The only things they can scavenge are dairy products and honey.
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The sign that is given in verse 14 is of a virgin conceiving, and that sign is given in relation to the preservation of the house of David. It is not given to Ahaz because it was not to be fulfilled in that generation. Verse 15 says “curds and honey He will eat.” This is talking about the Messiah and is indicating the reason they eat curds and honey is the nation is under political oppression. That is the condition of Judea at the time of Jesus; it is under the control and domination of Rome.
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Verse 14-15 deal with the Messiah, and then there is a shift in verse 16. “ ‘For before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings.’ ”
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Who is the child here? I bet it is capitalized in your Bible. It should not be. The child is Shear-jashub. That is why God told Isaiah to bring his little boy with him. The pronoun shifts from plural back to singular. Now Isaiah is talking to Ahaz, and he says, “ ‘…the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings’ ” by the time this little boy grows up to know the difference between good and evil, and you will not need to worry about the Northern Kingdom and Syria again.
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Verse 17 “ ‘The Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you [singular] and your people [singular] and your father’s house – days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah.’ ” So you have a prophecy in verses 13-15 that is built on a plural pronoun that talks about a far distant sign that is fulfilled in the Messiah. Then in verses 16-17 you have the near fulfillment referring to a different child, the child of Isaiah. Then the rest of chapter 7 and chapter 8 talk about the characteristics of Assyria’s invasion.
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You get a description of events in chapter 8. Isaiah is going to have another son and call him Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, which means swift to the booty, speedy to the prey. It is a sign that the Assyrian invasion will come with lightning speed. There is a description as to what will happen in that time of invasion.
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In “ ‘…The king of Assyria and all his glory; he will go up over all his channels and go over all his banks. [You are almost going to get drowned but not quite] Verse 8 “He will pass through Judah, he will overflow and pass over, he will reach up to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings will fill the breadth of Your land, O Immanuel.’ ” Who is Immanuel? Immanuel is the Child, the divine human Child born of a virgin in . He is identified now in chapter 8 as the one who truly owns the land of Israel.
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Then when we get to chapter 9, He is identified as the Child who is born, the Son who is given who will be the Prince of Peace. The Peace that is talked about there is the one who will bring peace in a full sense to Israel, peace in terms of the end of war and all these deprivations to the kingdom because He is the one who will come and establish His kingdom. That sense that He is the Prince of Peace is tied to His bringing the kingdom.

Romans 046b-The Prince of Peace ; , ,

Romans 5:1 NASB95
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
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Romans 046b-The Prince of Peace ; , ,
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Paul begins drawing out the first consequence or the first implication of the fact that we have been declared righteous by faith alone, which is we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. He brought into the discussion this consequence of justification that we have peace with God, wherein we had formally been at enmity with God. “For if when were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” He is stressing that we were enemies – we being every human being born at enmity with God.
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As I got to thinking about the concept of peace, I reflected on the fact that I have often heard that peace in the Bible was always juxtaposed to a mental attitude state of worry or anxiety. That is not quite true when you analyze the data, especially in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, peace is almost always related to the absence of conflict. Not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of harmonious relationships – not just the absence of military conflict but the genuine alliance between those who were at one time enemies.
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One of the most well-known places where the term peace is used is in the Messianic prophecy in . “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Now how are we to understand this phrase “Prince of Peace”? That is very important because we all are familiar with the Christmas story of how on the night the Lord Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the angels, the armies of God, appeared in heavens singing () “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men [or depending on how it is translated, to men of goodwill]!”
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There is a connection between that announcement and . Often that announcement is abused, twisted, made to be a support for some sort of pacificism or absence of war, but that is not really what that verse says or what Isaiah says. It is not for today, as we will see.
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The word for peace in the Old Testament is the word shalem, from whence we get our word shalom, which is used over 250 times in the Old Testament. It is usually translated with one of three words in the Septuagint (LXX), where the rabbis in Alexandria, Egypt translated the Old Testament into Greek – salvation, peace or complete, which is a very good translation for shalom. It indicates the absence of physical war, conflict or strife about 50 times. In some cases, it refers to a state of wholeness where there is not a state of antagonism or enmity with God. But it is clear from and other passages that that state of harmony between God and man, as Paul has said in , is the result of man possessing righteousness. A third meaning has to do with the peace offerings that were given as part of the Levitical offerings.
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What we first have to do now is to look at the context of Scripture. Sometimes people get the misunderstanding that when you just read something in the Bible, you can easily understand what is going on there. That is not always true. Whenever you open the Scripture, unless you are starting in , you are starting in the middle of a conversation.
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One night last week, after leaving the grocery store, I turned on the radio in the car. A caller had called in and was talking about the health problems of someone and how there was possibly liver failure or some other problem. She had continued to feed him, and he continued to lose weight. I wondered if she was talking about her husband or maybe her father. Then they closed out the conversation, and the doctor made some suggestions. Then they went to the show’s closing where I found out it was a veterinarian’s show. She was talking about her dog. There are always little things that we might miss that cause us to make guesses that are wrong about whatever it is that is being talked about in Scripture. We have to always understand context.
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I am going to show you a sign that appeared outside a business in Florida, and I bet most of us would think this was a rather inflammatory sign. “We would rather do business with 1,000 Al Qaeda terrorists than with one single American soldier!” What is the context? It is outside of a funeral home. Context is extremely important.
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When we look at , the context is war, an alliance that is developed against the house of David by the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Syrian kingdom. They have tried to woo King Ahaz, the king of Judah, to join them in a war against Assyria. Ahaz was at least smart enough to not join them. Because Ahaz’s spiritual nature is being evaluated, he is usually painted in Scripture as one of the bad kings because he did evil in the sight of the Lord and promoted idolatry. From what we know of history, he was also a fairly powerful and intelligent king.
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The issue that we find in this chapter is the issue related to the house of David. “And it was told to the house of David…” I have looked around in other places in Scripture, and this is an uncommon way to address the king of Judah as the house of David. So obviously if you are familiar enough with Scripture and you read this phrase, that ought to stand out and say, “Why is the emphasis on the house of David and not King Ahaz?”
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We looked at the Davidic Covenant last week. There are three elements to the promise of God in the covenant. There is the promise of an eternal house, an eternal kingdom, and an eternal throne. Right away we know from the way the text is written in for example, God promises that this descendant identified as David’s seed is human and a male. “When your days are fulfilled and you rest with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” There is an element here that suggests he is not just going to be human but eternal, not just a man who lives forever and ever. “And your house and your kingdom shall be established forever before you. Your throne shall be established forever.” Three times we have this statement that this is an eternal individual, eternal house, eternal kingdom and eternal throne.
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(Points 1-4) We have the issue of the war against the house of David and the security of the Davidic Covenant. Is God able to protect the descendant of David on the throne of Judah or is the Davidic Covenant threatened? () God directed Isaiah to take his young son, Shear-Jashub, to meet with King Ahaz (). This is not emphasized too much. God gives Isaiah the precise warning for Ahaz. This begins in verse 4. “Take heed, and be quiet; do not fear or be fainthearted …” There are four commands there, and all are 2nd person masculine singular pronouns. He is not addressing a group but an individual.
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(Points 5-6) God then ordered Ahaz to ask for a sign. (). Normally that would be presumptuous for a king to ask God for a sign or miracle, but since God is the one who has made the command to ask for a sign, it is presumptuous and arrogant for Ahaz to not ask for a sign, which he does in verse 12. “But Ahaz said, ‘I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord!’ ” It may sound good, but it is distorted.
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Then Isaiah responds to him in verse 13 with a message from the Lord and addresses it to the house of David, not to Ahaz. This is the introduction to the key Messianic prophecy in verse 14. It is addressed to the house of David, which is a plural idea, not to just the singular Ahaz. Basically what Isaiah says is “Is it a small thing for y’all to weary men but will y’all weary my God also?” (I put the “y’alls” in there so you know it is the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and Isaiah has got a good Southern accent.)
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“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you [y’all] a sign: Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” Immanuel means “God with us.” It is two or three words in the Masoretic text. Im (with) and then manu (nu ending is first person plural meaning us) and then el (God). It literally means God with us. This is really an important term. At Christmas time, we look at and 9, but we do not look at . is really important because it connects chapter 7 and 9 together as a singular unit, and the key word is Immanuel.
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The sign is going to be a virgin, ha’almah. The ha there is the Hebrew definite article, indicating that it is not just any virgin but the virgin. There is precedent in Scripture, and the reader should know who this is talking about. We ought to be able to look back in Scripture and figure out if there is something that we have heard before that would tell us about this virgin.
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There has been a lot of debate about the word almah. There are two words in Hebrew that are potential words for expressing a virgin, but neither are precisely equivalent to the word virgin. The word almah, if we look at all the ways it is used in Scripture, always refers to a young, unmarried woman of marriageable age. There are a couple of places where marriage is not in the context, and the word really does not have much around it to clarify it. The clear rule in interpreting Scripture is to go with the known and do not try to interpret the clear and explicit with something that is unclear and vague. Yet often people will say, “See this exception over here in this verse. Because we do not really understand this, we cannot understand these other 59 uses.” This is backward.
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Almah is unmarried and young. She has just reached the age of puberty, and, unlike our culture, when that happened in the Middle Eastern cultures, she is now of marriageable age. The difference between batulah and almah is that batulah was a word that was used for a virgin, an unmarried woman of any age. Almah emphasized that she is very young and has just reached the age where she can be married and have children.
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Another interesting thing here is that the Hebrew does not say, “Behold, the virgin SHALL conceive.” It is much more emphatic than that. It states, “The virgin is pregnant or behold, the pregnant virgin.” It is a sign – behold, the virgin is pregnant! How can that be? There is a sense of surprise and being astounded that this has happened. The wording indicates that there is something extremely unusual going on here.
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One of the problems we have seen in the way different translations, especially liberal Christian theologians, have tried to handle this is to minimize this. “Almah really does not mean a virgin. We are going to translate this the young woman.” That happened when they translated the Revised Standard Version back in the 1950s. It so upset conservatives that there was a boycott by conservative Christians on the whole Revised Standard Version for decades. Anybody who was a Bible believer would not buy that “horrible, blasphemous, piece of trash” because it denied the virgin birth by translating as simply the young woman.
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The Septuagint translators, the rabbis who translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek in the 2nd century BC, understood exactly what this was saying. In the Greek translation, they used the same word we have in Luke which is parthenos [parqenoj], meaning the virgin. The Parthenon in Greece, which is a very famous temple to Athena, is there because she is the virgin goddess – that is the legend.
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The Jewish rabbis understood this as a Messianic prophecy that she was a virgin, and it was understood to be a Messianic prophecy well into the early centuries of Christianity. It was not until almost 1000 years later that some Jewish rabbis finally were able to conjure up a way to interpret this without sounding like it supported the Christians.
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The Hebrew text in makes it very clear that the virgin is pregnant, and she will bear a Son. Obviously this Son is human – human mother/human Son. But the Son is going to be called Immanuel, meaning God with us. They are naming a human son God, which indicates this Son will have the attributes of deity.
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The idea that they should understand something about who this virgin is goes back to when God states the curse to Eve in the garden and makes it clear there is a promise there also. (addressing the serpent) “And I will put enmity [lack of peace] between you and the woman, and between your seed [Satan’s descendants who follow him in his thinking] and her Seed [reference to the Messiah]…” This is thought to be the first indication of the gospel. “…He [her Seed] shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”
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With this name “God with us,” we know the child is going to be a human but also divine. says “Curds and honey He [Immanuel] shall eat, that He may know [purpose clause]…” This indicates that He is eating this diet for a purpose of coming to learn something – “…to refuse the evil and choose the good.” This is not a son who will ever choose the evil; he will always choose the good. That supports the view that the divine/human child born here is not going to sin.
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There are also a lot of questions about what the significance is of the curds and honey. If we look at Isaiah 7:17 ff, we learn that this is not the diet, as some have suggested. A lot of commentaries will say that curds and honey is the diet of the aristocracy or royalty. But that is just the opposite. When you read the text, you see in verse 22 “…for curds and honey everyone will eat who is left in the land.” Those who are left in the land are those who are left after the horrible deprivations caused by the invasion of the Assyrians. Curds and honey is an expression of the somewhat restricted and impoverished diet of a people who are under oppression.
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So the child of the virgin who is eating the curds and honey indicates he is living in a time when Israel is under oppression and that he is learning something in his humanity under oppression. He sees the consequence of sin and that teaches him to refuse the evil and choose the good. This gets confusing because the key to understanding verses 13-15 is the fact that in 13-14 we have a focus on you, plural, which refers to the house of David. Verse 15 is a continuation of verse 14 because it is still talking about Immanuel. He is speaking to the house of David. God is going to keep the promise to David; the security of the house of David is sound.
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Then there is another change. There is the word “you” used (vs. 16), and it the 2nd person singular. We have all these 2nd person singulars addressing Ahaz. Then we have verses 13-15 dealing with the plural, addressing the house of David. Now we are back to the sign for Ahaz. The sign that is mentioned in verse 14 is the sign for the house of David.
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This is important, but you will read 95% of evangelical scholars today who will say this is an example of dual fulfillment. You have a fulfillment in the near, immediate future for Ahaz to give him confidence that his dynasty will not go down, and then you have the far ultimate fulfillment. This idea of dual fulfillment is extremely dangerous in hermeneutics. The general principle in hermeneutics is the single meaning of Scripture. There is no such thing as dual fulfillment. The one fulfillment of verse 14 is Jesus Christ, not the son that would be born to Isaiah, which is usually suggested.
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The reason they go that way is they conveniently ignore the singular and plural pronouns. That always flows from people who do not believe in the verbal, plenary inspiration of Scripture, so they play fast and loose with the text.
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“For before the Child…” In most of your Bibles, I bet “the Child” is upper case; it is in the NKJV. But there is no upper or lower case in the Hebrew. So verse 16 says, “For before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you [Ahaz] dread will be forsaken by both her kings.” The Hebrew with the definite article with Child is often used as a demonstrative. It should be translated “For before THIS child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good [before he is old enough to make moral decisions], the land that you [Ahaz] dread [Northern Kingdom and Assyrians] will be forsaken by both her kings.” You do not need to worry about this threat. Then there is a promise that comes up following that that deals with what will happen when the Assyrians hit.
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I want to emphasize this. There are two prophecies here: one to the house of David and one to Ahaz. The one to the house of David concerns the Messianic promise that God will fulfill his promise to David. The second prophecy is related to Ahaz, using singular pronouns, and promises deliverance before Isaiah’s young child is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong.
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Just to summarize the next section, in “And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly that is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.” The bee is introduced and refers to the military of Assyria. It recognizes that the bee in Assyria is going to come and wipe out the land, so that nothing is left except honey and curds. In verses 21-25, the land is spoken of as being so impoverished after the Assyrian invasion that a person will have only one young cow and two sheep. The result will be that everyone is scratching for food, “everyone will eat curds and honey” (verse 22). It is the food of oppression.
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Then we get into , and there is a description in the first 10 verses of all that is going to happen. In verse 8 as Isaiah is describing the devastation of the Assyrian army, he says “he will pass through Judah, he will overflow and pass over, he will reach up to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings will fill the breadth of Your land, O Immanuel.” Any Jew who has read the Torah knows that the land of Israel is God’s land; it is not a human being’s land. Here the statement is that this is “Your land, O Immanuel” reinforcing the view that Immanuel is God. But Immanuel who is God is going to be born to a virgin.
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In verse 9-10 “Be shattered, O you peoples, and be broken in pieces! [the destruction of the Assyrians]… Take counsel together, but it will come to nothing; speak the word, but it will not stand, for... [for what?]”
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Your English version translates this. Note it transliterated it the first two times. It is the same word in Hebrew - God is with us, Immanuel. By not paying attention to the original, you miss the dots that you need to connect to keep the string of pearls together.
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You have Immanuel in chapter 7, Immanuel twice in chapter 8 to show that we are still in the same context, and then the end of chapter 8, it connects this coming of the Lord of hosts (verse 13-15) to the sanctuary, which is the temple. It says the Lord of hosts is going to be “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” That phrase is used of Jesus in the New Testament, who becomes a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. Verse 14-15 “…as a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and many among them shall stumble…” That is exactly what happens when you get into the New Testament. Over what do they stumble? They stumble over the Lord of hosts.
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In verses 16-22, Isaiah emphasizes that YHWH is the only hope. But instead, Israel at that time was seeking hope in idols, New Age necromancy, mediums, astrologers – trying to get answers from everywhere except the revelation of God.
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The context then in chapter 9 is one of oppression and gloom. Light appears in Galilee to the Gentiles. The first two verses are quoted in the gospels to indicate the appearance of Jesus, the Messiah, is the light appearing to the Gentiles. It is in that context of war that we have this promise of a Child who will be born, who will be called the Prince of Peace.
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Remember the focus of much of Isaiah is on the coming of the Messiah. There is no suggestion in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel or any of the prophets in the Old Testament that there is a time gap in the sense of two comings of the Messiah – that he will come once to suffer and once to reign. They are blended together. The Messiah is going to come and be a suffering Messiah (). He is going to be a royal Messiah, which is the emphasis here. He is both – there are not different Messiahs. There are two different events that define His ministry.
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In , the promise is made regarding the future kingdom that “He [Messiah] shall judge between the nations, and rebuke many people…” At that time when the Messiah appears, then all the nations on the earth () are going to stream to Jerusalem to worship at the temple. There God will (vs. 4) “judge between the nations, and rebuke many people; they [the goyim, the people, the nations] shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…”
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This is taken out of context and is emblazoned over the entry to the United Nations building. This shows they have a high view of themselves and have defined a messianic role for themselves to end all war and all violence. But what tells us is that only when the Messiah comes as the true King of Righteousness will there be genuine peace, physical lack of conflict, no war on earth. It will not happen until then. I do not know what the statistics are now. When I was in college and taking military science courses, they gave us statistics that between the end of World War 2 and roughly 1972 (almost 30 years, 360 months), there was something like 700-800 wars or armed conflicts. That is almost two or three a month somewhere in the world. There is no peace whatsoever – just wars and rumors of wars continue to increase. Peace is not becoming more common; it is becoming less common.
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Among Jewish translators, there are a number of different ways of handling the titles in that are given to this Child who is born. The 1917 Jewish Publication Society (Tanach) chose to ignore the problem and transliterate his name Pele-joez-elgibbor-abi-ad-sar-shalom. That way nobody is going to get confused about who this person is because they just cannot read the Hebrew. Christians do the same thing when it comes to baptism. Rather than translating it immerse, they translate it baptism. That way they avoid the problem.
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It is clear from in the Hebrew text, which is one verse off from the English text, that it is talking about the Messianic kingdom and the throne of David. “…upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it through justice and through justice and through righteousness from henceforth even for ever…”
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The 1985 JPS (Tanach) translates it “The Mighty God is planning grace; the Eternal Father, a peaceable ruler.” They are inserting verbs where there is just a series of titles. The titles look something like this. The first one is pele (Wonderful), a term that is only used of God and refers to someone who works a wonder or miracle. It is used of a miracle or the one who performs the miracle, so this represents something extraordinary or is always associated only with God.
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The second title is Counselor; it is not Wonderful Counselor. It is Wonderful (comma) Counselor, as it was translated in the NKJV. Ya’etz – the One who plans or Advisor. The third title is Mighty God, El Gibbor. Gibbor is often used of warriors, so it is the Mighty Warrior God (interesting because of that juxtaposition with being the Prince of Peace). Then Abiyad. Abi meaning my father or the father of, and yad meaning eternity. The Father of Eternity, which is an idiom for One who is eternal or who has existed from the earliest of times. This is similar to .
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The last phrase is that He is the Prince of Peace. We are in and have already read , talking about when He comes and rules in the Davidic kingdom. They will at that time beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Now we are talking about His same rule in “…upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice…”
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This is a time of peace. What kind of peace is this in the context of Isaiah? Is it mental peace or lack of worry? Is it peace with God in a soteriological sense like we have in ? Or is this peace in the sense that when the Messiah, the greater Son of David, comes, He will establish true world peace, and there will not be any more wars. I think it is the latter; that is the context of Isaiah.
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“And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Luke was a physician by training, and he is a detail person. There are more details in Luke about the same stories than are found in Matthew and Mark. We have indication from Acts that during the time that Paul was incarcerated in Caesarea by the Sea for two years, Luke is going around in Judea and Galilee interviewing everybody who knew Jesus. It was less than 30 years from the crucifixion. He is getting eyewitness accounts; he spoke to Mary and to Jesus’ brothers and sisters. He has interviewed everybody who had anything to do with the life of Jesus. He is writing an historical account for the purpose of convincing Theophilus, the one to whom he is writing, that Jesus is indeed the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. Theophilus was probably a Greek or Roman.
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He locks it down in space/time on a specific incident. This is not just something that is generic; it is when Caesar Augustus sent out this decree. Then he expands on that in “while Quirinius was governing Syria.” There is some difference in terminology, but we have been able to lock down a Quirinius who governed Syria. It seems that he had an administrative position at two different times: once was from about 7-3 BC and then again from 5-11 AD, which puts the birth of Jesus not at zero but probably around 4 or 5 BC.
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We are told that everyone had to register, so (verse 4) “Joseph also went up from Galilee [You always go UP from Galilee because in Israel up is in elevation, not like for us where up is north and down is south], out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem [House of Bread, where the Bread of Life will be born], because he was of the house and lineage of David.” Joseph is a descendant of David and is (verse 5) “to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife [not married yet and in that stage of betrothal], who was with child. (Verse 6) So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. (Verse 7) And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”
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The word inn here is an unfortunate translation. It is the same word that was used when Jesus sent the disciples to find the upper room. When you go to Jerusalem, there are three or four different places where they say the upper room was. In these historical places over there, like the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, they say that was exactly where He was born. Historical evidence indicates that there is probably a 98% that they are right. Same thing with the Church of the Holy Seplulchre.
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When it comes to the upper room, on a scale of 1-5 – 1 being that is just pure guess work and 5 being that is 98% sure – the upper room is probably at zero. It is just made up in three or four different locations. Houses were built with an upper room which is the guest room. They left it up because it was usually warmer, so it was the least comfortable room in the house. If it was in the winter months or inclement weather, there was kind of a lower area where they would let the sheep and cows come in to get out of the weather. If you did not get there in time at Christmas and your cousins got there first, they got the upper room, and you got stuck sleeping with the sheep.
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There is not an inn here. It is not the concept that we have all grown up with of Motel 6 or Holiday Inn. It is more the idea that the guest room was already taken because they got there late, and they are having to sleep with the animals. That is why when Jesus is born, He is laid in the manger.
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“Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” They are there because this was where the temple flock was kept. The sheep for the sacrifices in the temple had to be kept close to the temple, within four miles. Bethlehem is very close to Jerusalem. When you are standing on the Temple Mount and look at the horizon, you see the big white wall that the Israelis have built to keep the Arabs out. Just on the other side of that white wall is Bethlehem. You can walk there, but it is not through the best part of town.
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The shepherds are out on that north side of Bethlehem towards Jerusalem. (Verse 9) “And behold an angel of the Lord [It is clear there is no definite article, so it is not THE angel of the Lord from the Old Testament, who is the preincarnate Christ] stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them…” Where do you get a picture of the glory of the Lord in the Old Testament? The most vivid is , when Isaiah is before the Lord in all of His glory in the heavens. Here the glory of the Lord is now bursting forth on the earth. It is interesting to observe that here it is dark and when Jesus is born, everything becomes light. At the end of His life in the middle of the day at high noon when everything is to be bright and He is crucified for our sins, everything goes dark.
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Verse 10 “Then the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.’ ” This comes right out of Isaiah; this is not just for the Jews but for all the nations. Verse 11 “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior [soter/ swthr], who is Christ the Lord [meshiach, Messiah]. (Verse 12) And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.” (Verse 13) Instead of one angel, there is now a multitude, almost an innumerable number. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host [antiquated word for army] praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!’ ” That is how we read it in the NJKV. In the NASB, NIV, ESV or one of the other translations, it will read “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among people with whom He is pleased [or people of favor, people of goodwill]!”
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The difference is that the Majority Text manuscripts read “goodwill toward men” in the nominative case. The Greek word that is translated there is the word eudokia [e)udokia]. It does not mean goodwill. It is not that God is going to pat everyone on the head and give them goodwill. It is a word that is always associated with the gracious benevolence of God towards undeserving mankind. When we read goodwill, it is a word that picks up a lot of the ideas of grace. They are making an exclamation that this is a demonstration of God’s grace to mankind.
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In the NASB and other translations, they base this on basically three older texts: Siniticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus. There are those within the history of textual criticism who think that if those three wise men agree, then so be it. But that is not right.
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This coming March 2012, we are going to have three lectures on textual criticism by Dr. Ron Minton at the Chafer Conference. We are wrapping the conference with a course offering that we need to film for Chafer Seminary on textual criticism that will be about 20 hours long. I had a conversation at the Pre-Trib Conference with Ron Hart, who is Professor of Bible at Moody Bible Institute. He talked to Maurice Robinson, who is one of the greatest living experts since Zane Hodges died a few years ago, about the Majority Text. Ron Hart said Robinson made the point that there are dozens of whole verses that are in the Critical Text – not just a word here or there – that are in the NASB, NIV, ESV but are not in the Majority Text at all. That is one of the many reasons that I tend to lean (and I am no textual critic) toward the Majority Text.
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That would read that this is a subject, nominative case noun, indicating God’s gracious benevolence toward mankind in giving the Savior. Rather than He is wishing peace among people with whom He is pleased. That can have some theological problems. I think the text is better to go with the reading of the NJKV, but not quite because goodwill does not capture the idea. It is divine goodness or grace toward mankind.
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What is the peace that is being announced here? We certainly know from other passages of Scripture that because of Christ’s mission to die on the cross for sins, there is peace with God. Is that what this is talking about? We know from other passages of Scripture that if you are a believer trusting in God, then we have a peace that passes all understanding. “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
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The peace that is here in Luke 2:14, I believe, is a Messianic peace. What is being announced in the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is from John the Baptist. “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand – the Messiah is here.” Then Jesus came and His message during the first 2 ½ years of His ministry was “repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He sent out His disciples only to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. The first 2 ½ years of Christ’s ministry is presenting Jesus as the King, the descendant of David, who would establish His kingdom and a rule of peace upon the earth based on all the prophecies of Isaiah.
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When the angel appears to Joseph and says not to put Mary aside because () “she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus [Yeshua], for He will save His people from their sins.” This clearly anchors this whole context in the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, which does as well. “For there is born to you this day in the city of David [Bethlehem, prophesied] a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” The announcement of the angels fits all of the glory that is going on in the heavens; a huge angelic army announcing His birth. Luke does not talk about the Magi, but they come and bring gifts for royalty, for a king (gold, frankincense and myrrh). Everything that wraps around the birth of Jesus is about the birth of a King.
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This is why Herod got so upset because the Magi were looking for the King of the Jews and were not looking for him. He thought he was the king. He was scared to death because they were from Parthia. The Magi usually anointed the king, the emperor of Parthia. They had already conquered Judea once and run Herod out of town. He had to flee to Rome, whining to the Romans to come and rescue him because he could not defend his kingdom (about 30 BC).
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Everything about the birth of Jesus is about the birth of this promised Old Testament Messianic King. When the angels are making this announcement, they are announcing that the King is here. That is what the gospels are about – the King came. But the King was rejected, went to the cross, and paid the penalty for sin in that crucifixion. He will come back as the King. The kingdom has been postponed, and there will be no peace, as announced here, until He returns according to . Only when He establishes that kingdom will there be peace on earth. That peace on earth is going to be the result of the fact the He has made peace with God because of sin. He is the peace offering on the cross that provides peace for those who are justified, peace with God, so that we are no longer at enmity with Him. That is our Christmas present.

Romans 047b-Peace and Reconciliation ,

Romans 5:1 NASB95
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
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Romans 047b-Peace and Reconciliation ,
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J. Vernon McGee was a crusty old curmudgeon. You hear him still on the radio even though he has been with the Lord for probably 20 years or more. He got his accent in Waxahachie, TX. Two great stories about Dr. McGee I like. When he first was accepted at Dallas Seminary, he had been accepted at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Virginia, which was a liberal Presbyterian seminary. He either went there for a year, or he went up and visited and decided that they were way too legalistic. I do not understand how liberals got legalistic, but they were. He decided he wanted to evaluate the grace orientation of Dallas Theological Seminary, so he walked into the main building of the seminary smoking the largest cigar he could find. He was still accepted as a student, so he decided they were grace oriented enough.
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In the early 1970s, he was invited to speak at chapel at Dallas Seminary. I guess they did not give him any parameters. People assume that you know what the routine is. He showed up about five minutes before chapel. The chaplain at that time was Dick Seume, former pastor of Berachah Church here in Houston. Dick informed him that they would open in prayer, sing a hymn, and then he would have approximately 20 minutes for his message. Chapel was only 30 minutes long. McGee was kind of stunned and did not say anything at the time. When it came time for him to speak and he was introduced, he got up and said, “Men, I was just informed that I only had 20 minutes to speak. No one can say anything significant about the Bible in 20 minutes. Let’s bow our heads and close in prayer.” Only McGee could get away with that. When you are talking about significant, important things of eternal value, sometimes an hour is not enough.
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I always think of missionaries who go over to India or places where there is little Bible teaching. People drive 7-8 hours to stand for 4 hours to listen to the teaching of the Word and then drive home 6-7 hours. Some of us have trouble driving 15 minutes for a 45 minute message once a week. Whatever the application of that is, may the Holy Spirit apply it to your soul!
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We are looking at this concept of peace that is expressed in . Paul begins with a conclusion coming out of 2 ½ chapters where he sets up the need and the description of exactly what justification is. We cannot justify ourselves; there is no way that any human effort or work could justify oneself. Justification is either by the work of another or by our own works – it has to be one or the other. He says, in drawing a conclusion from chapters 2-4, “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” This lays a groundwork for what is going to be said in the coming chapter.
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It is interesting as you read through the various commentators and expositors of this chapter, how different their views are. There is so much in this chapter that it creates a certain level of confusion. There are some who see it as an extension of the discussion on justification in terms of dealing with what happens at phase 1. There is a clean break in chapter 6, and it goes into sanctification.
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There are others who see this as a little bit of both, starting off primarily as an introduction to sanctification with the focus on the spiritual life. There are others who see this as a pure or true hinge chapter. I think that is more correct. It has elements related to the instant of our salvation (phase 1, justification) and the immediate implications of the benefits of our justification and also the implications or consequences of that that open the door to further development in terms of our ongoing spiritual life. There is a connection here. He foreshadows what he will say in chapters 6-8, as well as going back to and bringing to a conclusion that which he has already stated about justification.
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In the last couple of lessons, I looked at the word peace. We have peace with God, but what does this mean? If we were left with only verses 1-2, we might even think that this peace with God is not phase 1 but phase 2. We might think it is not just an absolute status that we have with God, but that it is an ongoing relationship that must be focused on. There are some translations that take it that way because there is a textual problem in verse 1 in terms of the statement of what “we have.” Some translations take it as “let us maintain peace with God,” which would be a phase 2 activity.
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Because it was Christmas and because we really do need to understand this concept of peace, I took a look at peace in the Old Testament, specifically in a messianic context looking at and and those messianic prophecies. The key word for peace in the Old Testament is the noun shalem, which is the root from which we get shalom, and which is the word used in Hebrew even today for a greeting, saying hello or goodbye, wishing someone well. It has a wide range of applications. The root meaning is to be complete, sound or fulfilled, but it also has other aspects or nuances to it.
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In the Old Testament, shalom is used over 250 times. The Septuagint translates it sometimes with the Greek word for salvation. That would relate to peace with God. Sometimes it is translated peace (over 50 times) and specifically in context of war. In other places, it is translated with the idea of complete. In some places, it is very close to the idea from the Greek word we have studied teleios [teleioj] meaning completion or maturity, reaching a wholeness in a relationship rather than something that is partial. Especially because there is so much war and violence in the Old Testament, the primary meaning of peace would relate to the absence of physical war, conflict or strife. But it is more than just a cold war status; it is also the fact of restored harmony between former enemies.
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That is an important idea that is brought over into the New Testament. The concept of reconciliation is that the human race is at enmity with God; we are hostile to God and in a state of alienation. Through reconciliation, we have peace with God or restoration of harmony. It is not just the absence of conflict but the positive aspect of harmony with God, and our relationship with Him is completely restored.
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The Old Testament also relates this to righteousness, as in . Shalom also refers to the peace offering that speaks of peace between God and man.
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I know it was a bit confusing when I looked at and brought in the idea that this announcement by the angels “and on earth peace…”, that this was not talking about reconciliation. That is just not the context. The whole context of the first two chapters in Matthew and Luke has to do with the announcement of the Messiah coming. The messianic prophecies related to the nation Israel were that He would establish a kingdom that was a kingdom of peace. There is a correlation with peace with God and reconciliation, but that is another idea that is not the focal point here.
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Sometimes we are guilty of Rorschach exegesis. Every now and then, I do the same thing. We see the word peace and that reminds us of peace with God over in . The Rorschach test is the inkblot
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test. You see something that looks familiar, so you immediately correlate it over to something else that is familiar. You fail to take into account the fact that that is not really what that original passage is talking about. It is looking at another aspect of the word.
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The word has a number of different meanings. I remember hearing a number of different good Bible teachers when I was younger making statements such as ‘The Bible never uses the word peace in terms of world peace or absence of military conflict. It always relates to either the individual’s relationship with God or, in terms of the Christian life, having an absence of fear, worry or anxiety.” But that is not really true either. The word peace in the New Testament is used a number of different ways.
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Look at how the Lord uses it in two particular passages. In , Jesus said, “Do not think that I come to bring peace on earth…” I can just hear some liberal saying, “This is a conflict in the Bible. Here He is the Prince of Peace, and here He says He is not bringing peace. The Bible contradicts itself.” We have to look at context again to understand the meaning and what Jesus is actually saying in passages like this. At this stage in His ministry on the earth, He is teaching the disciples that His message is going to bring conflict; it is not going to initially bring peace in terms of restoration of relationships.
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“Do not think that I come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. (Verse 35) For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’; (verse 36) and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’ ” He is talking about the fact that truth divides. Sometimes we get in our liberalized Western civilization world – the idea that any kind of division, any kind of disharmony, any lack of peace is in and of itself bad. But that is not what the Scripture says.
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Paul recognizes this in 1 Corinthians where he states that when the truth comes, it will divide. That is part of the nature of truth in a fallen world. It will cause division and opposition. If we are not teaching the truth in a way that it will expose people’s commitments to human viewpoint thinking and thus result in division, then we are compromising the truth. This is often seen today in the way numerous evangelical churches approach the idea of truth.
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I have recently been reading a book that has given me some ammunition that I did not have before. It is called New Evangelicalism by Paul Smith. It may not open a lot of your eyes because a lot of you do not know all the players who are mentioned in the book. When my friend Tommy Ice found this book about six months ago, I thought he had converted back into Pentecostalism he was so excited about it. I started reading it and called Tommy, and he was afraid I was converting to Pentecostalism. A lot of what is going on in this book is a description of the history of evangelicalism from the end of World War 2 to the present and how we got to the state we are in today.
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Some of you have children, relatives, friends who go to megachurches. There are really two different kinds of megachurches. There are some that are large because of the grace of God, and there is some measure of truth taught there. There are those who are following certain church growth strategies that came out in the late 60s and 70s. The promoters of this are people like Rick Warren and his Purpose Driven church, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA. Then you have Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago. Those models of the megachurch they developed really had their roots in the late 70s and early 80s.
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What has happened since then is a new level of deterioration and apostasy in the so-called evangelical community. That is the development of what is called the emergent church. The emergent church just about throws out any kind of doctrinal absolute in any way, shape or form. They sit around on a bunch of couches and basically play “let’s share whatever you think God’s Spirit told you yesterday.” Nobody is studying the Word, and they do not believe in any absolutes. They have gone completely post-modern in their view of truth because their foundational assumption is that if we are going to be able to address the post-modern world, we have to do it within a post-modern framework.
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I do not remember the Apostle Paul saying that if you are going to reach a pagan Greco-Roman world, you have to do it within a pagan Greco-Roman framework. You never use the devil’s tools to convince people to leave the devil’s world. It just does not really work.
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New Evangelicalism exposes a certain dimension of things that have happened over the last 30-40 years, and it traces this shift back to something that happened in the pre-World War 2 era. That was, the final collapse theologically of Princeton Theological Seminary, which occurred in 1929, when the trustees of Princeton finally approved a completely liberal doctrinal statement. Through the 19th century, Princeton Seminary had stood as a bulwark of biblical truth for the infallibility and the inerrancy of Scripture. Even to the present time, some of the greatest theologians that this country has ever produced in terms of their writings about the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture were the great Princetonians, such as Charles Hodge and his son Archibald Alexander Hodge. A.A. Hodge (named for his father Charles’ mentor) was the founding theology professor at what had originally been the College of New Jersey established in the mid-1700s to train pastors. Later it became known as Princeton Theological Seminary. A.A. Hodge had a son named Casper. Those three generations of Hodges held the line on inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. One of their protégés was Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. (We used to laugh in seminary that you could not be a theologian if you did not have some kind of alliteration in your name [A.A. Hodge, B.B. Warfield, C.C. Ryrie]).
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In 1929 when Princeton finally succumbed to the onslaughts of liberal theology, which claimed that the Bible is just another human book written by sinful, fallen writers and contained error. There were five or six key men who left the faculty at Princeton and moved about 30 miles south to Philadelphia and founded a seminary called Westminster Theological Seminary about 1930. Westminster was the covenant/Presbyterian counterpart to Dallas Theological Seminary, and they both produced a lot of sound theologians and emphasized the inerrancy and infallibility of God’s Word.
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Coming out of World War 2 and having a great desire to evangelize the world, there was a desire to get away from some of the negative caricatures of fundamentalism that had developed in the battle against liberalism in the early 1900s. They wanted to soften some of those militant edges and still maintain the same conservative theology emphasizing the fundamentals of the faith.
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Fundamentals of the faith were that Jesus Christ is fully God, who entered into human history and became a man; belief in the substitutionary atonement, miracles, virgin birth, physical bodily return of Christ to the earth in the future. What was the foundation for all of it was the belief in the verbal plenary inspiration of the Scripture as the infallible Word of God.
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Coming out of World War 2, you had the rise of people like Billy Graham. Many of you remember young Billy Graham, when he was just a real firebrand and extremely conservative, but he quickly softened as he got a broader audience.
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Another great evangelist of that era was Charles E. Fuller. Fuller founded a seminary in Pasadena, CA in 1950 called Fuller Theological Seminary. It had a sound doctrinal statement. They were firmly committed, as he was, to the inerrancy and infallibility of the Word of God. Interestingly enough, in the early 50s (1950, 1953), only 75% of the students entering Fuller Seminary believed in the inerrancy of the Word of God, but when they left, only 40% believed in the inerrancy, even though the school allegedly stood for it. By the early 1960s, they were getting rid of inerrancy and infallibility of the Word.
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This is just one of several places in the U.S. where what had been conservative evangelical groups committed to the inerrancy and infallibility of God’s Word were having major battles. Harold Lindsell, who was one of the original faculty members at Fuller Seminary, wrote a book about these battles that came out just prior to my matriculation at Dallas Seminary in 1976 called The Battle for the Bible. That was required reading in my first semester in a bibliology class with Dr. Ryrie.
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I lived through a lot of this period, and I read books about what was happening. A number of the key players that were there were also associated with some other things I was researching in my doctoral work at Dallas Seminary. I had 2-hour long interviews with these men in their offices. As I started to read this book that Tommy had recommended, I was getting excited because certain dots that had not previously connected in my mind were starting to connect again, and I could see what lies behind the modern church growth movement.
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This whole idea comes out of a lot of really nasty, evil human viewpoint, socialist/world peace apostasy that was bred in the early part of the 20th century and has produced an evil fruit today. If you think things are bad politically because you hear more about it every day, the political world is in great shape and wonderful health compared to the so-called conservative evangelical community. It is worse than I could have possibly imagined.
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What we see here is that these kinds of divisions are what happens when you stand for truth. All of that that I just went through was for the purpose of showing what happens historically when truth is compromised, when you do not stand for truth, and when you begin to water down the truth of God’s Word, so that the Bible is not the infallible and inerrant Word of God but just contains the Word of God. Or the Bible is better than any other book, but it is not a perfect book. When you start diluting truth, then you are going to get along with a lot more people, but it is going to lead to destruction.
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Jesus is talking about the fact that He is communicating truth in a world that rejects it. As a result, peace, in terms of harmonious relations among people, is going to be lost. In the next 20 years, what we are going to see is that churches like ours that take a firm stand for the Word of God are going to become fewer in number. For some reason, we are no longer producing a generation of pastors to pass the truth on to. They are not there, not interested, getting married before they go to seminary, having children, waking up too late to go get the kind of training they ought to have. I think that is part of God’s judgment: when people do not want the truth, God is not going to give them shepherds who will give them the truth. We have a paucity of pastors that can fearlessly proclaim the truth.
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Another thing is that we are losing people in the pew due to age – World War 2 generation and the generation just after that – at incredible numbers. We see this in our congregation and other congregations as we see people age a little bit and are not able to get out as often. Their eyesight goes, and they cannot drive at night. There are other maladies that come along, and they are not able to be as involved as they once were.
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Another factor is that after you have fought a battle for a long time, it is easier to just fold your hands and go someplace where you are not on the front lines so much. I see that happen. I cannot believe the number of older Christians that I know who have left really solid, large churches here in Houston and have gone to churches were I know the truth has been compromised. It is a large church, and they can be somewhat anonymous, less is expected of them, and the surroundings are much more attractive and accommodating.
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I know of some other churches in this city where the pastors seek to dig down into the Word, and they have people who say, “Why do we ever need to hear what the Greek or Hebrew says?” We need to know this because this is the Word of God, and we need to understand it accurately.
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Jesus said in that He came to set a division between father/son, mother/daughter, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, and even those who are our closest friends will separate from us because of our stand for the truth.
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Jesus said the same thing in a little different way in . “Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. For from now on five in one house will be divided: three against two, and two against three. Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” This is one way that peace is used in Scripture: it is talking about just the harmonious relationships on a human level within a family.
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Another way that peace is used in the New Testament is one of my favorite verses that the Holy Spirit threw in to Acts. He has various ongoing progress reports about the growth of the church in Acts. In , he says “Then the churches throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and were edified…” What you do not see by my just putting that one verse in there is that the previous verse says that the Apostle Paul left town and went back home to Taurus for awhile because he had been causing such a ruckus by his intensity and his desire to debate the truth in Jerusalem with the religious leaders. After he left, there was peace in Israel and the churches, and everybody could just relax.
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What we learn from a study of peace is that, first of all, God alone is the source of peace. He is called many times “the God of peace.” That is an attribute of His, not in the same sense as sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love, eternal life, but He is the God from whom peace comes. He is not a god who is a god like Satan, of chaos and disharmony and evil, but He is the God of peace, as seen in passages like “[Paul says] now the God of peace be with you all.”
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And “For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.” Great passages that show that the churches should be orderly and organized because God is orderly and organized. It is not a matter of confusion or chaos and people just all coming together and waiting on God the Holy Spirit to move them to say whatever they think God is telling them to say. God is not the author of confusion.
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states “Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant.” He is the source of peace.
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In , Paul again ends a letter “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely…” God alone is the source of peace.
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Peace with God is the opposite of enmity with God in a number of passages, especially the passage we are in which deals with the concept of reconciliation. The human race is depicted in Scripture as being in a state of alienation, of opposition, of enmity. We are enemies and hostile to God, and yet God is going to change that status to one of peace.
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Peace with God is used in reference to a positional peace. “…we have [present tense] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But peace is also used as part of our experiential sanctification. Just as we are justified and just as we have positional righteousness in Christ, we also are expected to live out in terms of experiential righteousness. We have peace, but we also have to grow in our peace with God. Every time we sin, we put ourselves back out of fellowship, and there is disharmony in that relationship. We have passages such as “Now may the Lord of peace Himself give you peace always in every way…” That is a process; it is not something they already have absolutely and totally. He is praying that they would continue to grow in peace.
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, Paul tells the young Timothy “Flee also youthful lusts; but pursue righteousness [That is experiential righteousness. If you are a believer, you already have positional righteousness, but you have to grow and mature.], faith [ongoing faith of our spiritual growth, not faith in Christ at phase 1], love [growing to spiritual maturity and expressing love for one another and for God], peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” So this is an experiential peace, in terms of spiritual life and spiritual growth.
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states that as we walk by means of the Spirit, part of the fruit of the Spirit is peace.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such there is no law.”
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makes it very clear in contrasting the believer who walks according to the flesh or is carnally minded vs. the believer who walks according to the Spirit and is in fellowship and growing spiritually. “For to be carnally minded [to walk by the flesh or sin nature] is death [Not physical death, not spiritual death but carnal death. Your spiritual life is ineffective and inoperative because you are out of fellowship], but to be spiritually minded [walking by the Holy Spirit] is life and peace.” We have peace as a quality of our spiritual life and growth.
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Peace with God is used both in terms of positional and experiential sanctification. Peace is also used to express an inner mental attitude of the believer who rests, trusts, relaxes in God’s plan and provision in contrast to a mental attitude of fear, worry, anxiety, or a troubled state of mind.
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I thought that was so interesting when I was reading through the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus in and , how many people were troubled. If an angel appeared to you, I guess you would be troubled too. It is like being sent to the principal’s office, except the principal just suddenly shows up in front of you, and you immediately wonder why in the world this is going on. Joseph is troubled; Mary is troubled; Herod is troubled and all the people are troubled because Herod is troubled. The Prince of Peace is coming to end all the trouble.
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Jesus uses it this way in (part of the upper room discourse) “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you…” The peace that we have is His peace; it is not something that we gin up within ourselves through some sort of mental attitude dynamics course or some kind of motivational training. We do not go on some late night TV show to watch some motivator tell us what we need to do in order to have more focus and stability in our lives. It has to do with our spiritual walk, the product of God the Holy Spirit, the peace that Jesus has. “…My peace I give to you; not as the world give do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
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That last phrase is important because at the beginning of chapter 14, Jesus is responding to Peter’s question “Lord, where are you going?” The Lord begins the chapter by telling them, “Let not your heart be troubled … where I am, there you may be also.” We are to be able to relax and not worry even in the most chaotic circumstances when we just do not know how things are going to turn out. Often I have said and others have said that God is going to do one of three things whenever we encounter adversity. He is going to save us from it, so we avoid it all together. He is going to save us through it. He is going to save us out of it; He will take us home. The trouble with option 2 and 3 is we do not know how long that lasts until we are actually absent from the body and face to face with the Lord. What we worry about is the pain, suffering, adversity and tribulation that may last 15, 20, 30 years before we finally get pulled out.
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We are to trust God. We are not to be in a state of anxiety or worry, living one day at a time. That is what the Lord says. We have His peace, so we need to learn to focus on the fact that God has given us His peace. It is a promise we can claim, and we can relax and not give thought to tomorrow. There is a sense there in worry that we do worry in a legitimate way about tomorrow. We think about what we are going to do tomorrow – do I have a presentation at work or do certain things tomorrow. I have to be prepared for those things. We wrestle with them in our mind. It is all part of concentration and pulling things together, so we do a good job.
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That is not the kind of worry that Jesus is talking about here. Jesus is talking about the kind of worry that keeps us awake at night because we are trying to keep control, maintain control, grab control of elements or people in our life because they are out of control. We think that if we can just somehow control it, life will be OK. We cannot do it; we have to rest in God.
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We have “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation …” We will always have adversity; we can count on it. But because we are in Christ, we have peace even in the midst of the most incredibly difficult circumstances. “…be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” In 1 John, because He has overcome the world, we can overcome the world.
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Peace is used to describe the positional change from enmity to amity, from hostility to friendship between man and God based on the payment of the sin penalty. The message of peace was often used as a synonym for preaching the gospel. “The word which God sent to the children of Israel, preaching peace through Jesus Christ – He is Lord of all –” Why? Because He is the Messiah who will come and bring peace in all of its dimensions.
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What is Peace? - Components of peace (slide)
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1. The absence of physical conflict. This may be physical conflict between two people or between two nations.
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2. The absence of mental conflict. You are in a state of worry, high anxiety, and fear about circumstances. What is going to happen, what will take place, how will I take care of myself, how am I going to handle the future, how will I face tomorrow? Tomorrow will take care of itself ().
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3. The absence of conflict between Jew and Gentile. Jew and Gentile were not at peace with one another in terms of the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament. There was a wall of separation between them (Ephesians 2:11 ff).
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4. The absence of personal conflict. That is how Jesus is using it in the passages where He said, “I did not come to bring peace.” That is, He did not come to bring an absence of personal conflict. That is different from how peace is used in terms of His title the Prince of Peace.
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5. The absence of spiritual conflict; enmity and hostility between God and mankind. Jesus has come to solve that problem at the cross. Because that problem is solved at the cross which relates to reconciliation, then these other circumstantial types of conflict can then be eradicated because those are related to sin. Once the major problem is resolved at the cross, then these other problems can be resolved.
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There will never be an absence of physical conflict, emotional conflict, the conflict between Jew and Gentile (which was resolved at the cross) or personal conflict until the sin problem is dealt with. That does not end it for us; that gives us a basis while we are still living in our fallen bodies and in the devil’s world to deal with it.
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When Jesus returns to establish His kingdom, then there will be world peace and an absence of conflict. Those who are living on the earth are going to still have some problems because they still have sin natures. That is why there will be a worldwide war at the end of the millennial kingdom. This is when Satan is released from his prison at the end of 1000 years and will lead a rebellion against God. All those who follow him will be destroyed instantly by God.
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Back to . Paul is going to develop the implications of being justified. “Therefore, having been justified [declared righteous] by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” I mentioned in the introduction that there is some debate over how to understand that phrase “we have peace.” The Greek word is echomen [e)xomen]. The ending is either an omicron “men” or an omega “men.”
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In the 1st century AD, one reason why we probably have a textual problem like this develop (if one person was speaking and the scribes were writing it down) is that the distinction between a short o for omicron vs. the long o in omega had disappeared, so that the omega and omicron were pronounced virtually the same in Greek. It would be easy to mistake that word hearing it. Echomen with the omicron is a present active indicative, and with the omega it is a subjunctive. Indicative is a statement of reality “we have faith”. Omen with the omega would represent an encouragement or a statement, such as “let us maintain peace with God” in the sense of staying in fellowship or growing in our spiritual life. “Let us exploit the peace that we have from justification.”
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There are a lot of different manuscripts with support for either reading. It is not just a clear cut case. In fact, reading a number of scholars, they will all point out that in terms of the external evidence, which is what they mean by the documents and manuscripts that we have (thousands of manuscripts), it is really weighted in the favor of the subjunctive. The internal evidence goes against that. It has to do with the flow of the argument, what the apostle is talking about, things like that.
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Even scholars who generally do not go along with the Majority Text reading, go along with it in this case, which is the reading that we have. “We have peace with God.” I think that is the superior reading. It is not “let us enjoy peace” or “let us maintain peace,” but I think it is pretty clear it must be taken as the indicative “we have peace with God.” That peace is through our Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul is talking about a consequence of being declared righteous.
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“Through whom [Jesus Christ] also we have access by [by means of or from] faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” He uses two key words in this verse – rejoice and hope. Verses 3-4 “And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation [adversity) produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.” Connect the hope in verse 2 to the hope at the end of verse 4 and beginning of verse 5 because hope is a key idea that goes through this particular section.
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Then we have the mention of joy and rejoicing in verse 2, and in verse 11, which is the end of this section, Paul says “And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have no received the reconciliation.” So reconciliation is brought in. That terminology is only really used in a couple of passages in the New Testament – here and in . Joy and hope are brought together. Peace and reconciliation are the other key words. Love is mentioned several times as well, especially in verses 5 and 8. In verses 8 and 10, we have the emphasis on us being enemies of God. This is a major passage on understanding the relationship of justification to reconciliation.
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“Through whom [Jesus] also we have access by faith…” Access is an interesting Greek noun prosagoge [prosagwgh], which means approach, access, or admission. It reminds us of Hebrew 4:16 which speaks of the fact that we can now come boldly before the throne of grace because of the high priestly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is through Him that we have access, and it is by faith that we have access into this grace. This grace is used as sort of a word play for the whole gospel. Everything related to the gospel is based on grace, so it stands for everything.
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“Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace [everything we have freely received from God] in which we stand…” It is a perfect tense verb for stand, meaning an action completed in the past that continues. Even out of fellowship, we are positionally in Christ; we always stand in grace positionally.
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This connects us over to in understanding this whole concept. At one level, it looks like it is talking about reconciliation between Jew and Gentile, but that reconciliation between Jew and Gentile is ultimately based on reconciliation with God. Because reconciliation with God was accomplished on the cross, Paul is arguing in , then the barrier between Jew and Gentile which was the Law has been removed. Now in Christ, there is one body. Jew and Gentile is not an issue spiritually in the church age.

Romans 048b-Peace Established at the Cross ; Ephesians 2:12-22

Romans 5:1 NASB95
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
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Romans 048b-Peace Established at the Cross ;
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Having gone through his discussion of the need for justification and describing that justification could not possibly be on the basis of any kind of works or moral obedience to the Mosaic Law, the Apostle Paul moves from his explanation of justification in to his explanation of the benefits of justification in chapter 5. As he goes through the benefits and the consequences of justification, he is really setting us up for understanding the implications of justification for the spiritual life, which is the focus of chapters 6-8.
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He brings us to a conclusion to focus on the primary benefit of justification in “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Having peace with God is a result of justification. It is important for us to understand that peace with God is in contrast to the enmity that every human being has with God because they are born in a state of enmity and hostility toward Him. We find the concept of enmity mentioned in verse 8 “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners [in the state of hostility toward God], Christ died for us.” Then he expands on that in verse 10 “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” The contrast with peace is this position of enmity or hostility toward God.
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Last time I talked about the fact that this word peace has a lot of different dimensions to it. In some places, it has the idea of an absence of physical conflict. That is how the Hebrew word shalom and that word group is used many times in the Old Testament in terms of the lack of warfare or the opposite of physical conflict. It is also used to describe the absence of conflict between Jew and Gentile. This is what we will see in our study in . It is used also in the realm of mental attitude to describe the absence of mental conflict – no worry, anxiety, or fear because our focus has been stabilized by a focus on God. Then it is also used to relate to the absence of just personal conflict between one person and another.
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All of these are secondary areas of conflict that are the consequence of the fact that every human being is born spiritually dead, hostile to God. All of the other aspects of tension that we have in life and the conflict we have in life are the result of sin. Ultimately, everything gets traced back to a spiritual cause. We do not live in a closed universe despite the way modern science addresses the creation. They operate on a closed model, as if there is no input from an external creator, God, and that God does not exist.
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As a result, many of their conclusions are flawed because they do not understand that the universe is really open. It is open to the control and direction of God. All causes ultimately go back to spiritual causes and the problem of sin that exists between God and man in one way or another.
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In , there are a couple of English translations I’ve seen that go with a reading of the Greek text that “we should have peace with God” or “let us enjoy peace with God.” Even though this reading has a lot of support from very old manuscripts, there are equally old manuscripts that handle this word “we have” as an indicative mood rather than a subjunctive mood.
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Once again, this gets into the area that I was discussing in the announcements of textual criticism and understanding how variations occur within the text. When I was in Kiev, one of the things I enjoy doing every year is catch up on a number of different things that I just normally do not get time to get to every day, one of which is watching various DVDs that come out, either through one of the creation organizations or through various other organizations.
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There was a debate that occurred in October (2011) at SMU sponsored by an organization that Dan Wallace, professor at Dallas Seminary, heads up that deals with recovering ancient manuscripts related to the Scriptures. He debated a scholar by the name of Bart Ehrman. I would suggest that most people here have never heard of Bart Ehrman before, unless you pay attention to the New York Times bestsellers list. The man who introduced the debaters said that for a New Testament scholar to have a book on the New York Times bestsellers list shows that signs and wonders still occur.
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Satan promotes his own, so since we live in the devil’s world, we can always expect that those who are hostile or antagonistic to the Scriptures are always going to find a platform in the world today. I’ve run into the name of Bart Ehrman occasionally when I was doing work a number of years ago on the DaVinci Code. That was one of the names that cropped up. If you remember back in the 90s, there was this group of scholars that were called the Jesus Seminar. They got together every few years to go through the Gospels. They had a color-coded scale of 1-4 and would decide if Jesus definitely said this, probably said this, probably did not say this but contained His ideas, or did not say this. They color coded every statement in Scripture according to their arrogant disbelief.
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Ehrman was part of that group. He has a tremendous pedigree. He was raised as an evangelical fundamentalist, went to good schools, and got his PhD studying textual matters under Bruce Metzger. Metzger was probably one of the foremost textual critics in the world – one of the top five until his death in 2007. Ehrman coauthored a couple of revisions of Metzger’s classic work on the text of the New Testament – the 4th edition and some other things. He had a more conservative view of the text at one time. He still does if you read between the lines and get past his “probablies.” The way he forms his titles and questions is very inflammatory, and they are designed to cause people to have a critical view and disrespect for the text.
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He has written a couple of popular books with titles like Misquoting Jesus – The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible. When you push Ehrman into a corner, he will admit that we are probably having 99% accurate text, but his basic claim is that we ultimately do not know because the earliest whole manuscripts that we have go back within about 100-150 years. There are some partial manuscripts that go back into the early 2nd century. There is a lot of innuendo, sometimes he overstates his case, but he has a great presentation. He has a winsome personality, and he just is able to communicate his lies and half truths. If you are looking for reasons to disbelieve the Scripture and the New Testament and that all this was just cobbled together by somebody later, then he is your man. He will give you a justification for your unbelief.
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Because of his popularity, I would say there are five or six points that he makes over and over. (Someone said repetition is the first five principles of teaching.) He certainly does that. What impressed me was that I was listening to this debate between Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman on “Do we have an accurate copy of the original text of the New Testament?”, and as I listened to him, I realized that I have heard all these objections. Whenever I have had the opportunity to witness to somebody who is a little bit knowledgeable and maybe watches the History Channel or the Discovery Channel, they have never heard of Bart Ehrman, but they are hearing his conclusions and points. They are out there, and so the average person you listen to is going to raise these objections.
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It is important to understand these things because we have to give an answer for the hope that is in us. Somebody might say, “Why do you trust the Bible?” or “Why do you think we have any kind of an accurate view of the Scripture?” You can sit there and say, “My pastor says so.” Or you can learn a couple of basic facts and point people in the right direction. None of us are going to be able to give a dissertation on the point right on the spot. People talk about how the New Testament has so many different variations. We have probably over 5,000 different manuscripts (partial or complete) of the New Testament, plus in terms of the early church fathers, we have literally tens of thousands of individual quotations of Scripture verses. The trouble is with a quotation, you do not know if they are looking at the Scripture and writing it down and copying it specifically, or they are just going from memory or paraphrase. But, nevertheless, we have that as some kind of a guide to go by. We can look at this and compare all this information and come to a pretty good confident level of what the original text was.
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Dan Wallace has done over the years an experiment in his classrooms where he has made up the Gospel According to Snoopy. He reads that to everybody in a large group; he will talk to them and train them. He will get 50-60 people in a room; then he will dictate it and people will write it down. Then he does away with the original and sees how accurately they can reconstruct the originals from untrained scribes. It is amazing that you can do that.
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Yet the liberal critics say, “No, you cannot do that. We have lost the original or the copies of the original or the copies of the copies of the original and cannot reconstruct the original.” But that has been disproven.
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We have over 5,000 manuscripts and 300,000 differences. That is because the differences are between spelling “hear” or “here” or “heare,” like the older English. Or between spelling “color” or “colour.” 99.9% of the differences are like that. In fact, in the Greek if you wanted to make a statement about Jesus loves Adam, there are over 15 different ways you can write that in Greek, and you will translate it the same in English, depending where you put the article or the word order which can vary a number of different ways. That does not mean that we do not have certainty as to the original.
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The word we have in is the Greek verb echo [e)xw], a long o [w]. The difference is between the subjunctive mood which has an omega and the indicative mood which has an omicron. It would sound the same if it were being dictated. From analysis of the context of Scripture, it should be translated as an indicative that we do have peace with God.
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“Through whom [Jesus Christ] also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” It is a present tense emphasis: We stand [completed action, the present reality of our position] in Christ. It is this grace in which we have access or approach to God.
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As we look at this whole topic of peace, I want to go to an important parallel passage which is in . Peace is used three times in this section, so this is an important discourse by Paul on peace and reconciliation. “Therefore remember that you [Ephesian believers] …” He has already reminded them in verse 4 that they were formally dead in their trespasses and sins. Verse 4 “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved.”
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Again, he is going back to their former state in verse 11 “Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh …” That means in terms of their physical heritage – they were not descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jews are Jews only if they can trace their lineage through Abraham, Isaac (the child of promise), and Jacob. Abraham had other sons: Ishmael by Hagar and other sons by his second wife Keturah, whom he married after Sarah died, but they are not the lineage for the Jews.
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“Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh – who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision…” Among the elite religious Jewish groups of the 1st century, or 2nd temple Judaism, there was this ethnic hostility toward non-Jews. Anyone who is not Jewish is a Gentile, and they were not circumcised because it was a sign of the Abrahamic Covenant. The issue here is not the physical circumcision or lack of it because there were a few other ethnic groups that practiced circumcision, but it did not have a spiritual or a covenant connotation. The emphasis here is that because they are not related to the Abrahamic Covenant, they are not worthy of anything. They were less than the dirt on the bottom of your shoes.
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There is this contrast that we need to understand in this alien nation that came as a result of the Mosaic Law and the distinctiveness that God expected from the Jews in terms of their culture, their lifestyle, and their national identity. They were to be set apart to God as a kingdom of priests.
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The first thing we note in terms of the contrast is this disrespect or demeaning of the Gentiles by the religious elite Jews of the 2nd temple period. This is also seen in passages we have studied in ; ; and 4:10-12 where Paul is dealing with this issue of circumcision that claimed that by simply being circumcised and properly related through circumcision to the Mosaic Law and the Abrahamic Covenant was enough for salvation.
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In Paul wrote “But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart…” That the emphasis in the Old Testament was not upon physical, outward circumcision but was a spiritual circumcision. This was clearly seen in .
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In Paul has his explanation on justification. “Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith.” The emphasis Paul has in ; ; and 4:10-12 is that physical circumcision was a work of the Law and was not a basis of salvation.
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The second point he makes, in , is that the Gentiles were without Christ, that is they did not have Jesus Christ as Savior. The emphasis here on Christ should be understood in terms of its foundational meaning as Messiah. christos [Xristoj]in the Greek is a translation of the Hebrew noun meshiach, the anointed one. He is talking at that time former to the cross, as we will see in the context. Prior to the cross, there was not a Messianic hope or expectation among the Gentiles because they did not have the promises and the covenants, so they were separated from the Messianic hope. This is also seen in where there is an emphasis on the hope that we now have because of the peace that we have with Christ.
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The third thing that he states in is that Gentiles were alienated from citizenship in Israel. They were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, therefore, not part of the theocracy. The theocracy meant the special nation that God set up on the basis of the Mosaic Law. If you were not related to God through the Mosaic Law then there were certain temporal blessings that would not be available to Gentiles unless they became a proselyte and converted to Mosaic Judaism in the 1st or 2nd temple period.
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The fourth thing that Paul says in verse 12 is that Gentiles were not party to the covenants of promise. Notice he says covenants of promise – plural. He is not just talking about the Abrahamic Covenant but is talking about all the covenants related to the Abrahamic Covenant.
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This is also in which states that to Israel belong the covenants of the promise. Paul writes that even after the cross. The Jewish people still are viewed as those who are party to the covenants in the Old Testament.
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This CHART here is a chart related to the Old Testament covenants of promise and when they will be fulfilled. This timeline is related to the history of Israel. All the sections prior to the cross relate to the Age of Israel, specifically the two dispensations of the patriarchs and then Moses. You have the formation of the nation of Israel, the period of the theocracy (Joshua, Judges), the monarchy (Kings and Chronicles), the exile, and then the restoration following the Babylonian captivity.
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The Abrahamic Covenant is given by God to Abraham. It is a unilateral covenant, which means that God alone bound Himself to the obligations of the covenant. In the ancient world when two parties were going to come together and sign a contract, they would do so with the literal phrase “to cut a covenant.” That grew out of the reality that they would have a sacrifice and would cut the sacrificed animal or animals in half and lay each half on the altar side by side. Then the two parties to the covenant would walk between the two halves of the sacrifice. When God made the covenant with Abraham, Abraham laid out the sacrifices and split them in two. God caused a deep sleep to come upon Abraham, so that God alone is symbolized by a smoking oven and a torch that went between the two halves of the sacrifices indicating that He alone was obligating Himself to the terms of that covenant.
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For that reason, we refer to it many times as an unconditional covenant, which is a term that has a couple of ambiguities to it. It is why I prefer describing that as a covenant of promise and a permanent covenant. There were three elements to the Abrahamic Covenant that we studied many times in the past. It was a promise of worldwide blessing, of a specific piece of real estate (land that existed between the Euphrates and the Great Sea, the Mediterranean Sea), and of a seed (specifically pointing to Jesus Christ, who would be a blessing to all people).
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Each of those elements (the land, the seed, and the blessing) was then expanded into subsequent covenants of promise. This is why Paul uses a plural in in terms of covenants of promise. He is referring not only to the Abrahamic Covenant but also the Land/Real Estate Covenant (not fulfilled until the millennial kingdom), the Davidic Covenant (This focuses on the seed that comes through the line of David and is not fulfilled until Jesus Christ returns to establish the kingdom in the future. When he establishes that kingdom, He will rule over Israel from His throne in Jerusalem), and the New Covenant (application to the church in this dispensation but ultimately is not fulfilled in the terms that are stated in until the millennial kingdom).
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This is what Paul is referring to here that Gentiles were aliens, estranged from or separated from the commonwealth of Israel and the covenants of promise. They were not partners in terms of these covenants. The covenants were between God and Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
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The fifth point Paul makes in is that the Gentiles had no hope. They had no hope because there was no future expectation with God in the Gentile philosophies or religious systems. They were also without God or godless – the word atheoi, where we get our word atheist. That describes the state of Gentiles up to the cross as a whole.
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In Paul draws a contrast from the past or former time to the present time. He says “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” A couple of things to note here. This change that takes place between being estranged or alienated from the covenants, the promises, the commonwealth of Israel and now being brought near is not because culture has changed. It is not due to a political shift or to some sort of enlightenment on the part of the Jews that they are no longer going to be arrogant towards the Gentiles. What makes the distinction is what happened at the cross.
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Another thing that we should observe here is that in the English we have the word “now,” but in Greek, there are two different words for “now.” There is the word arti [a)rti] and the word nuni [nuni]. nuni is the word we have here. In many places, those two words can virtually be used interchangeably, but there are a number of places where when they are used in the same context, arti has a more immediate sense, such as right now or today or this moment, and nuni has the sense of now in this age or in this dispensation. Paul uses it that way in “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” He used arti in the previous verse to emphasize the immediate period of the pre-Canon, apostolic age of the church, but then he talks about what continues throughout all the church age, that is faith, hope, love in contrast to the temporary revelatory gifts of knowledge and prophecy.
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Here we also have him using nuni, and in a context it is talking about now in this dispensation, this post-cross period. We can state fairly certainly that what he is talking about is now in this new state (this post-cross period, dispensation or age), now in Christ Jesus. In Christ Jesus is a technical term for the believer’s position in Jesus Christ, so that is unique to the church age. Tribulation believers will not be baptized by the Spirit, will not be placed in the body of Christ. This is a distinctive term used only of the universal church, believers in Jesus Christ in this age, between the day of Pentecost 33 AD to the rapture of the church.
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I want to go back and pick up on this issue of what happens because of our position in Christ. Two specific passages that talk about the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit also emphasize that as a result of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, this ethnic distinction that had been part of the Old Testament ritual was no longer in effect and is completely removed.
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“For by one Spirit [God, the Holy Spirit used here in a passive voice verb “we were all baptized,” indicating he was the means of baptism] we were all baptized into one body…” Notice this comes to play in our passage in talking about this new body, this new entity that came into existence on the Day of Pentecost. This is the church. This is what is so important for us to understand that in this new body of Christ, there are new spiritual realities that involve not only our relationship to God but also our relationship to one another. Specifically, in context of Ephesians, the relationship between Jew and Gentile in Christ - there was no longer to be this distinction as had existed in the Old Testament.
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Remember in the Old Testament, the only ones who could have any kind of close or direct access to God in the temple or previously in the tabernacle were male Jews. Gentiles could only get so far: They had to stay in the Courtyard of the Gentiles in the temple. Women could not go into the inner courtyard: They had to stay in the Courtyard of the Women. They could not get as close to God in terms of worship. If you were a slave, you were also restricted in your worship of God in the ritual of the worship of the tabernacle and the temple.
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Passages like and Galatians 3:26 ff are not saying that ethnicity disappears. It is not saying that sexual distinctions disappear. He is not saying that people who are slaves are suddenly emancipated, or people who are free are suddenly enslaved. There is no change in terms of your natural physical status: You are still a slave, still a Gentile, still a women, but in terms of relationship to God, those distinctions no longer have a role because of the work of Christ on the cross.
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“For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body [equally members of that body] - whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free – and have all been made to drink [or receive] into one Spirit.”
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Paul expands on that in “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” He is using a technical term for sons of God there. In contrast earlier, he had been using an analogy about young children in a Roman household, who were governed by a tutor who basically dominated their life tyrannically until they reached the age of maturity when they became an adult son. That would be a term that would not be sexist and would relate to someone who had reached maturity and would be treated as an adult with all the rights and privileges that they would have within the family.
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He equates every believer to the rights and privileges of an adult son within a Roman household. We all become adult sons, have those full privileges in Christ as a result of faith in Christ. He explains this in “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” There is no mention of the Holy Spirit there; we just have a use of the same verb baptize, but now we have the goal which is Christ – the body of Christ. Putting on Christ is a positional term, just as being baptized into Christ is a positional term related to our identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection.
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“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here we have three pairs of individuals that are contrasted: Jew/Greek, slave/free, male/female. You wonder how blind people are – they say this means that in the body of Christ that there are no sexual distinctions, so you cannot say women cannot be pastors. Well, then Paul must be the biggest idiot and inconsistent person in the world because that is exactly what he says in . He does not say that these physical distinctions are eradicated in terms of function, but in terms of immediate access to God and spiritual privilege, there are no distinctions anymore as you had in the Old Testament under the Mosaic Law.
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“And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” I want you to see how these main ideas always crop up together with Paul, and he is tying them together. We have the baptism by the Holy Spirit into Christ and the unity of this new oneness in the body of Christ. Then he says “if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed…” We have studied that in when we are talking about the true descendants of Abraham are not those who simply follow him genetically but follow him in terms of his faith in God. That is the true spiritual descendant of Abraham.
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That is what Paul says here: We are Abraham’s descendant if we have faith in Christ following Abraham in terms of justification. Verse 29 “…heirs according to the promise.” That is one of the main ideas that Paul kept hitting on throughout chapter 4 that if the blessing is based on promise, then it is not based on works and should be based on faith.
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“For He Himself is our peace…” Jesus Christ is our peace, referencing back to verse 13 that we “have been brought near by the blood of Christ,” which is just a metaphor for the death of Christ. He Himself is our peace – Paul emphasizes this with the repetition of the pronoun. “…who has made both one…” Who is he talking about; who is the “both?” It is Jew and Gentile. Ultimately, there is a barrier between man and God, but here he is talking about the barrier of the Law between Jew and Gentile. That is exactly what was said in that we are all one in Christ. Now he is talking about the fact that in Christ this distinction between Jew and Gentile is destroyed.
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We really have two different areas in which there is a barrier. There is a barrier between Jew and Gentile, and then there is a barrier between Jews and Gentiles together and God. That barrier is a state of hostility or enmity between God and the human race on one hand and between Gentiles and Jews on the other hand on the basis of the Law.
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This becomes eradicated in because Christ abolished the enmity in His flesh. The enmity which existed between God and mankind and between Jew and Gentile is eradicated where? Not at the point of salvation but at the cross historically – 33 AD. This is when that eradication takes place objectively before God. “Having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances…” This is a reference to the Mosaic Law.
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He renders the Mosaic Law inoperative. “For Christ is the end of the law…” Jewish/Gentile hostility on the basis of those legal distinctions of the Mosaic Law is eradicated at the cross.
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“…so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace.” In Christ there is not a distinction. The enmity here starts off between the two, but then it moves and starts making the shift to solving the problem between God and man. Verse 16 “And that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity [that exists between Jew and Gentile and between Jews and Gentiles and God].” As a result of the cross, enmity is replaced by peace. The issue is now the cross. It is not the Law, culture, sin, or anything else.
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When we look at the illustration of the barrier, on the left are the elements of sin that create a barrier between God and man. The fact of sin, the penalty of sin, character of God in terms of His righteousness - those three aspects of the sin problem are all solved by the universal aspects of the cross, that is the unlimited part of unlimited atonement. Unlimited atonement is for all, as we are studying in Colossians. He cancelled the certificate of debt for all at the cross. The penalty of sin was paid for by Christ in terms of redemption, and the character of God in terms of justice is satisfied by propitiation.
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The next sin problems – the lack of righteousness, our spiritual death, and our position in Adam are resolved only when we put our faith in Christ. At that point, we receive the imputation of Christ’s perfect righteousness, we are declared justified, we are born again spiritually, and we are placed into Christ. All of that happened simultaneously at the instant of faith in Christ.
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“And He [Christ] came and preached peace to you who were afar off [Gentiles] and to those who were near [Jews].” They were near only because they had the privileges of the covenants, not because they are closer to salvation. As Paul described in Romans, they are closer to God in terms of the covenants, so they have blessings, but these do not include salvation.
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“For through Him we both [Jew and Gentile] have access by one Spirit to the Father.” The results are then spelled out in verses 19-22. “Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” Before they were not citizens or members of the commonwealth of Israel, but now they are members of something new. Jews and Gentiles are now fellow citizens in this household of God. Verse 20 “Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets…” That phrase does not refer to Old Testament prophets. If it were referring to Old Testament prophets, it would be in chronological order – prophets and then the apostles. These are the New Testament gifts of apostleship and prophets. These were temporary gifts given only during the period of the foundation of the church in the 1st century.
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Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone, and the foundation is the apostles and prophets who gave new revelation related to the mystery doctrine of the church age during the 1st century. Verse 21 “In whom the whole building [imagery is of the church as a building], being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” This is a spiritual temple; it is not referring to the physical temple. Here it is the corporate temple of the body of Christ and not the individual temple within each believer.
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“In whom [Christ] you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” It is talking about the corporate body. It is not the indwelling of the Holy Spirit but the dwelling of God in the body of Christ as a spiritual temple to God. This is all a result of the peace that occurs objectively at the cross.
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“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is the enmity that is removed. We learn from Ephesians, there is peace between Jew and Gentile in Christ. And there is peace between mankind and God. This is the basis for our access to God, which is in Christ.

Romans 049b-Questions, Clarification and Contending OR What’s in a Name? ;

Romans 5:1 NASB95
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
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Romans 049b-Questions, Clarification and Contending OR What’s in a Name?
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I got a triplet of questions or comments/observations last week that came together in a perfect storm. Tonight is going to be questions, clarification and contending. Yesterday I recorded the next installment in the Jude classes developing and the command that we are to contend for the faith. The word for contending means to strive, work hard or vigorously, bringing in the idea of discipline and intensity. It is a word that is typically used of an athlete preparing for an athletic contest and then all his effort he puts into winning the contest.
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We contend for the faith a couple of different ways. One way we contend is within our own soul because the sin nature always wants to distract us and pull us off into some area of false teaching, sin or carnality. On the other hand, we always have to fight the attacks that come from others either from inside the church or outside the church, the cosmic system. When that happens, then we are to contend for the faith. The faith meaning a term that relates to the body of doctrine that is foundational to Christianity.
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Last time as we went through our study of , we focused on the fact that now as justified believers by faith, we have peace with God. These questions that came up while they may appear to be somewhat distracting or go in a little different direction, they really are important because they ultimately relate to what Paul has said in . As we shift into a new direction in chapter 5, I want to take this one last time to pull some of these threads together to be sure there is no confusion or questions left unanswered. (But there always will be though – that is just the way we are.)
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“For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.” The focal point here is on the promise to Abraham. In terms of the Abrahamic Covenant, that was not a promise of eternal life. That is the promise that he would be the “heir of the world” - in terms of the fact that Abraham through his seed would bless all of the Gentile nations, and all the world would be blessed through Abraham. This idea of promise is connected in verses 13 ff to inheritance which focuses us to a future reality. Abraham did not inherit the land and did not realize the promises that were made to him by God in the Abrahamic Covenant.
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In other studies that I have had, there were at least 12 different promises that God made to Abraham in the Abrahamic Covenant. They included that God would develop a great nation from Abraham and that God would give Abraham (not just his descendants) a specific piece of real estate in the Middle East which he never personally had. He was still a sojourner, a traveler basically living out of a mobile home (a tent). The only piece of real estate he owned was the burial ground where he and Sarah were buried. God promised that Abraham was to be blessed in his own lifetime, which he was. God also promised that He would make Abraham’s name great. We saw just a hint of that in Abraham’s lifetime.
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God promised a blessing upon those who would bless Abraham and his descendants in . He announced a harsh, divine judgment on those who treated Abraham and his seed or his descendants with disrespect. That is so important to bring out that God said, “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.” In English we use the same word to translate two different words in the Hebrew. The first word in the Hebrew related to God’s judgment is a term for a harsh judgment – the same word that is used in related to the curse of sin.
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But “those who curse you” is a different word that means to treat you with disrespect, which is a light sense. If they do not take Abraham and his descendants seriously or if they treat them frivolously (not in the sense of harsh Nazi-type anti-Semitism but just with disrespect), God says, “I will judge you harshly.” If God says He is going to judge harshly those who treat Israel with disrespect, how do you think God is going to judge those who are seriously anti-Semitic in a harsh, overt way.
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In Abraham, all nations would be blessed. Not that national distinctions are wiped out, but through Abraham all nations, all the Gentiles would be blessed. God promised that Sarah would have a son and that was fulfilled in his lifetime. There was going to be an Egyptian bondage. His descendants would be taken out of the land God promised for 450 years, and then they would return. Other nations would come from Abraham aside from the promised seed. This is fulfilled in various Arabic nations. Ultimately, these intermarried, so today you cannot really identify all those different groups – the distinctions between the Midianites, Ishmaelites, and the Edomites.
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God changed Abram’s name to Abraham. That is important in light of what we are going to study tonight. The way in which the ancient world looked at a name was that it identified something about the character of the person. The one who changes a person’s name is the one who is in authority. We see this again in the changing of Jacob’s name by God to Israel. God also changed Sarai’s name to Sarah.
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All these 12 provisions are part of God’s promise to Abraham which was stated 20 times. It is restated 6-7 times just within the Abrahamic stories from and then reiterated to Isaac, Jacob and Joseph 20 times. It is for us to get the point that God is serious about this promise that He is giving to Abraham that He is going to give him a seed, and through that seed, there will be worldwide blessing of all the nations. God was going to give them a specific, literal piece of real estate.
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As the history of Israel developed, and God entered into a temporary or conditional covenant, called the Mosaic Covenant or the covenant at Sinai, there was a further division or distinction that was made in terms of the worship of God between Jews and Gentiles. Paul talks about this as the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile in . Last time I was focusing on this concept of peace and how it is also developed in other of Paul’s writings. In , Paul talks about the peace that comes, the reconciliation that Christ accomplishes on the cross that destroys the barrier between Jew and Gentile, but primarily the barrier between God and mankind.
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We see that historically there developed this enmity not just between man and God, but there was this enmity or hostility between Jew and Gentile. Gentiles were demeaned as “uncircumcised.” This was the typical way in which they talked about the Gentiles – they were the uncircumcised, and the Jews were the circumcised. Gentiles were thus separated from a Messianic hope. They did not have the promise of the Messiah. The promise was given to Israel, but it is through the Messiah that the Gentiles would be blessed. But they do not know that; that is not revealed specifically to them. They were alienated from citizenship in Israel, which was a position of temporal blessing and blessing within the covenant.
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Gentiles were not party to all the covenants, including the New Covenant. The Jewish covenants were given to Israel and were between God and the house of Israel and the house of Judah. There were three Gentile covenants: the Creation or Edenic Covenant in the Garden of Eden, the Adamic Covenant which is a revision of that initial covenant in , and the Noahic Covenant in . The Abrahamic Covenant is further developed in terms of three unconditional or eternal covenants: the Real Estate Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the New Covenant.
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Also in , Paul points out the Gentiles were without hope. That is, they had no promise of salvation, a Savior to them - it was through the Jews. And the Gentiles were godless.
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In , as Paul develops this, he is showing this distinction between Jew and Gentile that was part of the Law was completely obliterated in the church age because we are in Christ. That is just in the church age that he says there is no Jew or Greek. That does not mean the physical, actual reality of being an ethnic Jew or a Gentile was eradicated. Jews were still Jews and Gentiles were still Gentiles, just like men were still men, women were still women, slaves were still slaves, and the free were still free. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” He does not mean that everybody who becomes a Christian is asexual and that maleness and femaleness are somehow eradicated. Or that the way to emancipation as a physical slave was through becoming a Christian. When he writes his letter to Philemon about receiving back the slave Onesimus, he cannot order Philemon to release or manumit Onesimus. He cannot do it because that is in the physical realm.
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This is talking about the fact that in the Old Testament under the Mosaic Law, there were distinctions made that only free male Jews had access to the inner areas of the temple. The women were restricted to the Courtyard of the Women and the Gentiles to the Courtyard of the Gentiles, but now in Christ, all have equal access to God. These distinctions from the Mosaic Law are completely obliterated in terms of our personal worship, our personal relationship with God.
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There was enmity between Gentile and Jew because of the Law, but also enmity between all human beings (Gentiles and Jews) and God. The work of Christ on the cross meant that that enmity is changed to peace, and so the issue is no longer sin but whether we accept the death of Christ on the cross. The result is there is now this unity in Christ, and we are being built together in the body of Christ.
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Last time when I went through the passage and read some of the broader context, I had a question that came to me related to understanding this relationship of Gentiles to Abraham’s faith. In what sense are the Gentiles or church age believers descendants of Abraham spiritually? This also goes back to what we studied in where Paul states, quoting God speaking to Abraham when He changed his name, “(As it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations’) in the presence of Him whom he believed – God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did; who [Abraham], contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations [physically]…”
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God had promised him that. That was one of the provisions of the Abrahamic Covenant that he would become the physical father of many nations. But it also goes on to state that he will become the spiritual father of those who follow him in faith ().
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Here is the first of three questions that I was asked: Can you please clarify the concept of the spiritual seed of Abraham? Now let me give you the short answer. The physical seed of Abraham is the seed that goes through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is Israel and refers to the descendants, and only the descendants, physically of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The spiritual seed, which is the focus of , is only mentioned as the seed of Abraham and not of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You cannot call the church or Gentiles saved in the church age spiritual Israel. Israel is always a term used of the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In , it is only talking about those who are the spiritual seed of Abraham in that they are of the faith and not of those who are emphasizing circumcision as a path to either salvation or spirituality, justification or sanctification.
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The second question which I have condensed a little bit: What does it mean to be the “Israel of God?” In , Paul says “And as many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.” What does that term “Israel of God” mean? The claim that is made is that this shows that the church age believers are really the true Israel and that we are the Israel of God. That is false. I will show you why when we get there.
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The third question is: How can someone who is anti-Zionist be anti-Semitic since many Jews are anti-Zionist? You may not realize that, but there are many Jews who do not support a modern state of Israel. The ultra-Orthodox still do not believe that there should be a Jewish nation until the Messiah comes. They are called the Haradim, a term that refers to all of the ultra-Orthodox group – the Hasidic, the Lubavitchers, and a number of other groups. They do not serve in the IDF in Israel, and this is becoming a real controversial issue now in Israel. They live off of welfare in many cases, but they won’t serve in the IDF or the army.
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I was reading an article in this month’s Commentary Magazine, which is a publication that deals with a lot of political issues but primarily Jewish issues. The article has to do with why are the Jews letting the anti-Semites define what anti-Semitism means? It was a reaction and is dealing with writings of an Israeli who has left Israel, kicked the dust off of his feet, moved to London, and is a self-declared anti-Semite, anti-Zionist – a self-admitted, self-loathing Jew.
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Someone sent me a text the other day that there is an article in the last issue of Newsweek magazine (class recorded 2-2-12) on why Jews vote like atheists. I also found a blog by a rabbi that the reason Jews vote like atheists because they are! It is a simple answer. 90% of Jews are either actual atheists who do not believe there is a God or are functional atheists who live as if there IS a God, He has no relevance to their lives. The rabbi then said, “That is why they vote like atheists, and I am one of them.”
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When I get into this, I am going to deal with some issues that affect some of you in this congregation and some of your friends, colleagues, and loved ones. Part of the responsibility of the pastor is laid out not only in to contend for the faith but is also laid out by the Apostle Paul on . “Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock…” Who is he talking to? This is at the end of his third missionary journey when Paul was on his way to Jerusalem, and he did not want to take the time to go all the way to Ephesus, so he stopped off at the closest port city which was Miletus. He asked for all of the pastors of the churches of the believers in Ephesus to meet him in Miletus.
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He is talking to a group of pastors. “Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.” Pastors, watch your own doctrine, teaching and application. Take heed is a word in the Greek that means to give attention to something, to apply your mind and thought process, focus on something.
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Verse 29 “For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves [enemies on the outside] will come in among you, not sparing the flock.” This is everything from persecution to the influence of false doctrine and ideas that impact the local church. Verse 30 “Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.” Some of you pastors are going to apostasize, depart from the faith. So you have savage wolves and perverse pastors. Sadly, we have had our own experiences with pastors who fall into this category.
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Verse 31 “Therefore, watch, and remember [Paul’s example] that for three years I did not cease to warn everyone night and day with tears.” So Paul is constantly warning everybody about false doctrine.
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I want to talk about this second question I raised “Who are the “Israel of God?” The answer to that is the foundation for the answer to question 1 and 3. I got an email from a distance member of our church who got an email from someone who goes to a church that is pastored by someone who has come under the influence of N. T. Wright and his perverted teaching on the distinction between Israel and the church which he has rejected. Wright is also a preterist and has rejected the historic doctrine of justification by faith alone. He has influenced some pastors who pastor churches that were formerly solidly free grace dispensational.
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The claim that was made in a Bible class just recently by this particular pastor, who incidentally has no formal theological training, was that the phrase in “called by My name” relates to Jacob being renamed Israel by the Angel of Yahweh in . There is no connection between the two. That is usually what happens with false teaching. You either have a leap in logic, or you have somebody who just imposes their theology on the text, which is called eisegesis. We talk about exegesis (ex meaning out of) - we derive or pull out through inductive reasoning and study of the Scripture what it teaches. Eisegesis is when you form up a theological system that you then read into the Scriptures. You get the Scriptures to try and fit your theological system.
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The third point in his argument was that after the Angel of the Lord in asked Jacob what his name was, Jacob says Jacob. Then the Angel says after this he would be known as Israel. What did we just learn about Abraham? This is a sign of authority over someone else: The one in authority has the power and ability to change the name of a subordinate. Then Jacob – the heal grabber, the crafty one, the one who is always manipulating things – says, “Tell me your name, I pray.”
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This pastor said that when Jacob asked the Angel what his name was, the Angel replied, “Why is it that you ask about my name?”, and this means that the Angel is saying that Jacob already knows it. He said it is the name he just gave him - Israel. But that is not in the text anywhere. The pastor then says that Christians are therefore called the Israel of God. If the Angel of God’s name is Israel and Christians are called the Israel of God because Christians are in Christ and we are in Israel, then the church age Christians are the new Israel.
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There are a lot of people who believe this. This is just one form of the argument. There are large numbers of evangelical Christians (most but not all come from a Calvinistic background) who hold to this replacement theology. It is the belief that the church replaces Israel, so the promises that were supposed to go to Abraham are now going to be fulfilled in the church.
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In maybe 1999, the Evangelical Theological Society was meeting in Boston. Since I was in Preston City, CT, I decided to go. I saw a lot of my former professors from Dallas Seminary and a lot of classmates. I was talking with Elliott Johnson, a great hermeneutics professor at Dallas Seminary. Bruce Waltke, Hebrew professor at Dallas at one time and a dispensationalist, walked up. Ed Bloom, who was the pastor of Bethel Presbyterian Church back in the 1960s before he became a professor at Dallas, and Elliott Johnson walked over to Waltke and went right after him. They asked Bruce if he had figured out that Israel still means Israel and that the promise that God made to Abraham still lies between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates. Bruce Waltke has become a covenant theologian and amillennial, so the land is now heaven for him.
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In the next two or three months, they are going to have a large conference of these anti-Zionists who have become much more vocal in Bethlehem. A worldwide conference of pro-Palestinian Christians who think that Christian Zionists are a heretical sect according to Stephen Sizer, who is one of their leading advocates and authors.
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What you basically have in this construction that this pastor puts together is first of all a context problem. He does not understand the context of either or . Whenever you take the text out of context, you are left with a con job. You add that to a misreading problem (he just reads something right into that text) and add two lexical problems (one from and another from ), you are left with a theological problem of massive proportions.
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This is replacement theology, which is the historical breeding ground for anti-Semitism. It really had its roots back in the allegorical hermeneutics of Origen in the early 3rd century and became institutionalized by Augustine in the late 4th/early 5th century.
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To understand the overall context of , you have to understand the Abrahamic Covenant. It is the context for . Everything from the call of Abram in to the death of Joseph (left dead in a coffin in Egypt as Genesis ends) is all about God’s covenant with Abraham and the outworking of that covenant. In that covenant, God promised Abraham a specific piece of real estate/the land, a seed through which there would be worldwide blessing, and all the Gentiles would be blessed. Those statements were all expanded in subsequent covenants.
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The immediate context in brings our focus on a word play, and that word play is essential. The Holy Spirit loves a pun or a paronomasia, which is a word play. He uses these in numerous Old Testament books, and they are designed to get our attention. They did not have boldface type or underline or italics, so they used things like word plays and puns in order to get people’s attention and to emphasize certain things. All of a sudden you see this interchange going on that gets your attention.
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There is a word play here on the name of Jacob. Jacob means the trickster, the supplanter, the heel grabber. He is the youngest of a set of twins born to Isaac and Rebekah. God had promised them that before these twins were born, the older, which was Esau, would serve the younger. The blessing is already promised to the younger. But the heel grabber has to manipulate things and get it himself. We have the episode where he disguises himself, so that his old, blind father Isaac will think he is Esau. He fixes this favorite meal for Isaac and brings in to him, so that his father will give him the blessing of the older son. Then he tricks his brother Esau. When Esau came in from a hunt and was tired, worn-out and hungry. Jacob said he would sell him the bowl of lentil stew and trade it for Esau’s birthright. He has manipulated things.
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That is not the way you get it. Even though he got it, he got it the wrong way. The right thing done in a wrong way is wrong, so God has to teach him a lesson. The lesson is that Jacob has to move out of the land. That is always the sign of some kind of discipline from God. He moves up north to look for a wife and goes to work for cousin Laban. The primary reason he has to leave is because after he has tricked Esau, Esau is breathing murder. His mother Rebekah gives him some money and tells him if Esau finds him, he will kill him. He is to go stay with cousin Laban for awhile.
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Jacob works for seven years and wants to marry Laban’s beautiful daughter Rachel. But Laban out tricks the trickster. This is how God is bringing discipline into Jacob’s life. He is going to become the victim of his own methodology. You read through this story of Jacob and Laban and realize these are not likable people. You do not want them for your neighbors. They are conning each other, and they are family members. They are sneaky, hypocritical, always trying to get everything they can out of the other person, not honest, backstabbing, etc. After working seven years and getting tricked into marrying Leah, who was wearing the veil, and he thought it was Rachel. He had to work another seven years to get Rachel. After 14 years, he is finally beginning to get a little humility.
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This time God works things out, and he is able to go back home. He heads back to the land. In , Jacob is heading south to the land and Laban is in hot pursuit. Rachel has stolen the family idols which is the sign of the inheritance where the family blessing goes. As he gets ready to enter the land in , Esau is going to meet him. The last time he had any dealings with Esau, Esau was breathing threats and going to kill him. He decides he is going to send all these gifts of sheep, goats and cattle ahead of him for Esau to placate him. He sends all the women and stays behind, so by the time all of this has gone past Esau, maybe his temper will have cooled, and he will not be out to get Jacob.
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Jacob is still trying to control the situation and has not really learned to trust God yet. That is when we run into him in . “Then Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, the Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your family, and I will deal well with you’: I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and of all the truth which You have shown Your servant; for I crossed over this Jordan with my staff, and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, lest he come and attack me and the mother with the children. For You said, ‘I will surely treat you well, and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’ ” You see the humility there. He is dependent upon God, looking to God to take care of him and fulfill His promise that through him will come an innumerable multitude of descendants.
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In “And he arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok.” Here is where we get into the word play. The story is about Jacob (Yaaqob), the man. And Yaaqob is crossing over the Jabbok (Yabboq). It is the same consanants – you just shift the b and the k sound. Now he is going to get in a wrestling match, and wrestling is yeabeq. So you have those three words – Yaaqob, Yabboq and yeabeq – and that gets your attention.
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The map shows the path that he has taken into what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. The Trans-Jordan is where he will cross over into the Promised Land at a place called Peniel. Peniel means “God face to face” which is the verse from which Camp Peniel took its name, so that when people come to camp they will meet God face to face.
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“[The women were sent ahead] Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day.” He does not know who this is, but it is a person in the form of a man. He understands who angels are because back in verse 1 “So Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.” He knows who angels are and can identify them. This is later identified as the Angel of the Lord, but this is in the form of a man. So there is this wrestling match.
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The Greek verb that is used to translate wrestling (yeabeq, Hebrew verb) is palaio. Pale is the noun used in “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood …” The Greeks named the land Palestine based on palaio because it sounded like Philistine. But Philistine starts with a “f sound” not a hard “p sound”. Palaio would not make the shift from a p to an f sound, going from Hebrew to Greek. So palaio is not based on Philistine. This is one of the myths that the modern Arab inhabitants of the land want you to believe: that they somehow trace their heritage back to the Philistines, and that Palestine is a terms that relates to the land of the Philistines. But it does not. It was the land of the wrestler. The Greeks originated this terminology for that region and called it the land of the wrestler. Who is the wrestler? The wrestler is Jacob. It has nothing to do with the Philistines; it has to do with the land of Israel.
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The wrestling match goes on all night. Jacob is not winning. The Angel of the Lord is just fighting hard enough to keep the contest going until daybreak. “Now when He [Angel of the Lord] saw that He did not prevail against him…” Jacob by this time understands that this is not just a man but is a divine person. He is wrestling with Him because he wants the blessing. Now he is being dependent upon God and holding on because he wants God to be the one to give him that blessing. In verse 25 the Angel of the Lord touches the socket of his hip and leaves a permanent wound. Thereafter, Jacob will limp as a constant reminder that his life changed this particular night.
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“And He said, Let Me go, for the day breaks. But he said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!” That is the issue. The focal point of this story is on this wrestling match. He is holding onto God in persistence because he wants God to bless him. Verse 27 “So He [The Angel of Yahweh, the preincarnate Lord Jesus Christ – the pastor got that much right] said to him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Jacob.’ ” Chisler, heel grabber – this is not much of a name for someone who is blessed by God. Verse 28 “And He said, ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God [Elohim. In “Israel” the el is short for Elohim] and with men, and have prevailed.’ ” You have struggled with God. You are not giving up in the spiritual battle and will hold onto God for your blessing. You have prevailed in your problems with Laban and the others and have learned humility and grown to spiritual maturity.
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In the term Israel, el is the name of God, but the root sara is used in the same context as a synonym for wresting and for struggling with God. The popular etymology is that he is called Israel because he struggled with God. There is a lot of debate as to just exactly how you get to these things. In Hebrew and in the Old Testament, these words that are used for these names are not always the dictionary meaning of the root word. It’s a word play; it sounds a certain way and so brings to mind this idea of contention or fighting. Jacob is called this because he struggled with God and prevailed.
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There is a homophone in the Greek, which means that it has the same sound and same letters, sarar, that also means to rule. That is why some of you have seen or heard that Israel means the prince of God or the one who rules with God, but that is again speculation. Maybe that is the word sarar that is translated struggled here and only used a couple of times, so we are not really sure. But the text tells us what the implication is that God wants us to get out of it that he is named this because he has struggled with God and prevailed.
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Then Jacob says in “…Tell me Your name, I pray …” He still has a little bit of that “I want to control you, God” mentality that we all want to hold onto. There is no answer. Remember that the contention from this pastor was that the implication of this is “you know who I am.” If there is any implication, it is “if you think about it, you will understand who I am.” But there is this mystery here cloaking the identity of God. This is why context is important – you have the immediate context of , the broader context of the life of Jacob and the Abrahamic Covenant in , and the broader context of the Old Testament.
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In , you have an almost identical phrase when Manoah, the father of Samson, says to the Angel of the Lord, who has just appeared to Manoah and his wife and promised them they will have a child. “ ‘What is Your name, that when Your words come to pass we may honor You?’ And the Angel of the Lord said to him, ‘Why do you ask My name, seeing it is wonderful?’ ” The Hebrew word for wonderful is pele. It is only used to apply to God, so when he says “seeing it is wonderful,” He is using a term indicating that He is God; He is divine.
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God is cloaking Himself. You do not get a full picture of who God is until Jesus comes to reveal Him according to . You are just reading into this text the idea that the name Israel applies to the Angel. That is what this pastor had said. When Jacob asked, “What is Your name?”, it is implied that “you already know My name, and it is the same as yours.” Is that there? It is an error of reading; it is eisegesis. He is reading something that is not in the text. He does not understand the context; he cannot read what is in the verse and is reading things into the verse. Then he completely misidentifies the word study which is related to Israel. If there is a name for God in the text, what is it? Elohim. Israel. Peniel. They are used 4 or 5 times in these verses. The only name for God that is here is Elohim, not Israel.
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In the broad context, we see that God promises to bless the Gentiles through Abraham and his descendants. This theological argument, using the term loosely, misreads the text because the Angel never implies that Israel is His name as well. The two key words that are misidentified are first of all Israel, as the name given to Jacob in relation to his new status, his new direction, and his new life. Israel focuses on Jacob and his positive relationship to God, and later Jacob is used of Israel when they are in carnality, like the time of Jacob’s trouble in the Tribulation. Israel is used to focus on the positive when God is blessing them.
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That is all background to understanding , which is the close of Galatians. Paul says, “And as many as walk according to this rule [what he has just articulated in terms of walking by means of the Spirit starting from ], peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.” Notice that even in the English, it is clear you have the prepositions repeated. He is not identifying them with the Israel of God. He is talking about two groups of people. The first group, them, refers to those who are walking according to this rule. The second group is the Israel of God. The NIV translates it “even the Israel of God,” which is a mistranslation because it is clear he is talking about two groups of people.
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The term Israel is used 43 times in 41 verses from . It is used a total of 73 times in the New Testament. Every single time (and I have gone through and analyzed every use of the term Israel in the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles and Revelation) it refers to the physical, genetic descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is a hermeneutical fallacy of the first order to take a word that in every other use in the Bible refers to the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and then all of a sudden give it a totally different meaning. There is no basis, no justification for that whatsoever. There is no foundation for it. It is just reading a theological system into the verse.
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It is clear in the Scripture that Paul always recognizes that there is a distinction between the Gentiles and the blessing that comes to the Gentiles through the Jews. This is the background in . Paul says “Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision [technical term for the Jews] for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers.” – the covenant and the promises belong to Israel. Verse 9 “And that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy, as it is written: ‘For this reason I will confess to You among the Gentiles, and sing to Your name.’” The Gentiles are not equated to the circumcision; they are still distinct.
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This all started in this pastor’s view in . “[Quote from the ] After this I will return [context of is the Tribulation, so this is the Second Coming] and will rebuild the tabernacle of David [establishment of the millennial kingdom], which has fallen down; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will set it up [establishment of Messianic kingdom]; (verse 17) so that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord [. All the nations will come and worship God in Jerusalem at the Mountain of the Lord], even all the Gentiles who are called by My name, says the Lord who does all these things.”
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This is where the pastor started – “called by My name” is not Israel from . “Called by His name” are those who identify with the Messiah in the Messianic kingdom and those who are believers. Those who are going to the Mountain of the Lord to worship according to .
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Remember the promise in that is talked about as the background in Genesis. The promise to Abraham was that all the Gentiles would be blessed through him. They are not going to become Jews; there is going to be worldwide blessing that is going to come through Abraham and his descendants. In “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ ” This refers to the time when God originally imputed righteousness to Abraham and justified him prior to his calling in . The quote comes from , but it should be translated as we have seen that Abraham had already believed God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness.
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“Therefore [Paul says] know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham.” It does not say sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is only the sons of Abraham – they identify with Abraham because they are trusting in God alone for their justification. They are trusting in Jesus Christ by faith alone, not by works of righteousness which we have done ().
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Verse 8 “And the Scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, ‘In you all the nations shall be blessed.’ ” That is what was talking about. That is why James quotes it in to emphasize that the Old Testament foresaw that the Gentiles would also be saved. The Gentiles are blessed if they come by faith alone.
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Verse 9-11 “So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham. For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them. But that no one is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for ‘the just shall live by faith.’ ”
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Galatians is sort of the abbreviated short version of what Paul later writes after he has meditated on it for awhile in Romans. He is pointing out that those who follow Abraham receive the blessing of Abraham.
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Verse 14 “That the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” We are not talking about Old Testament Gentile salvation; he is focusing on church-age salvation of Jew and Gentile in Christ. He goes on to talk about the promise of Abraham that is fulfilled in verse 15 “Brethren, I speak in the manner of men: Though it is only a man’s covenant, yet if it is confirmed, no one annuls or adds to it.” That Abrahamic Covenant is still in effect.
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Verse 16 “Now to Abraham and his Seed…” Now we get into something a little tricky because the word seed is a collective noun. A collective noun is like people – it can refer to a small group or a large group, a crowd. It is a singular noun, but it has a collective meaning. Seed can be singular or plural. It is singular in the sense of apple seed or individual seed, or it can talk about all the descendants of somebody meaning the descendants of Abraham. Here Paul makes a point out of the fact that the word Seed is singular, and so the promise is to a Seed singular. “…He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘And to your Seed,’ which is Christ.” He applies the promise of blessing ultimately to the person of Jesus Christ.
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Verse 17-18 “And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect. For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise.” Paul says in that the promise is to Abraham that he would inherit the world; he would receive his inheritance in the future.
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The bottom line here is simply what Paul is saying is that Abraham is the father of those who believe, who follow him in faith alone in the Gospel – faith alone in Christ alone. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the line for the physical lineage of Israel, and the term Israel is only used for those who are physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The spiritual descendants of Abraham refer to those who are either physical descendants or who are Gentiles who follow Abraham in faith. This is why Paul says in that not all Israel is Israel because some are only physical descendants. You have to be a physical descendant and a spiritual descendant to be justified and to have an inheritance in the future kingdom.
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The world is becoming more and more hostile to Israel and the Jews. If the Jewish people are not allowed to have their own territory, and you make statements as some politicians have made that the existence of Israel is a problem, and Israel does not have any right to the land; then what you are basically doing through the backdoor passively is saying that all the Jews need to be in a land that will not protect it. In Israel they have a place that protects them; they have a land that is home base. It is the only place in the world where they have true, 100% security, and the government is not going to turn against them and persecute them for being Jewish. If you say that they do not have a right to that land, you are tacitly giving permission for another Holocaust and giving approval to the Jews living in a world that is hostile to them.
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Another way in which anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is from the UN to the various different groups that criticize Israel. Zionism does not mean you support everything that the Jewish government does. The Israelis do not support everything that the Israeli government does. That is a distortion of what Zionism is. Zionism says that the Jews have a right to the land and to their own nation and to defend it – it does not say anything about whether they are right or wrong. When you hold them up to a standard that is different from the other nations, where you criticize the Israeli government for doing things that your own government is doing and you do not criticize it for, then what you are doing is isolating Israel and holding them up to an unacceptable standard that is unique to them. That is anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not just the active hostility and assault on the Jews; it is also a passive acceptance of treating the Jews in a more negative manner simply because they are Jews. There are many people who are guilty of passive anti-Semitism because they take a Palestinian side. In doing so, they totally ignore a whole host of international laws established from the San Remo Resolution in 1920 and subsequent to that which recognized the Jewish people had a right to all the land west of the Jordan River for a national homeland for the Jewish people.

Romans 050b-Hanging in There: Why and How?

Romans 5:2 NASB95
through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.
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Romans 050b-Hanging in There: Why and How?
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This is a tremendous passage dealing with some of the mechanics and stages within the spiritual life and the virtues and values that are part of our spiritual growth. The focal point is on endurance so I have titled it “Hanging in There: Why and How?” Sometimes we are tempted to not want to hang in there for one reason or another. There are many things that are enemies of our endurance and our perseverance, not the least of which are physical factors: distractions, fatigue, what we need to do, which keep us from being focused on what we need to be focused on. They are indeed also part of the test.
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“Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God. (3) And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [adversities], [because we know] knowing that tribulation produces perseverance [endurance]; (4) and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence]. (5) Now hope [confidence in God] does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
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I have retranslated this a little bit to give you a sense of how the words really connect. The translators have taken the word rejoice in verse 2 (meaning boasting) and translated it glory in verse 3, but it is the same word.
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Two ideas are present as we look at this passage that do not resonate very much in a modern American setting. Those are the words endurance and hope. What Paul says is that hope can only be developed through endurance. Therefore, hope is not based on the superficial, motivational truisms that so often characterize churches and sermons today. When that is all we get, we usually run aground on the shoals of life, and our attempted endurance is quickly shipwrecked. Our culture today is one that has generally become soft, and we do not have much that we really have to work hard at.
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We are going through a time of economic recession right now, and it has been very difficult for some people. This is a time when they are going to see some character qualities develop and either pass or fail the tests they are going through. Some of us have gone through some difficult times in the past few years, and some have not. Generally speaking about our culture as a whole, we have become terribly soft. We do not have to labor as intensely as generations in the past. We have all manner of labor-saving devices and technology to access the internet and make phone calls from anywhere we are and receive them from anywhere. It is just amazing.
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When you think back on how most of us grew up, which was not really that long ago all things considered, the changes that have taken place from the 1950s to the 1970s just in your kitchen are really incredible compared to the way things were 100 years before that. We have become spoiled by our culture.
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We have also been spoiled in a lot of ways by a lack of rigorous discipline on the part of either parents or educational institutions. Just think about the fact that when many of us were young, going back to the 1950s or 1960s, it was not uncommon for parents to spank their kids. There are some states that have made that illegal. It was not uncommon for school teachers to give pops, coaches especially. I remember when I first taught school in the 1970s, hardly a week went by that I was not giving licks to some kid for disobedience.
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One of the most eye-opening experiences I ever had was with my grandmother. She was probably in her 60s by the time I was old enough to attend her 5th grade class. She taught at Jones Elementary down at the east end of Houston, just off the Ship Channel. She was down in the barrio with all her Hispanic kids. To me she was just a little old purple-haired grandmother. She did not retire from HISD until she was 75, when I was a freshman in high school.
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I would go down to visit her classroom. These kids would disobey, and she would take them behind the blackboard and take out this square paddle that the shop teacher had made that was larger than a ping pong paddle and ¾” thick with holes bored through it. She would give those big Hispanic boys paddles, and they would come out with tears running down their cheeks. She was not beating them, but the way people have been retrained to think in our culture, that would be abusive, and she would be out of a job. But she probably did a better job than anybody. For a woman to have a masters degree in education back in the 1940s was unbelievable, but she did.
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I heard today (2-9-12) that another group of psychologists, the “witch doctors” of our modern culture, came out with a study saying that not only is spanking bad for children, but it will also make them aggressive and argumentative, make them respond more negatively to stress as they get older. I turned on Fox News today, and Megyn Kelly was bringing an expert on who had years of experience in the field – it turned out to be her mother. Megyn started with a clip of a number of times she had been on different shows and got into a heated argument with Bill Reilly over some topic, clearly showing her aggression and trend towards maybe being a little verbally violent. She asked her mother if her spanking her had made her that way. Her mother said, “When you acted that way, that is why we spanked you.”
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Psychologists are dealing with a “what if” issue here. They do not know what those kids would have been like without having been spanked. They do not have an objective norm against which to evaluate anything. Maybe that is exactly why those kids were being spanked because they had those trends already, and their parents were trying to drive it out of them. Who knows more about this - the Bible or some 20th century psychiatrist, who has limited data?
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It has produced a culture that is soft. There are areas where it is not so soft. There are areas in the military, in athletics that have to deal with the reality of competition and genuinely losing and winning in situations where it counts. But when a culture becomes soft, we lose a sense of discipline and are not teaching a firm, tough mental attitude that is able to stick to things no matter how difficult they become. We create more and more of a weak culture and an effeminate culture. When you combine that with the influences of the rise of radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and the limitations on certain things that you can do in terms of training boys, some people have tried to raise this issue in the last 10-15 years that we are acculturating our young boys to a feminine ideal. This is the “metrosexual” and not the strong, virile male type who is a good leader.
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If you doubt that, we have a classic cultural example of the result of where all this goes if you go over to Eastern Europe. It is the kind of thing that took place in the former Soviet Union. They did a lot of social experimentation with marriage and parenting, and in that extreme socialist culture, it destroyed initiative in the men. One of the things I have observed for almost 20 year of going over to the former Soviet Union is that (in a generalization) a vast number of the males are drunks. They are not motivated, but the women are. The women too often got married or pregnant or both too young, and the guy turned out to be abusive and drunk, so they divorced. She is living alone with a child or two, trying to make ends meet and get an education. It is hard to find male leadership.
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I am trying to say that this is more than one facet that affects this. We live in a culture today where we analyze many of our social problems and our decline and find there are numerous elements. It is systemic, and we have to address it on a number of fronts. Too often those fronts end up being just symptoms of a even deeper problem: a spiritual problem and a rejection of God.
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When we have a culture that has spoiled our children both intentionally and unintentionally over the last 50 years, it wipes out this sense of self-reliance in our children. Unwittingly, we create in them an attitude of entitlement and dependence. A study came out indicating that government dependence in the two years of our current administration (2012) has increased 23% according to the introductory statement of the article I read.
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“American dependence on government has soared to an all-time high under the Obama administration, growing 23 percent in just two years, according to a new study by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative research group’s 2012 Index of Dependence on Government revealed that 67 million Americans are now banking on some federal program including programs related to healthcare, housing, welfare, education subsidies, and other government programs that were ‘traditionally provided to needy people by local organizations and families.’ ”
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As Medicare and Medicaid have increased and now this new healthcare monster that is coming down the pike, it just creates a dependent attitude and mentality among people. That prevents them from being mentally tough and having this sense of “I’m going to face my problems in life; it may be difficult and hard, but I have the resources to do it.” As Christians, we know those resources are the resources provided for us spiritually in Christ.
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There are several features of our culture that lead to weakness, failure and defeat. We have created a culture where everyone looks for a free, easy solution to the problems. Everything in life is quick now. We have drive-through windows. We can tap on the screen of our cell phone, and we have an answer to our question or immediate information; or we can send in a to-go order to a local restaurant. We are used to instant response and instant gratification; there is no longer that need for discipline to wait. In one of the studies I have read, this impacts the involvement of young people in church.
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One of the problems that has occurred in our culture across the board is that churches, especially where people are expected to exercise a measure of discipline and come and sit in a pew and listen to a lecture for 45 minutes to an hour, cannot get younger people under the age of 30-35 to come and be involved in mid-week services. It does not matter whether they are Jewish, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Methodist or Bible church. The discipline of approaching education in that manner has been taken away from them through various methodologies that have been used in elementary schools for the last 30-40 years, as well as the fact that they do not see that need for learning. They think differently about it and do not have the discipline to sit and learn. They want answers quickly, and the Christian life is not where you learn 15 points and become an expert on the Bible and understand God’s plan for your life and how to grow spiritually. It takes the rest of our lives. The Christian life is based on a long-term perspective and is not based on a sense of immediacy.
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When we look for stress-free, easy solutions. that is automatically counter to what the Bible teaches. We have this quick-fix, convenience, comfort mentality. I remember a classmate of mine from seminary who graduated and then taught at Capital Bible Seminary for a few years in the early 1980s. He wrote an article for one of the theological journals in which he applied this whole issue to seminary education. I have seen it get even worse since then.
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You have men in congregations who do not want to move across the country to go to the best seminary to get their training to be a pastor. Their first question is whether they can take those courses online. They do not want that rigorous discipline of the classroom. They cannot articulate it that way, but that has been bred out of them. If they are going to be a doctor or lawyer, they understand if they want to excel, they have to go to a good law school or medical school and may have to move away from their hometown.
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I have been amazed at this shift. I have looked back to many of the men that I was in seminary with and those who were just a half a generation ahead of me, and they moved from all over the country once they realized they had the gift of pastor-teacher. They moved to Dallas, TX to get the very best education they could because they understood the principle that if you wanted to glorify God in your life, you had to do the very best. They understood this high standard. They packed up their bags and recognized that they had to trust God to provide for everything. Now you have a generation of young men who are not sure if they can trust God to provide for them and their family, so they do not move. They are spiritual wimps, and they do not know it. They do not know how to trust God and have that sense of confidence which is what this passage is talking about, that is, what is at the base of giving believers that really solid mental attitude of trust and confidence in God.
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Another factor of our culture that runs counter to the spiritual principles is that we value entertainment over hard work, accomplishments and success. Just look at what has happened in this presidential primary mess in the Republican party. A couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney had to release his tax returns. All of a sudden you hear even conservatives saying, “Look how much money he makes, and he only paid 15% taxes.” That is because most of his money is invested in various long-term investments, and 15% is the capital gains rate. He is not working like other people are working. They do not understand it and just see that difference. This jealousy comes up. They do not look at him and see that he is a tremendous success. He was able to take what he was given and multiply it and make even more money.
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That is a biblical principle that we should take what we have been given and multiply it and use it in other areas. Instead, we value entertainment and handouts more than we do hard work, accomplishments and success.
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The bottom line on this is we have rejected the values of our forefathers. When a generation rises that rejects its heritage and the values and beliefs of its predecessors, then that culture is doomed to absolute failure and collapse because the next generation does not have any kind of connection whatsoever to the past. Once they sever that connection to the past, then they have no anchor anymore and are cast adrift. It is easy for them to become slaves because that is what has happened in their mentality. When you lose mental toughness and lose that ability to be independent and to face the challenges, tough times, and adversities of life with confidence, hope and certainty, then you develop a dependent mentality.
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As we have developed an effeminate culture and a spoiled culture, we have a developed a dependent culture. Dependency is a slave mentality, and slaves can never appreciate freedom or exploit liberty for greatness. In fact, they begin to turn against those values because it is something that is completely beyond their thinking and something they consider to be unachievable.
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We have raised a generation that is missing the key ingredient which is a mentality of self-reliance and independence and mental toughness. They have lost what it means to have a positive mental attitude.
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In these verses in , we have the ABCs of the Christian life summarized. Adversity builds Christian character. A-adversity, B-builds, C-Christian character. God says there is no other way to build Christian character than to face adversity with the promises and provisions that God has given us. Anything else is a shortcut and destroys the process.
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As we look at this section, we see the tremendous implication that Paul is drawing out of our justification. He says in “Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” That is what we have at salvation, but then he is going on and talking about the post-salvation spiritual life. “…and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God.” Verse 3 “And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations [rejoice in adversities]…” That is a strong Greek word that he is using here – kauchaomai [kauxaomai]. It has the idea of boasting. Think about what it is like when you have really accomplished something, and you want other people to know what you have done. You have surmounted a challenge in your life and made it, and you want to go tell your friends about it. Look at what I have accomplished!
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We exalt but not in something that we have done but in the glory of God and His provision for it. We can rejoice in adversity. The basic Greek word here is translated tribulation in some versions, but that gets confused with The Tribulation. It is just the word thlipsis [qliyij], which means adversity, difficulties, challenges. We all face them: medical challenges, health and financial challenges, challenges related to family members, parents, children, friends, coworkers. You cannot run away from these aspects in our lives. That is our tendency to leave it, but we have to learn to go through it.
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That is the character quality that Paul mentions in verse 3. The reason we rejoice in adversities is that we know that adversity produces endurance. The basic idea of endurance is not avoiding the problem or the conflict or the difficulty; it is learning to trust God in the midst of the difficulty. You cannot get away from that, so we have to learn to trust God. This does not happen easily. We do not go home and say, “I have the promise – I have it down. Tomorrow no matter what happens, I am going to move through this and just exalt and be excited about whatever difficult things come my way.” It takes years to learn to do this because our sin nature is really bent on a pseudo self-reliance, an arrogant self-reliance that is contrary to God.
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We know this foundational biblical principle that adversity produces endurance and endurance character. This is in a positive sense, a sense of approval. It is a word that is difficult to translate, and many translations do it in different ways. But it has this idea of becoming approved in your character and in who you are. It indicates spiritual maturity and growth.
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And character produces confidence. There is a process. But didn’t the person who first began this have hope? We will see that he did. There is a hope that we have in the beginning of salvation. It is not a mature hope; it is a hope that is limited because we are just spiritual babies after all and are just beginning. That has to mature as we go through life and this cycle again and again.
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“Now hope [confidence in God] does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” That shows the relationship of God’s love for us as a foundation for facing the challenges of life and the provisions that He has given us.
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As we get into this, I am going to focus a lot on these two words – endurance and hope. A hope is something that is lost also on our culture because they do not have anything that they can put their confidence in. They do not have anything of certainty that is going to endure throughout the ages, and that is the sense of hope in the Scriptures. It is not wishful optimism, not just looking inside of oneself and ginning up a measure of confidence in something so that they can go forward, not pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. It is a certainty that is focused upon the solid rock of God’s character and the solid rock of the Scriptures.
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We are going to look at the doctrine of the believer’s hope in Scripture. This will be a summary overview of Paul’s use of this term in Romans. Paul uses the term hope 13 times in 9 verses in Romans. Out of 36 times that Paul uses the word hope, 13 are in Romans – that is a little over a third. In Romans we get a real glimpse into the whole doctrine of hope that we find in the New Testament.
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We think about the fruit of the Spirit, which is the result of walking by the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. There is no hope in there. But hope is certainly a biblical value; it is a character quality that is related to the concept of perseverance. It is a mental attitude that is developed in a believer through the application of Scripture. It is not apart from Scripture or apart from walking by the Spirit, but it is produced through Scripture as we come to understand who we are in Christ, what we have been given in Christ, and where we are headed. Our destiny is not a temporal destiny; it is an eternal destiny – the messianic kingdom.
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That has to become real to us because that is what enables us to face the trials, tribulations, and adversities of today. It is this hope that is always oriented to our future destiny that gives a believer confidence to face the circumstances of today. It is through this hope that we are strengthened mentally. We become tough so that we can endure even some of the most extreme persecutions that have occurred in history from cultures and governments that have gone against Christians.
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We hear these incredible stories of Christians who have endured. Today there is a lot of persecution among Christians in Iran. I have read that the percentage of conversions from Islam to Christianity in Iran is among the highest of any conversion rate in any Muslim culture in all of history because of what is going on there. Ahmadinejad and the imams may be running Iran into the ground and threatening to destroy Israel, but as the people suffer more and more, they realize the bankruptcy of Islam and are turning to Jesus Christ. We need to be in prayer for those people.
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One of the byproducts is that they go through persecution; they are arrested, get thrown in jail, and some cannot handle it. They revert and reject Christ and go back into Islam simply because they cannot bear what is happening to their families. They do not have the mental toughness yet from their spiritual growth to be able to face the unpleasant circumstances. And to face it with joy. That is what is distinct about Scripture and a spiritual life is that we do not grumble and complain about our circumstances because we understand who is in charge. We understand that the test is to face that with joy and not with anger, hostility and depression.
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This is all wrapped up in Paul’s concept of hope. We have to learn to be mentally tough. The Holy Spirit can develop that spiritual mental toughness. When we look at what Paul says about hope here in Romans especially, we see a depiction of what is said in the rest of the New Testament.
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When I was a kid growing up and was engaged in anything that might be a little bit or a lot difficult and I wanted to bail out, my mother would always say, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win. You are not going to quit.” It was really tough to argue with my mother. Some of you know that she had three kinds of polio, encephalitis, hepatitis, kidney infection, bladder infection and me two months early. They had to take her out of the iron lung because the polio had completely overtaken her diaphragm and abdominal muscles, so she could not breathe at all on her own. Just think of that, ladies, giving birth when you have no abdominal muscles and you cannot breathe and cannot push. They pulled her out of the iron lung, pulled me out, and pushed her back in. She overcame a tremendous amount just on her understanding of the Word and just that mental toughness that that generation developed coming out of the Depression. She would never, ever allow me to ever given in to any mentality of giving up.
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When we look at the world system around us, there are still areas within our culture where endurance is still taught and still valued. It is an analogy within culture that Scripture uses again and again in order to teach these principles to believers. It is a familiar analogy, and Paul uses it many times. He uses analogies from athletics and from warfare and combat.
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He sometimes blends them together as he does in Ephesians 6:10 ff where he talks about the fact in verse 12 that “…we do not wrestle [athletic term] against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” He goes on to describe the armor that Christians are to wear in spiritual warfare.
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If you are going to be a success in either field, athletics or the military, you have to develop a mental attitude of toughness. This is what is developed in boot camp when young men and women go into the military service. The ones who fail are the ones who just cannot measure up; they cannot develop that mentality of toughness and discipline. To be a success in anything in life, you have to have a sense of self-discipline and be able to persevere beyond any difficulties and hurdles.
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On of the foremost writers and thinkers in the area of the military was Capt. Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart
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who wrote on military strategy. He was born in 1904 and died in 1970, and coming out of World War 1, he embarked on his life’s work which was studying and analyzing military strategy. He made the statement and a brilliant observation “The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.” Think about that – it is not technology, not how physically fit they are; it is the mentality that is in their commanders and is imbued into the men. Winners are shaped not just by physical talent. There are a lot of people who perhaps have greater talents than some great athletes, but the great athletes become great because they are disciplined and develop a mental attitude of toughness.
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This principle is very much true for every Christian. In some of the verses we are going to go to in our study, I want you to notice how many times Paul points us to mentality, to think this way because of something you know. It always comes back to knowledge of the Word. That is not the endgame, but if you do not have the knowledge of the Word and do not understand the biblical principles, then we cannot
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develop the kind of mental attitude that we need because we do not have the facts.
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Another example of this is in the area of athletics. I have a couple of quotes here from a modern athlete who has, in a couple of different areas, run the race and won. He struggled against cancer and won, and he also was a record holder in the number of times he has won in his cycling races. That is Lance Armstrong. When you read what he writes about his life in athletics, he rejects God but talks a lot about confidence and a winning mentality. But for him, it is just reaching deep inside of himself and pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. He is believing in something to get him past the hurdles.
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He said “Hope is the only antidote to fear.” That is a good observation and fits with what Scripture says. Hope is what enables us to overcome the obstacles of fear, of anxiety, of uncertainty and worry. He also stated that “knowledge is power, community is strength, and positive attitude is everything.” Even, as my mother also used to say, even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then. Unbelievers capture certain elements of what I call creation or establishment truth. He certainly has done that.
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One of his quotes that I ran across is something we should all pay attention to, especially when we are going through difficult times. Develop a long-range, which may be years of looking at certain difficulties. “Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask myself, which would I rather live with?” In his next book, he summarized it in a more succinct manner. “Pain is temporary; quitting lasts forever.” I think that is a good point.
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In the New Testament, God reveals to us that the critical element in the Christian life is our volition. Do we have the willingness to stick it out? What my mother called “stick-to-itiveness.” Do we have the discipline to focus on the Word of God, to think about it, and to be motivated by the Word? That is what the tests in life are all about. Sure we fail, but it is not devastating. Just because you fail, it does not mean you need to quit. Failure just means that you have to figure out another way to persevere. Quitting means you have another opportunity to go forward.
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When we fail, we just confess it and move on. Forget what is behind and press on, as Paul says, to the high-calling of Jesus Christ. That is because we come to understand what the endgame is, and one of the words that defines that in Scripture is hope. Endurance means to hang tough and to stay focused on the eternal objectives so that we do not give up.
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This word hope is found all the way through Romans. The first place it is mentioned is in , which is talking about Abraham and his faith. Abraham’s faith is focused on a promise. Faith always has an object, and that object is some statement of God, some promise of God that we are grabbing hold of with our faith. Faith is knowledge – we know that to be true.
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Modern man has misled us into thinking that faith is different from knowledge, but the Bible and God tell us that faith is knowledge. It is based on something that is not seen. We are relying on the testimony of someone who is reliable, someone who is an eyewitness, someone who designed and created things to be the way that they are – and that is God.
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Abraham is focused on this promise of God, and that promise is something that he came to realize would not be seen or fulfilled in his physical lifetime. God would still be true to that promise even though it might not be fulfilled for millennia.
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“Who [Abraham], contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, ‘So shall your descendants be [promise from ].’ ” It would be better translated as “against all hope, on the basis of hope he believed.” The first hope being the kind of hope that man has, and the second hope being his confidence in God.
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In , Paul started this section by saying, “For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect [legalism is contrary to faith].” Heirs of what? Heirs of this promise. When are they going to realize that inheritance? When is Abraham going to realize the inheritance? That is still off in the future, so hope has a future orientation.
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In , he goes on to say, “…because the law brings about wrath; for where there is no law there is no transgression. Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure [there is a certainty there] to all the seed…” Here we have this word seed again, and it is a word in both Greek and Hebrew that is a collective noun. A collective noun means that it has a singular form, but it can have either a singular or plural meaning. Much like our word deer – you can see one deer or 10 deer.
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Verse 16, the promise will be fulfilled to all “those who are of the faith of Abraham [all those who imitate the faith of Abraham].” He is not saying that all of them become Jews, but all of them become spiritually related to Abraham because they imitate his faith. Verse 17, “(as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations’) in the presence of Him whom he believed – God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.”
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What is saying is that the promises of the covenant were made to Abraham and his seed, his descendants. But Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is going to use that singular sense, which really is not used in any of these original passages from the Old Testament, and say there is another sense to this because it is singular. It also refers to one Seed, which is Christ. I cannot interpret the Old Testament this way, but Paul can because the Holy Spirit is inspiring him to do this.
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For those of you who are familiar with Dr. Robert Thomas, who was here at the 2009 Chafer Pastors’ Conference, this is what he refers to as the inspired full sense or inspired sensus plenior of an Old Testament passage. It is when Paul, a writer of the New Testament and under the ministry of the Holy Spirit, uses an Old Testament passage and gives it a meaning that you would never get from just reading it in its original context. Because the Holy Spirit is the ultimate divine author of both the Old Testament and the New Testament passages, he has a right to assign it new meaning, but we do not. So under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul hones in on this one word. This also emphasizes why even the grammatical sense of plurals or singulars is significant in terms of God’s revelation. Inspiration extends down to that level of detail of the text.
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In , Paul says contrary to hope, on the basis of hope, he believed. That tells us about hope’s relationship to belief. Hope focuses on the promise that faith is grabbing hold of. Hope is related to faith. Faith is the act of belief, and hope is that confidence and is faith on steroids. It takes it to another level because you are focusing on something in the future that you have a certainty about that strengthens your faith today. Even though all the empirical data, all the experience that Abraham had mitigated against the fact that he and Sarah would ever have children, he believed God and knew that God was able to make that happen.
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He believed the promise, so that goes on “And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He did not waver at the promise [notice hope is related to promise and faith] of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God.” So hope focuses on a future reality, and that becomes more real to you today than whatever the experience is that you face no matter how difficult it is.
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As a pastor, I see this more and more. When you get older and get into your 70s and 80s or even sometimes at an earlier age, you may face degrees of health problems. Something just happened in my family in the last week. My wife’s sister fell on a wet bridge doing her job in Austin and had multiple fractures in her right ankle, which is your driving foot. She had surgery, will have another surgery, and cannot put any weight on it. She lives alone and now suddenly is very dependent on others. We do not expect these difficulties. You or your spouse may begin to lose your memory or have some debilitating disease. What gets you through that is the confidence in God. Sometimes when I go to the hospital and visit, I am blown away by their faith and confidence in the Lord. We have to learn that. Whatever you are going through now is a training ground for what you will go through later on. Are we going to hang in there and fulfill the plan that God has for us?
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The next time we run into the word hope is in . “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope.” When was the creation subjected to futility? That is talking about when Adam sinned, and the entire universe came under the judgment of sin. It did not just affect Adam and Eve and their relationship to God; it affected all of creation. It affected the serpent, the animal kingdom, all of nature. At that point, the 2nd law of thermal dynamics went into effect, which states that everything moves to a state of entropy, that is disorder, technically non-usable energy. It all begins to run down. That started with Adam’s fall. All of creation was subjected to futility in hope because there is a plan. It is moving towards an endgame that comes at the end of the millennial kingdom.
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Now Paul is going to say in “For we were saved in this hope [confident expectation]…” There is a promise that is given to us at salvation, the gospel, which is the promise of eternal life. We are given that hope, that confidence, and that too gives sustenance, strength, and stability to our present life.
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“…but hope that is seen is not hope…” It is not based on empiricism or rationalism; it is based on the revelation of God who tells you that this is the way it is. Are you going to believe Him or not?
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We look at the context of and are struck by another similarity. In , we discover what Paul is talking about is suffering again. He is talking about adversity and going through hardship. “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” He is saying that that is such a miniscule shadow when compared to the brilliance of the glory of God’s plan and future for us and is not worth focusing on and being upset about. That is why Paul says we should not grumble or complain. The only way we can reach that is when we get this perception that the most difficult things we face today are just a shadow compared with the glory of God and His plan.
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He goes on to say in verse 19 “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.” This will occur in the millennial kingdom when church age believers come back with the Lord Jesus Christ. Part of the curse is rolled back during the kingdom, and then in the new heaven and the new earth, there will be no curse. That is the context of verse 20-21 “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
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Whenever anything bad happens, there is something deep within us that knows this is not how it is supposed to be. I shouldn’t have to face this – my parents died, my best friend died, my dog died. But we live in a fallen world, and we all come to grips with this every day. As believers we have information that defines what that fallen world is about, and it is not a permanent state. That is what gives us hope. We know what the endgame is, and there is a reason and a purpose for whatever we go through, even though we do not know it. That is where he is going to end up in – “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” God in His sovereign plan is going to pull it all together for the good.
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“For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” It is not just about our little self-absorbed problem with our little difficulty; it is the whole creation – every atom, every molecule screams in agony because of the curse of sin. Verse 23 “Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.” That is our hope. We are given the Holy Spirit to enable us to get through this. Verse 24 “For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?”
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Paul says, “Rejoicing in hope, patient [enduring in adversity] in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer.” Prayer is how we express our dependence on God, and we express those groans over all the difficulty that we are facing in life. We take it before His throne of grace.
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“For whatever things were written before [lives of the Old Testament believers] were written for our learning, that we through the patience [endurance, hupomone/ u(pomonh] and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Where do you get hope? We have to learn the Scriptures and make it part of our souls. There is still that process today. How you grow as a believer today is not any different than how it was in the 1st or 2nd century. Technology does not change anything; it may make some of the Scripture more accessible but does not make spiritual growth easier or different.
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“Now may the God of patience and comfort [God of endurance] grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus. Verse 13 “Now may the God of hope [He gives us hope, He is the source of our confidence] fill you with all joy and peace [There is the fruit of the Spirit, but it is related to the hope that God gives us which is in the promises of His Word.] in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” That is how we have it – by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we are able to abound in hope. It cannot happen if you are walking in the flesh, but if you are learning, applying and focusing on the Word, you develop that mental discipline to focus on and grab the Word and let that shape your mentality. Then you can have hope and stability in any situation. God the Holy Spirit is waiting to give it to you, but your job is to take the Word and make it part of your mindset.

Romans 051b-Hope and Endurance

Romans 5:3 NASB95
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance;
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Romans 051b-Hope and Endurance
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Last time I began to do an analysis of hope. Why do we need to hang in there? There is this connection between hope and endurance throughout Scripture. “Through whom [Christ] also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God.” Pay attention to that word rejoice; it is a key word in relation to hope and endurance. These words occur again and again in combination.
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“And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice. Most versions change the meaning here, but it is the same word we have in verse 2. You need to see how Paul is developing it by using the same word.] in tribulations [adversities], knowing [because we know] that tribulation produces perseverance [endurance]; and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence].
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“Now hope [confidence in God] does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
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I pointed out last time we see this connection between endurance and hope. Hope is really a process and not something that we get at the instant of salvation. We have, like many other aspects of the Christian life, some element of it when we are first saved. In fact when we understand the gospel, there is a gospel promise of eternal life – we have the hope of eternal life. There is a past element to this concept of hope, as we will see, that talks about that which we learn at gospel hearing. But it is a forward-looking thing. So hope is a present reality based on a past promise that anticipates a future destiny. It shapes in our thinking a level of confidence in God, so that when we face the challenges and vicissitudes of life, we are not knocked down by them but can stand firm and develop through the Word a mentality of toughness and strength.
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It is in Romans that we see most of the main ideas of the word hope that are found within the New Testament. Thirteen times in 9 verses Paul uses the word hope in Romans. Out of a total of 36 times that Paul uses the word hope, this means a little over 1/3 of those uses are found in Romans.
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Hope is not a fruit of the Spirit. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.” That is something the Holy Spirit produces within us as a character quality that reflects the character of Jesus Christ. It is the result of walking by the Spirit.
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Hope is more related to understanding that promise of a future destiny that is tied in with our hanging in there as we grow. As we stick with the Christian life, we do not bail out, we do not quit, we do not go look for some place that has better programs, music, or whatever attracts people to certain kinds of churches. We understand that it is the Word of God that is really our strength in times of difficulty and that gives us the specifics related to that hope. What we see here in these verses are the ABCs of the Christian life – Adversity Builds Christian character.
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Hope is not a fruit of the Spirit but is a mental attitude developed in the believer through the application of Scripture, so that we can endure through trials. It is not apart from walking by the Spirit but is more related to the content development in terms of our mindset than character per se.
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Hope is based on a past promise of a future reality. And hope provides the believer with such confidence in a future reality so certain that it strengthens and toughens the believer’s mentality today to face the fight and to surmount unpleasant circumstances with a mentality of joy even in the midst of difficulty.
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I want to expand this a little more and go beyond just what Paul says about hope in Romans to look at what he says other places and then knock the boundaries off of that to look at what other New Testament writers say. Technically this is what is called a biblical theology. For the average layman, biblical theology is a theology that is in contrast to a non-biblical theology. But trained theologians do not use it that way. Biblical theology is used to develop theology within the books of the Bible, so you would have a theology of Romans: What does Romans teach about the essence and character of God? What does Romans teach about the Holy Spirit, about salvation, about the sinfulness of man? Then you would look at another book like Ephesians and do the same kind of thing. That is developing a biblical theology.
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Then you would summarize that: What does Paul teach about God, salvation, sin, eschatology? Then you do the same thing with Peter and the writer of Hebrews, whom nobody knows except a few over-stressed students in seminary at finals week. Then you have Johannine theology. Then you combine these and that is how you build to a systematic theology.
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Paul uses the word hope 23 times in 22 verses. Not all of them apply to hope in terms of the spiritual life; sometimes he uses it in a little more prosaic manner. From the key verses, we will develop our understanding of the doctrine of hope in Paul’s writings.
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The first thing we notice is that hope is related to our future destiny. Hope has something to do with the fulfillment of the promise. We saw that with how it was used in with Abraham. Abraham had a promise that enabled him to have hope or confidence in God in fulfilling that, so that his experience with his own and Sarah’s infertility was not as real for him as the promise of God. That is part of how hope relates to faith. Faith is our belief that something is true. As Jesus said, all we need is a mustard seed of faith. The mustard seed is one of the tiniest of all seeds. You do not need a mountain-size faith to be saved; you just need a little bit of faith to be saved. But that faith in Christ is what is the basis for our justification.
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Hope really focuses on the expansion of faith, and it is much more robust than faith. It is not unrelated to faith, but it is faith on steroids and focusing on the future. Hope is related to our future destiny, where that becomes more real to us than our present time.
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Most of us are just like the teenagers many of you have raised. We do not like to admit this, but we used to tell the teenagers that we raised that they needed to look beyond the end of their nose when they were going to do things. Unfortunately, spiritually we often make those same mistakes as spiritual adolescents. We do not think in terms of the long-term plan of God. When that long-term plan that is beyond this earth and that goes into the millennial kingdom and beyond becomes more real to us, then it really begins to change and shape the decisions we make and our responses to the circumstances that we face.
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Hope is related to that future destiny – our roles and responsibilities in the messianic kingdom, that is, during the dispensation of the millennium. Hope develops as we grasp the reality of what the Bible calls our calling through the study of Scripture.
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The passage we are going to look at is “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” Here we have an example of how Paul sort of piles one genitive phrase on top of another.
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I have been doing some reading in some liberal-influenced commentaries recently. I do not care too much what liberals say, but I am hearing some of these things too often when I am trying to talk to people about the Bible. Sometimes we have to understand what the unbelievers are going to say because that is what they have heard from the Discovery Channel and the History Channel and have read various novels related to Christianity that attack Christian belief. One of the things that liberals came up with back in the 19th century was that Paul did not write Ephesians or Colossians because the writer writes differently than the writer of Romans, Galatians or 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Of course, the fact is that Paul is addressing a different audience and writing 10 years later. If you went back and read things I wrote 20 years ago before I had the benefit of an editress who crucified me daily because of the way I wrote things, you would not necessarily say it was the same person that wrote something I wrote today. Everybody grows and matures in their writing. There is different style and vocabulary, but that is related to topic and other things.
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That shows the superficiality of the skeptical mind. They say this is hard and fast evidence that the Apostle Paul could not have written Ephesians. The reality is that everybody has these kinds of stylistic variance. If you look at different writers who write on different topics, that will change style and vocabulary.
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What is going on around ? Why is Paul saying this? Going back to , Paul shifts his topic a little bit. This is one of those very famous sections of Paul’s writings: Verses 3-14 in the original Greek are one long sentence. The Apostle Paul would get excited about something and would pile clause upon clause and phrase upon phrase.
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What is fun is when you are teaching 1st or 2nd year Greek and getting into diagramming is to throw this one out and try to get your students diagram this in the Greek. It is bad enough in the English. Most English Bibles will break it up into as many as seven sentences. The problem with that is in an English translation, the sentence is your basic unit of thought. If this is one sentence in the original, then it is one thought with a lot of secondary and tertiary ideas. If you break it into 7, 8, 9 … 12 sentences, then what you have done is create 7 independent statements or ideas, instead of just one idea with secondary and supporting aspects to it.
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As soon as he finishes that long sentence in verse 14, he starts another long sentence in verse 15. Here he shifts and draws a conclusion coming out of the long sentence of verses 3-14 and talks about prayer. Verses 15-16 “Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints [their trust in Christ and their application of doctrine in their life – love for all the saints], do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers:” This tells us something about his prayer life that he is continuously praying for the various congregations and various believers he knew.
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What does he pray for? This is the kind of thing that you and I need to pay attention to. How do you pray; what do you pray for? Most of us have on our prayer list people who are ill, struggling with something, facing some challenge or adversity in life. But I would suggest that most of us need to pay attention to how Paul prays for people.
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He says in “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.” We ought to pray that God would give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, but we ought to know what that means before we pray for it. Paul prays for this same kind of thing in other epistles. He recognizes that the ultimate authority, the member of the Trinity who distributes things and is ultimately in charge is God the Father. All prayers should be addressed to God the Father.
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Somebody says, “What happens if we pray to the Holy Spirit or to Jesus?” We have a promise over in that if we do not know how to pray, the Holy Spirit acts as a sort of divine buffer. If we are not right or do not know someone’s name, the Spirit knows how we should pray and cleans things up for us in the process. That is not an excuse for sloppy praying, but that is a reality that even when we are praying like we ought, the Scripture still says we do not know how we ought to pray.
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The Holy Spirit is involved as an intercessor. We do not pray to an intercessor; we are praying to the one the intercessor goes to. That is why we do not pray to Jesus, but we pray to the Father. Jesus intercedes for us with the Father, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, but Mary and the saints do not intercede. That is what Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy teaches, but we do not believe Mary and the saints have anything to do with our prayers. It is between us and the Godhead, but different members of the Godhead have different roles with regard to prayer. It does not mean that if you pray to the Son or to the Spirit that God is going to slap your hand and not answer your prayer. It does mean that nowhere in Scripture are there prayers that are addressed to the Son or the Holy Spirit. There are specifically different roles, and we should learn that and pray correctly.
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We also need to understand that now and then there are hymn writers who take a little license and are addressing things to the Son. We just give them a little poetic license unless they push it a little too far and look at it on a case-by-case basis. A lot of times just the generic word Lord can refer to the Father or to the Son, so we will give it the benefit of the doubt that it is referring to the Father.
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Paul always addresses his prayers to the Father, so he is praying that God the Father, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, would be the one who would grant something to the believer. This is praying in the will of God because we know it is the will of God for us to know the Word of God and the will of God so that we can mature and glorify God.
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“that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom…” This is the first time that we hit one of these genitives - “the spirit of wisdom.” This has been translated a couple of different ways. The Greek is pneuma sophias [pneuma sofiaj], which means that it does not have an article with it, so it is emphasizing the quality, the essence of these nouns, as opposed to making any kind of specific distinctions. Some translations (NIV, EB) interpret the word pneuma to refer to the Holy Spirit, which is wrong. They translate it the Spirit of wisdom in the sense that it is the Spirit of God who produces wisdom. This is true in such passages as “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him [Messiah], the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.”
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We understand the principle that God the Holy Spirit is the one who produces wisdom, but that does not mean that this is how this phrase should be translated. It could be talking about just a spirit of wisdom, in which case some may take this as the human spirit. The word spirit or pneuma is a word that has about 11-12 different meanings in Scripture, so we always have to be careful how we understand it. It could refer to an evil spirit or demon; it can refer to the wind or to breath; it could refer to the immaterial part of man as a synonym for the word soul; and in other places it refers to part of the immaterial nature of man that is completely distinct from the soul. We have to look at each usage in and of itself.
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If you get too strict with the word spirit and say if it is referring to man it is the human spirit which he gets at regeneration, then what do you do when Genesis talks about the spirit of Pharoah? Pharoah was not saved and did not have a human spirit. Uh, oh – I have to redo my theology. That is an example in the Old Testament of how the Hebrew word ruach simply is used as a synonym for the immaterial part of man or the thinking of man.
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Sometimes the word spirit has to do with attitude, which is more likely here in Ephesians. Pneuma could be used in this kind of genitive construction as an adjective, in which case it would mean spiritual wisdom. That is certainly possible and viable. I think the option of spirit being understood as an attitude or a mental attitude of wisdom is how it is understood in a number of translations like the KJV, NKJV, RSV and Logos’ Lexham English Bible (electronic version).
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I think that is what this is talking about that God might give to the individual believer an attitude or mentality of wisdom. Wisdom in biblical thought is something very different from wisdom in Greek thought. Even though this is a Greek word, the background for Paul is not Athens but Jerusalem. The idea of wisdom in the Old Testament is the idea of producing something skillful. Bezalel and Aholiab were two of the craftsmen that were put over all the craftsmen that built the tabernacle. They were given skill (the KJV translates it that way) in their craftsmanship in building the articles for the tabernacle.
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As the goldsmiths, seamstresses, weavers, and others made the tabernacle one of the most beautiful pieces of art that ever existed on the planet, the Spirit of God gave them chokmah, which is translated wisdom but has the idea of skill. For the Jews, skill was not intellectual acumen, not academic accomplishment, which was more of the Greek idea of someone who could think well, had a good grasp of intellectual issues, and was adept in logic. That is not the Hebrew idea which was much more practical. For them wisdom was the ability to take abstract truth and make something of it that had beauty and value.
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When we look at the difference between wisdom and knowledge in the Bible, knowledge is our understanding of what the Bible teaches, and wisdom is the ability to take the knowledge and apply it to the circumstances and situations of our life, so that what we are producing is something that has spiritual beauty, that has real value as testimony before men and angels. God is the one to give that mentality of wisdom. Paul is talking to believers at Ephesus, so it is clearly something that goes beyond anything that happens at salvation and is clearly talking about the believer’s spiritual growth.
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The second term in “…revelation in the knowledge of Him” has the concept of disclosure or unveiling, and it is the idea that as we study the Word, God is going to disclose Himself more and more to us, so that we come to know Him more in a fuller sense. The Greek word that translates knowledge is the word epignosis [e)pignwsij], which has to do with a fuller, more experiential knowledge. It is not that I can rattle off the 10 attributes of God and give you 10 points on the doctrine of the Trinity, but that knowledge then leads me to a closer relationship with God. As that relationship develops, it in turn leads to a greater understanding of those attributes and of who God is and what He has done.
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Paul is praying that God would be the one to give us this mental attitude of wisdom or skillful application and continue to disclose Himself in a fuller knowledge of Him. This is not apart from His Word but is through His Word. We just cannot exhaust the knowledge of God that comes through His Word. I do not know why people try to find it somewhere else; it is all there. We have not exhausted the 66 books of the Bible yet, so why do we want to go somewhere else to find knowledge of God.
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All of that is important to understand because verse 18, related to hope, is the next part of the sentence. We have to understand the context of what Paul is talking about that he prays for. Verse 18 “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.”
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It is an unfortunate place to put the verse break because we think of this as a separate sentence. There are some translations that break this into a separate sentence in the English. The versions that are guilty of that are the NASB, NIV, NEB, NET (new electronic text), RSV, Logos’ Lexham English Bible, and they recognize this is a continued thought from the previous verse.
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“the eyes of your understanding being enlightened…” is a parenthetical statement. It can only be taken that way because the word that is translated enlightened is pephotismenous, which is a perfect participle which means it is talking about completed action. It is not talking about the process of enlightenment, which is how it might appear in your English Bible; it is talking about an already-completed enlightenment. The only thing that is already completed in enlightenment in reference to a Christian is what happens at regeneration.
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What Paul is actually saying here is that he prays to the Father that He “may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him” because the eyes of your understanding have already been opened, they have already been enlightened. That happened at regeneration.
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Then he comes back to his main line of thought in verse 18 “…that you may know what is the hope of His calling.” If we drop out that initial phrase and just talk about “revelation in the knowledge of Him … that you may know what is the hope of His calling,” it takes us to the next level.
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Even though there are some translations that try to tie this into a present tense rather than looking at it as completed action, the context both in Ephesians in this chapter and the overall epistle talks about the fact that we are already children of light. Being a child of light is something that occurs to us positionally at the instant of salvation. Light is the result of responding to the gospel.
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“For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Light here is related to the knowledge of the gospel – knowledge of who man is, who God is, and the revelation or disclosure to man of our need for salvation. That is related to the glory of God. We will see something related to the glory of God again and again as we go through this concept related to light.
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This takes us back to what is often referred to as the Shekinah glory in the Old Testament - that visible presence of God in the tabernacle that was in the Holy of Holies and that was the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. When Moses would go in, God would speak to him; when Moses came out, his face just shone. He had to wear a veil over it because as it dimmed, the people would think that God was leaving him. It was the light that was related to God’s glory.
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Some people get the idea that Shekinah has something to do with light. Shekinah is just a Hebrew word (not used in the Old Testament) for a dwelling place and denotes the dwelling presence of God. It pops up in places as a cognate in Greek, even in Russian, as the word skene, which means a dwelling place. Russian borrowed it from the Greek. Light is related to that dwelling presence of God.
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Another place in which this is used is in . Here it helps us understand that believers are positionally and by nature now regenerated; they are light because they have responded to the light of the gospel. We are children of light because light is our new nature. “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers…” This is the biblical prohibition of missionary dating. There are a lot of people who think that they just cannot find anybody out there that is Christian or spiritually mature, so I am just going to date whoever I can find and try to convince them to become a believer and then hope they will become mature.
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That whole concept is spelled MISERY. I have seen it again and again because it always invokes compromise of one’s belief system in that process. I cannot tell you how many single people I have known over the past 10-12 years – almost crisis proportions – who never discover or locate a person of the opposite sex who is interested in the Scripture at the same level that they are. You have two options: one is how to be alone and the other is to compromise. It is sad to watch how many compromise. I know of a lot of tremendous believers (more women then men, sadly) who just cannot find somebody who they can share with on that spiritual level, so they settle. You just do not settle for 2nd or 3rd best – it is always bad.
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Paul states it clearly in “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness?” We are light, as Paul says in . “For you were once darkness [positionally as an unbeliever], but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.” “Light in the Lord” describes our position or identity in Christ, but the next phrase moves from the positional realm to our day-to-day Christian growth. We are children of light, and now we are to walk as children of light. I do not know what your family name is, but let us say you are Smiths. Your daddy would say, “A Smith does not live like that; she are to live your life like a Smith.” That is what Paul is saying – you are a child of God, and your last name is Light. You are to live according to the standards of the Light family. It is not an option and is our position.
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Because of that, Paul challenges the Philippians in 2:15 “That you may become blameless and harmless [Christian growth, direction of our spiritual maturity], children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.” Every believer is to be a light in the world. We are not supposed to hide our light (“This little light of mine; I’m going to let it shine.”).
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“You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness.” That is our position. The instant we are saved, there is an enlightenment there that comes because we are now a new creature in Christ. “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened [regeneration concept], and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit.”
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This is not taste in the sense of going to the grocery store and tasting all the samples offered on every aisle. By the time you get through, you do not want to buy any groceries because you are full. I remember one year when we first went to Connecticut and had not been there more than month, we decided to go exploring. We went over to Newport in Rhode Island, and they were having a chowder festival. There must have been 25-30 restaurants that were represented, and each one gave you a little paper cup with a little less than an ounce of clam chowder. When you go through 25-30 restaurants, that is 25-30 ounces of clam chowder, and you are full!
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That is not what the word means. It is not to just get a little taste or sample; it is to fully embrace something: The idea to eat something, take it into your person, and assimilate it into your being. This is not a term for just sampling salvation; this is the term that relates to being saved. You are fully enlightened, have tasted the heavenly gift, and are partakers of the Holy Spirit.
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This concept of enlightenment is related primarily to our position first of all in Christ that comes at regeneration. Paul is praying () that since we have already been enlightened when we were regenerated and become a new creature in Christ, we have new capabilities to understand divine truth. He says that already having the eyes of your understanding opened, he prays that God the Father would give you the spirit or mentality of wisdom and increase revelation in knowledge of Him. This is for a purpose. Knowledge is not the endgame and is just the means to an end. All of the notes that you take in Bible class are not the endgame. They will help you go to the next level.
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“The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” Now what exactly does this term calling mean? It is a term that has been picked up in Calvinistic theology to relate to what is called effectual calling. This means that God the Holy Spirit, in Calvinistic theology, only effectually calls those who are elect. Everybody else gets passed over; the Holy Spirit ignores them.
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We do not believe that. We believe that those who are chosen by God are those who respond to the gospel. It is that invitation of the gospel that is a synonym for the calling. There are in theology two calls. One is the external call, and this is the external gospel invitation which any person hears. There is the internal call which is the work of God the Holy Spirit, which always goes along with the external call in making the gospel clear and understandable. In Calvinism, they often teach that because man is so spiritually dead (and he is), he cannot hear the invitation. If he does not need to hear the invitation, why does Satan blind the minds of the unbeliever ()? If people are so spiritually dead that they cannot understand the meaning of the gospel to respond to it, then why does Satan need to blind them? He can just leave them alone because they are not elect. But Satan blinds them because they can understand and they can respond if they so choose, and he has to deceive them and distract them from the hope of our calling.
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is the best illustration of calling in the Scripture. This is the parable of the wedding feast. Jesus made a lot of points by telling stories. Some people say telling stories and reading stories are not really teaching doctrine. But Jesus taught a lot of doctrine through telling stories, so just because it is a story does not mean Jesus did not teach something.
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He is talking here to the disciples and the multitudes. Verse 1-3 “…The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come.” The call here is synonymous to the invitation. They have been invited to the wedding and have been told to come. They are not willing to come and obviously resist the call, the invitation.
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Verse 4-5 “Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.” ’ But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business.” The call goes to everyone and refers to simply that invitation to believe the gospel.
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Verse 6-8 “And the rest seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy.’ ” Why were they not worthy? Not because of something inherent in them because they made a decision to reject the invitation (gospel).
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Verse 9-14 “ ‘Therefore, go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment. So he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”
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Those who are chosen (eklektos/ e)klektoj, elect) are the ones who responded to the invitation. All were called, all were invited, but the only ones who were chosen are the ones who responded to the invitation and had the right wedding garments. The wedding garment is a picture of the imputation of righteousness. One came who wanted to come on his own terms, and the picture here was that God says, “You are not getting in on your own terms. You are getting in on my terms, which means you wear the wedding garments I provide [righteousness of Christ].” Calling relates to invitation. The way that the New Testament writers used the term called is simply as a synonym for those who responded to the invitation.
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When we look at , “the hope of His calling,” it is His calling. He calls us, and the hope is part of the calling which is that expectation of eternal life. We come to understand all that is involved in that eternal life and our future destiny, and that comes under the next category which is “riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.”
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The genitive phrase “of the glory” should be understood as an attributive or adjectival genitive modifying inheritance. It should be translated “what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints.” We have a glorious inheritance and have to come to understand the wealth of it. We have to understand the riches that are ours in that eternal destiny in terms of ruling and reigning with Christ in the terms of the millennial kingdom and beyond that on into heaven. It is not sitting on a cloud, plucking on a harp. There is going to be a tremendous amount to do and all kinds of things we are going to advance in. The knowledge of God is infinite and eternal, and we will never ever approximate it.
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We have this glorious future in front of us, and we need to come to understand it. The more we come to understand it, the more that motivates us to do well now, to develop that tough mental attitude to face the difficulties, the challenges, and the heartaches of life that come our way. We never know how they are going to hit us.
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Paul says the same kind of thing in “Because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel.” The past is the gospel; the promise, the future is the destiny. Our hope is our confidence today in terms of the future.
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This is described in as “the hope of the gospel which you heard.” It is that expectation of a future reality.
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In , Paul uses it again in relationship to endurance. He praises them “remembering without ceasing your work of faith [production of faith in your spiritual growth], labor [produced from your love] of love, and patience of hope [endurance that your confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ produced]…” There is a hope that comes when we understand the gospel, and then there is a hope that develops and matures as we go through the process of facing trials and enduring. Hope that we have at the beginning is transformed to a mature, robust hope as we grow and mature by our understanding of the gospel as the future becomes more real to us.
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In talks about this hope as being the “eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began.” “that having been justified by His grace we should become [future tense] heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” You have an aorist participle, “having been justified”, which precedes the action of the verb, “become” (ginomai/ ginwmai, become something we were not before). This connects hope and inheritance and our eternal life.
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“Looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Romans 053b-How to Develop Christian Virtues. ; ;

Romans 5:3 NASB95
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance;
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Romans 053b-How to Develop Christian Virtues, ; ;
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There is a virtue list in , and it is a description, in some degree, of a process of Christian growth. When we come to a paragraph like this, it is important to not only study it in terms of what it is saying but then to recognize that this is only one part of the picture. There are other passages from Paul, Peter, and James that complement what is said here. This is just one look, one expression of the dynamics that occurs within the Christian life. It is incorporating all of the virtues that are manifest within the Christian life using the term virtue as a broad category.
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In “Through whom [Christ] also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God.” The phrase ‘the glory of God’ is often used as a representation of the entire character of God. How do we know that? In context, we know that from a passage like “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The phrase does not always refer just specifically or literally to the effusion of His essence, but it relates to His entire character. It stands as a figure of speech representing all the attributes of God.
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Paul then continues in “And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [adversities]…” It is important to think about that that when we hit times that are not going quite like we want them to, we need to develop a habit pattern of thinking and reacting in terms of rejoicing and not in terms of complaining, griping, and moving in the negative direction. That is easier for some people than for others just because of your personality, but ultimately, we can only truly rejoice in whatever we are facing, especially when it is adversities, because we know something. We have learned that this God as a sovereign God supervises the events in our life, and there is a plan and a purpose. We may not understand it until we are face-to-face with the Lord, but we will understand it, and when we do, we will know it is good.
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“And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [adversities], knowing [because we know] that tribulation [adversity] produces perseverance [endurance]; (verse 4) and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence].” We see a stair step here of these characteristics that the Apostle is talking about.
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As I have continued my study of this, this is actually a literary device called a sorites, also known as a climax ladder or the Latin term gradatio. You take a set of statements that proceed step by step through the force of logic or relying upon a succession of indisputable facts that are related to each other that build upward to a climatic conclusion. Each statement usually picks up on a key word or phrase in the previous statement to build to the next statement. So it indicates a progression.
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There are several of these within the New Testament. We looked at a parallel passage last time in , and we’ll look at another in . You find examples of this literary device in all kinds of ancient literature, whether it is the Old or New Testament, classical literature, or rabbinic literature. In the Mishnah, there is an example of this type of thing in Pirkei Avot 1:1 “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and delivered it to Joshua, then Joshua to the elders, then the elders to the prophets, and prophets delivered it to the great men of the assembly [synagogue].” You see that stair step progression. You take a word, repeat it, and move it to the next level.
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You have these virtue ladders, I am going to call them, which help us to understand a progression that occurs in spiritual growth. You should not get in your mind that this is a hard and fast progression, that Paul is writing a scientific treatise that you are going to do this and then this and then this. Each time you look at these different lists, while there are similarities, they are not identical. They are expressing the pattern by which Christians grow. Each time you have an expression of this, the writer is emphasizing different virtues and different qualities within the Christian life. So it is not a rigid sort of formula that if you do this, this will happen, and if you do this, that will happen – if you just get out your checklist, you can mark off exactly how you are growing. Life just does not work that way.
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Life is dynamic, and we do not grow at the same rate. We do not all need the same information to grow – some need information and doctrine taught one way and some need it taught another way. Everybody is different, and God provides. That is why we have different men who have the gift of pastor-teacher, and through their personalities, they appeal to some people, while others appeal to other people. God uses all of them within the body of Christ.
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In the New Testament, the classic passages are the ones we have looked at already: , , , and . In some of these lists, there is a contrast with a vice list. So you have a virtue and vice contrast. Essentially what the writer is doing is following a pattern of teaching ethics that was common, not only in the Old Testament period in Israel but was also common in Greece and in other cultures. They would teach by comparison and contrast. We do not learn by just looking at what is right. We learn often by looking at what is right and comparing and contrasting it to things that are almost right or things that are the opposite, so that we can understand the various shades and gradations of distortion that may occur so that that which is pure white is better understood when you compare it not just with black or gray but with eggshell white.
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So by contrast, you wonder what makes the difference. Why do we have these kinds of distinctions and what causes that? This is what causes people to become curious and then to investigate, study and learn things. Ethical instruction was often taught within this kind of a contrast.
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We got into this by looking at this emphasis on hope that we have in . I compared that with other passages. We looked first of all at what Paul taught about hope within Romans. We saw that hope, though not mentioned in the list in on the fruit of the Spirit, it is still part of the spiritual life and is a mental attitude that is developed in the believer through the application of Scripture, so that we can endure through trials. It should be understood primarily as confidence, and it is a confidence that grows. We have a certain confidence at the very beginning of our Christian life, but that confidence is a little bit wobbly. As we grow and mature, we face trials and testing and we apply the Word and claim promises, and that confidence becomes more stable and stronger.
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Faith perceives a proposition or statement, and we believe it to be true. Hope is based on a past promise of a future reality. Hope provides the believer with confidence in this future reality so certain that it strengthens and toughens the believer’s mentality today to face, fight, and surmount unpleasant circumstances with a mentality of joy in the midst of difficulty.
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We went beyond Romans to other statements that Paul makes about hope in other epistles, and then went outside of Pauline epistles to other statements related to hope. Many of these are part of this stair step or virtue ladder that is developed and articulated by different writers of Scripture.
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When we talk about virtue, it is one of those ideas that is prevalent both among the non-Christian world and the Christian world. It is tempting to start to think about virtue, and then look at how virtue has been discussed and developed within classical philosophy, specifically within the ethics going back to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (writing in the Nicomachean Ethics). There is the development of ethics in the Middle Ages. Classically, the way Western civilization taught or viewed ethics within an Aristotelian or classical Greek background was that there were four cardinal virtues.
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(1) Temperance is from the Greek word sophrosyne. We often associate temperance with not drinking. The temperance movement or the prohibition movement in the U.S. has colored our understanding of that word, but it has a rich heritage. It is a word that is very close in meaning to the second virtue which is (2) prudence from the Greek word phronesis [fronhsij], which has to do with thinking. They both have to do with balanced thinking and not going to extremes. (3) Courage (4) Justice In the Middle Ages, Christians added to those four cardinal virtues the three Christian virtues: faith, hope and love.
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The problem with that is if you read Aristole, Plato, or other ethicists writing in the Middle Ages, they had a lot of different virtue lists; they did not just have four virtues. Among the Christians, they did not just have three. That is sort of a misrepresentation; they talked about many different ones.
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Here is a quote from Aristotle’s book on rhetoric. He states that “the components of virtue are justice, courage [two of the four that I just mentioned], self-control, magnificence, magnanimity [being gracious], liberality, gentleness, practical and speculative wisdom.”
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I do not want you to think that there is a hard and fast step-by-step type of procedure that one goes through. Each writer states things a little differently.
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Even the unbeliever recognizes certain qualities of virtue. He just thinks that man on his own can produce them. The difference between the human viewpoint pattern and the divine viewpoint pattern is that in human viewpoint, there is a thought that man can generate this just from his own self-will. Volition is always at the core of the teaching in these areas. Whereas, in Christianity, we recognize man can do good and can do a qualitative good, but it does not have any value before God. God recognizes the root is corrupt; the fruit is always going to be tainted by the corrupt root of Adam’s original sin.
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We see both outside the Bible and within the Bible that there are as many different virtue lists, one might say, as there are writers. In some places, writers have different lists depending on the Scripture. We look at the context, and we should ask the question why is Paul emphasizing these virtues in this list and other virtues in other lists? It has to do with the context of why he is writing and to whom he is writing and what he is addressing in terms of a problem. We need to be careful not to set up some sort of absolute list and then follow that.
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adversity ----> endurance ----> tested, approved character ----> confidence (hope)
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(thlipsis) (hupomone) (dokime) (elpis)
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trial ---------> testing ------> endurance ----> perfect work maturation
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(peirasmos) (dokimion) (hupomone) (teleios)
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In , you have adversity which is just negative. We all face adversity. Then we face it through handling it correctly, and it develops endurance. Then endurance has a result in tested or approved character, which is spiritual growth beginning to mature and develop. Ending up with confidence.
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looks at it a little differently. “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.” The word for various in Greek is poikilos [poikiloj], which is where we get our word for polka dot. It has to do with that which is variegated or that which has different aspects to it. We may have similar tests in life, but they are always different. We never know when they are going to hit. That is why James uses the word “fall into.” You are just walking along and then boom, there is something that happens and you do not expect or anticipate it. It is all kinds of different trials. He emphasizes the trial or test aspect rather than the adversity aspect. A test can be an adversity type of test or a prosperity type of test. It can be expected or unexpected. The bottom line is that we are to count it or consider it joy.
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I think that James follows a great pattern here of introducing his basic themes at the very beginning. This is typical in most literature. You learned how to write this way when you were in elementary or junior high to put into your topical or introductory paragraph a basic foreshadowing of what you were going to say, the main ideas that were going to characterize your paper.
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The writers of the New Testament or the ancient world were not any different. Their opening introductions, whether writing or speaking, emphasized the basic themes and ideas that would be developed within the body of an epistle or within the body of the speech. After studying James, James writes to teach his readers how to count it all joy when they encounter various trials. He does not just start here and give this command to count it joy when you encounter trials. How do I do that? He gives an idea in the introduction and then he develops it throughout the body of the epistle.
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The basis for being able to count it all joy is similar to the basis that Paul has over in where he says we are able to glory or rejoice in adversity because we know something. James uses a causal participle to express the reason or the basis for being able to count it joy. “because you know that the testing of your faith produces patience.” That is what a test is: It tests the doctrine in your soul, what you have learned in Bible class and internalized. The test is going to give you an opportunity to use it or abuse it. You are either going to forget it or are going to apply it. That is the test.
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“But let patience [endurance] have its perfect work [maturing or completing, bringing you to the goal that God intends which is spiritual maturity], that you may be perfect [mature] and complete, lacking nothing.”
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(See chart above comparing Romans and James) We see that both start with some kind of test or adversity. Then James brings in the idea of testing, and then they both go to endurance. Paul in Romans leaves out anything between adversity and endurance. As you learn to endure according to Paul, you get tested or approved character, which is similar to what James is talking about when he says you are reaching the end that God desires: You are maturing. Paul then goes on to another level expressing hope.
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(See chart on next page comparing Romans, James and 2 Peter. Working up the ladder.)
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Peter lists faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control and then endurance. Before he gets to endurance, he has four other virtues listed that are not in either Paul’s list or James’ list. But any of them would agree, you start with a trial or adversity, but that produces different qualities. As I have studied this 2 Peter passage, I have come up with some new information related to some of these words which helps explain it a little more.
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You see an indication there after ‘endurance,’ you have ‘spiritual responsibility’ (eusebeia). I have usually translated that in relation to the spiritual life, but there is a lot more to it than just the spiritual life. That word is related to the Latin word piety. In their culture, that word involved and included a sense of obligation to behave a certain way. It is more than just the spiritual life. There is a certain responsibility to grow and mature within that leading to loving one another. And then love. That is the list we have in 2 Peter.
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Let’s begin by looking at . We need to understand the context. It is very important to always understand the context of passages. This part of Peter is really interesting. There is a lot of similarity between 2 Peter and Jude. As I pointed out in the Jude series, Jude is writing after Peter wrote 2 Peter. They are probably writing to the same group of churches somewhere in Asia Minor (what we call Turkey today). Peter was warning them that certain false teachers were going to come, and they were going to create a lot of trauma within the body of Christ. Jude is writing after they have shown up on the scene. There are a lot of interesting parallels between the two epistles, but Jude is not redundant to Peter, or the Holy Spirit would not have overseen the inspiration of Jude.
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Peter begins with a standard introduction that we have in many different letters. He introduces himself in verse 1 as “Simon Peter, a bondservant [slave] and apostle of Jesus Christ.” Then he gives his recipients “to those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.” Then he gives his blessing in verse 2 “grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge…”
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Or by means of the knowledge which is epignosis [e)pignwsij]. This indicates a fuller knowledge, a more immediate applicable knowledge than just brute facts or information.
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Since we have such a multiplication of information today, always remember that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. We are flooded with information; we cannot keep up with all the information. You have to have knowledge, and knowledge is not just information. Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. You do not have to know as much if you are wise because wisdom has to do with the proper use of knowledge. People think they know a lot just because they have a lot of information, but they do not have a lot of wisdom. They do not know how to utilize all of this data that is thrown at them constantly. They are just overwhelmed by it.
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Epignosis goes beyond just the basic knowledge of information and facts, which is gnosis, to a fuller, more applicable use of knowledge. This is important because epignosis is going to show up again in verse 3 and in a later development of this epistle.
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“as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge [epignosis] of Him who called us by glory and virtue, (verse 4) by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
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It is important to take a look at this whole section going all the way down to verse 11. Having set things up in verses 3-4 as his introduction or prologue, Peter then develops this starting in verse 5. If you look at the way your English Bible and sometimes Greek text are punctuated, they end verse 4 with a period, but actually verse 5 should not be seen as being a separate thought. It moves right from verse 3 to verse 5. There should not be that kind of break there. What Peter says in verses 5-7 is the outgrowth and the expectation that it becomes incumbent upon his readers when they understand what God has given them in verses 3-4. They state what God has supplied them.
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If you look at verse 3, you can see the connection “as His divine power has given to us …” Whenever you see anything related to giving, it is always a grace verb. The emphasis in the very beginning is on what God has given to us all, and then as you come down to verse 11, Peter ends up by saying “…will be supplied to you abundantly…” Will be supplied is the grace verb again. God gives in verse 3 and gives in verse 11 – that is the bracket.
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In technical literature, this is called an inclusio, and in artillery, it is called bracketing. In artillery, when you are shooting at a target, your first shell probably goes over the target to get the range. The second shell will probably fall short of the target to again lay out the range. Ideally, the third shell hits the target. It is bracketed; it defines the parameters of your topic. You have grace in verse 3 and grace in verse 11 and that frames his discussion and explanation.
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In light of this prologue in verses 3-4, Peter is using a literary device that is very similar to what we find in a lot of literature at this time in history. There is a lot of evidence of this similar vocabulary and wording from the time of about 200-300 BC all the way through the New Testament period. This is important to understand that Peter is writing like someone who is the product of a Greek culture, using that kind of language that gives us a little bit more of a perspective of what he is emphasizing. He is not writing like a Roman or like a Jew.
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This kind of vocabulary and structure was used in statements that were made in relation to a benefactor, where a city or a region had received certain blessings, provisions, or gifts, like military protection, from a king or someone else, and they would respond with some sort of statement of how this benefactor had provided for them. That is exactly how Peter frames it using similar language. He talks about how God has provided for us; He is the great benefactor who has given us everything related to life and godliness.
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In verses 5-8, he focuses on the fact that because God is this great benefactor and has provided us with His benevolent grace, those who have responded and been the beneficiaries of His grace are obligated and should be committed to a specific course of action, i.e., walking up this ladder of virtue.
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I have often taught this in another type of illustration because you run into people in the Christian life who are licentious as opposed to understanding obligation. Obligation is not legalism. Legalism is when you say my obedience to God is the cause of His blessing to me. God blesses us because we possess the perfect righteousness of Christ. That is grace; it is freely given to us and not on the basis of who we are or what we have done but because of God’s grace. Because God has given us something and it is so magnificent and incredible, there is something implicit within it that is an obligation to be responsible.
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If I were to give you a brand-new Lamborghini or Rolls Royce or BMW with the keys and the title, that car is now yours. That does not mean you should treat it any way you want to. You can drive it and never change the oil, but eventually you will just lock that engine up. You may never check the tires, and eventually the tire treads will wear down, and the tires will blow out. You may never tune the car up or check the fluids, and the next thing you know, you own this wonderful car, but it is sitting in your front yard up on blocks and doesn’t do you any good. You have been irresponsible in utilizing that which was given to you.
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If someone gives us something or for any other possession we have, there is an inherent obligation to take care of it and responsibly manage and use it. That is the idea here that God has given us so much in terms of our spiritual life, that implies a reciprocal responsibility on our part to utilize that so that it has the benefit in our life that God intended it to have.
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This is the pattern that Peter sets up here. In the beginning, it expresses what God has given, and then in verse 5 on, he talks about what that entails and what that should mean in our life. In verses 8-9, he contrasts it with the negatives of what he will say about the false teachers that are going to come in and cause problems for this congregation. In verses 10-11, he connects those who go up the virtue ladder to the future kingdom and their position to rule and reign with Christ. It has a tremendous logical flow to it, and we want to fit our understanding in the middle of this.
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We have examples of these kinds of honorific statements. For example, there was one commending a physician named Philistos of the island of Kos. “Therefore, so that all may know that we express appropriate appreciation to those who practice the policy of making us the beneficiaries of their philanthropies, be it resolved to commend Philistos of Kos, son of Nikarchos, and crown him.” There were literally thousands of examples in archeology of these kinds of statements that were made at that period of time.
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What Peter is doing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is just using this same literary style that we find in the ancient world at that time. But he is shifting the focus away from the benefactor in the first part to the obligation for every believer in the second part. He is answering a question, and that question is how do we get what is stated in “by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature…” That is Peter’s claim that we as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ can participate or partake of the divine nature. What does that mean?
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What it means is that there are certain attributes of God that we can imitate and that are shared. Theologians (I usually do not divide the attributes of God this way) have historically divided the attributes of God into two categories. Incommunicable attributes of God are those that God alone has. They are not reflected in His creatures to any degree. Then you have communicable attributes, and these are attributes that are shared and reflected to a limited or lesser degree in God’s creatures. The attributes of God that are shared with His creatures are part of what are known as the image of God.
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In , we read that God created man – male and female. He created them in the image and likeness of God. What does that mean? It means that mankind (male and female) is a finite representation of God to represent God and rule over creation. This involved not a physical representation but a representation in terms of his soul – his thinking ability, ability to lead, ability to create, ability to make moral decisions imitating the righteousness and justice of God. All of this would be part of man’s makeup. We summarize this in terms of his self-consciousness, his God-consciousness, and his moral-consciousness.
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But that image that man had as the image of God was perfect at the very beginning, a perfect reflection of God with perfect righteousness. It was untested righteousness, but it was still perfect righteousness. When Adam sinned, that image became marred and corrupted; it was not destroyed but was defaced. It was not removed but was just messed up and corrupted because of sin. There is a process whereby God is restoring that image in man, and that is part of the whole salvation process – the whole process of redemption and reconciliation.
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Paul alludes to this in “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be confirmed to the image of His Son…” The image starts off perfect. Man in Adam and Eve had that perfect reflection of God’s character, but when they sinned, that became corrupted. The only way that process begins to get reversed is in the process of sanctification in the spiritual life through God’s work in the believer. We are going to be conformed to the image of His Son.
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When Peter says we can be partakers of the divine nature, what this means is that through applying God’s promises and principles that are in His Word, in the process of spiritual growth and advance, the character of God begins to be developed within us. We imitate that and participate in the divine nature. The question that we should ask when we read is how do we become partakers or participators in the divine nature? How are God’s attributes going to be manifest in my life? How am I going to change?
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The answer is to walk up the virtue ladder in verses 5-7. By walking up that virtue ladder, as we have seen in Romans, James and 2 Peter, God’s character is manifest in us: the fruit of the Spirit. In this process, Peter is going to show how those who have received God’s grace in verses 3-4 can become participants in the divine nature and benefit fully in what God has given them, displaying God’s character and attributes in their own lives. He does this by going through these various virtues.
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A number of Greek scholars have observed the similarity in Peter’s literary structure and his language here as an imitation or reflection of other comments or statements in Greek letters at that time. One decree that goes back to 280 or 290 BC is a decree that honored Antiochos III or Antiochos the Great, the father of Antiochos Ephiphanes. “Inasmuch as Great King Antiochos has continued his ancestors’ policy of special favor toward all the Greeks, and has brought peace to some and has given aid to many who were in trouble both privately and publicly, and has brought liberty to some who had been enslaved, and during his entire reign has legislated with a view to benefiting mankind, having first rescued our city from slavery he declared it free.” You see the similar kind of pattern reflecting upon the benefits that had been given someone from someone else.
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As we look at the details and the structure of what Paul says in , it starts off in most English translations with the translation of the first Greek word as “as.” In Greek, it is hos, and the knee-jerk basic translation for hos is the word as. But it is often used in numerous places with the meaning of since or because. We lose the force of it when we translate it “as His divine power.” It should be translated “because His divine power has given to us all things…” Another thing that comes across here in the Greek is the phrase His divine power is stated in a genitive construction which is out of place here. That is why it is referred to in grammars as a genitive absolute. It is designed to focus our attention upon this phrase as a key phrase. It has taken a genitive and used it as a subject of a clause, so the focal point is on God’s divine power.
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But it is not just talking about His omnipotence. We think through the 10 attributes in the essence box: God is sovereign, righteous, just, love, eternal life, omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresence, veracity and immutability. When we look at the phrase His divine power, it is looking through the lens of God’s omnipotence to His whole character. Grammarians call this a periphrasis, where one attribute is taken, but it is really standing for the whole. It is not just saying this only comes from God’s omnipotence, but it comes from His whole being, His whole person. You could substitute this because God has given to us all things. But the emphasis he wants us to understand is that what is behind this gift is God’s omnipotence. Nothing is more powerful than God.
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So in the entirety of His character, but specifically the fact that He is an omnipotent God whose power cannot be thwarted or broken, God has given us these resources and has provided these things for us. He has given to us all things, Peter says. Not some things, not most things, not an abundance of things, but all things. It is an inclusive concept. This is a foundational doctrine in Scripture that God “has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness…” ()
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The Greek word that is translated life is zoe [zwh]. Life here does not reflect to just eternal life. That is our knee-jerk response: Yes, God gave us eternal life. That is not the focus here. It is juxtaposed in this combination with eusebeia [e)usebeia], which does focus on the spiritual side. Zoe in many passages also emphasizes physical life, the basic necessities of life. God recognizes this even in passages such as , which quotes from , that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Even in that statement from Deuteronomy, there is a recognition of physical life but also of spiritual life that comes from the nourishment of the Word of God.
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Scripture also emphasizes that there are basic necessities of life that we have to have in order to get anywhere in life. This is what is subsumed here that God provides for us, emphasized by Jesus in passages such as Mathew 6:25ff in the Sermon on the Mount. When he talks about all the flowers in the field that God arrayed, you should take no thought for all the details of life because God supplied for the flowers in the field and can do even more for you. God is going to provide for the physical necessities that we need in order to keep body and soul together to accomplish His will and His plan for our life.
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He has given us everything that relates to life and godliness, so no matter how bad things may appear where you are down to living in a one-room apartment and just having Ramen noodles three times a day, God still has a plan for your life. You are still alive, and you have the opportunity to minister to people. That may be exactly what God wants you to do - to be able to have a witness to others who are living in that same apartment complex eating all the various flavors of Ramen with you.
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God provides all that pertains to life and godliness. Eusebeia is translated godliness and is one of those ambiguous, vague words that sounds so holy (even holy is an ambiguous word), but it has lost its emphasis for us. We do not understand what it means. In the Old English and the development of English, godliness means God likeness. At the core of that word godliness, there is an element of truth that it is focusing on that part of God’s character so that we can be like God in certain areas of our character. It is related to the spiritual life. But there is more to eusebeia than simply the spiritual life. In fact, in the ancient world, many times in non-biblical literature, the word eusebeia often has the idea of duty or responsibility, so in this case, it would be the duty of the believer in relation to God’s plan for his life.
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The Greek word was eusebeia, and the Latin word or the Roman concept was pietas. I have a quote here from Cicero in his book on rhetoric. “Pietas warns us to keep our obligations to our country or parents or other kin.” It is related to being responsible and mature in how you handle the resources that have been given you from country, from parents, or from others. It emphasizes elements of reverence and loyalty to those to whom it is properly due whether it has to do with God or parents or social institutions or fellow citizens. In fact, pietas for the Romans was a high virtue that also included the idea of dogged determination and an unflinching devotion to duty. Something similar to endurance, hupomone [u(pomonh]. It was somebody who was determined and is not going to be taken off course, but he is going to fulfill his obligationsand his duty to those who have provided for him.
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This changes our understanding of eusebeia. It has to do with the spiritual life, but it has to do with the responsibilities and the obligations we have toward God who has given us so very much. He has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness, and it comes “through the knowledge [epignosis, more than just facts or just understanding the Gospel. It is moving beyond that basic knowledge of God] of Him, who called us by glory and virtue.” Glory stands for His character, and virtue emphasizes the moral excellence of God.
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“by which [His glory and virtue which stand for His essence] have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature…” It is a stress on knowing the Word of God; our duty and responsibility is to know God through the Scriptures. It is not just something that is optional. It is something that is fundamental, and without which, there can be no spiritual life or spiritual growth.

Romans 052b-Virtue, Character, and the Holy Spirit. .

Romans 5:3 NASB95
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance;
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Romans 052b-Virtue, Character, and the Holy Spirit.
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Hope is actually the end product as expressed in in this expression of the process of spiritual growth. This is not an absolute formula. We have a tendency to look at some things at times and say it is an absolute formula, yet there are several places in Scripture where this very similar process is described and they overlap. But I do not think these should be taken as rigid steps. We will see how the overlap fits together; you will understand what I mean by the time we are finished. We want to be sure we understand how the Scriptures present the spiritual life and the process of spiritual growth.
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“through whom [Christ] also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God.” This is an introduction and foreshadowing to the spiritual life, which he does not get into full bore until chapter 5 which sets up chapter 6 where he begins the main section dealing with spiritual life and spiritual growth.
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“And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice, exalt] in tribulations [adversities], [because we know] knowing that tribulation [adversity] produces perseverance [endurance]; and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence]. Now hope [confidence in God] does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
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We began to look at hope because hope is the end of the product in terms of how Paul talks about hope in just the epistle to the Romans, pointing out that more than 1/3 of the uses of hope in the New Testament are in Romans. The believer’s hope is not mentioned as a fruit of the Spirit but is a mental attitude of confidence that is developed in the believer through the application of Scripture, so that we can endure through trials. We might say that hope is faith on steroids because there is a close relationship between these two concepts.
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Hope is based on a past promise of a future reality. Just as faith grabs hold of a promise, so hope focuses on the future fulfillment of that promise. Faith precedes hope; hope builds on what faith originally grabs hold of and then looks at it with a greater degree of confidence. Hope provides the believer with confidence in a future reality that is so certain that it strengthens and toughens the believer’s mentality today to face, fight, and surmount unpleasant circumstances with a mentality of joy in the midst of difficulty.
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Years ago there was a book by a couple of Christian psychologists, who were both professors at Dallas Seminary at the time. That was back in a time when a lot of Christians and pastors were wrestling with what is the relationship between the Bible and psychotherapy. Unfortunately, the biblicists have lost that battle for the most part in terms of evangelicalism. Part of the reason is that a lot of Christians, even Christian theologians, cannot get past the camouflage of biblical terminology and a lot of biblical principles that do show up in the better models of so-called Christian psychology.
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If you have questions about why I have made those statements, you can listen to some of the lectures by Martin Bobgan that we had at the 2008 Chafer Seminary Bible Conference. The Bible teaches that we can face and surmount any problem in life. I am not talking about biochemical problems or problems that are medically based in terms of some kind of physiological or genetic-based disorder. I am talking about the problems many people face in life, even depression or problems with various emotions. God says that we can surmount those things by using His Word. It is not easy though.
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We live in a world today where people want it to be easy, and they do not want to really grab hold of the victor’s wreath of being able to face and surmount the difficulties of life on the basis of God’s Word. We are a spoiled generation. It is just amazing what the statistics are in terms of the “infantilism” of Western civilization adults.
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Do you realize that more Americans under the age of 50 watch the cartoon channels than CNN or Fox News? That is because we have created a culture that has idealized adolescence. Now, according to recent studies, adolescence does not end until you are 34! That is based on the fact that we have created a culture that has so idolized the teenage years. The term teenager entered into the lexicon of the English language at the beginning of World War 2. Before then, you went from being a child to somewhere around puberty you became an adult with all the responsibilities that went along with that. Now you go through this adolescence or teenage years that start at puberty at 11-12 and go until you are 34. The teenage fashions set the standard for adults, and adults want to talk and act like teenagers and do not want to assume responsibilities.
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What Paul outlines for the spiritual life and what the other writers of Scripture do as well is that life begins when you become an adult and can handle the responsibilities of adulthood. Life does not begin when you become a teenager. Part of the responsibilities of adulthood is learning how to face the realities, the difficulties, the adversities of life and utilize the tools that God has given us to face and surmount those difficulties. When we wrap ourselves in a cloak of fantasy and divorce ourselves from
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reality because we are living in an unreal world where we put all our focus on basically a teenager’s view of life and reality, then we are doomed to failure. When you create a whole culture that is based on that, then there is very little hope for the survival of that culture or civilization, which is where we are in terms of Western civilization.
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Life begins when you take on the responsibilities of being an adult. I think back on when I was a kid. “I just wish my parents would treat me like an adult.” People still say that, but what they mean, practically speaking, is they want to be treated like an adolescent. We need to learn what it means to be an adult. Being an adult means to face life with the principles that face the situations in the world in terms of reality and not in terms of some utopian dream or adolescent fantasy, not trying to recapture something we think we missed when we were 15, 16, 17, 18 years of age.
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It is amazing how many people when they hit certain stages in life – for some it is 40, for others it is 60 or 70 – and try to act out on missed opportunities to fulfill adolescent fantasies when they were young. It is just a sign of immaturity and a sign they have never grown up. They are caught in a teenage trap.
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Scripture is clear that we have to develop this mental attitude in hope. It is based on a confidence, based on a future reality. One of the things I did as I was wrestling with some different ideas was to deal with this issue of virtue. What we are talking about here are all virtues. A virtue is a moral excellence, a character quality. Down through the ages in extra-biblical literature from Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, he basically reflected Plato and Sophocles. On up into the Middle Ages, different philosophers have defined and categorized virtues in different ways.
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In the Middle Ages, they took the four classic virtues and added three Christian virtues of faith, hope and love to them. Then you have other people who talk about the virtue of hard work. But that is not part of the classic four. How do you distinguish a character quality from a virtue? It is nebulous and confusing. The Bible does not classify it that way. In fact, we look at various lists (we’ll look at later), and virtue (Greek word arête/ a)reth) is listed as part of these moral qualities. It is not set apart as a distinct quality – that comes out of Greek philosophy. The Bible instead looks at a range of behaviors that may be necessary for developing moral excellence, but even moral excellence is included within that process of spiritual maturation and character development.
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I was looking in the last few days at the field of ethics. I’m not talking about the biblical study of ethics. Some of this may have to do with Christian philosophers dealing with developing different elements of ethics and standards, how to teach ethics, how to inculcate ethics into people. There are about three schools of thoughts, and only two of them will concern us.
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One is the school of thought that the way you teach ethics is you teach the list of don’t do this and don’t do that. That has been viewed as a failure by some contemporary ethicists. Another group came along that emphasized virtue character. Rather than teaching a grocery list of dos and don’ts, what you do is you inculcate character into individuals and into children as they grow up. When they hit a certain ethical problem, rather than thinking in terms of a list of dos and don’ts, they make a decision from an inculcated character that is virtuous. There is a lot of value in looking at that.
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Because all empirical knowledge always has some truth to it and some element of falsehood to it because man being finite in his knowledge is always coming to know more and more things, man is going to get certain things right and certain things wrong. Besides the idea that ethics should be taught in terms of character formation first and foremost, the other element is the recognition that for there to be real character development, a person must live in light of his purpose. There is a teleology that is part of this virtue character type of ethics. They have to understand where they are going and make decisions today in light of a long-term reference point.
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That is not any different from what the Bible teaches in terms of the fact that as we mature, we come to understand the confidence, the hope, that future reality that God has for us, and we begin to learn to live today and make decisions today in light of our destiny, in light of where God is taking us in His plan, which is not just limited to here and now on this planet but in terms of our future destiny to rule and reign with the Lord Jesus Christ when He returns in the millennial kingdom.
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My third point is that “hope provides the believer with confidence in future reality so certain that it strengthens and toughens the believer’s mentality today to face, fight and surmount unpleasant circumstances with a mentality of joy in the midst of difficulty.” We went beyond Romans to Paul’s use of the word hope in other epistles and discovered that he says basically the same thing that he does in Romans.
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We are going to look at non-Pauline writings - Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, and James. Those were all written primarily to Jewish Christian audiences. In the early church, more than half of the Christians were Jews, and the earlier you go the greater the percentage of Jews there were even throughout Asia Minor and other areas. The modus operandi of the apostles was to go to the synagogue first, and from there, those who became converts and trusted in Jesus as Messiah established other churches.
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Hope is used in four passages in , , , . It has this same idea of a confident expectation, a future that is so certain that it impacts present reality. The writer of Hebrews in chapter 3 has shifted to a focus on challenging the Christians that he is writing to not to give up in the face of pressure, not to give up on their spiritual life in the face of adversity, specifically persecution. There is good evidence that these were Jewish believers, who were former priests in Israel. The writer of Hebrews is writing to a former priestly, Levitical community in Judea that is coming under a certain amount of persecution, opposition and hostility from Jews who were not believers in Jesus as Messiah. They are at a point where they want to give up.
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You have the same kind of situation we are talking about in . There is external adversity and pressure and the temptation to just go with the flow of the culture around you rather than holding firm to the truth. The comparison that the writer of Hebrews sets up here is the failure of the Exodus generation to truly trust in God once they had been redeemed from Egypt and were out in the wilderness and the failure of not looking forward to the Promised Land, which is the focal point here of this passage and was their future, their destiny, and what was referred to as their Rest, which would come once they entered the land that God had provided for them.
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The writer of Hebrews is warning them not to give up because if those to whom he is writing give up, they are going to miss out on their role and responsibility in the future Rest of the millennial kingdom. They will be like the Exodus believers who failed to persevere and endure in the wilderness. They let the pressure of the negative external circumstances cause them to turn away from the promise of God and focus back on the leeks and the garlic in Egypt. They wanted to go back where they had convinced themselves that life was really easier under slavery than it is out here trusting God. Remember that every day God provided food for them in terms of manna, provided for their clothing and shoes that never wore out during the entire 40 years in the wilderness, provided water for them; and yet they were ungrateful and rejected God’s provision and wanted to go back to Egypt.
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As the writer of Hebrews comes to the end of his 2nd instructional section in , there is a comparison between Moses and Christ in “And Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which would be spoken afterward, but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm to the end.” Remember we are a temple to God, both individually and corporately. That is the idea of a house here.
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This is not a warning that if you do not hold fast you are going to be kicked out of the house (lose your salvation). The house here is comparable to the temple and serving in the temple. A future role that we as believers are going to have is serving and ruling and reigning with the Lord Jesus Christ in the millennial kingdom. If we are failures in the Christian life in this life and lose rewards, which is the presentation of privileges and responsibilities at the Judgment Seat of Christ that are positions we will have in the millennial kingdom, then we will be just like the Exodus generation of Israelites that failed to enter into the Promised Land. Were they still going to be saved? Were they still free from the slavery in Egypt? Sure they were. Because of disobedience to God, they failed to be able to realize all the blessings that God had promised to them. That was left for another generation.
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We need to “hold fast to the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm to the end.” The Greek word that is translated confidence is parresia [parr(hsia], which has to do with openness or boldness. The same word that is used in “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace…” It has that idea of a robust confidence in our future destiny. Because of that, we are able to hold firm to the end.
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is one of those passages that everyone loves to ask questions about because on the surface it appears as if this is a warning again that if one does not persevere or endure or if one falls away, then there are those who teach that this indicates that you can lose your salvation or maybe you were not saved to begin with (the Lordship variation on it).
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The reality in is that the writer is talking about believers, those who have trusted in Jesus as Messiah. Verse 4 “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened…” When you do a word study on photizo [fwtizw], which is the Greek word for enlightenment, it indicates somebody who has become a believer. We studied this last week in where Paul is praying that having “the eyes of your understanding being enlightened,” they would understand the knowledge of God’s will. It is based on the fact of the perfect tense participle of a previous completed action of enlightenment.
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Verse 4 “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift…” It does not mean just tasting in the sense of sampling or getting a hint of what it tastes like, but it means completely chewing it, eating it, and assimilating it and making it a part of your body. This again is a word indicating that they are truly saved – “…have become partakers of the Holy Spirit [indicates complete participation with the Holy Spirit], and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come.”
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Verse 6 “if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance…” If you reject what God has given you, there reaches a point of no return. Not because God’s grace is not there but because after a person has rejected grace for so long and pursues carnality, it hardens the heart and the soul to a point where practically speaking they will not turn back, recover or reverse course. They have reached a point of their own perversion and decline – a point of no return.
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It is in that context in that Paul says, “And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end.” Do not be overcome by negative circumstances; do not let yourself give in to thoughts that are basically generated by self-absorption and self-pity. Those are always generated by a false view of reality, based on false expectations. People just have wrong expectations about life. They think life is going to be wonderful, and that there is not going to be any difficulty or heartache. They have this utopic view of reality that gets shipwrecked on the shoals of reality.
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If you are a biblical Christian, you understand that this is the devil’s world, and there are going to be bad things that happen to good people. Not because God is out of control or has lost control, but that bad things happen because for the time being, God is allowing His creatures to exercise free will, and in the exercise of free will, they are going to make bad decisions and experience consequences of those bad decisions. Sometimes those consequences pile up – one bad consequence upon another – until you create just a systemic mess. In the midst of that systemic mess, we are trying to live and have a measure of stability, but chaos has been the result of millions of people making bad decisions and compounding bad decisions. Then we say, “Why did God let this happen?” We blame God rather than recognizing that the reason things happen the way they are is the result of a plethora of bad decisions on the part of hundreds of thousands of millions of people.
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It is not God’s fault. God is allowing creatures to be free. To allow a person to be free means that they are going to be allowed to make bad decisions. You cannot just allow them to be free and to make good decisions. Only if you buy into a liberal, utopic view of reality. When you do not believe that there is real evil and depravity in the world and have a somewhat utopic view that reality can be improved upon and perfected, then what happens is that you are not going to make plans that take into account the real horrors that occur in history. Sometimes they are natural disasters; sometimes they are disasters caused by evil human beings, such as the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The only way you can explain that is because God has given man freedom, and freedom means that God is not going to step in and say “Since you made that bad decision, there will not be any bad consequences from that.”
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If you are going to allow people to experience the benefits of success from good decisions, you have to allow them to experience the opposite, or it is not freedom. The corollary of freedom is that people are going to make bad decisions, and they are going to experience the consequences of that. When we face that from the vantage point of God’s Word, we have reality, and we can understand that God is still in control and that the end game is going to be good.
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That is why Paul says in “And we know that all things work together for good…” God works them together for good. It does not say that all things are good, but that God in His sovereignty is going to bring His plan together at the end, and when we are in heaven and have that eternal perspective, we are going to look at what happened and say that was good and right. It should not have been and could not have been any other way because when it all comes together, this is what brings about the glorification of God and the vindication of God’s character and His plan in the angelic conflict.
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“And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end.” Do not give up. Develop a mental attitude of toughness. Not toughness in terms of the world, which is toughness for its own sake, but it is a toughness because you understand reality and are dependent upon God.
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“Thus, God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise [in reference to the promise made to Abram in the Old Testament] the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us.” There is the analogy: Just as Abram was able to face situations in his life because of the promise of God, and when he grasped the hope of the future fulfillment of God’s promise, then he could face the challenges of life in front of him. That is the same thing that we have.
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“for the law made nothing perfect…” The Mosaic Law could not accomplish perfection; that was not its purpose. Its purpose was not to show you could be perfectly righteous because no one ever kept the Law. Even today, no one can keep the Law. That shows that we are incapable of keeping the Law because no one ever did it. It is not to show that we can do it but to show we cannot do it. Since we cannot do it, God has to do it for us. That is why He has provided a Savior.
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“For the law made nothing perfect; on the other hand, there is the bringing in of a better hope, through which [eternal life through Jesus Christ] we draw near to God.” That is Jesus Christ – He has a better promise of eternal life because He paid the penalty for sin. We have that confidence, that expectation of eternity with God.
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“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.” The focal point is not on faith in faith, not on faith in the fact that it should all just work all good, not in faith as some abstract principle. It is faith in the One who promised. It is not even faith in the promise because what makes the promise valid, solid, something we can depend on is the dependable character of God who is behind the promise. These verses give us a focal point on understanding faith.
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Another place where we see the word hope is in “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” The hope that is living is not a dead hope, not a hope based in some optimistic wish, not based in feeling or emotion, not based in something that can change, but it is a hope that based on a living reality that Jesus Christ rose physically and bodily from the grave.
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That is what changed the disciples. They were a bunch of cowards running and hiding from the Roman soldiers and from the Jewish officials when Jesus was arrested. After the crucifixion, they all went into hiding and had absolutely no courage whatsoever. They did not want to follow Him to the cross, and so they all ran and hid. Two days later when Jesus rose from the dead, then they saw Him, and it changed them. All but one, that I know of, died a martyr’s death. John is the only apostle who died from the natural cause of old age.
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All the others gave their life for the belief that Jesus Christ rose physically and bodily from the grave because they saw Him. If you are a coward, you are not going to give your life for a lie. Maybe one of them might but not 10 of them. They gave their life for what they knew to be true because they had seen Him in His body with the nail prints in His hands and the spear wound in His side. It is a living hope, a confident expectation that we will be raised from the dead. Just as Christ had victory over death (), we will have victory over death.
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“Who through Him [Christ] believe in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.” It is a correlation between that confidence of our future resurrection in the presence of God in a physical bodily resurrection and Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Your faith and hope are in God and His character and understanding what He has done in history. It is not like what you see in the movies when after Jesus has been crucified, the apostles come together and are fearful, and suddenly they hear this disembodied voice. That is not how it was – it was not something in their head, not a psychological resurrection. They did not say like you hear at some funerals, “They are always going to live because they live inside me.” That is not what the Bible teaches in the Old or New Testament.
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They are alive because they are alive! They have a new physical but immortal body, an incorruptible body that will never fade away. This is based upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ who conquered death. It is not thinking you cannot deal with the fact that you will never see someone again because they just disappeared into an existential nothingness, so you will pump yourself up and just make yourself feel better by saying, “They will live inside me; they will live in my heart and in my memories.”
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That is not what the Bible is talking about. Jesus did not rise from the dead because the disciples created a new myth that gave them somehow a psychological boost. They saw a bodily-resurrected Savior, and there was no doubt in their minds at all. It was not a mass hallucination.
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“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts [mind, thinking or innermost part of man, kardia/kardia] and always be ready to give a defense [well thought out, logical explanation of why you believe what you believe] to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.” Do you know what that presupposes? It is so obvious that you have a living hope that people are going to ask you about it. I won’t embarrass anybody by saying, “How many people have ever had anybody ask you why you have such hope in the face of death?”
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That is what this is saying. When people ask you why you have this living hope, why are you so hopeful, then you can give a reasoned, logical, articulate answer explaining why you have this hope. Some people are going to have a more logical and more reasoned explanation than others. It is not saying in this verse to be ready to give a defense like Paul would give. It is not saying to be ready to give a defense of the gospel like John Calvin or like Darby or like Scofield or some other good Christian thinker would give. It just says to be ready to give your answer the best that you can do. It is not your explanation that is going to convince them; it is God the Holy Spirit. But we have a responsibility to give the best, most logical, most reasoned answer to why we have this living hope.
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In , there is a progression here. “…(we) rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” The same word that is used there, which is the Greek word kauchaomai [kauxaomai], is used again in verse 3. Usually most translations do not translate it with the same English word. Some will say “we glory in hope” in verse 2, and then “we rejoice (or boast) in adversities” in verse 3. But it is the same word in both places.
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There is a difference between joy, using the verb chairo [xairiw], which is more of a mental attitude, stability. It leans toward this sense of exultation, but remember that is not the main idea. When Jesus said, “My joy I give to you,” just a couple of hours later He was alone in Gethsemane and was in emotional turmoil Matthew tells us. The pressure upon Him to walk away from the cross was so great that He sweated drops of blood. That can only happen when a person is under tremendous physical pressure. But He did not fail that test and did not become emotional and walk away from it.
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He still had joy even in the midst of emotional pressure, so joy in the sense of chairo has that idea of strength and stability of a mindset. But kauchaomai, which is the word we have here, goes beyond that to a physical exultation, a happiness. This is the basic meaning of this word we find in the Scripture that has the idea of exultation, of boasting, of praising something. We find that Paul uses the word five times in Romans.
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The first two times he uses it, he uses it in a negative sense of boasting in a wrong, arrogant attitude. He uses it to refer to those Jewish leaders who boasted in the Law. They asserted their ethnicity and their relationship to Abraham in the fact they were given the Mosaic Law. They so exalted in the position, the blessing, the privilege that God had given them that they were lording it over everyone else. That was how Paul used boasting in a negative sense, for example in .
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In , he uses it three times in verses 2, 3 and 11. In all these places, he is talking in a positive sense in exalting in hope. We are so focused and our thinking has been so transformed by the realization of our destiny. It is not something that you just make up. You truly exalt when you hit hard times, when you hit opposition, when you come under that particular pressure. Paul uses the term in a couple of other passages. One he quotes from the Old Testament twice.
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and , Paul summarizes an Old Testament passage. “He who glories [boasts], let him glory in the Lord.” This is sort of a summary of what Jeremiah states in
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. Quoting the Lord, “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, nor let the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord, exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these I delight…”
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Paul took all of that and summarized it as boasting in the Lord. If you are going to boast, boast in the Lord, not in your own effort. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” That is a negative, and it not a focus on what we have accomplished, who we are, or what we have done.
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“But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ…”
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, he is dealing with the fact that he has an unexpected and unpleasant thorn in the flesh. God brought that adversity (thlipsis/qliyij) into his life in order to keep him humble, to teach him not to be arrogant because of the blessings of revelation that God had given to Paul.
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“…Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities [weaknesses], that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” Boasting in this sense is a positive exultation.
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As we look at , we see a progression here. “And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [adversities, negative external pressure, thlipsis], knowing that tribulation produces perseverance [endurance]; and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence]. We have a stair step progression to spiritual maturity. Paul is looking at it as a negative. thlipsis is the noun from the verb thlibo [qlibw], which means to crush, to press, to compress something, to squeeze something. It came to be applied to those situations when people are pressed or squeezed by negative external circumstances.
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We all face those because we live in a fallen world. We live in a world where everyday we wake up and say we are going to do five things today and then get none of them done because of things that interfere. If it was an ideal world, we would get all five things done within the first 30 minutes, and then we could just go to the beach for the rest of the day! But that is not how life is. Most of the time when we set up the five things that are due today, then things interfere, and the next day we have that same list of five things to accomplish.
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We live in a fallen world and are constantly fighting against reality which is negative. We deal with negative circumstances whether people and people-oriented problems or events which have a wide range of sources. The events can be generated by the weather, such as droughts, hurricanes, tornados. I have good friends who live over in Birmingham, and they have had horrendous tornados in the last couple of years. They were out of school for 9 days because of all the damage that was done by tornados.
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Adversity can come from health. We have a number of people in the congregation and people in your family who are dealing with all kinds of health challenges and difficulties. We complain and we gripe, rather than saying God is in control, so I need to figure out how this negative circumstance gives me the opportunity to exalt because I know God is using this to produce spiritual growth and maturity.
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adversity ----> endurance ----> tested, approved character ----> confidence (hope)
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(thlipsis) (hupomone) (dokime) (elpis)
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The word thlipsis has to do with that external pressure of adversity that comes, and it is closely related to another Greek word stenochoria [stenoxwria], which is in where it has the idea of narrowness. We have this word adversity (thlipsis) which means pressure and the other word relates to it as narrowness where you feel squeezed by the circumstances of life.
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The next step is that it produces perseverance and is best translated endurance, the ability to hang in there. hupomone [u(pomonh] means to abide under something – not to escape it but so stay in the circumstance and have joy in the midst of the negative pressure.
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The third step is that it results in a tested or approved character. This is the noun dokime [dokimh], which also shows up in dealing with the judgment seat of Christ to see whether we have approved character. That is when everything is burned up, and those who have gold, silver, and precious stones have approved character. Those who have everything burned up as wood, hay and straw are not approved, and there are no rewards. They are saved, yet as through fire, the passage says in verse 15.
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We have tested and approved character. It has been evaluated and has passed the test, and this in turn increases our confidence in God.
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The next passage I want to took at that connects to this and has another similar but different series of events is in . (Verse 2) “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.” Here he uses the word chara [xara] in the Greek, which is the word related to the verb chairo [xairw], meaning to be joyful. It is not the same idea, but it is similar to the idea of kauchaomai. kauchaomai is more of an emotional exultation that goes with it; whereas, chara indicates the solid mental attitude of stability, tranquility, peace and happiness even in the midst of trials.
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Paul says in verse 2 “…count it all joy when you fall into various trials.” The idea of falling into the trials is that you never know what is going to happen. You wake up in the morning and think everything is laid out for the day. Then things domino, and it is not at all what you expected. You just fall into those trials. The word for trials is not a word meaning adversity; it is tests. It can be a good situation, a test of prosperity, or a negative situation, a test of adversity.
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We are able to have joy in the midst of those circumstances (verse 3) “because you know that the testing of your faith produces patience [endurance, hupomone].” That brings in the idea that the testing is another form of the noun based on dokime. It is that same idea of testing for approval. It is not testing to see where we fail but testing to see where we are succeeding.
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“But let patience have its perfect work [God’s intended result, teleios/teleioj], that you may be perfect [mature] and complete, lacking nothing.”
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adversity ----> endurance ----> tested, approved character ----> confidence (hope)
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(thlipsis) (hupomone) (dokime) (elpis)
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trial ---------> testing ------> endurance ----> perfect work maturation
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(peirasmos) (dokimion) (hupomone) (teleios)
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If you face the maturation process and do not know what to do, God has revealed it to you in His Word, so you need to pray to God to reveal the wisdom that we need in order to handle whatever that adversity is. But we have to ask in faith () trusting that God will give us the answer. Then believing His answer and not being like the one who is double-minded, which is the idea of doubting or being of two minds. That is the person who says – “I can do it the human viewpoint way or do it the divine viewpoint way. I could go with psychology and go see my psychobabble counselor, or I could apply the promises of God’s Word. I just do not know what to do.” That is being double-minded.
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“But let him ask in faith, with no doubting [no double-minded], for he who doubts is like the wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” There is no stability there whatsoever.
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Next time we will look at , which gives us a different series of events. All of these are describing the same process but just from a slightly different vantage point emphasizing different elements in our spiritual growth. But they are all based on learning to truly trust in God’s Word, understanding that He is taking us through a process, like a boot camp, in preparing us for a future destiny to rule and reign with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is now that we develop that character and the qualities that will be needed to function as leaders in that future environment.

Romans 054b-The Virtuous Christian Life. ;

Romans 5:3 NASB95
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance;
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Romans 054b-The Virtuous Christian Life ;
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This is such an important section that I want to go back and just hit the high points as we make our progression. In , Paul introduces a group of virtues. Paul says in verse 2, “through whom [Christ] also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God.” Hope in the Bible always speaks of a confidence, a certainty, and not a wishful optimism but a certain absolute always looking forward to the fulfillment of a promise. A promise made by God, therefore it is guaranteed in terms of its certain future fulfillment.
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I want you to pay attention to this phrase “glory of God” because we are going to see something similar to it in where we are reminded we grow through the knowledge of Him “who called us by glory and virtue.” That term glory is a term that is often used as a synonym for the character of God.
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, we “rejoice in hope of the glory of God,” that is, His character because that is what guarantees and stands behind all the promises which focus on that future destiny.
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Verse 3 “And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice]…” It is the same word used in verse 2 (rejoice in hope), so most English translations changed to a different word, but it should stay the same so that we understand that there is a consistency here. Verses 3-5 “…glory in tribulations [adversities], knowing [because we know] that tribulation produces perseverance [endurance]; and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence]. Now hope [confidence in God] does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
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The focal point here is on hope in terms of the spiritual life and the fact that this is grounded in the certainty of our salvation. From God’s perspective, there is an integral connection between our past, present and future salvation. We are saved at the cross: one decision, trust in Christ as Savior is our justification by faith. This is phase 1 salvation or justification salvation. We have ongoing spiritual growth – phase 2 salvation. Then future glorification salvation – phase 3.
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In the mind of God, there is an integral connection between these three. What Paul is explaining here is how removed from “this grace in which we stand,” which is our position as saved new creatures in Christ, to the growth process to its ultimate culmination in the plan of God.
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Hope is a “living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (). So it is not a wishful optimism, a dead hope, a hope in hope, or hope for hope’s sake because the alternative is just a nihilistic pessimism. It is hope in a certain reality that is indicated by the resurrection of Christ. Our hope is in God (). We are to be able to give a solid, well-reasoned, constructed answer to people for the hope that is in us.
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That is important because there is not a canned answer. People ask us questions, and they come from all kinds of directions. We need to really internalize and understand what the Word of God teaches because when people ask questions of us and we get those opportunities to explain why we believe what we believe, it is never (trust me!) in all my years from the direction of whatever it is we have studied. It is just going to be based on the knowledge that we have in our own soul.
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In , we see this stair step of virtues. We start with rejoice in hope [confidence]. We also rejoice because we know that adversity produces endurance. Then endurance leads to character, and character leads to confidence.
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adversity ----> endurance ----> tested, approved character ----> confidence (hope)
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(thlipsis) (hupomone) (dokime) (elpis)
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Last time I introduced you to a new term – a new concept to me as well. This was a logical device that originated with the Greeks called a sorites. It was a form of logic that was developed in Greek philosophical thought that was related to a chain of syllogisms or a chain of individual items, where the items each build on the previous one. You move from maybe your minor premise to a conclusion. It is thought historically that this developed from Eubulides of Miletus (an island off Greece).
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The term sorites comes from the Greek word soros, which means heap. Because it related to a puzzle that was referred to as the Heap, and so that is why it was called soros, and the type of logic was sorites. It was on the idea that would you describe a single grain of wheat as a heap? No. Would two grains of wheat be a heap? No. Would three grains be a heap? No. You can follow that on out until you get to would 500 grains of wheat be a heap? No. Would 1000 grains be a heap? Well, maybe. If 999 is not a heap, and you said if you go from 0-1, you do not have a heap; then why is the addition of one little piece of wheat to 999 make it a heap?
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One of the other forms of this kind of logic related to what was called the Liar. Most of these have a paradox imbedded in these. There is a certain aspect of a conundrum or puzzle related to these kinds of logical puzzles. The liar says that he is lying, so is what he says true or false? If a liar says that he is lying, how do you know? If he is lying, then he is telling the truth. How can he be telling the truth if he is a liar?
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There was another example of this called the Bald Man. Would you describe a man with one hair on his head as bald? What if he has two hairs or three? You can see it is the same thing as the Heap. If he has 1000 hairs on his head, is he bald? What about 1001? If he is no longer bald with 1001, how did one hair make that much difference?
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That was the idea.: moving from one step to another through a series of logical chains to reach a conclusion. We see this exemplified in a lot of different types of literature in developing certain statements. There are a number of these sorites in the Scripture. Sometimes they are referred to as a ladder. That is the term I am using here is the virtue ladder which is developed in these passages – there is a progression.
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But there are some things that we need to try to understand that these progressions are not the same in every passage. We also looked at . In verses 3-4, there is a sorites. “Knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience [endurance]. But let patience have its perfect work [end role or end game], that you may be perfect [mature] and complete, lacking nothing.” When we add that, we see that there are more different stages mentioned by James than by Paul in Romans, but there is a certain similarity. They are talking about the same thing but are using different vocabulary and emphasizing perhaps different intermediate stages in light of the theme of what they are teaching in their particular book.
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trial ---------> testing ------> endurance ----> perfect work maturation
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(peirasmos) (dokimion) (hupomone) (teleios)
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What I am pointing out here is that the writers of Scripture do not have a hard and fast, 6-stage process that they all refer to. Spiritual growth is not a rigid, mechanical thing. There are mechanics involved. If you watch a ballerina on stage, there are mechanics to ballet. There are mechanics to music, to art, to anything in life. Watching a ballerina dance on stage is anything but mechanical. Watching an artist draw is anything but mechanical. Watching a concert pianist is anything but mechanical, yet it is grounded on mechanics. Mechanics has to do with the fact that you have to understand certain basic techniques and procedures in order to eventually produce something that has beauty, esthetic value, and is very smooth.
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I used to hate that when I was taking piano lessons or later in junior high and high school playing trombone and having to play technique exercises. How boring. But you learn basic skills and get certain things in the muscle memory in your fingers or in your enbouchure, and that would enable you later to play better and have a much more artistic result because you had mastered the mechanics.
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The writers of Scripture under inspiration of the Holy Spirit are making it clear that there are certain stages in the growth process that we all pass through that are similar but do not present just a hard and fast stage 1, stage 2, stage 3 that are the same for every writer. That brings us to the other side of spiritual growth, which is that it is dynamic.
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There are certain mechanics, certain basic elements that are there, but they do not develop in the same way and in the same order in every person. Some things certainly follow in the same order because there is a logical relationship, but we grow at different rates and at different stages because we are different people. One person has a sin nature that trends toward asceticism, and another person has a nature that trends toward licentiousness.
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Another person has a sin nature that is heavy on his area of weakness that is producing a lot of overt or mental attitude sins, while another person has a sin nature that does not emphasize overt or mental attitude sins so much but emphasizes a lot of personal morality, which is generated by his own flesh and not by God. Isaiah refers to this in “our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.” They do not measure up to His absolute standard. That does not mean that they are not good, but it is a relative good. It is a good in relation to what other human beings produce, but in terms of God’s absolute standard, it is a relative good.
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In these lists that we find in passages such as , , , ; these are similar but different. They are a list of virtues and often contrasted with vices. Virtue is a term that we get our English word from, the Latin word virtus, but the Greek word that we find in the Scripture is arête [a)reth]. They named the camp for the teens up in Colorado Camp Arete, and it refers to moral excellence. That is its core meaning, but it is not quite how the New Testament uses it.
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We are not going to find our understanding of the New Testament meaning of virtue by studying Plato or Sophocles or Aristotle because the background for the New Testament is not 5th or 6th century Greek thought – it is the Old Testament. The concept of virtue in the New Testament is not quite the same as you would find it in Greek philosophical thought. There is an overlap of meaning, but it is not going to be identical. The thinking of Peter as a Jewish fisherman had its foundation and framework in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament.
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It is interesting that in the Old Testament, the word arête is only used in the Septuagint five or six times, in which case it refers to the praise of God in relation to His absolute standard of righteousness and justice. God is praise worthy because of who He is. It is not used of human beings. We have a different concept going on because what they bring into the New Testament is foundationally a concept of virtue that is related to the character of God. That is profound once you sit down and begin to work with that a little bit. An extremely important observation for us to make is why is that word used somewhat rarely in the New Testament? Peter uses it a couple of times, and Paul uses it a couple of times, and that is about it. What is the significance of this in terms of biblical thought?
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One of the places that Peter uses it is in . Both 1 and 2 Peter, Hebrews, James and Jude are Jewish epistles which are written to Jewish believers in Jesus, as Messiah. The common background of thinking, the shared lexicon between the writer of these epistles and their audience is clearly going to be the Old Testament. In addressing these Jewish believers in , Peter says “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” The Greek word translated praises is arête. It is talking about the excellence of God’s character that is praiseworthy. That is too many words to use to translate it, but that is the idea that we can proclaim the quality of God’s character: His righteousness, justice, grace, love, all of that which is manifest in the way He works with His creatures. I think that is an important way to understand this concept of virtue in the New Testament.
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Classically, Plato categorized four virtues which became standard in Greek thought. A note on the background in Greek thought: Originally the word arête had the idea of a person, object or animal that exemplified the perfection of that person, object or animal. So a dog that approached the ideal dog would have the virtue of dogness. A man who exhibited all the positive qualities of manhood would be described with the Latin idea of virtus, which focused on the male who had those qualities of moral excellence related to a man. He exhibited courage, honor, and self control. A flower would approach the excellence of flowerness and would have the virtue of a flower. The term virtue is a word that would have a lot of different ideas and nuances depending on the context and what it was related to.
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That was the original meaning of virtue as an object, person or animal that exhibited the best of what that individual thing was supposed to be. As Greek thought developed, Socrates used the term to include a more moral or ethical sense. In his thinking, the maturing or growing person who was gaining knowledge and insight into the world around him and into his purpose and meaning in life, which Socrates referred to as the good, exhibited virtue by growing and maturing in that particular area as he gained insight into the good and lived in light of it.
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Plato took that and developed it into the four classic virtues of wisdom, courage, prudence and justice. Aristotle was Plato’s student. Plato was an idealist, so he is operating from a purely rationalistic viewpoint: You are starting with ideas in the mind and then working your way out to understand reality. With Aristotle, you start with sense perception, and then on the basis of what you learn through your senses through empirical analysis, then you develop your understanding of everything in the world. He started with the idea of virtue and also held to the idea that Socrates had introduced that it had a moral or ethical sense.
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Aristotle developed that idea of ethics to include two different kinds of ethics. A practical virtue included courage, temperance and generosity, which he called dianoetic. dia [dia] meaning through, and nous [nouj] is the Greek word for mind. So it was a more thoughtful, mental attitude type of virtue: ways in which the mind worked, reason was used which included insight wisdom, knowledge, and art. For him art was not drawing; art is producing something in life.
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Why is that important? Greeks have this tradition of developing this whole idea of virtue, so there is a very strong moral and ethical nuance within pagan Greek thought. I am using the word pagan in its standard dictionary meaning, that is, non-Judeo/Christian, non-biblical thought. They write all kinds of things exploring the idea of virtue, and then they come to the Old Testament, which is God’s revelation to man through Moses, Joshua, David, the prophets, and we do not find the word. Now that is an important thought to meditate upon.
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I think that is because the Bible and God’s thinking comes from a different starting point than Greek thought. Greek thought starts within man, but God starts with Himself. We read at the very beginning in that God created the heavens and the earth. There is no defense of God because God is the one who created the entire human race and knows that every human being has imbedded within him something called the imago dei in Latin (image of God). “…let Us make man in Our image…male and female He created them.”
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Those are really important verses to think about in relation to this whole concept of virtue because God created Adam and Even in His image. First of all, it means that a human being was to reflect or resemble God in certain ways. A human being, male and female, possesses this whole quality of imageness, and it was taking the infinite character of God. Infinite applies to every aspect of God’s character: His knowledge, presence, power, righteousness, justice, ethical virtues. When God creates man (Adam) as opposed to the angels, He compresses His character into a finite representation. That is really hard to get our mental fingers around, but what that means is that every human being in that pre-fallen case of Adam was designed to be finite representation of God. So you can look at man, a human being being what God intended him to be, and there is an echo of that original meaning of arête. A thing approaches its intended design; it has virtue. It’s not because the Greeks got it right; it is that there is a residual element of certain truth that hangs around within human thought.
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So man is created to be this representation of God, so you look at man and can see God. Man was created perfect and righteous. It is an untested righteousness, but it is still righteous. He is as righteous as God is because he is in the image of God. It is an untested, unqualified righteousness, and that is the purpose of the test in the garden related to the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What happens in the Garden of Eden? Satan has taken on the form of a serpent in order to entice the woman. The serpent was the most subtle of all creatures, indicating that he is tricky, cunning, and he has thought through an approach to the woman that is going to entrap her.
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Eve gets sucked right in, and she begins to question God. Satan says, “Has God really said this?” with the implication “Is this really the right thing? Is this really good? Isn’t God holding something back from you?” She begins to evaluate God. What made her an evaluator or judge of God? Nothing. Rather than saying, “God said we are not to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and then turning her back on the serpent and walking away; the wheels start turning, and it is not long before she is looking and lusting after that fruit. She thinks somehow God is withholding something from her. She eats, and then she leads Adam into that sin.
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After the Fall, we talk about them as being corrupt. There is something that happens within the nature of mankind as mankind, so that they are not what they were prior to that disobedience to God. Now they have been corrupted by sin. It does not mean they are as bad as they can be; it does not mean that they are always going to do bad, evil things; it does not mean that every human being is an Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Iran’s Ahmadinejad. It means that every human being has a predilection towards disobedience to God, and in doing that, he is capable of doing horrible things. Or he can do good things that may have horrible consequences. His imageness though has not been changed. It has maybe been defaced or marred or distorted, but we are still in the image of God. Something has happened to that, so it is not what it was prior to the Fall.
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We go through the Old Testament and have all the things that happened. We have the pre-flood civilization and the worldwide judgment on man where God says the thoughts of the human heart are evil continuously. Not a good commentary on the basic predisposition of the mind. Then after the flood, the first thing that happens is the rebellion against God at the Tower of Babel. God decides He is going to go to Alternate Plan B, which He always knew about from eternity past, and He selects Abraham to work through.
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We come to the New Testament and the fulfillment of the messianic promises in Jesus who is also the eternal second person of the Trinity. Jesus is eternal God; He is the incarnation of God. God recognized that no human being could pay for sin because they can only pay for their own sin, so God has to provide that payment.
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The picture of that from the Old Testament is the sacrifice at Passover. There is a substitution there that God is going to bring a judgment of death in the 10th plague upon the Egyptians and everyone in Egypt, so God gives a solution to the judgment to Moses and the Israelites. They would take a lamb chosen on the 10th of Nisan, evaluated until the 14th to make sure it is without spot or blemish. On the 14th, it will be sacrificed, and the blood is going to be applied to the door, so that in the application of that blood to the doorpost, God will pass over the house and not bring the judgment of death on the firstborn in that household. So there is a substitution. This is a gift from God and not something that is based on the inherent virtue, morality, ethics or religiosity of the people inside the house. It is based on the fact that they hear what God’s command is, and they obey it because they believe it to be true.
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In the New Testament, we read in the Gospel of John one of the most significant statements about who Jesus is. In , we read “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him [deity], and without Him nothing was made that was made [Creator, active agent in creation]”, which is what Paul states in .
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We are introduced to this concept of the Logos as a complete, divine person distinct from but identical to the Father - multiple personalities within the unity of the Godhead. In Judaism, a problem developed with that but only after the 2nd temple was destroyed. Before that, there were clear indications of a multiplicity of personality in the Godhead. The verse you will often hear in discussions with Jews is that they are strict monotheists because in , it says “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” The word that is used there in the Hebrew for one is echad, which is not a singularity but is a unity of multiplicity.
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There is another form of the word one that is used to indicate a singular item that is not a plural in terms of unity. The reason we know this is because of a statement that Moses makes at the end of the second chapter in Genesis after God has created Eve and brought her to the man. Moses says in verse 24 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to this wife, and they shall become one flesh.” It is the word echad. The same word that you have in . But you have two persons who become a unity in marriage, so that the concept of God being a unity of persons is not foreign at all to the Hebrew Scriptures.
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When we get into , we read “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory…” This is the Word that was with God and was God (). Watch this word glory in . We know from “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That is a term that incorporates and encapsulates all God’s essence. Glory stands for the character of Jesus, a term for divine glory.
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“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us...” The infinite, 2nd person of the Trinity became a finite representation of God. This is what Paul develops later as the second Adam. “…the glory [full essence of the Father] as of the only begotten of the Father [unique one of the Father], full of grace and truth.
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“No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” The Greek verb is exegeomai [e)xegeomai], where we get our English word exegesis, which means that He is the one who unpacks the meaning of something for us. Jesus is the one who discloses and reveals to us through a visible, finite representation of His character who God is.
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Something is going on related to character transformation in these virtue ladder verses. is the conclusion to Paul’s development of the basics of the Christian’s spiritual life, which begins to be introduced in , but the core chapters are 6, 7 and 8. “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son…”
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There is that word image again. In , image is a finite representation of who God is. Man was created in order to serve God, to rule over God’s creation, and to reflect the essence of God’s character to men.
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What is the Greek word that was used to refer to the excellence of God’s character five or six times in the Old Testament? It is arête. It does not have anything to do with the Greek concept of arête, but it was used by the translators of the Septuagint in Psalms and . It was used in order to express the moral excellence, the praiseworthy character, the righteousness and justice of God, which is how it comes over into the New Testament. , ; ; .
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All Jewish authorities long before the time of Christ recognized that God had turned off the volume, and He was not revealing Himself anymore. The Old Testament canon is shut down and closed, and they finalize it. There is nothing new added to it. That does not mean the Jews quit writing because there are other books that are written about what is going on in the Jewish community, and some of these books have become part of what is called the Apocrypha. These are books that were hidden and were not part of the canon.
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Jerome, who lived in Bethlehem in the 300s, translated the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament into Latin. That Latin translation became known as the Vulgate. The Pope wanted Jerome to include the Apocrypha in the Vulgate, so he did against his desires. The introduction to the Vulgate said that the Apocryphal books were not part of the Bible. Neither Jerome nor any Jewish authority had ever accepted them as part of the Old Testament canon, but they said they are good because they teach something about what happened between the Old Testament and the New Testament. They are worthy of our study but are not the Word of God.
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Nobody read that introduction, so what happens in the history of the early church and the Roman Catholic church is people thought because the Apocrypha was within the front cover and back cover of the Bible, it was just like all the other books and that lead to its eventual inclusion in the Roman Catholic Bible.
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Those books of the Apocrypha were written during the time of the Hellenistic empire. This is the term used to refer to the Greek empire after Alexander died that was split up between four of his generals. In terms of the Middle East, you have the Ptolemies down in Egypt and the Seleucids who controlled roughly Syria and what we now know as Turkey. They are constantly fighting with each other and what is between Syria and Egypt: Israel. The Jews who had returned from the Babylonian exile/captivity are constantly being used as pawns between the Egyptians and the Syrians.
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The language they are beginning to use all the time is Greek, along with Hebrew and Aramaic. So Greek thought begins to influence them, and Hellenism begins to dominate the culture of the Jews. It is exacerbated by the fact that once the Seleucids rise to power, you have Antiochus the Great (Antiochus III) and then his son Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who is the real evil one in the Old Testament and is used as a type of the future Antichrist. They try to stop Jewish worship. Antiochus Epiphanes burns all copies of the Scriptures. If anyone is caught circumcising an infant, the infant and the parents will die. If anybody is caught observing the Sabbath, they will die. It is a complete anti-Semitic suppression of anything that is uniquely Jewish.
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This is the same period of time that the 1, 2, 3, 4 Maccabees are written, and in these books you have the use of arete (virtue). It is the first time it really shows up in extra-biblical literature, Jewish literature, with a Greek meaning. When it is translated into the Septuagint, it is not used with that meaning. It refers to the character of God.
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When we get to , we are told that the destiny that God has set for every church age believer is to be conformed to the image of His Son. Man and woman are created in the image of God to be a perfect, finite representation of God in terms of His character and abilities and to rule over His creation. Adam’s sin of disobeying God plunges the entire human race into sin, and that image is not erased but it is effaced, marred, distorted and has to be repaired. It cannot be fixed by man; it can only be fixed by God.
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How does God do it? He sends a Savior who pays the penalty for sin, a Savior who is the exegesis or the explanation of the character of God, who in His life displays the character of God. says “…we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” When the Son is crucified, buried, resurrected and ascends to heaven, the goal that God has for every believer is to conform them in their spiritual growth to that image. The excellence of that image is called arete. So when we think of arete (virtue) in the New Testament, get rid of the Roman concepts, get rid of the Greek concepts, and deal with the way it is used biblically in terms of manifesting within our character the character of Christ. That is what this is all about. We manifest the character of Christ through us, and that can only happen through a change that occurs through God the Holy Spirit.
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We “proclaim the praises of Him…” () through spiritual growth. This is what happens when we get to . Here we learn that the opening phrase should be understood as a causal statement. What is the focal point of the phrase “His divine power”? It is the character of God as seen through the lens of a power word. Often that happens in languages where we use one characteristic of something to stand for the entirety of the thing that we are talking about because that is the one aspect or character of the thing that we are really emphasizing but not to the exclusion of everything else. It is not that God’s power gave this to us to the exclusion of His righteousness, His justice, His love, His virtue as we will see.
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“as His divine power [all that God is, His divine ability] has given to us all things that pertain [relate] to life and godliness…” These really relate to two different things. Life relates to physical life, which only is fully experienced by us once we are regenerate. Before that, we are the walking dead, like zombies. We think we are alive, but Jesus came to give us life. We died when Adam ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We became spiritually dead. Life has to do with once again we can experience the fullness of life that God has for us, and He is going to give us all the necessities of life that we require in order to fulfill His purpose for us.
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The second word is godliness (eusebeia/ e)usebeia) and is related not just to God-likeness but to showing reverence and loyalty to those to whom it is due. This is a concept that I have really been working through in the last 2-3 weeks to get a fuller understanding of the word eusebeia and how it relates to the concepts of faith and love.
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I think it is always interesting how the Holy Spirit works. I can be reading on five or six different subjects, and there are times when everything clicks together. They are not even related. It is just the dynamics of God’s revelation and the Holy Spirit in our life.
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This word eusebeia is similar to the Greek word piety (why it is often translated piety, pietas in Latin) and focuses on the idea of showing reverence and loyalty. Then I’m reading in a completely different book on archeology trying to prep for going to Israel this summer, and I’m reading a statement in a paragraph. In ancient covenants, when a king conquered another country, he would impose a surrender document (we would say today), a new covenant or contract describing the relationship between this defeated power and his power as “you are now supposed to love me.” In a conquered nation, you do not have warm feelings about your conqueror. That idea of love as expressed and used in those covenant documents is just like Deuteronomy where we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and strength. This idea of love in a covenant context was not talking about having warm feelings about God or the person who initiated the contract, but it is loyalty.
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eusebeia has to do with the new life we have in relationship with God and showing loyalty to Him so we can fulfill what God intended us to be. See how that once again impinges on the original meaning of aretE being all that we are intended to be. The first stair step in this virtue ladder in “But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue…” is going to be faith, pistis [pistij].
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I remember years ago when I was first beginning to get a handle on the issues in the lordship debate, I read the 1st edition of John McArthur’s book, The Gospel According to Jesus, where he argues his whole lordship theory. He changed in subsequent editions because a number of people pointed it out that pistis normally has the meaning of the act of belief. It is a noun that describes the act of believing something, but in virtue ladders where there is a series of virtues, pistis does mean faithful. That is where McArthur got the idea that when said “For by grace, you have been saved through faith…”, he wanted to translate it faithfulness.
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is not talking about a series of virtues; it is describing the act of believing. The noun pistis can have 3 different meanings according to BDAG. The meaning related to its use as a noun when it is standing alone is the act of believing, but when it is related to a series of virtues, it has the idea of being faithful. This is talking about a person after salvation, talking about their Christian growth. The faith rest drill is an act of believing God, but it is an act of learning how to be faithful in doing that, so that we do not just do it occasionally, but we learn to make this a habit pattern in our life.
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Faith is used in that sense here in . We have imbedded within these ideas of eusebeia and love which is the final step in the stair step down in verse 7 “to godliness [eusebeia] brotherly kindness [philadelphia/ filadelfia], and to brotherly kindness love.” Love has to do with loyalty, not emotion. Godliness has to do with manifesting the character of God in terms in faithful loyalty to Him and manifesting the kind of character he created man to manifest – His character. That can only be produced by God the Holy Spirit, which is why we find a parallel between this passage and the fruit of the Spirit passage in “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
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This is one of those sorites passages. They are not given in a logical order here; they are if you understand the context because the commandment Paul gave in is to love one another. That is why it is the first fruit mentioned because what he is talking about is how do you do that? It is by walking by the Spirit. The fruit of that is first of all love.
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Self-control is the same word in that we have in the list of “to knowledge self-control…” All of these need to be broken down so we understand the internal dynamics and relationships, but I want you to come out of this understanding a couple of things. First of all, while there are certain connections that are similar in spiritual growth, it is a dynamic not a static process. It is not the same for everybody. There are certain things that are logically and temporally based on other things. For example, we have to have a trial, a test. We have to endure the test and that develops perseverance. Certain things have to go in a certain order.
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Other things do not necessarily go in that order. They are the virtues, moral excellence, or the mirror or reflection of the character of God that is developed in our life. We cannot develop this on our own, but it has to be done by walking by the Holy Spirit. That is why says “For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How do you become fruitful? By walking by the Spirit who produces the fruit of the Spirit. These passages all intersect, and it is critical for understanding aspects of the Christian life.
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The bottom line is that it is not just a matter of sitting, learning the Word, and it is going to automatically happen. What is imbedded in all of this are mandates that we have to do certain things or not do certain things under the filling ministry of God the Holy Spirit in response to what the Word of God says.
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The simple one is “Study to show yourself approved unto God…” I need to be filled with the Holy Spirit and need to study. That is a command to study. That is not any different from any of the other commands that talk about doing certain things or not doing certain things, having certain qualities in your life and not having certain qualities in your life. It is still volitional. The Holy Spirit is not going to produce the fruit apart from your volitional engagement in doing what the Word of God says to do when you are in that situation.

Romans-055b-Skills for Developing Virtue. ,

Romans 5:3 NASB95
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance;
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Romans 055b-Skills for Developing Virtue ;
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, specifically verses 5-8, present a similar list of virtues to those that are spelled out in . In “Through whom [Christ] also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” This phrase “in which we stand” focuses on the present reality of a justified believer. Chapter 5 is really a transition from talking about justification, which is laid out at the end of chapter 3 and 4, to the spiritual life for how a justified believer grows and matures in grace and by means of grace. This is foreshadowed in this stairstep.
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adversity ----> endurance ----> tested, approved character ----> confidence (hope)
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(thlipsis) (hupomone) (dokime) (elpis)
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The other kinds of virtue ladders that we find in other passages of Scripture are all firmly located in sanctification-focused passages. Paul is sort of introducing here some of the key ideas that will come back to dominate what he says about the spiritual life in , and 8.
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“…and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” This hope is a forward-looking confidence, a certainty and not a wishy-washy expectation or wishful optimisim, a certain confidence in the future. It is becoming more significant as I read this now and other passages that the phrase “glory of God” was often used as a sort of summation of all of God’s character. We see that in passages like “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We would expect maybe righteousness of God or the justice of God, but we have the glory of God because that is a term that summarizes all of God’s character, all of His attributes. We fall short of that.
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Last time and the time before, I talked about defining virtue, not on the basis of the human viewpoint tradition of Greco-Roman thought but on the biblical usage of the terminology as it was rarely used in the Old Testament only on 3 or 4 occasions. For example, only in Isaiah and a couple of other places was the term virtue used in the Greek translation. The rabbis who translated from the Hebrew text did not see virtue in a Greco-Roman sense as being equivalent to the moral concept in the Scripture. Where you do find arete [a)reth]used is when it is proclaiming the excellences of God’s character. The term virtue in the Old Testament was understood to be related to the sum total of God’s character and not an abstract or autonomous concept of moral excellence, which is what you have coming out of both Greek and Roman philosophy and culture.
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For the Jews, it was something that was grounded objectively in the character of God, so when we get into the New Testament, we have to continue to follow this principle that the primary frame of reference for New Testament vocabulary is not 5th century Greece or 4th century Rome; it is the Old Testament. That is what formed the frame of reference for the apostles and the early Christians who were mostly Jewish and not a Greco-Roman pagan culture.
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We can paraphrase it that Paul says that we rejoice in this confidence in relation to the character of God. “And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [adversities], knowing that tribulation produces perseverance [endurance]; and perseverance, character; and character, hope [confidence].” That is our stairstep. It is a figure of speech or a way of developing a logical flow called sorites, which is one thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another.
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I pointed it out this way by thinking through basic steps or stages in spiritual growth. There are three major passages (some minor passages) that we have looked at that approach the Christian life in terms of expressing certain virtue or character qualities that are part of a progression of spiritual growth.
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adversity ----> endurance ----> tested, approved character ----> confidence (hope)
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(thlipsis) (hupomone) (dokime) (elpis)
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We learn to deal with adversity, we endure, we are tested or evaluated, and then character is developed. That is a key concept that God is producing a specific character in us. The process of this development leads to hope.
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trial ---------> testing ------> endurance ----> perfect work maturation
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(peirasmos) (dokimion) (hupomone) (teleios)
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“Because you know that the testing of your faith produces patience [endurance]. But let patience have its perfect [maturing] work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” We see that James looks at it a little differently than Romans, some similar verbiage and qualities, but they do not have to be identical. Too often we try to make each of these elements relate to another, as if God is laying out some rigid blueprint. It is not rigid; it is dynamic. There are a lot of different elements that are part of it, and each writer is going to emphasize different aspects of the maturation process depending on what he is focusing on in terms of his specific, distinct audience.
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James is talking about a trial, so there is similarity there between the adversity where Paul starts in and the trials of . Then there is testing, and there is the noun dokimion [dokimion] which is similar to the adjective dokime [dokimh] for “tested, approved character” in . But both also emphasize endurance, which is a commonality. It is that development of endurance, stick-to-itiveness in a spiritual sense, hanging with it, and not fading out because of distractions in life or thinking you have arrived.
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I am amazed how many Christians think they have arrived when they have maybe gotten to first base and are acting as if they have hit home plate. They just do not have this stick-to-itiveness to hang in there over a period of 4, 5, or 6 decades.
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James emphasizes the trial leads to testing, then developing character leading to endurance, which leads to maturity. These are called virtue lists. The opposite of a virtue is a vice. There is this contrast we often find in these lists, specifically , where you have the works of the flesh contrasted with the fruit of the Spirit.
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We looked at where it lays the groundwork in Peter’s thinking that it is God’s power, the totality of His character as seen in His omnipotence that provides for us everything related to life and godliness. I emphasized that the term godliness, eusebeia/e)usebeia, is a word that emphasizes a loyalty toward God. It is not just living a life that imitates God or reflects His character, but it is grounded on a faithful devotion and loyalty to God. It comes through knowledge (epignosis/ e)pignwsij).
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I want to talk about the word interchange between these two forms of the word knowledge. Sometimes we have the word gnosis, which is the basic root noun for knowledge, and other times, it is intensified with a prefix epignosis. epignosis emphasizes a fuller, more experiential or usable knowledge; whereas, gnosis emphasizes knowledge itself. The way we all use language is we sometimes use a word that reflects a part for the whole, and sometimes we use a word for the whole for the part that includes more than just the sum of the parts. There are those who say you have drawn too tight a distinction between epignosis and gnosis. Maybe in some cases that is true, but when the writer uses these terms, he is choosing one over against another.
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We believe in verbal, plenary inspiration and that every word is ultimately chosen and selected by God the Holy Spirit not just for stylistic reasons but because He is emphasizing something even between synonyms. If you have, for example, agape [a)gaph] (word for love) and philos [filoj] (another word for love) in the same passage, and they are translated in English as love, there is a reason that the writers of Scripture chose to use one over the other. There is something they are emphasizing, and they are not just choosing them for some stylistic variation.
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In this introduction in , we are told that all of this is given to us “through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue.” That relates to His character, so virtue again is used in relation to the character of God, His glory.
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“By which [on the basis of or by means of His character] have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises…” Promises focuses on content, and by virtue of having these promises (specific content-oriented statements in Scripture that we can take to the bank as a firm commitment from God) that we may by following and implementing those promises partake of the divine nature. Again we get this idea that it is God’s character that we are able to display that is developed in our lives as a result of the implementation and application of those promises. We can be participants and develop the character of God within us. It is by doing this that we escape “the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
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I emphasized this word corruption because it indicates something that is in decay, something that is dead and rotting. That is the world system – dead, rotting and nothing attractive about it. Satan tries to put makeup on something that is dead and rotten to make it attractive and appealing to us, but the end result is going to be destroyed, and there is nothing there that is really of value.
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The way in which we escape that is by developing this character that God is developing in us, so we need to understand what are the mechanics, what is the way in which God does this, and what are the elements of that character. All of this is to lead up to understand this virtue ladder that is developed in , where Peter writes “But also for this reason [because God has given this to us so that we can escape the corruption that is in the world], giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.” You see there is a progression – you add one to the other. There is a development from one stage to another; one quality builds upon a previous quality.
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The list for 2 Peter starts with faith, to that one add virtue, and to that knowledge, which is gnosis and not epignosis. We might ask the question why is the emphasis on gnosis? That is because you have to learn the facts and the information in Scripture before it can be usable information. gnosis is not contrasted to epignosis; it is just the first stage in development of going from knowledge to a full, usable application knowledge. We have to learn it first before it becomes usable and applicable.
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Then we develop self-mastery, then endurance, then godliness which is that loyal, faithful obedience to God, then brotherly kindness or brotherly love for one another, and then ultimately love (agape) which is the ultimate in this list.
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Confidence (hope) Perfect work, Love (agape)
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(elpis) maturation (teleios)
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Love for one another
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Tested, approved character (philadelphia)
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(dokime)
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Spiritual responsibility
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(eusebeia)
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Endurance (hupomone) Endurance (hupomone) Endurance (hupomone)
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Self-control (egkrateia)
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Testing (dokimion) Knowledge (gnosis)
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Virtue (arête)
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Adversity (thlipsis) Trial (peirasmos) Faith (pistis)
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There are some differences in the lists, but in the middle is this word endurance (hupomone/u(pomonh) that we need to hang in there and develop that consistency, that stick-to-itiveness in the Christian life.
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The first character quality is faith. There is a distinction between faith as a noun describing an act of believing and the word faith referring to what is believed. For example, in it talks about “by faith” and then there are various Old Testament heroes that are cited for the way in which they trusted in God. It not only has the idea of the act of trusting God, but also on the basis or by means of what they believed to be true, they acted consistent with what they believed to be true. They did something with the faith. It was not just something internal, subjective, and was theirs and they kept quiet; it led to action. This is a distinctively Old Testament idea that the virtues that are developed in the spiritual life are not just some sort of static, passive mental thing, but they are all to culminate in action that is the result of character transformation.
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Peter begins with the statement in , “giving all diligence.” He uses a Greek word that means to exert all diligence. It is a participial use of the term which indicates means. When this means is emphasized, this is the way in which one element is added to another. You have a growth progression that takes place by being diligent. That is something that engages our volition. The Christian life is not this sort of mystical, passive thing that God just zaps you with.
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I pointed this out the other day when we were talking about the filling by means of the Spirit. The Spirit influences us, but He does not make the decision for us to apply doctrine. We do not just say I have confessed my sin, I’m in fellowship, now the Holy Spirit is going to make this hard decision easy for me. He does not work that way; He does not override our volition. He brings to our mind the information that we need, and then it is up to us to implement it and choose to apply that knowledge in the specific situation or circumstance.
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We are to be diligent: this is the same word that the KJV translates “Study to show yourself approved unto God…” () That word “study” is spoudazo [spaudazw], and it means to be diligent in the study of God’s Word. It has the idea of putting effort into and consciously being diligent about something. It means focusing on your spiritual life and developing spiritually positive growth-producing habits that will lead to spiritual growth.
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“…giving [exerting] all diligence, add to your faith virtue …” This word faith [pistis/pistij] also can have the idea of faithfulness or reliability when it is in a virtue list like this. It is not just the act of believing; it is faithfulness in applying that which one believes. This is at the very core of spiritual growth - having a firm conviction or belief in a body of doctrine and learning to consistently, faithfully implement that. Faith is the starting point of our spiritual growth. It is an immature concept at this time because you are talking about a spiritual infant. That spiritual baby loves, just as babies love their parents, but it is not a mature kind of love which is what the progression moves toward.
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You add to this “virtue.” Virtue is showing the character of God. There is a character transformation that is going on. Virtue, in its biblical usage, is focusing on reflecting as an image bearer of God His character in us.
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The Image of God (imago Dei)
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Virtue = the reflection of God’s character
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Mankind created The “image” is defaced The “image is being
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in God’s image. and corrupted by the fall. conformed to the image of
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Christ through justification
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> > > > > > > > > > and sanctification.
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We are created in God’s image, and that image was corrupted by the fall, but we are told that we are being conformed to the image of Christ, His character. Even though that image has been corrupted and defaced by sin, it can be renewed and it is being renewed in the process of sanctification. Through justification and sanctification, that image is being renewed according to the character of Christ. What God is trying to do with us in terms of our spiritual growth is to make us reflect Christ’s character in us. We are not to look at various Christian personalities or people that we admire to imitate their character, as much as it might be admirable as a Christian, but we are to look to Christ. That is the pattern that God is using; He is conforming us to the image of Christ. A question then comes “How exactly does this take place?” This is the process of spiritual growth. As we move forward, God begins to develop this character in us, and this starts at an early stage.
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One of the fun things about looking at a passage like this is to try to fit it together with other things we have learned and studied, so that we come to a more usable understanding of what the Scriptures are teaching. When we go through what Paul says and look at what Peter says and what other passages teach on the development of the Christian life, we see that each writer looks at things a little differently.
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When we try to put them all together, that is really what I think is fun. That is what we call systematic theology. We develop what Paul thought about something – that is Pauline theology or, in technical terminology, a biblical theology of Paul. We look at what Peter says – that is the biblical theology of Peter. We look at what John says in the epistles of John, and that is the biblical theology of John. Then we try to synthesize it all and put it all together to get a full picture. That is how God wants us to do this: to think a lot about what he says in Scripture. He does not give us all the answers; He gives us all the data so we are forced to go into the text and massage the text over and over and pull these things together.
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In the past, I talked about foundational spiritual skills. Whether we talk about the stress busters or problem solving devices or whatever the terminology is, these are the basic skills that are taught again and again in Scripture that we need to use in order to grow and mature as believers.
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Basic Spiritual Growth:
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Spiritual Skills for Developing Virtue
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Recovery: Confession,
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Spiritual Power: Filling of the Holy Spirit, Walking by the Holy Spirit,
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Spiritual Knowledge Base: Faith Rest Drill, ,
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Grace Orientation,
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Doctrinal Orientation,
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The first is confession. Confession is that which gets us recovery from failure. It is not a license to sin, which some legalists want to accuse us of saying because we are not treating sin as something that is inconsequential but that God is not holding that against us. We are saved, our sins are forgiven judicially at the cross and positionally at salvation. On the basis of that, whenever we fail, there is the free grace offer of forgiveness and cleansing by simply admitting to God the sin that we have committed. He wants to forgive us, but it is not done without us recognizing that we have sinned and that we have disobeyed Him. There is a recovery procedure that gets us started in the right track again.
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Then the next spiritual skill is walking by the Holy Spirit and being filled by the Holy Spirit. I like walking by the Spirit because it emphasizes that moment by moment dependence and is a little broader term. If you are walking by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is the one performing the action in filling us with His Word, comparing with . The Holy Spirit is filling us with His Word, stores it in our soul, and brings it to memory when we encounter various situations in life.
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We are passive to that. When the Scripture uses the passive command “Be filled by means of the Spirit,” it is emphasizing the actions performed by the Holy Spirit. We are just sort of receiving it and are in a position where that can happen as a result of confessing sin.
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But we are to walk by means of the Spirit, that is, actively engaged in dependency upon God the Holy Spirit step by step. It is a lifestyle term. This comes back to a term related to character. is to be filled by means of the Spirit. is walking by means of the Spirit. This is the foundation. Confession gets us just to a recovery position. You can confess your sins all day long, but it will not move you one inch further in your spiritual growth if you do not walk. It simply gets you turned in the right direction to begin walking by the Spirit. Some people are so dizzy that they almost pass out spiritually because they sin and confess, sin and confess, sin and confess; and they never get off that dime. We all go through that; that is part of spiritual babyhood and learning. Eventually, we hope we manage to spend a second or two in fellowship and walking before we fall down and have to confess again. Maybe after 20 or 30 years, we think we might even get to the point where we do not stumble quite as badly as we have in the past.
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These two realities focus on the spiritual life not being something we produce by just going out and deciding that we are going to be moral, we are going to do the right thing, we are going to make the right choices in the right situations, and somehow we are going to pull ourselves up by our ethical bootstraps and please God. The Scripture clearly teaches the Christian life is produced by the Holy Spirit. So what is the basis for that? Those are the next spiritual skills: faith rest drill, grace orientation and doctrinal orientation. They are laid out in the chart in a logical order. Grace orientation comes first because we have to understand at salvation and in the Christian life that everything is by grace. That is part of doctrine.
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Somebody who is too detail oriented for their own good might say that grace orientation is part of doctrinal orientation, so how do you make a distinction? You are just emphasizing grace is something that you really have to orient to before you can orient to the rest of doctrine. Grace is foundational. But that is just looking at these three in sort of a logical connection.
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The reality is that in the growth process, there is interplay: the three work together in tandem. There is a give and take, and growth is taking place as the three interconnect. In the faith rest drill, what are we doing? We are learning a promise that is part of doctrine; it is not separate from doctrine. We are working on a skill here: learning a doctrine and grabbing hold of it with faith and trusting in it, relying upon God. The promise is true because God is true. It is not the focus on the promise itself but on the God behind it who is always true and faithful.
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“By which [God’s character] have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature…” We need to start learning salvation promises, promises related to forgiveness, and promises dealing with different problems and issues in life. People have problems with depression, anger, laziness, discouragement, lust – how do you start dealing with these? By learning promises in the Scripture and claiming them. It is practiced over and over again like sitting down at the piano and playing scales or running through the fingering or slide procedures on an instrument over and over again until they become so imbedded in muscle memory that it becomes virtually automatic.
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That is how you develop skill. You do not develop skill by applying it once every three or four days. You are not going to get good at anything. This is something that you learn to practice over and over again, and eventually that becomes part of you and imbedded as a skill.
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The 2nd of these spiritual skills is grace orientation: learning again and again and again that everything in our life is due to God’s grace, and we do not deserve anything that we have. Most of the time if we got what we deserve, we would not even be down under a bridge. I do not know where we would be, but it would not be good. How many times do we make decisions or procrastinate decisions or make bad decisions, and God does not lower the boom on us. Instead, God takes care of us and provides for us and graces us out. We have to learn that principle that we are who we are and have what we have solely by the grace of God and not because we are somebody, but because God has chosen to give these things to us freely.
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Peter will conclude at the end of the epistle a command () to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” That is the 3rd of the spiritual skills: doctrinal orientation, where doctrine is a term that refers to the entire realm of what the Bible teaches. It is not a term that it has come to be used in contemporary language as if it relates to abstract theology. You may not be aware of this, but in theological circles, seminaries and Bible colleges, they make this dichotomy between doctrine and application.
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But that is not how the Bible uses the word doctrine. Doctrine is not just abstract principles. It incorporates everything from theory to application. The military uses the term doctrine in this way, starting from planning, procedures, developing various ways in which they approach certain problems and issues and then all the way to the final product and its application implementation in warfare. The whole thing is covered under the concept of doctrine. This concept we have then is not just learning a lot of principles in some sort of abstract sense, sticking it away in notebooks so we can go home and say see how much I’ve learned about the Bible and theology. It should culminate in action, in changed life and living, in changed procedures that produce success in the Christian battlefield scenario. So we have doctrinal orientation which is aligning ourselves and our thinking to everything that the Bible teaches us about thinking and living.
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These three work together in a dynamism as we learn promises, about God’s grace, content about doctrine, procedures, thinking. The result of the spiritual skills is character change. These are just the things that we act on. These skills of walking by the Spirit, faith rest drill, grace orientation, doctrinal orientation are just things we do to maintain the walk to stay in fellowship, but it is God the Holy Spirit that produces the fruit, the character transformation. We do not do that.
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I cannot say that I am going to go out and produce love or joy or self-discipline today. Not in this sense; this is something that is a product of the Holy Spirit that is distinctively and uniquely produced by the Spirit in my life. The only command in is to walk by the Spirit. When you walk by the Spirit, then the Spirit produces this. We cannot change our character into the character of Christ. This is summarized in this list in “…love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”
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We are to obey the Scripture. Remember the context here in talks about as we grow in knowledge, it lays a foundation for escaping the corruption of the world. But if we remain ignorant (no doctrinal orientation or knowledge), then we remain anchored to that corruption. “As obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance.” With knowledge you should not conform to the thinking and the operation of the world.
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, we add to faith virtue as we grow, as we develop faithfulness in the Word, and then we begin to see some character application and transformation by God the Holy Spirit. Then to virtue we add knowledge, which is the word gnosis. In , Peter says “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God…” – that is gnosis. Before you can have a full knowledge, a usable, applicable knowledge that leads to real wisdom in life, you have to know the facts. You have to know the facts that have been revealed in Scripture; there has to be a knowledge of information and what the Scriptures teach. Gnosis is in verse 2 and verse 5. epignosis is in verse 3 “as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him…” That is taking the information level to the next level as a result of application and believing and trusting in the Lord.
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“to knowledge self-control …” The Greek word for self-control is enkrateia [e)gkrateia]. It is an interesting word – it is a fruit of the Spirit. It is not something that you and I can just generate on our own.
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I remember when I was a kid, I really wanted my dad’s Marine Corps KA-BAR knife. He said when I got a plus on my report card on self-discipline, I would get it. In elementary school, you had to earn everything you got. You started from a deficit, and if you wanted a check or plus, you had to prove it to the teacher. In junior high, they started everybody off with E for excellent, and we had to do something to lose it. It was not until I was in the 7th grade that they changed the grading system that I qualified under self-discipline.
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Self-discipline is something anybody can generate in the flesh. There are a lot of very disciplined, organized, self-mastered individuals in the world, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with a spiritual fruit or spiritual character quality. This is a spiritual character quality that it does not matter what your personality is. Many of you have been in different jobs or careers where perhaps you had to take a certain personality test in order to maybe advance to another level. I know that these kinds of things were coming into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, like the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis or the MMPI tests (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory). Fortunately, none of those were required for admission to Dallas Seminary until the 1980s when they started requiring that. There were really good men who did not qualify because they did not pass some psychological exam. That just shows the trends of their sin nature may be coming out in that.
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What we are talking about in terms of spiritual maturity is that the Holy Spirit produces the character of Christ in us. In our flesh, operating in the sin nature, you may be a disorganized, lazy, undisciplined individual, but God the Holy Spirit is the one who transforms that. That does not transform through going through some sort of personal counseling or learning 5 steps to be a more organized, time-managed individual. It is the product of spiritual growth and is the Holy Spirit who changes us.
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In contrast, what we have is a description in that in the last days people will be undisciplined and lack self-control. (Verse 1-3) “But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good.” We certainly see that today – a tremendous lack of any kind of self-discipline or self-mastery among numerous segments of the population. (Verse 4) “traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God …” This a picture of modern society. But believers, no matter what their background or their character qualities as a result of their sin nature, can have that transformed through perseverance.
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We read in “to knowledge self-control [self-mastery], to self-control perseverance [learning to stay with it and stick to it], to perseverance godliness.” Perseverance is the idea of staying in difficult circumstances and continuing to do the right thing because it is the right thing no matter what the pressure is to go to an easier course of action.
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The next step is godliness, eusebeia, which in the old English gets the idea for godliness from the word God-likeness. It is a good word to a certain degree because it shows that what is being emphasized here is the character of God is being imparted and developed within the believer. It goes beyond that by studying both the use of the Greek word eusebeia, as well as the Latin word pietas, which has the idea of not only developing this character of God but of showing reverence and loyalty to God.
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The greatest commandment in the Old Testament, if you ask anybody who is Jewish, is what is called the Shemah. Shemah is a Hebrew word which means, literally translated, to listen or to hear. The Shemah is “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” Often that verse is taken to emphasize monotheism and a singularity of God within Judaism. But even some Jewish scholars are beginning to recognize that that is not the thrust of this word one. It is not talking about a singularity of God.
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The word shemah is the opening word and is a command to hear or to listen, but it really has the implication of obey. If you as a parent come home and your child has disobeyed you, in scolding them you might say, “You didn’t listen to me.” You are not saying that they did not have their auditory nerves vibrated with the sound of your voice, but what you mean is “You didn’t obey me; you didn’t respond properly to my commands.” Hebrew does not have the wide range of vocabulary that English or Greek do, so one word had to function in a lot of different ways. One of the ways in which shemah functions is in the concept of meaning obey.
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To freely translate would be “obey this, Israel.” It is a command. The Lord our God in the Hebrew is Yahweh Elohenu (our God, our Elohim). The focus is on Yahweh; who is this Yahweh? Yahweh echad actually has the idea of the Lord alone, not the Lord is one. Last time I pointed out that the idea of one does not always mean a singularity. It is also used in relation to Adam and Eve coming together, and the Lord said the two would become one flesh. It is a recognition that there is a multiplicity within a unity. But the word echad also has the meaning of alone. Even the Jewish Publication Society 1985 translation of the Old Testament (the Tanach) translates “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord alone!” Modern linguistic scholarship has made it clear that that is the emphasis here, and throughout the Old Testament, there are corollary passages that emphasize that Israel is to worship God alone, not any other gods. That is what loyalty to God means.
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When Jesus is asked what are the greatest commandments, He begins by saying “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one!” Why does He start with that? Because it is a command to Israel to be exclusively loyal to God, and then the greatest commandment flowing from that is the commandment that they are to love the Lord their God with all their heart (mind), soul (life), and strength – every aspect of their being. It is a call to complete and total dedication and loyalty to God and God alone. That is first and foremost, and then out of that flows the second commandment that they were to love their neighbor as themselves.
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When we go back to and the idea of godliness, it is this idea that brings in not only a reflection of God’s character but that loyalty. One of the greatest words describing the love of God in the Old Testament is the Hebrew word chesed, which refers to His faithful, loyal love. In fact, ahav, the other word for love, is not used that much of God. Chesed is used again and again, emphasizing that love is loyalty. If we were going to define love, that would have to be in the definition.
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For example in the Old Testament, when a king would conquer another nation and the conquered king would have to swear loyalty and allegiance to the king who had conquered him, they would enter into a contract, and that covenant would demand that the conquered king love the conqueror. It did not mean that they had to feel good about him and all those things that we associate with romantic love. It meant that that conquered king had to be completely loyal to the conquering king despite how he might feel. He had to be loyal to him.

Romans-056b-Spiritual Skills and Virtue Development. ;

Romans 5:3 NASB95
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance;
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Romans 056b-Spiritual Skills and Virtue Development; ;
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Several weeks ago, we started in as an outgrowth of what Paul had said in his discussion and explanation of justification by faith which began, in terms of laying the foundation, back towards the end of chapter 1 and chapter 2. The foundation being that every human being, moral or immoral, still falls short of the glory of God – the conclusion being stated in Roman 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Therefore, man is incapable of ever overcoming his own deficit. The only solution is a divine solution, is grace, is for God to provide that which needs to be accomplished.
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It was foretold through many different means and pictures, what we call typologies which are pictures made from either events, objects, animals or people that were designed to portray something about God’s work of salvation. The greatest of these types or pictures in the Old Testament was that of the lamb. From the very beginning of time following Adam’s sin, when Cain and Abel were to bring a sacrifice to God, Cain brought from his own produce, which was the result of his own effort, and it was rejected. Abel brought what God had instructed him, which was a sacrifice of a lamb. It was Abel’s sacrifice that was accepted because it was done by faith and in obedience to God, according to .
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From that point on throughout the Old Testament, you see this development of the imagery of the animal sacrifice, the sacrifice that is a substitute for the individual who is coming before God. The sacrifices of an animal can never take away sin. We know that an animal’s life and blood (life being portrayed by the blood) are not sufficient to pay the penalty of sin. It is not sufficient for expiation, for cancelling out the debt of sin. There had to be a sacrifice that was worthy.
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The worthiness of that sacrifice was depicted by the lamb that was without spot or blemish at the Passover especially. At the original Passover, it was a lamb roasted on a skewer that would have been shaped somewhat in the shape of a cross. The sacrifice was chosen four days earlier, it was evaluated to be sure it was without spot or blemish, and then it was sacrificed. The blood, which depicts life (as taught in Leviticus), was smeared on the doorposts and the lintel of the house. When God, who was bringing death throughout Egypt upon the firstborn in every family, saw the blood that was applied, He would pass over – the meaning of pesach. The death of that lamb had provided a covering for that household, and death did not come.
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This was the basis for the Jews’ redemption: a purchase that brought them out of the slavery of Egypt. That becomes the primary picture in the Old Testament, as also in the New Testament, for God’s redemptive work. It is God who provides the sacrifice, the lamb, whose death pays the price for sin. The lamb could not do that, so someone becomes a man. Like has to substitute for like. The eternal second person of the Trinity comes into human history, born of a virgin, called Yeshuah, the Savior of His people. This is from the Hebrew verb yeshah, which indicates salvation or deliverance. He will pay the penalty for sin as the Lamb of God who goes to the cross.
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That death provides a foundation for justification. Justification is then explained by Paul in as being grounded in what happened with Abraham. Long before there was even the Mosaic Law and 2000 years before there was a Jesus of Nazareth, there is an act that takes place by Abraham when he trusts in God, and God seeing that faith declares Abraham to be righteous. It is not because of who Abraham is or what he has done but because of the object of his belief. He believes that God will provide this salvation.
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To Abraham at that point in his life, long before we meet him in when God calls him out of Ur of the Caldees, his understanding of God and salvation and the promise of the Savior was probably as somewhat fuzzy as it was for many of us when we first trusted Christ, especially if that was at a young age. There was an understanding that God provided a solution to a problem and that was through Jesus. We just grabbed hold of that in faith and believed it. It is because of that that God declares us to be righteous.
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Paul goes into this in . As an illustration, Abraham is justified before he is circumcised; he is justified before the Mosaic Law is given and before any of the rituals come into practice in Israel later. It shows that justification is totally apart from ritual, from circumcision, from obedience to the Torah. It is exclusively based on faith in the promise of God, and it is ultimately God’s work that is the basis for our justification.
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Paul begins to develop the benefits of justification in . This is one of the toughest chapters in all of Scripture to exegete and deal with. Often this chapter, I think, is misunderstood. I always heard that up through Roman 5, you are dealing with justification, and the spiritual life or sanctification does not begin until . But the more I am studying , the more I am realizing it is the transition chapter to the spiritual life. This is the first chapter in Romans where Paul begins to talk about life. His discussion of justification is completed by the end of chapter 4, and now we are talking about the benefits of justification, which are that we now have a new life in Him.
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“Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” It is a perfect tense, which indicates completed action; we have already come to stand in this place. When we look at the phrase “in which we stand,” it is talking about the present results of standing, which happened at some undetermined time in the past when a person trusted in Christ as Savior.
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“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have [present tense] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope [confidence] of the glory of God.” Hope is the focal point. We have hope mentioned in verses 2, 4 and 5. Hope is not mentioned again until we get to .
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When we go to , it gives the conclusion of what Paul says about the spiritual life. He wraps it all up and brings this to a conclusion by verse 30. Verses 31-39 are a summation of that first section. As he builds to his conclusion, he says in verse 18 “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”
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What I want you to do is think in terms of what Paul has said and where Paul is going. I learned a long time ago when I was reading a book that was difficult, it was helpful to read the conclusion so I knew where the author was going. Once I had a handle on where he was going, it was easier to follow how he got there.
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Where have we seen the terminology “with the glory” before? It is right here in “…and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” “Not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [thlipsis/ qliyij - adversities, sufferings]…” We see those ideas again in . Verse 19 “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.” Expectation means a forward-looking focus; we are looking forward to something that is going to bring things to a conclusion. Verse 20 “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope.” It is the first time we see the word hope after we get out of .
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There is a procedure in the military when you are shooting big guns off of a ship or any artillery. It is called bracketing. You know where your target is, but your first shot is to get the range and you overshoot the target. Then you back up your next shot where you undershoot it. This brackets the target. The third shot goes dead center and takes out the bad guy.
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You do the same thing in literature, and it is called an inclusio. You have certain words, phrases or structures at the beginning and at the end, which tell the reader that this is the structural unit of thought that we are focused on.
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This tells us that the structural unit of thought here begins at , focusing on the benefits of justification, which is our new spiritual life in Christ and that it all points to this thing called hope, our future expectations. Paul says that God subjected the universe and the world to this judgment of sin, this penalty of sin, in hope. That is because there is a future reality, and there is a need in order to prepare for that future reality, certain things had to happen that that hope may be brought to reality. It is explained in verses 21-22, which we will go through eventually.
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Verse 24 “For we were saved in this hope …” There is language very similar to what we find in the beginning of . Hope that is seen is not hope. That tells us that hope is something that is related to this time frame, just as faith is related to this time frame. “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” When we die and are face-to-face with the Lord, we are going to be walking by sight, and so faith is no longer operative. It is not based on what we see, not based on empiricism; it is based on trust in the witness of God.
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Hope is the same way. Hope is not based on something that is seen; it is based on a promise. This is what Paul emphasized with Abraham that Abraham believed God and His promise of salvation. That is what gave his life meaning and definition because he was focused on something that God is going to give him in the future and that gave him hope to endure whatever he went through in life. Hope is not just wishful optimism, but it has a certainty, something that is definite and is based on a promise.
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“But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.” The hope has to be based on a promise because it is based on faith, and hope and faith are bound to time. Then Paul goes into a discussion of the role of the Holy Spirit and God’s overall plan down to verse 30. We see the focal point of hope and its relation to a promise and the certainly of that promise because it is grounded in the character of God.
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The 1600s were a difficult time in England. They were not quite as difficult as the Reformation period in the 1500s, especially the time during the reign of Mary Tudor, who was known as “Bloody Mary” during her very brief reign. Over three hundred Protestant Christians were burned at the stake. They made the ultimate sacrifice as a witness for Jesus Christ. But in the 1600s, England continued to go through these religious tumults. You have the claims of the Stuarts to the divine right of the monarchy and the claims of the Puritans that they did not have absolute authority from God, but their authority was limited by virtue of the laws of England. This was a time when there were not only problems related to the authority assertions of the Stuarts, but after the end of the Cromwell period and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II (he came back as a Catholic), this created another measure of problems in England.
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It was during that time that there was couple named Andrew and Elizabeth Renwick, who were just common laborers in Scotland. They had lost all of their children to disease, and they were left in a state of bereavement. The wife, much like another Elizabeth in Scripture, sought the Lord in prayer that God would give her another child. God answered that prayer. A young boy came into their life, and they named him James. From the very beginning of his youth, they taught him the Scriptures. He was extremely positive to the Word and was extremely bright.
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He was the son of weavers, and yet he was so bright he was accepted at the University of Edinburgh. He was denied a degree and refused the right of graduation because he refused to accept Charles II as the head of the Scottish church. His family were devout Presbyterians.
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Nonconformists in Scotland were being martyred quite frequently during this time. The English would nail their severed heads and hands to the city gates as a warning to others. James left Scotland, as many did during this time, and went to the Continent and to Geneva where he received further training and ordination, but he still had a love for his own people back in Scotland. He eventually returned to Scotland, where he began to teach, preach the Gospel, and organize churches. He worked diligently around the clock and rarely slept. Frequently when he did sleep, he was just camping out on the moors in the cold and stormy nights. Often the only place he had to study was in a cave or somewhere out in the wilderness.
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He soon became known and was a wanted man by the English. He frequently had to evade the King’s soldiers until one day he was captured in Edinburg, put in prison, and convicted of treason. His mother visited him in prison, and you can imagine how she felt. She hated to know the fact that he would soon be martyred, and it was his head and his hands that would be hanging from the gates of Edinburgh.
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On February 17, 1688, he smuggled out a message to her and said, “There is nothing in the world that I am sorry to leave but you. Farewell, Mother. Farewell, my wanderings, cold and weariness for Christ. Farewell, sweet Bible and preaching of the Gospel. Welcome, crown of glory. Welcome, o thou blessed Trinity and one God. I commit my soul into thy eternal rest.” The next morning he embraced his mother, and they went to the scaffold. He was 26 years old.
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He had that peace because of his focus on the promise of God. He knew exactly where his destiny was. There were no fears or terrors. He knew he was justified by faith alone, and so he had that complete confidence and complete rest. He had a sure and certain hope.
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That hope was in the essence of God, the glory of God which is what Paul says here in “…and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory [rejoice] in tribulations [adversities].” He is rejoicing in adversity because what this produced in his life.
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This is a type of construction that is based on a form of logic that was developed during the 5th century BC called a “sorites,” which is sort of a stair step of logic. If one thing is true, then the next thing develops from that, and the next thing develops from that. I pointed out there were these virtue stair steps in several passages of Scripture.
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We looked at the stair steps of virtues in , where we went from adversity to endurance, endurance to tested, approved character, and then that yielded hope or confidence. The more we see God intervene in our lives and provide for us, the more confidence we gain, and our faith is strengthened.
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We saw the same kind of thing in , where James writes, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces patience [endurance]. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” It is the idea of maturing work or the end goal that God has in mind in terms of our Christian life, our growth to spiritual maturity.
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Confidence (hope) Perfect work, Love (agape)
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(elpis) maturation (teleios)
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Love for one another
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Tested, approved character (philadelphia)
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(dokime)
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Spiritual responsibility
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(eusebeia)
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Endurance (hupomone) Endurance (hupomone) Endurance (hupomone)
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Self-control (egkrateia)
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Testing (dokimion) Knowledge (gnosis)
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Virtue (arête)
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Adversity (thlipsis) Trial (peirasmos) Faith (pistis)
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The stages in the James stair step are a little different, but there is a lot of similarity. We begin with the trial. This leads to testing or the evaluation of faith as we see the utilization of the doctrine in our souls as it is applied to the particular situation or adversity. The more we do that, the more it produces endurance. This is the point where the two stair steps relate to one another, and then it yields maturity.
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We went from there to that focused on a lengthier list of virtues that also relate to this same idea - the stair step to virtue. Peters writes that we are to give all diligence, focus on, make it a point or goal in our life to add to faith, which is trust in a faithful God. That is the starting point.
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Verses 5-8 “…add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control [a fruit of the Spirit], to self-control perseverance [the commonality in the 3 stair step lists], to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.”
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Brotherly kindness is an interesting word. philadelphia [filadelfeia] where we get the name of our city Philadelphia and also the name of an ancient city in western Asia Minor or modern Turkey, focuses to the love for those in the body of Christ. Jesus said in that we are to love one another as He loved us. That is brotherly kindness or brotherly affection.
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Then in “…[add] to brotherly kindness love.” – the ultimate in this list of values. Love really comes at a maturing level. Love is not something in the full sense that we have as young believers. To really have that as part of our life, our character makeup spiritually only comes as a result of spiritual growth. It is not something you can expect of an infant. They have a measure of love, just as any infant does, but love has to reach maturity, and that only comes as you go through this process and come to understand the Word of God and see God work in your life experientially.
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The one commonality in the 3 stair step lists above is endurance. Hanging in there, not giving up and not quitting no matter how much the opposition is that we face. Think of someone like James Renwick and his martyrdom. There were so many at that time who were focused on doing what God said to do, whether that involved the overt preaching of the Gospel in the face of opposition or just being a faithful parent or whatever area of life God called you to.
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Virtue, as the Bible uses the term, is not grounded in an Aristotelian or Platonic concept of virtue but is really grounded in a way the Old Testament talked about God. There are only three or four times in the Hebrew Old Testament that the rabbis translated a couple of different Hebrew terms into the Greek word arete when they translated the Septuagint. What they were saying is that this virtue, in their understanding, was related to the perfections of God’s character. It was not something that was found in man or in creation, which is what the Greeks came up with in their ideas, but this is something that is rooted in the very character of God.
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The Image of God (imago Dei)
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Virtue = the reflection of God’s character
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Mankind created The “image” is defaced The “image is being
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in God’s image. and corrupted by the fall. conformed to the image of
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Christ through justification
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> > > > > > > > > > and sanctification.
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Man is created in God’s image in , but then that image is defaced, corrupted, marred in when Adam sins. All of Adam’s descendants are still in the image of God, but it is a defaced image and cannot be what God intended us to be because of corruption from sin. When we are saved, justified positionally in Christ, then God begins to work in and through us according to to conform us back to that image of Christ. As the image of Christ is developed in us, then it produces the fruit of the Holy Spirit, which is the character of Christ, and we have that transformation.
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In the past, we have talked about spiritual skills (stress busters). A skill is something you have to practice again and again to perfect it; it is not something you just go and do. I remember when I was young and was taking piano lessons. I had to practice 30 minutes every morning. You probably did the same thing, and if it wasn’t piano lessons, then it was sports, dance or other things. But you had to master those skills and do them over and over again. That is how you learn.
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That is how we must drill ourselves. Whenever we face adversity in life, whenever we have a decision to make in how we are going to react or respond to a set of circumstances, we have to decide whether we are going to do it God’s way or my way. Are we going to apply the principles of Scripture or the doctrine to the situation or are we just going to react in our own emotion, out of our own selfishness and arrogance? Every decision then becomes a test. A test does not mean it is something big; it just means it is an opportunity to either obey or disobey God.
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When we disobey God, there is a means of recovery, and that is the first skill which is to learn . My mother had me memorize it, and it was the first complete sentence I ever said. I guess she decided I needed to learn how to confess my sins in light of where I would probably go in life. That is our recovery tool. When we fail and initially react in anger, bitterness or resentment, immediately we think we reacted too quickly, we confess our sin, and we are back in fellowship. That is simply a restoration and reorientation of direction.
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In the Old Testament, they used the term shub, which means to turn. Repent in Hebrew is teshuvah, which means to turn toward God. The confession is a turning. It does not move us anywhere; we are just reoriented in the direction of our life. We may sin again two seconds later, and before long, we end up spinning in a circle. If we stay focused in the same direction, which the Bible refers to as abiding in Christ or walking by the Spirit, then we have another tool or skill to develop for handling the problems of life. We refer to this as the filling by the Holy Spirit, who fills our soul with the Word of God and brings it to our memory, and walking by the Holy Spirit.
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Then we have the faith rest drill, grabbing hold of the promises of God. You have to have something to grab hold of. You have to memorize those promises. We have to learn about God’s grace, which is really what is going on in . Why does Paul jump in verses 2-5 to this virtue ladder, this stair step of spiritual growth right out of the chute as he comes out of this section on justification? The focus is on understanding grace, and you cannot implement or walk up this virtue ladder if you do not understand grace. The place to understand grace is the cross. That is what becomes the focal point of verses 5 ff.
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Basic Spiritual Growth:
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Spiritual Skills for Developing Virtue
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Recovery: Confession,
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Spiritual Power: Filling of the Holy Spirit, Walking by the Holy Spirit,
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Spiritual Knowledge Base: Faith Rest Drill, ,
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Grace Orientation,
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Doctrinal Orientation,
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We have these three spiritual skills. Grace orientation is where we learn about God’s grace, and doctrinal orientation is where we learn all of the procedures and principles that God has in His Word. They really work together. It is not a linear thing; it is an inner dynamic between these three things. In the faith rest drill, our mind is grabbing hold of a promise, a doctrine. The fact that we have it is because of grace. They all really interconnect.
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Interplay of Spiritual Knowledge Skills
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Grace Orientation
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“Grow in Grace”
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>>> <<<
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Faith Rest Drill Doctrinal Orientation
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“By these promises” “Grow in the knowledge”
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,
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<<< >>>
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Recovery: Confession,
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Spiritual Power: Filling of the Holy Spirit, Walking by the Holy Spirit,
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Spiritual Knowledge Base: Faith Rest Drill, ,
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Grace Orientation,
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Doctrinal Orientation,
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As we implement that, we grow in our understanding of God’s grace and the fact that He is constantly providing for us, and we do not deserve it at all. We continue to grow as we learn more promises. That is one of the great things about memorizing promises: you usually have to repeat about 80, 90 or 150 times before I have got it. Three weeks later, I have forgotten it and have to go back and review it. Every time you repeat it in your mind, you are thinking about it. As you are memorizing a passage, your mind is really drilling down into the meaning of that verse or set of verses, so that you understand and are not doing rote memory without understanding the concepts. You are thinking it through and assimilating the principles and promises that are embedded within that particular promise.
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As we go through this whole procedure under the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit begins to change us from the inside out. It is not this top-down/outside-in kind of change, which comes from legalism. Legalism says that if you want to impress God, you need to clean up your life in these 25 areas. You cannot do these things, and you need to start doing these things. There is an element of truth to that, but if it is done without the recognition of the work of the Holy Spirit, then it is nothing more than wood, hay and straw ().
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Your body takes the food you swallow and then begins to metabolize it, break it down, put it into the blood stream, and then it goes out to strengthen and nourish the cells in your muscles and your brain.
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As we spend time walking by the Spirit and being nourished by the Word of God, it is the Holy Spirit inside of us who begins to take the Word and breaks it down, assimilates it into your thinking and your life, and it is spiritually metabolized so it becomes part of your thinking. The more you use it, the more it becomes second nature and becomes a habit. You have to practice it and not wait until the big moment and then figure out how to practice it. It’s too late.
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Read sometime. Wisdom goes crying through the streets, “Come and get me now. If you do not get me before the crisis, then when the crisis comes, it is too late.” You cannot learn it after the fact; it does not help.
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is another one of these kinds of these lists of virtues. The fruit of the Spirit or the production of the Spirit – not the production of you but is what the Spirit produces in you as a result of the command in to walk by means of the Spirit. As we walk by the Spirit, the Spirit produces these character transformations in our life.
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“Love,” “Joy” – that is the rejoicing that is mentioned back in We rejoice in hope of the glory of God, and we rejoice in adversity. “Peace” – we have peace with God, but that is a positional peace. As we walk by the Spirit, as we grow spiritually, we develop an experiential peace, tranquility, contentment, relaxed mental attitude, so that as we go through the exigencies of life, we do not hit the panic button quite as much. The sin nature is never eradicated and pops up at some of the most inconvenient times. “Longsuffering” in the Greek it is makrothumia [makroqumia], which means long on anger; it takes a long time to get upset over something. It is the opposite of being short-tempered. “Kindness” and “Goodness” are byproducts of grace orientation as we recognize how nasty we have been toward God. That only comes after you have been saved and have begun to realize life before you were saved was not all that significant for God. He did not save you because you are so sweet, wonderful, brilliant, accomplished, and heaven just would not be the same without you; God saved you inspite of yourself, just a dirty, rotten, obnoxious sinner like everyone else. There is nothing good in us that would cause God to want to save us. We finally realize that everything we have in life is due to His goodness to us. He is kind to us when we do not deserve it. “Faithfulness” – we become more faithful to God in our walk with Him. “Gentleness” – has the same idea that we are not prone to anger, being upset or bitter, but we are treating people in grace. “Self-control” – self mastery, which is a mastery of the passions defined in (the works of the flesh, the sin nature).
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In this growth progression CHART, at the base you have the 5 basic spiritual skills: Everything grows out of those. At the next level as we move out of spiritual childhood, we get a personal sense of eternal destiny. That means we begin to realize more and more where God is taking us, and that future expectation that we have, the certainty of that future destiny begins to impact our present decision making. We have all seen examples of that - if you are a parent and have children and, if not, if you can just remember your own childhood. I always remember one of my mother’s favorite sayings it seems was “you have to learn to think beyond the end of your nose.” Most children are that way: they just don’t think in terms of consequences an hour or two hours or a week or three weeks or further down the road. Then one day, it begins to dawn on them that there are consequences, good and bad, and they need to make decisions today in light of what the ultimate consequences need to be, what they would like to see.
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This is developing just within a human realm, sort of a sense of where we are going, and we make decisions today in light of what we want to do a year or two or three down the road. The same thing happens spiritually, as we realize where God is taking us. This is a preparation and training period; God is taking us through circumstances to prepare us to rule and reign with Him in the future. That is our eternal destiny. That begins to impact the decisions that we make today.
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These three adult skills (CHART) all relate to God; they interact. We have a personal love for God that is related to learning more about all that God has done. It is an outgrowth and a response to grace orientation. The more you really understand grace, all of a sudden, we begin to realize all that God has done for us. It is related to loyalty. Love for God is really defined in Scripture as loyalty to God, and loyalty is manifested by obedience. This is why Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” He is not talking about having warm feelings in your tummy about God. He is talking about loyalty. How do you know if you love God? If you are obedient.
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We come out of a culture where love relates to emotion and feeling, but emotion and feeling are pretty flighty and do not last all the time. We have to have the integrity and the character to be loyal. We build on that personal love for God. As we come to love God and understand grace, then it impacts how we treat others – both others in the body of Christ (love one another as Christ has loved us) but also loving those outside of the body of Christ. , , and a couple of other places quote from that we are to love our neighbor as ourself. We are to focus on Christ - occupation with Christ is a form of love for Christ ().
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Ultimately, the result of this is happiness. It is that joy that James talks about in . The reason I have this happiness, sharing the happiness of God, at the end of the progression is because James starts off, “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience” (vs. 2-3). I think that the rest of James is teaching how you do that. The ultimate end of it is what James starts off commanding at the beginning, which is to “count it all joy.” The only way we can do that is to go through the growth progressions that are defined in the book of James.
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In , we read this conclusion: “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have [present reality] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is in this “grace in which we stand” (vs. 2). Then he moves from talking about what we have in this position we are now in (vs. 1-2) to talking about this virtue ladder, this stair step progression to spiritual maturity in vs. 3-5. Why does he do that and how does this fit within his thought flow? It fits within the thought flow when we look at how these verses begin in the Greek. It is somewhat clear in the English.
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Some versions will put a paragraph after verse 5. Some of my Greek texts do not even put a paragraph break until verse 12. I think 1-11 represents one basic paragraph, which is a collection of thoughts surrounding one basic idea.
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“Now hope does not disappoint…” That initial word “now” really is a break from what he has said in vs. 2-4, which just get us to the word “hope.” How do we get hope? There is the progression. What Paul really wants to talk about though is hope. Why does hope not disappoint? Because he says “the love of God is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” It is not as clear in the English, but that verb “is poured out” in the Greek is a perfect tense. That means it is a completed action. If that pouring out of God’s love is completed, when did that happen? That happened when we were justified, at the instant you trusted Christ as your Savior. At that instant, God poured out His love to us by means of God the Holy Spirit. It is a completed action with results that go on through the rest of our life and on into eternity.
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It is poured out by the Holy Spirit. What is the focal point in that verse? Understanding the dimensions of this love which has been poured out in our life. Why is that so important? Then Paul has to explain it in verse 6. He says “for …” “For” in English almost always translates a Greek connective, the word gar, which means an explanation or, in some cases, it could almost be translated as “because.”
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Now he is going to give the reason or cause for the principle in verse 5. Verse 6 “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” He goes right back to the fact that if you are going to understand how to make it through this stair step progression, you really have to take some time to think about what God did when you got saved. You really have to take some time to try to probe into the dimensions of God’s love and all that He did for each of us at that instant of salvation. The more we learn that, we become grace oriented, doctrinally oriented, and our love for God begins to grow and develop.
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Paul explains this. “For [because] when we were still without strength…” When we were spiritually impotent, in fact spiritually dead, we were incapable of saving ourselves. “…in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” That is what all unbelievers are called. The Greek word is asebes [a)sebhj] ; it is a technical term that always describes unbelievers. Christ did not die for the godly, the popular, the good-looking and talented, the brilliant – He died for everybody, and they are all ungodly. Every human being is born ungodly.
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Then he explains it again in verse 7 “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die.” If you are really good, it is still almost impossible that somebody is going to die for you. Maybe if you are a righteous man, it might happen, but it will be rare. Verse 8 “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He didn’t die for you because you were righteous or good; He died for you because you were ungodly and a sinner. He died for people who did not deserve anything.
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Verse 9 “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” “By His blood” comes from chapter 4. Verse 9 is where Paul had this loose thread hanging out here, and he is going to tie that into what I have been saying about what Christ did on the cross. That is where we were justified by His blood – by His death for us as sinners on the cross. That is completed action.
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We were justified the instant we trusted in Christ as Savior, but then he says, “…we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” If you look at that word “wrath” as it has been used in Romans 1:18 ff that the wrath of God has been poured out on those who have rejected Him and who are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, wrath is a term for God’s judgment in time on individuals and on the human race, for divine discipline, divine judgment in time. So the term “we shall be saved” is a future tense. It can be that as you grow and mature as a believer, you are being saved from wrath. It could also refer to something that happens further away.
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It probably relates to the whole process of sanctification. We often talk about the three stages of sanctification. At the cross, we are saved from the eternal penalty of sin. In phase two, we are saved from the power of sin. What are we also delivered from? The wrath of God, the judgment of God, experiencing the divine discipline of God not only on those who are unbelievers suppressing the truth in unrighteousness but on those who are believers who are living in carnality suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.
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Verse 10 “For [explanation] if we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” Here he uses an a fortiori argument, which means he is arguing from the greater to the lesser. Paul sets up what he develops in the first part of : it is the death of Christ that relates to justification, but it is His resurrection life that is the foundation for the Christian life. That is one reason why the resurrection is so important.
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According to the reformed theologians, especially those who are Calvinists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, they often look at this term as related to the physical life of Christ on the earth between His birth and His crucifixion. If we look at this as foreshadowing to what Paul develops in , it is not His pre-crucifixion life; it is His post-crucifixion resurrection life that is the foundation for the Christian life. Reformed theologians want to say that not only was Christ’s death on the cross redemptive, but also any suffering He went through in life was redemptive.
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What I hope you are catching from this is how important it is not just to do the in depth, microscopic exegetical analysis but to look at how somebody’s thought develops within the context and how he uses certain words in certain ways in a broader spectrum than just looking at the minutia. You have to do both.
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Verse 11 “And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” “Rejoice” is an inclusio. He started off by talking about rejoicing in the hope of the glory of God in verse 2, and now he comes back to rejoicing in verse 11. That brackets the text (vs. 1-11). “Reconciliation” ties us back to the fact that we have peace with God in verse 1. You see how verse 11 connects us back to the opening thought in vs. 1-2. As we tie this whole thing together, we are going to come to an understanding that the foundation for moving forward in the spiritual life is understanding what really happened at the cross. God’s love is demonstrated to us in that He died for us, and we did not deserve one thing. That is the key to grace orientation. If you do not get grace orientation, which necessarily implies a heavy dose of humility, there cannot be any growth. Growth demands submission to God’s authority, which means humility, dependence upon God providing the solution, and we just rest in it.

Romans-057b-God's Love and the Atonement.

Romans 5:6 NASB95
For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
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Romans 057b-God’s Love and the Atonement.
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The theme of Romans is the word dikaioo [dikaiow], the verb to be declared justified or declared righteous, dikaiosune [dikaionsunh] righteousness. And Romans is really all about the idea of how do people become righteous in God’s sight. The previous chapters have focused on God’s free gift of righteousness through Jesus Christ and His death, that we received it by faith alone, and it is indicated by the prime example in the Old Testament of Abraham: Abraham believed God and it was counted or imputed to him as righteousness. Then as Paul develops that and begins to speak of the benefits of justification he talks about the fact in verse 1 that we have peace with God.
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Looking down to 5:11 he doesn’t mention anything else about peace with God. And the whole concept of our peace with God is related to another theological word which is “reconciliation. That word we find is the very last word in verse 11. So this section from vv. 1-11 is an integral section building around this idea of our oneness or being brought together with God. This is indicated by threes two great words in the New Testament, peace with God—because we are justified—and reconciliation which means that there was enmity or hostility between man and God and now there is a restoration of harmony between man the sinner and God who is the righteous judge of the universe.
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The word that was coined in English to express that concept is a word that really doesn’t have a counterpart in either Hebrew or Greek but it was just one of those words put together in English in order to communicate this restoration of harmony—the word atonement. It comes from an English attempt to put this together and if you break down the three syllables you have at-one-ment. That is brining the two who were at enmity with one another to a position of being united or being one. This really does speak of the atonement in that strict sense related to this concept of peace and reconciliation. The words atonement and reconciliation sort of sum up all that is accomplished by Christ on the cross. So we speak of the entirety of what He did on the cross as the atonement or reconciliation.
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Those two ideas, peace with God v.1 and reconciliation v. 11, sort of bracket this section. So we know that that is what Paul is talking about, that one of the first benefits of justification is this fact that we are unified or united with God, because a sin penalty is paid for and through faith in Christ we have received the perfect righteousness of Christ. Now there can be harmony between God and the sinful creature because the sinful creature has now been given righteousness.
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In verse 5 Paul connects hope to the love of God that has been poured out by the Holy Spirit to us. It is an understanding of this love that is crucial for understanding God’s grace. The love of God has been poured out upon us. What exactly does that mean? And how are we to understand God’s love for us? God’s love for us is the foundation for grace. If we are ever going to get anywhere in the spiritual life we have to come to understand grace. And this is what Paul is beginning to explain in vv. 6-8. There is a lot in these verses that we need to understand but it all wraps around the understanding of God’s love and what happened at the cross. It is at the cross that we see God’s perfect picture of what love is.
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In these three verses we see three terms that define a sinner, the unbeliever. He is without strength; he is called ungodly; he is called a sinner. Then in verse ten unbelievers are called enemies. All of these terms describe the unbeliever in different aspects of his position in relation to God. There are other words that we need to pay attention to: In v. 6 the word “for”, in v. 7, righteous and good.
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We use the English word “for” in different senses. In the Greek the two words “for” in v.6 and v. 7 are two completely different words and express two completely different ideas. The first word is gar [gar] which always introduces either an explanation for something in the sense of giving the cause or reason for something, or in a logical argument it describes the basis or the foundation for something that has already been stated. So it could be translated “because,” or it could be translated in the sense of explaining more fully what has been stated before. It is important to understand verse 5 because verses 6-11 are really going to explain it in terms of its significance. And what has been articulated so forcefully by Paul in verse 5 is that hope doesn’t disappoint because the love of God has already been poured out upon us. Now we have to learn about it. We don’t learn about it when we get saved. We only come to really understand what happened after we are saved. Paul is trying to help us understand all of the wonderful things that we have in Christ and that God gave us at salvation and in justification and what those benefits are for us today. So he begins this explanation.
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NASB “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” The phrase “when we were still” translates just one word in the Greek, and that word has the idea of when something was in a certain status and it continues to be in that status. So the state that we were in is the state described as being “helpless” or “without strength.” This is the Greek word asthenes [a)sqenhj] and it literally means “without strength.” A person can be without strength in a lot of different ways. They can be without strength spiritually or morally, or they can be without strength physically. When the word is used to describe somebody who is without strength physically then it is usually translated “ill” or “sick.” Of the uses of this word in the Gospels and Acts about 70 per cent of the time it refers to somebody who is physically sick or ill. But there are still a few times when, for example, when Jesus said that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak He used that same word and He was talking about a spiritual weakness or inability on the part of people because of the corruption of sin. So in the Gospels and Acts the primary use has to do with physical illness, but there is still about a third or so of the uses that refer to a spiritual or moral weakness. In the epistles from Romans all the way through the rest of the New Testament those proportions shift so that about 70 per cent of the uses of this term relate to spiritual weakness or inability. This is the same word as used in James chapter 5 when it talks about “If any among you is sick let him call for the elders to pray.” There it shouldn’t be translated “sick,” it should be translated “if anyone is going through a time of spiritual weakness.” Remember, the theme of James is all about persevering in times of testing. In times of testing you just become spiritually tired and want to give up and so the solution is to call for spiritually mature believers to pray for you that you might endure during those times of spiritual weakness.
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That is what it is talking about here, because it is talking about believers in their status before they were saved, when they were without strength. So it is talking about their spiritual condition and the sense that they are unable to do anything to rectify their problem. They are unable to save themselves, unable to perform righteousness, unable to do anything to bring about or to cause peace with God. They are also described here as ungodly as they are without God and without any orientation towards God and living like the world.
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So Paul begins by focusing on the way we were, when we were continually in the status before salvation of being spiritually incapable of solving the sin problem.
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Then he says, “in due time” or [NASB] “at the right time.” This is probably a reference to the same idea Paul had in where Paul said “the fullness of the time” Christ came into the world, talking about the fact that God in His plan organised and prepared thew world in such a way that Jesus came at a time when God had laid the foundation in terms of revelation in the Old Testament and it was the right time for him to come. So in due time “Christ died for the ungodly.”
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When we get to that second English word “for” it is the word huper [u(per] which is used four times in these three verses. There are two prepositions in Greek for substitution, the other is peri [peri] which is used most of the time; huper is used many times for substitution, usually with a genitive case noun afterwards and it has the idea of doing something in place of or for someone else with the idea of substitution. It is the idea here of substitutionary death. Christ died as a substitute for the ungodly—asebes [a)sebhj]. This is the negative of eusebeia [e)usebeia], “godliness.” There are three forms that this word takes in the New Testament—asebeia, asebes, and asebeo, a verb form which is only used two times in the New Testament. The first form, asebeia, is found six times in the New Testament and it is translated as “ungodliness” in four of those occasions and twice it is defined as “ungodly.” In every case except it is clearly used to describe unsaved men. In the translation is “Study to show yourselves approved unto God,” but in the NKJV and a number of other translation it is usually translated “be diligent to present yourselves approved unto God.” Because the Greek word that is used there spaudazo [spaudazw] has the idea of putting everything you’ve got into something. But in the context it has to do with studying the Word, so studying to show yourself approved unto God is a good translation but it has the idea of making this a priority and a focus in the life to be a good servant of God. Then the last phrase is “rightly dividing the Word of truth.” That is where we bring in the idea of the focal point for this diligence, and so that relates to the idea of studying.
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But then there is a contrast in the next verse. Paul is talking to Timothy and he tells him first of all to diligently pursue the study of the Word so that he can accurately handle it. Then in verse 16 he says, “But (in contrast this is what you should not do) shun profane and idle babbling”—just the everyday nonsense of conversation that most people have on things that have no eternal value—“for they will increase.” This is a problem with the undisciplined tongue and loose mouth, which is what James chapter three is all about—“to more ungodliness.” So ungodliness is used here of the behaviour of a Christian, but what it is saying in light of all of the other uses of asebeia (which describes the behaviour of either the unbeliever or the believer) is that if you don’t shun profane and idle babblings then those who engage in those things just end up producing behaviour typical of unbelievers and the world. That is the focal point. This is the only time this whole word group is used to describe something that applies to a believer, but it is in the context of saying don’t act like an unbeliever.
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The second form of the word, which is the word that we find here in the text, asebes, is also translated ungodly in most of its uses—eight of its nine times in the New Testament—and it is an adjectival form. But in almost every instance it is used of an unbeliever. It is Christ who does for the ungodly—unbelievers. This is an adjective that always describes unbelievers—; . In it describes those who were destroyed in the Noahic flood; they were all unbelievers. Then the verb form, used twice in the New Testament—; —both are used to refer to those who were killed under God’s judgment at Sodom and Gomorrah.
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So in we have a clear statement that Christ died as a substitute for the ungodly. In verse 7 Paul uses the word gar [gar] twice to show an explanation or illustration of what he has just said. He has just talked about substitution, that Christ died as a substitute for the ungodly. Now he is going to emphasise how unusual this is and how rare it is. NASB “For [gar] one will hardly die for [on behalf of or as a substitute for] a righteous man; though perhaps for [on behalf of] the good man someone would dare even to die.” The first “for” is an explanation, the next two are huper, the preposition for substitution. This is a contrast between righteous and good, or so it seems. In most cases in the New Testament the term “righteous” and the term “good” are used interchangeably or synonymously. If that is the way Paul is using this he is stating, “on the one hand scarcely for a righteous man one will die.” Then he says, “perhaps,” and this would emphasise the rarity of it, “for a good man someone would even dare to die” (in a few rare cases this will happen). That is how some commentators take this. Others see a distinction between righteous and good, righteous being a person who is in and of himself righteous, justified; righteous in that he has conformed to God’s standard. But the good man is someone who is doing good to others. He has more of a relationship with people, is more outgoing, and he does things for people. Someone who does things for people is more socially acceptable and involved. Somebody is going to die for him; nobody is going to die for the person who is morally upright. What Paul would be saying there is that there are these two situations, about the only two kinds of situations in which somebody might die for somebody else, but in both of these situations it would be a rare thing.
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But however we understand this (and we are not sure which it is) they are both making the same point, and that is that within human experience of one human being giving their life for another this is an unusual and rare thing. This is why we give medals of bravery to people who give their life for other people. It is something that goes above and beyond the call of duty and something that is very heroic. John said that no man has greater love for his brother than that he laid down his life for him. So this is an unusual reality and is a demonstration of love. And that is exactly where Paul goes in his explanation in the next verse.
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In he is contrasting God and God’s love as demonstrated at the cross with the expected behaviour of human beings. NASB “But God demonstrates His own love toward us …” It happens when we are in antagonism and rebellion toward God and not doing anything that would gain God’s favour and make Him desire to save us, and God is going to demonstrate His love for us. The Greek word sunistemi [sunisthmi] means to provide evidence of a personal characteristic or claim through action or demonstration. It is showing evidence of something. So what Paul says here is that in contrast to man’s modus operandi God demonstrates His own love toward us “in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
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The word “love” is the Greek word agape [a)gaph] here. There are two words for love used in the New Testament. The broadest term is agape; the more narrow term is the noun philos [filoj]. philos emphasises a more intimate love, a love that may involve more emotion whereas agape is a broader sense of love. The word “while” is the same word in the Greek as in verse 6 where it says “while we were still without strength,” emphasising that continuing state of being, in that passage weak and in this passage now identified as sinners, those who have missed the mark. “Christ died for us” is, again, huper.
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This verse is one that draws a parallel with and when we think about these two verses together they say the same thing. There are a couple of different ideas in that are not in but what there is is the same statement about God’s love. In are the words “God so loved.” People say “For God loved the world so much,” but that is not what it means. It is a Greek adverb there houtos [o(utwj], which means “in such a way.” It is just another way of saying what Paul says in , that God demonstrates His love. God’s love is not like our love and we have to understand that, and this is the starting point for understanding love. Paul emphasises the substitutionary aspect of that.
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This idea of substitution is inherent in everything that the Bible teaches about how man gets his sin forgiven. That is very much a part of the gospel. Substitution is really the most important idea in understanding the concept of unlimited atonement. NASB “And He said to them, ‘This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for [huper = on behalf of] many.’” The Calvinist who believes in limited atonement will say He didn’t say for all, He just said for many, because the “many,” the elect, are the ones who are saved. But “many” can also refer to all. For example, when John says that all the people in Judea and Galilee went out to hear John the Baptist does that mean that every single person living in Judea and Galilee went. Not necessarily. We use these terms in an exclusive or universal sense that covers every individual and also in a more selective sense. We have to look at other passages to get more precision.
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NASB “And when He had taken {some} bread {and} given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is My body which is given for [huper] you; do this in remembrance of Me.’” Does that mean that Jesus only gave His body as a substitute for those eleven who were still left in front of Him? No. When Jesus said “the many” in Luke with regard to the cup He is not giving a definitive statement about the extent of the atonement, He is emphasising it is substitutionary; it is given on behalf of others. NASB ““I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.” John uses the term “world” is a number of different senses, and this is an extremely broad sense. The word refers to the inhabited planet and those who inhabit it. So here it is an extensive if not universal sense here where Jesus says, “I shall give for the life of the world.”
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NASB “and He died for all, so that they who live [the number who believed in Him] might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.”
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NASB “who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony {given} at the proper time.”
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NASB “For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.”
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NASB “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.”
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NASB “and He Himself is the propitiation for [peri] our sins; and not for ours only, but also for {those of} the whole world.”
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NASB “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” That term related to the forgiveness of sins there is further explained when we get into . Verse 13 “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions”—referring to a previous action. We know it is a previous action because it occurred at the cross. We see that in verse 14. He forgave you all trespasses because He had already wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, “which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” So it was at the cross that that certificate of debt is wiped out. That is expiation; it is the cancellation of that debt. So Christ died for all, the penalty is paid at the cross; not when you trust in Him.

Romans 058b-Justification and Reconciliation Provide Confidence in the Future. Romans 5:8-12

Romans 5:8 NASB95
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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Romans 058b-Justification and Reconciliation Provide Confidence in the Future.
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is building towards a conclusion that begins in verse 9. In the English this is translated “Much more then,” indicating that Paul is building a chain of logic to help us to understand again the implications of justification. The “therefore” in verse 1 is drawing our attention to a conclusion or implication for something that has been said. In the previous chapters there has been a focus on explaining how a person becomes righteous. This is the heart of Romans. The foundation of Romans is this whole concept of righteousness: how can an unrighteous, sinful person become righteous—not in the sense of a relative righteousness in comparison to other people but a perfect righteousness in comparison to the righteous standard of God’s character, for that indeed is the standard.
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It is interesting that if we do a word study of dikaiosune [dikaiosunh], the Greek word translated “righteousness,” that it is consistently spoken of as the righteousness of God. In Paul says, NASB “But now apart from the Law {the} righteousness of God has been manifested … [22] even {the} righteousness of God…” He talks about “His righteousness” in v. 26. And so the righteousness that is being addressed here is God’s character.
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We have to pay attention to the grammar because this is what God the Holy Spirit has emphasised through inerrancy. The very words are inspired by God. So verse 1 of chapter 5 begins, “Therefore, having been justified by faith.” He has explained justification by faith; he has explained righteousness of God.” The righteousness is God’s character, and it is that righteousness that is imputed to us. It is that concept of righteousness or justification, that declaration of a person’s righteousness that is by means of faith. That phrase “having been justified” in verse 1 is going to appear again in verse 9.
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NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.” Everything between verse 1 and verse 9 is something of a digression in order to help us to understand what God has done in providing us that justification and the implications of it for our hope and confidence of the fulfilment of God’s promise in the future. So as we look at just the flow of Paul’s thinking here we see that in vv. 6-8 the emphasis is on God’s grace, and that God’s grace was not only not based on any good thing that God saw in us but it was based totally on God’s character because there was nothing good that God saw in any of us.
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It is really sad today that we are getting so far away from our Christian biblical roots in this country that fewer and fewer people understand what theologians call the doctrine of total depravity. Total depravity doesn’t mean that everybody is depraved in an extreme sense; it just means that every aspect of a person’s thinking has been corrupted by sin. We are all under condemnation and therefore we are inherently bad; we have a propensity to evil and if we are left to our own devices without external controls of authority or God that we will always default to a sinful direction. That is really important to understand because when we look at what some call the culture wars we see the trajectory that has occurred in this country over the last 20 years. People talk about how there is a lack of civility in politics, a lack of civility in the country, and people don’t know how to sit down with opposing views and talk to each other because they become more and more polarised based on some underlying fundamental factors.
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Thomas Sewell has written a number of books, one of which is called Conflict of Vision, has done a great historical analysis of what makes the difference between a person who has what we call a conservative orientation to the issues of life and someone who has a liberal approach to the issues of life. In his introduction he talks about if there is a crowd—let’s say we just went out on the street and pulled a couple of hundred people in—and we say, okay, everybody who believes in the death penalty get over here and everybody who is against the death penalty get over here. So there would be a division. Then we would say, everybody who believes that the government is the solution to the problem rather than the government being the problem—those who believe the government is the solution get over here and those who believe the government is the problem get over there. Very few people would change sides. If you said, if you believe that the government needs to provide a healthy safety net financially and they need to provide health care for everyone, then line up. Thos who would provide health care over here and those against it over there. Very few people would change sides.
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What that indicates is that even though these issues do not share the same details and are not related to one another there is an underlying belief system that is what determines how they respond to each of these different and distinct issues. Those who are conservative have a view of man that is less than positive. They believe that human beings are basically flawed and corrupt to one degree or another; that man is basically evil. The liberals are those who believe that man is basically good, so they are very trusting of government because, after all, the government is made up of wonderful people who have your best interests at heart. The problem is that the founders, the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, whether they were Christian or not, were all influenced by a theistic worldview at the time and they had a view of man that he was basically evil. And in the words of Lord Acton, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” so you want to limit the power given t those in authority because water rolls down hill and they will inevitably come along and abuse that power and authority; so there needs to be checks and balances on it.
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That is why, fundamentally, people who are “liberal” who have their views affected by a positive view of man as being basically good, are completely at odds with the Constitution. They don’t believe that the nature of man, the nature of government, or the nature of society is what the founding fathers believed it was. They have completely changed and are really and completely out of bounds so they are trying to change things. This is what sets up the polarisation in our cultures. It is very important to understand that the Bible teaches that man is a sinner. We have seen in pointing out several words in , , & 8 that we have words like “we were without strength, ungodly, sinners,” and that this is how God describes all human beings. These are not complimentary terms. God does not have a high view of the human race because God understands the dimensions of the corruption that has occurred because of sin. That doesn’t mean that man can’t do relatively good things. Jesus said, “You being evil know how to give good gifts to your children.” Despite the fact that they have been corrupted they know how to do relatively good things; they just can’t do good or righteous deeds at the level of what God has provided.
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In the verses we have seen we are told that our status prior to justification was being without strength, ungodly, and being sinners. And despite the fact that we were in that negative position God sent His Son to pay the penalty for us as our substitute. Having established that Paul made a little diversion in order to remind us of this tremendous exhibition of God’s love, because that love is related to that confidence that we have in God. The word that we must keep our eye on in this whole section, vv. 1-11, is this “hope” that doesn’t disappoint that is in v. 5. We have this hope that doesn’t disappoint because “because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts [at salvation] through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” Then he explained the depths of this love. So now that we understand the depths of this love that God has exhibited in salvation we now can go forward from that to understand the certainty it gives us in all of the ups and downs and problems and issues of life, and all the times that we may doubt our salvation or God’s plan for our life.
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The model here, again, is what happens at salvation. The apostle Paul always goes to what happened at the cross and what happened at our salvation—we became a new creature, we were justified—and really unpacks that to help us to understand that should change what we do today, what we think and how we live as a Christian. Most of us don’t spend nearly enough time just stopping to think about all that happened to us at salvation, all that God did for us, and thinking about it in terms in a more personal sense where it has a little more of an impact upon us.
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NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.” What happens in this verse is really important to understand. Because it is at this point that the apostle Paul uses and argument that is called an a fortiori argument. This is a Latin phrase which means “from the stronger,” like a fort. The fort refers to the fact that you talk about a strong conclusion, something that is true, that is very strong, and then if that is true then something lf lesser significance must also be true. This is a very common type of argument used in logic. This strong conclusion that is stated here in verse 9 is that we have been “justified by His blood,” an aorist passive participle. The aorist indicates this is something happened previously and the passive voice indicates that it is something that we received. We do not perform that action, we don’t justify ourselves; we receive the declaration of justification from God and it is adverbial in the sense of a causal statement. So it should be translated, “Much more then because we have now been justified.” That is the strong statement. Justification is the strong statement because it is very difficult for God to take a rebellious, ungodly, weak, unrighteous sinner and to give him righteousness, and to declare him to be righteous. That is a very difficult thing to do and God did that in His plan by providing this substitute. By virtue of His substitution His perfect righteousness could then be made available to anyone who believed on Him. This is the doctrine of imputation: Christ’s righteousness is imputed to anyone who believes in Him for salvation. It is on the basis of that credited righteousness that God declares us to be righteous, justified.
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If that is the hard thing to do and God has accomplished that, then the lesser thing is we have a certainty of future salvation. If God has already provided us with justification then, of course, something of lesser difficulty—being saved from the wrath to come—is something that God can provide—“ we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.”
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Notice in this verse the means of justification as well as the means of salvation from wrath. Both are through Jesus Christ. The first phrase is stated to be “by His blood.” This clearly emphasises that His blood is the means of justification. But we often run into people who have somewhat confused notions of what the phrase “blood of Christ” means. It has often been emphasised within the ranks of fundamentalism that it is they took the blood of Christ as a literal phrase. However, we should understand the phrase “blood” as a metaphor. It is not talking about literal blood, of the literal shedding of blood, but that the violent shedding of blood is a metaphor for the loss of life. Leviticus says that the life is in the blood. So blood is used as a metaphor for life; the shedding of blood means the shedding or the loss of life.
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We see examples of this kind of figurative use in places like the covenant with Noah where God said whoever sheds man’s blood [murder] by man should his blood be shed. That is not being only restricted to being a violent death where somebody lost their life through exsanguination, it could be somebody who is hit over the head or just had a brain trauma and died, somebody who was just poisoned, or any number of ways of dying or murder. But the phrase “shedding of blood” was a metaphor for the shedding or the loss of life. So blood = life, and this is documented in Greek lexicons such as Arndt and Gingrich.
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But here we have a great verse to show its metaphorical significance because verse 9 is parallel to vees 10. Verse 9 says, “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.” In verse 10 Paul is going to transition his argument forward and is going to change the terminology from justification to reconciliation. He is going to talk about being saved from wrath is parallel to being saved by His life. “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son …” The previous verse said we were justified by His blood. Blood and the death of His Son are synonymous concepts. This shows that “blood of Christ” is just a metaphor for the death of Christ. That is how this figure of speech was used throughout the Scriptures.
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It is interesting that when looking carefully at vv. 6-11, verse 6 says that Christ died as a substitute for the ungodly. Verse 8 says that Christ died as a substitute for us—that means we were ungodly. In verse 9 we have another reference to His death: we are justified by His blood. Verse 10: we were reconciled through the death of His Son. Then in v.11 there is another reference to this, “…we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” So there is a reference or allusion to the death of Christ in every verse but verse 7 which was a sort of illustration that it is rare for human beings to die for another human being no matter how righteous or good they might be. So the focus obviously in these verses is on that death of Christ. So it is clear that phrases like “died for the ungodly, Christ died for us, justified by His blood,” and now “we are reconciled through the death of His Son” all refer to the same thing.
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The second part of this is that Paul says “because we have now been justified by His blood.” That is past tense action. It has already happened; we are now in a status of justification. Then he says “we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” That phrase “shall be saved” is a future passive indicative. We receive the act of being saved or delivered [sozo/swzw = save/deliver]; “through Him”—indicating means or the instrument by which God accomplishes something. Neither of these are talking about the cause of salvation; that would use different grammar. Jesus’ death is the means by which God is able to save us. The ultimate cause of our salvation is the grace of God.
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But it is interesting: “we who have now been justified shall be [future tense] saved.” How many times have we talked to somebody and asked, “Are you saved?” Well according to the way Paul uses the term “saved” here “saved” is in the future, not in the past. We need to be very careful how we read the word “saved” in Scripture. In Romans Paul never uses the word sozo [swzw] to describe what we call phase one justification, he always uses the word to refer to primarily phase two salvation, i.e. being saved from the power of sin, and a few times he uses it for phase three salvation, our future glorification where we are saved from the presence of sin when we are absent from the body and face to face with the Lord.
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He uses this phrase “we shall be saved from wrath.” What is wrath? It is suggested that for most people when they read the phrase “wrath” they think that this is a reference to eternal judgment. In fact there are numerous theologians and commentaries that think this. Usually that is related to their theological framework. And when they come to the text with a Covenant theological framework rather than a dispensational framework they come with a replacement theology framework which dominates most systems of thought in theology rather than dispensationalism. They can only think in terms of wrath as something future. But wrath is not necessarily something future.
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Notice NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” This is the first use of the word “wrath.” It is a general rule of interpretation of the Bible (not an absolute rule) that the first time a word is used in a particular letter or book it sort of defines for us the meaning of that word in that book. Sometimes the first five or six times a word is used in the Bible really shapes its meaning for the rest of the Scripture. So the word “wrath” in some places does refer to something in the distant future. For example in we are saved from the wrath to come. That is a term for the Tribulation, but here this is not a term for the Tribulation. And nowhere are we convinced that it is a term for future eternal condemnation. We studied in Romans chapter one that wrath is a term to describe God’s judgment or divine discipline on human beings in time, within history, not after the conclusion of history into eternity. So wrath may be the discipline of God tomorrow because of bad decisions made today or it may be something that is a little more distant in life, but it is not something after life in the future.
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In verse 18 of Romans chapter one Paul writes “For the wrath of God is revealed (present tense) from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” Ungodliness usually describes the character, lifestyle and the thought system of unbelievers. Ungodly is the behaviour of an unbeliever, not that of a believer. So the behaviour, lifestyle, and unrighteousness of an unbeliever and his rejection of God is going to bring about divine discipline in time. That is what the wrath of God describes.
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NASB “But because of your [unbelievers] stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” In that verse and verse 8 it is talking about more of an eschatological future of judgment, but all other uses of wrath in Romans have to do with here and now. In chapter 2:5, 8 even there the most natural reference for wrath is that this is something in time because it should be governed by the first mention of wrath that is laid out in . Since the rest of Romans chapter one and on into chapter two is an outworking, an explanation of how God’s wrath is revealed it seems to be talking about something in time, not something in the future. This seems to argue that , should be taken to mean a wrath that is brought about not in the day of judgment—it sounds future—but it is really talking about when God, after His longsuffering has had enough, brings divine discipline on the life of the unbeliever. Contextually we have to let the context define the meaning of words.
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The second reason that 5:9 should be understood as temporal within our life is that it is compared or contrasted in verse 10 with the fact that we shall be saved by His life. So the contrast is that we shall be saved from wrath by Him, and we shall be saved by His life. When we look at Romans this phrase of “life” is talking about the life that we have as believers, the newness of life that Paul talks about in . It is based upon the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus Christ. This verse isn’t talking about His physical life between the time that He was born in Bethlehem and the time that He died on the cross of Golgotha, it is talking about His resurrection life. Paul makes that very clear as we will see in chapter six. Life contextually in Romans is always talking about our present experience of the fullness of life which we have been given in Christ. This is how it is used in Romans chapters 5, 6 7 and 8, and also later on in chapters 12-15. So he uses the term “life” and the phrase “to live” in terms of our phase two life as a Christian. We are saved by His life because it is His resurrection life; it is the basis of our being given new life.
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describes what happens with the baptism by the Holy Spirit. NASB “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead [resurrection life] through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” The Christian life, the Christian walk is based on the new life that have in Christ, based on His resurrection and the fact that we have been united with His resurrection.
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A third thing we need to note in terms of how this life theme is emphasised is that the concept of death and life appear together in eight verses in chapters 5-8. And the contrast is always between Christians who are either living in carnal death and not walking by the Holy Spirit, walking in darkness, and the Christian who is walking in life. This is seen by a verse that is usually quoted by people out of context in witnessing, and that is , “For the wages of sin is death…” Paul has been talking about justification in the first part of chapter five, and chapter six is talking about the Christian life. The wages of sin if you are a Christian and you continue to walk in darkness and live out of fellowship on the basis of the sin nature is death—not eternal death but you are the walking dead, like a zombie. You have eternal life but you are living as if you are a spiritually dead unbeliever. Everywhere through these chapters where it talks about death or life it is always talking about experiencing the fullness or the abundant life that we have been given in Christ.
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The future tense is what we often jump to as long-term distance, which it can be, but it can also be near future: that the way in which we are saved from wrath by His life is by learning to live in fellowship, walking by God the Holy Spirit, abiding in Christ; and that is a way in which we experience that fullness of life. So the context helps us to understand that this is talking about the present experience of believers.
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Again and again throughout Romans where Paul uses the word “saved” or “salvation” he is talking about something future. He never uses that word group in the section where he is talking about justification. This is the first time we run into the word and it is referring to something future that occurs because we have been justified. So this is talking about phase two salvation—saved from the present dominion or tyranny of sin but by walking by the Holy Spirit, walking in fellowship with God, letting the power of the Holy Spirit work in our lives. Because of that we are saved from divine discipline in time [wrath], whether it is immediate or a little more distant. So the way to avoid divine discipline in the life and divine judgment as a result of living and walking in carnality is to confess sin, walk by the Holy Spirit, stay in fellowship and abide in Christ and apply the Word, and that will save from wrath.
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Paul then goes on to build upon this. NASB “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” Again he uses it in that same future tense that we are saved by His life and we have already been reconciled, already justified. Then he builds upon that again [11] “And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” In verse 10 there are two forms of the word “reconciliation.” There is an aorist passive indicative—“if while we were enemies,” a general thing that happened in the past—and then the second time an aorist participle which refers to an action that precedes the action of the main verb. So this is talking about the fact that we have been reconciled already, and now it is talking about the present tense reality or the future tense reality, being saved by His life. Then at the end of verse 11 it refers to this action by its name, “the reconciliation.” We have now, already as believers in Christ, received reconciliation. He uses this transition from the term justification to reconciliation as the overall term that he is describing because reconciliation is the term that relates to all that was done at the cross.
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In verse 11 we read the phrase in the English translation, “but we also rejoice in God.” Have we seen that before? In verse 2 we read “through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult [rejoice] in hope of the glory of God. We began in verse one with the phrase “because we have been justified by faith.” He is going to draw implications from that and one of those is this aspect of rejoicing in God. So when he comes to the end of this paragraph in verse 9 he says “Much more then, having now been justified …” He is returning to that basic principle that he has established in chapters three and four. “… we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.” This is the basis of our real joy. We have joy in this life because we come to understand how we have been delivered from the wrath, the discipline and the judgment of God that comes in time.
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This becomes a ground for our understanding of assurance of salvation. If Christ died for sinners who were enemies of God and unable to reconcile themselves, and having no merit or value in themselves, and God through His mercy has reconciled such sinners to Himself, how much more will He be merciful to those He has already reconciled? In other words, if God can save a sinner then the one who has already been reconciled by the death of Christ will certainly escape the wrath of God and will continue to be justified no matter what happens—ending eventually in His glorification. So there is an implicit argument here for the assurance of salvation.
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The human race is born in a legal state of hostility toward God because of Adam’s sin. No fallen human being can change this state of hostility; we can’t reverse it. We are in prison; we can’t do something that has to be done by someone out of prison. The opposite of what we see in this passage of hostility and enmity is peace or harmony with God, and that status must be changed. It can only be changed if the legal penalty is paid, and that payment is through the death of Jesus Christ—His subsitutionary spiritual death on the cross.
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That lays the foundation for getting into the spiritual life.

Romans 059b-Justification and Reconciliation.

Romans 5:8 NASB95
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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Romans 059b-Justification and Reconciliation.
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In the first eleven verses of chapter five Paul is making his transition, moving from talking about what happened at salvation (justification). The first implication Paul pulls from justification by faith is what he identifies as peace with God (5:1) and then identifies more clearly as reconciliation which he almost uses as a synonym for justification when we get to the end of these eleven verses. NASB “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” The reconciliation has to do with what has happened in the past: salvation by His life, meaning His resurrected life that is the basis doctrinally for understanding the new life that we have ().
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NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood …” Talking about what has already transpired. In verse 10 that shifts from the parallel, from having been justified, to being reconciled. This parallel sets up some interesting implications but also can open the door to some confusion. It has led theologians to some different positions.
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In this passage we see reconciliation as a ground for our assurance. Because we have been reconciled to God we shall be saved by His life and on that basis we can have present joy, v. 11. “And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” The mention of joy again is the same verb that we have in verse 2, “and we exult in hope of the glory of God,” and also in verse 3, “we also exult in our tribulations.” Paul ties all this together. The vocabulary is very important for us to understand. Unfortunately that verb for “rejoice” is translated “glory” in 5:3 [NKJV] and it throws us off the track. When we realise that it is the same verb in vv. 2, 3 and 11 then we see that that ties together the beginning of the paragraph with the end of the paragraph, and it is all talking about why we can have real joy right now in our Christian life today, not just looking for that joy in the future as a result of our eventual glorification. He is focusing on the present tense implication of justification in terms of the joy that comes from reconciliation, and how that peace that we have with God becomes a foundation for living the Christian life and understanding the Christian life, which is what he gets into starting in chapter 6.
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So we want to go back and review this doctrine of reconciliation as we see it in Romans. It raises three basic questions. First, what is the relationship between justification and reconciliation? The reason that is an important question is because justification is something that happened to us as believers, only those who expressed faith alone in Christ alone. In this passage, though, it seems that Paul creates a very close parallel between reconciliation and justification. But then the work of reconciliation it is said in to be something that occurs at the cross, as it is here in also, not something that occurs in time when an individual puts their faith in Christ. This is what has caused some basic confusion. Some of the questions that have been raised relate to the fact that with God reconciling the world to Himself, is the world that is reconciled to God or is God reconciled to the world? In other words, who moves? Also related to this is the issue of propitiation. What is the relationship between reconciliation and propitiation? Propitiation is said to be something that happens towards God in terms of His justice and His righteousness, that when He looks at the cross and that in the death of Christ His justice is satisfied, and so God id propitiated. It doesn’t mean that He changes; it means that because His judicial requirements are satisfied because the penalty for sin is paid God’s justice is then satisfied so that God is free to graciously bestow salvation on mankind.
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So the first question has to do with this relationship between justification and reconciliation. Also what is the relationship between reconciliation and propitiation? And then the third question has to do with the issue: is God reconciling the world or is God being reconciled? How does this work and what are the aspects of this? What we are going to see is that reconciliation has two different aspects. One is definitely related to an objective work of God that occurs on the cross that is related to the world, so that the world, which is at enmity with God, is in a position of hostility, because of the violation of God’s righteousness and justice (that is where propitiation comes in), and God has to change that state from hostility to peace. That is an objective thing that happens at the cross. We will see as we go through these passages that that dimension of reconciliation is objective, and like justification it is also forensic. Forensic has to do with actions in the court room, and so what we are talking about is the judicial dimension to reconciliation which helps us to understand why Paul can closely connect them between and 5:10. That objective dimension to reconciliation occurs at the cross and the state of the world is being transformed from being a state of hostility—once God’s character is satisfied (propitiation) then the world’s position of enmity is changed, which doesn’t make the world saved but it makes the inhabitants of the world saveable.
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Therein lies a very simple expression of a lot of different theology and it is really just the fact that reconciliation has two aspects to it. One is the objective one and the second is this subjective one that occurs personally. We see the same kind of thing when we see words like “forgiveness.” That forgiveness occurred at the cross. Colossians chapter two: God forgave us by wiping out that certificate of debt that was against us—basically the indictment related to sin. That was wiped out or cancelled when it was nailed to the cross. That happened historically, so that there is a forensic dimension also to forgiveness. It happened at the cross when Christ paid the penalty and the certificate of debt was wiped out. But that doesn’t change people individually, it is related to that legal change of relationship to God because the penalty is paid but that doesn’t change the on-the-ground reality of each person’s experience of being spiritually dead and being unrighteous. It is only when we then express faith in Christ that we receive the imputation of righteousness, are declared justified and then receive new life and regeneration and have eternal life. And so those individual subjective aspects are then taken care of.
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In , we have two different uses of the word “reconcile.” NASB “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son [past tense], much more, having been reconciled [aorist passive participle], we shall be saved by His life. [11] And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ [present tense], through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” So there is a reception of reconciliation in verse 11 and that relates to passive voice of “we were reconciled” in verse 10. That means we received that action of reconciliation, we don’t do anything to reconcile ourselves to God. But wait a minute, it seems like Paul is going to say something a little different in .
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1. The human race is in a legal state of hostility, which is really what enmity means. It is not a sense of personal animosity or hatred or personal vindictiveness on the part of God, and it certainly isn’t talking about enmity in terms of what is on the human side of the equation. The enmity is related to God’s character. There is a status of hostility that is in place and it is grounded in man’s violation of God’s judicial character. So it is a forensic state, a judicial state, and not an experiential, subjective, personal state of animosity.
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2. No fallen human being can change this state of hostility. There is nothing we can do. We are the prisoner in the dock, we are under indictment and we can’t do anything to change that, it has to be changed elsewhere.
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3. The opposite of hostility is peace. In the context of Romans chapter five the peace here is also going to be a judicial peace, because it grows out of our understanding of justification. Verse 1, “Because we have been justified by faith.” That is forensic, not experiential. So by implication “we have peace with God” too, must be forensic. So in Romans five we are talking about a forensic aspect to this issue of peace. The hostility is forensic, i.e. it is based on a legal case. It is so interesting that Scripture grounds everything that God does toward mankind on a contract. That gives it this legal framework. It is about law, so that from the very beginning, before there was even sin in the human race God is grounding everything He does on the basis of the rule of law. And when man is operating in sin he always wants to buck the law, he always wants to violate the law, and the more rebellious the human race becomes, the more antinomian it becomes, the more it rejects the rule of law. And what always comes about when the rule of law is rejected is either pure anarchy or pure tyranny. The history of the human race always tends to move in one of those directions, apart from the grace of God and the influence of Scripture. We see the collapse of society because there is a rejection of the rule of law. But the Bible lays this foundation on the rule of law, that everything God does it related to law.
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A side note: Coming out of the “lovely subjective” sixties where everything was about love and flowers (unless, of course, you were conservative. Love was not directed toward conservatives or the military), and all about emotion and relationship. Justification was the focus doctrine of the Reformation but, because of societal transformation, but the time of the 60s and 70s the key doctrine for gospel communication is reconciliation because reconciliation is relational.
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In this passage the focus isn’t on relationship, it is on justice, on law. So law precedes relationship. Isn’t that interesting! What other area is there where law and contract precedes a relationship? Technically it is marriage, because a couple establish a formal legal contract. They are promising in a legal sense to be faithful to one another until “death do us part.” And the love that they are declaring to one another is a love that is not related to emotion, because it is whether in sickness, health, in prosperity or poverty, or whatever the circumstances may be; and that is not related to emotion.
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But what we see is that relationship biblically develops once the legal relationship is established. Then the personal relationship can build on that because a boundary has been established of security within the contract. On the basis of a legal contract a relationship can now develop. Law precedes relationship. And as we look at all these dimensions of salvation we see that they are grounded in legal principle that is established by God in a contract law, and this becomes a foundation for us for understanding contract law.
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4. There must be a change of status; the legal penalty has to be paid. So that status of enmity that is legal has to be transformed into a legal state of peace or harmony and that can only happen by paying the forensic penalty. That is done by the substitutionary spiritual death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
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Having said that, we need to look at our other main passages on reconciliation. In 2 Corinthians chapter five we see one of the most significant passages related to reconciliation. What we have seen so far is that reconciliation has to be grounded on a change of relationship. That is the central meaning of reconciliation. It is a change of relationship that is grounded on a change of legal status in terms of that state of hostility.
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NASB “For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died.” What is Paul’s starting point here? It is the same starting point as : that it is God’s love, and God’s love provided a substitutionary solution to the problem. This has to do with the universality of the objective or judicial side of Christ’s work on the cross. [15] and He died for all…” This is not talking about universalism in terms of the result of His death on the cross, it is talking about universalism in terms of the focus of His death on the cross; He is dying as a substitute for all; it is a real payment for sin. The bill is paid. Christ’s payment of the objective penalty doesn’t automatically the subjective reality of each person being spiritually dead and unrighteous; it just means that the external penalty is paid in relation to the character of God. “… so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.” Those who live are those who put their faith alone in Christ alone, and the purpose for the payment of the objective penalty is so there is a subjective application when people believe in Jesus.
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And the purpose isn’t just so that they have eternal life and go to heaven, but that their life will be transformed and they won’t live like self-centered, self-absorbed, whiny two-year-olds anymore but they will start living for God in light of God’s plan or purpose. That is, they will live for Him who died for them and rose again. In other words, there will be a focal point shift in the vision of their life—or there should be as they get some doctrine and begin to grow—and it is not just all about them anymore, it is that they realise that their life is all about Christ. It is always just all about Christ, and it is never about us anymore and it never really was about us but we convinced ourselves under the blindness of the sin nature to think that our life was all about us. It was always about God’s plan, period.
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NASB “Therefore [because this has happened] if anyone is in Christ, {he is} a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” He is a new creation. This is what occurs at salvation. So he has gone from talking about this substitutionary atonement idea (vv. 14, 15, and which is objective, legal, and historical) to the subjective application—the only way to be in Christ is to trust in Him, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit identifies us with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection—and the result of that is we are a new creation. We have that qualitative newness of life of .
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NASB “Now all {these} things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” The first thing we see here about reconciliation is that God is the one who does the work of reconciliation. This is the same verb as in Romans chapter five, katalasso [katalassw], and here it is an aorist active participle, which means it is going to be modifying the main verb in some way. God reconciled us, believers in this passage. They are the ones who are changed, not God; whereas propitiation was Godward, directed towards His righteousness and justice; reconciliation is manward related to changing that status. It was the objective status related to the law in ; here it is related to the subjective application of it in each individual believer. “… and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” or, “the message of reconciliation as it is stated in v. 19.
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NASB “namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…” that has to be at the cross. The term “world” is one for all of the inhabitants of the planet. It is the same object as in , that God loved the world in this way. The object of His reconciliation is the world conceived if as unbelievers. That is NASB “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “… not counting their trespasses against them …” That has to do with individual imputation. We are not condemned for our individual sins; we are condemned for Adam’s original sin. We sin because we were already fallen because of Adam’s original sin. “… and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.” Word of reconciliation is parallel to ministry of reconciliation, so how does the ministry of reconciliation operate?
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The ministry of reconciliation operates by communicating the message reconciliation, which is the word of reconciliation stated in v. 19. God performs the action, and the world seen and perceived as fallen in a state of hostility, receives the action. Personal sins are not imputed to the unbeliever; they are not the issue at salvation. That is huge, because most people who are not Christians think that the whole issue is all their petty little sins. They do not extend up to the significance of Adam’s original sin which plunged the entire human race into sin. It is not our sins that is the basis of our condemnation.
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We have this message of reconciliation. That is evangelism; that is communicating the gospel, the good news to people that they are no longer in a legal status of hostility to God because Christ’s death reconciled us, but that doesn’t change their eternal destiny, that only comes if they accept the gospel and are personally reconciled to God. NASB “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ …” An ambassador is one who is a citizen of one nation who is appointed by the governing authority of that nation, and is under the authority of that nation, and is sent as a representative to another nation. Even though he is living in another country, and even though he is going to do what he can to live as closely to the customs of that country without violating his own background, his own home, he goes to represent his nation. He is a representative and that is who we are as believers. We are representatives of Christ and we are under His authority. “… as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” We are pleading with people to be reconciled to God.
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So on the one hand God is in Christ at the cross reconciling the world to Himself—objective, and that happened at the cross because that provides the basis for the shift in the world’s orientation to God from hostility to peace—and now, on the other hand, we plead with each individual to apply that in terms of their own individual orientation to God. We are to plead with people to be reconciled, it is not just automatic. But reconciliation is a term that relates objectively to all of this that has taken place at the cross so that sin isn’t the issue anymore, the issue is: are we going to accept what Christ has done for us?
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That then takes us over to , NASB “For it was the {Father’s} good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, {I say,} whether things on earth or things in heaven.” That is the objective aspect of that payment, and it is done through Christ. Here we have the word apokatalasso [a)pokatalassw] which means to reconcile completely; nothing is left undone. That same word apokatalasso is used in NASB “and might reconcile them both [Jew and Gentile] in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity.”
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We conclude that reconciliation is the work of God for man in which God undertakes to transform man’s position of hostility (legal animosity, not personal animosity) to peace in order to make possible and actual eternal fellowship with a righteous and just God. So the objective aspect of reconciliation is Godward and is related to, but not the same as, propitiation. We say that reconciliation was accomplished forensically or in a legal sense once and for all by Christ on the cross. Then it is applied to each believer positionally only when a person has trusted in Christ. That is the subjective aspect that takes place when one trusts in Christ as savior.
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Now when we go back and look at Romans chapter five and its relation to justification we see how Paul is looking at one dimension of reconciliation, and that is the objective aspect that is resolved at the cross. But because his readers have trusted in Christ and have been justified they are reconciled. So if he speaks to them in terms of their current position in Christ, and he says that because of that they can now rejoice as a current reality, not just because in the future they are going to spend eternity in heaven, but they have joy now in their Christian life because they have received this reconciliation and are in harmony with God. It is on the basis of that, then, that we can drive forward in our life in experiencing the rich abundance that God has for us.

Romans 060b-How Sins Get Transmitted.

Romans 5:12 NASB95
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—
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Romans 060b-How Sins Get Transmitted.
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As we have noted, Romans chapter five is a transitional chapter. Paul is taking us from the realities of the foundation of what we call salvation, but what he specifically calls justification, in this epistle. He makes a strong distinction between justification, that which takes place at the instant of salvation, and the word group that we normally translate as saved he reserves to refer to primarily the Christian life, the life of the believer after salvation. We have to make that distinction and always be aware that it is typical in our culture where certain words become taken out of the Scriptural context and used in ways that aren’t the way the Bible necessarily uses that word, or maybe doesn’t use that word all the time. “Saved” is like that. We normally think that saved is getting into heaven and escaping eternal condemnation. It is used that way in Scripture at times but the word, whether it is the verb sozo [swzw] or the noun for salvation, soteria [swthria], can refer to healing, to deliverance from some calamity, or it can refer to the outworking of our justification. For example, in Philippians chapter two as Paul is addressing those who are already believers and secure in their eternal destiny exhorts them to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” That is the post-justification spiritual growth that occurs in the believer. That is going to be the thrust of Paul’s focus from Romans chapter six to Romans chapter eight.
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In Romans chapter four we finished our discussion about justification. In Paul began to focus on the implications of that justification. NASB “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Then in verses 2 & 3 he goes on to talk about the implications of that in terms of our hope and our faith and our spiritual life and growth. That is the thrust of those first eleven verses, and in verse 11 he says, “And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” He shifts his vocabulary from justification to a broader concept which is reconciliation, which is always related in the Scripture to the concept of peace.
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Now he is going to backtrack a little bit when we get into this next section because he wants to make sure his readers, and we also, understand the connection between justification and the spiritual life. So really stands as a hinge, as it were, between the past discussion on justification and the coming discussion on the spiritual life. He is transitioning from one to the other. He is now bringing some final points to our attention about justification and then he is going to develop that into the way the believer should think and react in terms of sin in his own life.
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In verse 12 he is going to start bringing us to this conclusion on the basis of what he has talked about. In some translations the verse starts with a “therefore,” but actually in the Greek it is not a “therefore.” Therefore indicates a conclusion. But he uses another phrase, dia touto [dia touto] which indicates “For this reason.” And “for this reason” isn’t drawing a logical conclusion based on previous information but that he is bringing something new to what he has been saying in the previous eleven verses. It is like weaving a rope where you lay down one thread and then lay another thread on top of it, and then you begin to twist them together. That is what he is doing rhetorically in this chapter.
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What Paul is going to do here is start a line of thought in verse 12. He starts off, “Therefore, just as,” and he uses a certain kind of construction here in the Greek where he uses a word which is like a conditional clause where there are two parts to it. In the first past there is the protasis (the “if” clause) and then there is the apodosis which is the second clause. He will say “just as” and then later he says “thus” in verse 18, not in verse 12, because it is as if he stops in the middle and says, ‘I am not sure they are really understanding the point, so I want to make sure they don’t misunderstand me.’ He goes down a little bit of a rabbit trail, which is called an anacoluthon in literary circles, and he diverts his attention for a minute to explain how and why every human being is declared a sinner. We have to understand what the sin nature is, what sin is, and the basis of our condemnation. This is something that is so difficult for some people to understand.
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People think that the reason that they are going to go to the lake of fire is because of their sin, and they think that the reason that they are going to be judged at the judgment seat of Christ is because of their sin. For the doctrine of real substitution to be true that means Jesus Christ paid the penalty for every person’s sin. It is paid for. The way the gospel has often been presented by people who hold to unlimited atonement is that it is a hypothetical atonement or a potential: Jesus died for you but if you reject it He didn’t really die for you, you have to pay for your sins in eternity.
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Some people have said that there are a couple of places in the Gospels where Jesus says to the Pharisees that they will die “in their sins.” That phrase “in your sins” or “in their sins” is used in several places, but there is a difference between the preposition en [e)n] and the preposition “for.” Dying “in your sin,” if we look at the use of that phrase in John it is not clear. Jesus just makes this statement that “you are going to die in your sin.” So how do we understand what an ambiguous phrase means in a couple of places? We look to see if it is used anywhere else. Maybe it is used somewhere else where it is not ambiguous. In Paul says, NASB “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” That is the same phrase, and it is talking about being spiritually dead—physically alive but spiritually dead; so “in your sins” in that context means to be spiritually dead. Then Paul uses that same structure in NASB “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh …” It is the same phrase. From those two clear passages it seems that the phrase being “in your sins” is related to being in a state of being spiritually dead. When Jesus addressed the Pharisees and others and said, ‘You will die in your sins,” what he is saying is, ‘You will die physically still in a state of spiritual death.’ He is not saying they will die for their sins or that they will make a payment for their sins, he is saying they are going to die in that state—still spiritually dead.
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As we have seen, there are basically three problems that we all have. Problem # 1 is a legal problem: God as the judge of the universe has assigned a legal penalty to the human race of spiritual death, and that legal penalty needs to be paid. The second and third problems are the consequence of that legal penalty that God assigned to Adam. When Adam died spiritually that new status of spiritual death is what is passed on to all of his descendants, but that legal condemnation is what comes down on him at the beginning and then it changes his status so that all of his descendants are born in a state of spiritual death. So no matter what happens at the cross in terms of paying the legal penalty the reality is every human being is still experientially dead. Problem # 2 is the experience of being spiritually dead for every human being. Problem # 3 is that because we are spiritually dead we produce unrighteousness. .
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So we have three problems: a) The legal penalty; b) We are born spiritually dead; c) We are unrighteous.
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We can’t be with God or spend eternity with God unless the legal penalty is paid and unless there is a spiritual rebirth so that we move from death to life, and unless we are righteous. The first of those was solved at the cross. That is that universal aspect of the atonement: Christ died for all. Christ propitiated the Father, satisfied His righteousness, for the whole world; that is universal. Redemption: He paid the price for all, so redemption is for all. Reconciliation in terms of the objective side is for all. That is universal. But those three things only satisfy the righteousness of God. They are all God-directed. They satisfy His righteousness, they pay the legal penalty, and they solve the barrier problem between God and man. But that still leaves every individual human being in a status of being spiritually dead and unrighteous, so that has to be solved.
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That is the condition that everybody is in. The legal penalty is paid, so the fact that they are under condemnation for sin, is no longer the issue. The issue is, they have to have righteousness and they have to be regenerated. That is why life is such a major theme in the Gospel of John and why John begins near the beginning with the conversation with Nicodemus related to the fact that we can’t get into the kingdom unless we are born again, regenerate, are given that new life. Because we are born physically alive but are spiritually dead. The individual aspects of the atonement that are related to regeneration and the imputation of righteousness solve those two problems. We are only regenerate when we believe, and we only receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness when we believe.
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Now, as Paul has established that foundation for understanding imputation and justification, he wants to make sure that he is not going to move into understanding the spiritual life without his readers clearly comprehending the fact that sin isn’t the issue in terms of the person’s relationship with God. He builds his argument in & 7; in he really nails the issues on the spiritual life. He doesn’t mention the Holy Spirit until chapter eight. Sin is not the issue in terms of loss of salvation or that that is what we should always be focussed on: the fact that we have failed. Christ solved that problem. But we have to understand that sin is still an experiential problem because it knocks us out of fellowship, but it doesn’t cause us to lose our salvation. This is the problem that Christians have had down through the centuries: they just have not known what to do with sin.
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So in the early church there was the rise of monasticism after a persecution, because when the church had been persecuted and people were being dragged out of their homes because they were Christians and taken to the Colosseum and the lions, it was easy to become arrogant and proud and thinking, Oh I am spiritual, I am becoming a martyr. But once Christianity became legalised, what were they to do to self-flagellate? They couldn’t become a martyr so that had to do it themselves. They had to figure out ways to go out and impress God, so they either went out into the wilderness, like the early desert monks, and lived by themselves, or maybe they became the pillar monks who would climb up on a pillar and sit there. They thought that was spiritual. Then they began to cloister in monasteries. We still have people who think that as a Christians that is good and that we should protect ourselves from the world. A lot of churches are doing that, where they build family life centers, bowling alleys, movie theatres, and everything is about the life of the church. But Jesus said we are to go out and we are called for a purpose: to be actively engaged as ambassadors. We are engaged to go into this foreign culture no matter what the threat might be, no matter how little security there may be, taking the gospel. And ambassadorship isn’t for apostles, it is for every believer. We can’t be ambassadors if we sit at home with five other friends and think how great we have it, God has blessed us, and the rest of the world is just going to hell in a hand basket. We are called to be engaged and not to retreat into some sort of monastic, protective enclosure—friends, family, whatever.
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The problem that Christianity has had is that they don’t know what to do with sin afterwards. So it develops monasticism, asceticism and forms of legalism and other things in order to somehow impress God. Paul is coming back to this in these last verses of chapter five to make sure we understand what sin is, where it came from, how we got condemned—and we are not condemned for our personal sin, we are condemned for Adam’s sin. When Christ died on the cross He died for Adam’s sin plus every single sin that you and I ever commit.
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Paul is going to begin with the comparison and the contrast between Adam and Christ: between the sin of Adam and the death of Christ on the cross. He starts off with the comparison and doesn’t get to the contrast until v. 18ff. NASB “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— ”
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In the next two verses Paul describes relation between sin and death. the NASB “for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.” This covers that period from Adam to Moses. In other words, what he is saying is those people were not being imputed their sins because there was no law. So they are not condemned for their own sin. His conclusion is going to be they are condemned for Adam’s sin, but they are not going to be condemned for their sin—just like we are not condemned for our sin.
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NASB “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses…” Even though they are under condemnation their condemnation is not based on their sin. The fact that they were spiritually dead shows that they were under condemnation. But it is not for their sin, it is for Adam’s sin. “… even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.”
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In the next section, vv. 15-17, Paul is going to contrast Adam’s sin with grace through Jesus Christ. NASB “But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many. [16] The gift is not like {that which came} through the one who sinned; for on the one hand the judgment {arose} from one {transgression} resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift {arose} from many transgressions resulting in justification.” Here he sees that that condemnation is automatic for everybody, but we have already been told that justification isn’t automatic for everybody, it is qualified by personal faith and trust in Christ. The free gift isn’t automatic to everyone. [17] “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace…” Abundance of grace; that is the qualifier. If we don’t receive the gift then we don’t get justification. “… and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.”
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Then he picks up his analogy again in verse 18 where he is going to connect Adam’s sin and condemnation with Christ’s obedience and justification. NASB “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.”
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Notice how when we get to verse 18 when Paul is picking up his primary thought which began in verse 12 he takes us right back to those words he associated with the legal act of justification. He talks about judgment, condemnation, the one man’s righteous act, resulting in justification of life. Here is where he goes back to pick up the thread that he has laid down at the end of chapter four and he is now going to tie that in with what he has been introducing through reconciliation.
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NASB “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.” The question then is, how does death spread to all men? In some Christian backgrounds, for example in Protestant liberalism, in Arminianism, and in some other systems of Christian theology there is no belief in Adam’s original sin. Their belief in sin varies depending on which group we are talking about. The same thing is true in Judaism. In Orthodox rabbinical Judaism, which is based on the Talmud (which is a reinterpretation of the Mishna), they don’t believe in Adam’s original sin. They will believe that people are bad but are also capable of good, but they don’t have a doctrine of total depravity. They believe total depravity is that every person is actively evil and wicked. That is not what total depravity means. Total depravity means that every aspect of our being has been depraved, but because the sin nature also produces morality we can be as evil people. In fact, the worst form of evil is not the overt wickedness that we see in some forms of idolatry, human sacrifice, etc.; evil in its worst form is masked as altruism, that which is good and beneficial.
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We are going to have to define what sin is. A lot of times when we talk to people who are not Christians, or even when we talk to people who are Christians, we find they have restricted sin to such a narrow category of heinous, horrible actions that when you say you are a sinner they so no, they are not, because in their mind sin means committing these horrible things. But the Bible says sin is any act, any thought, any word that violates the character of God. It is not that there are degrees of sin. There are degrees of consequences from sin but there are not degrees of sin. Telling a “little white lie” is as much a violation of the character of God as committing genocide. The consequences are far different, but they are both sin. Eating a piece of fruit in disobedience to God plunged us all into this nasty mess that we are in. It wasn’t anything horrible, it was just an every day act that many of us perform every single day but it was done in disobedience to God.
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So we need to address this question: how does this spread to all men? How can we all be guilty? Paul begins in by stating it this way, NASB “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—” Paul is going to build his whole discussion here on this comparison and contrast between Adam, the first man, and Jesus as the second Adam. We call Him the second Adam because He was created the same way the first Adam was created: He is without sin. Adam was created without sin. Jesus in His humanity is just as capable of sinning or not sinning as Adam. He has the same volition as Adam in His humanity. In His humanity that is the whole issue: He has to face life and the testings of life to always decide for God and always in obedience to God. This is what describes: Jesus was humble and submitted Himself to the authority of God, even to the point of going to the cross. So there is this comparison that Adam failed and we are suffering the consequences but Jesus in His humanity succeeds, and because of that the human race can be restored to its original purpose and fulfil the original plan that God had for the human race as His image bearers in ruling and reigning over the planet.
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“Therefore, just as through one man …” In the Greek there is this phrase hosper [w(sper] which introduces the beginning of the comparison, and then the second part is going to introduce by either the word houtos [o(utoj], which means “this,” or it might be rendered in the Greek houtos kai. What we have in the second part where it says “and this death spread to all men” in the Greek is kai houtos. The order of the two words is switched. But never is the comparison formula, the second part, introduced by a kai houtos; it is always introduced by a houtos kai. The second part of this verse isn’t the second part of the comparison. The second part of the comparison doesn’t come in until we get down to verse 18.
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Paul is expanding the initial statement, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world,” by the second statement, “and so death spread to all men.” The last part of this verse is an echo of the first part. So we understand the point that if we have one man and it is because of that one man and his decision that sin enters into the world. Paul concludes in that second half by saying, “and so death spread to all men, because all sinned,” i.e. in Adam positionally. “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world.” It is interesting that the word “sin” there has an article with it, which means he is talking about a specific sin—not just any sin that Adam committed but the sin. This is it; this is the sin that changed everything. The Greek word for sin here is hamartia [a(martia] which means simply to miss the mark. That is the point of , that we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. That phrase “the glory of God” is an idiom for all of His character. We fall short of His standard; we just can’t be good enough.
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It is through one man that the sin entered the world. There are two different words used in for entry. There is the word eis [e)ij] which means to enter into something. It is an aorist indicative here referring generally to something that has happened in the past, but one of the ways an aorist is used is as something that is beginning. The grammatical term is an inceptive aorist. An inceptive aorist means that it should be translated “just as through one man sin began entry into the world.” It has the emphasis on the beginning of a process. “… and death through sin.” Death comes through sin, and this is all forms of death; not just spiritual death but it includes all forms of death. Spiritual death was the legal condemnation but in this passage he is talking about the ramifications of that on every single human being. We are not talking about the legal penalty, we are talking about the consequences of that legal penalty; all the forms of death into human experience because of that one sin. “…and so death spread to all men.” Here Paul uses a similar word to the one he used for entry, the word dierchomai [dierxomai]—the Greek preposition dia plus the verb erchomai. It doesn’t mean simply to enter, it means to come through, to pass through; it is used for things like a sword piercing into a body, of Christ passing through the heavens in His ascension, and it has the idea of something that is going in and spreading. It would be used to describe a gas expanding and permeating all the areas of a house.
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So the first statement Paul makes is that sin enters, it goes through the front door into the world, and death through sin; and death begins to spread out to all mankind. The word that is used here for mankind is the word anthropos [a)nqrwpoj] which can mean male but a lot of times it can mean just the human race. Here it would be adequate to understand it as “death spread to all human beings.” Why? Because all sinned. We must always remember that sin isn’t defined by its impact in terms of our experience but by its relation to God. Sin is sin because it violates the character of God, not because it has certain negative consequences in our experience.

Romans 061b-Why Every Human is Guilty of Adam's Original Sin.

Romans 5:12 NASB95
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—
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Romans 061b-Why Every Human is Guilty of Adam's Original Sin.
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In Romans chapter 5 the topic that were looking at in these first five or six versus is understanding how the entire human race becomes guilty of sin. We all understand that Adam sinned. Eve ate from the fruit of the tree first and her sin only affected her. But when Adam ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we are told that in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, for example, that in Adam all die. It's not even and that is not the result of some of paternalistic writing of Scripture, it's not some of patriarchal interpretation of the human race, it is because God in the way he created the human race, created man first and then women.
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It is interesting that once you throw away the doctrine of creation then you can start coming up with all kinds of theories as to who was created first and why one was created over the other, and it is just all speculation and people come up with different things just to fit their own social and political agendas. Because once you get away from any bedrock certainty any kind of truth and revelation then all you basically doing is just making things up to fit the current narrative. And that's exactly what happens in our postmodern world our postmodern environment. But the Scripture teaches that was Adam's sin that was determinative here, because Adam was designated as the head of the race. So Adam sins, and not only does he come under the condemnation of that sin penalty when he sins, but then as a result of his sin all of his descendents are also judged guilty and received that imputation. Some people say that's not fair, that's a choice Adam made, but I would've made different choice. Oh really? Is that true? How do you know that for sure?
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It's really interesting. I was having a conversation with somebody day and it's really interesting to get us to think a little bit about the fact that we can be sure something is happening. We can have a high level of certainty of some things being true but that's not the same as something being 100% true, and a lot of people confuse that. An example of one we were talking about today is that God the Holy Spirit works in our lives in many ways. God the Holy Spirit works in our lives to bring to our consciousness doctrines that we have learned to help us recall Scripture, and God the Holy Spirit works in our lives in and prodding us, maybe motivating us, to witness to people. In a lot of ways the Holy Spirit works behind the scenes and brings things into our mind. But that's not just necessarily the Holy Spirit working internally.
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To go back into the Old Testament when believers did not have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and we are never told that Nehemiah ever had the enduement of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, there for their frequent statements made by Nehemiah in the book like “and God put it on my heart to, God put it into my mind to do something. And so he attributes to God bringing into his consciousness certain ideas in certain things, and that's not done through the indwelling God the Holy Spirit. That was just done through some sort of special revelation. And, of course, we know special revelation is it for today; but because we have indwelling of the spirit because we have the filling of the Spirit, and of the Spirit is active in our sanctification, I can say with certainty that God the Holy Spirit brings doctrine to my mind. But when I'm driving down the road or I'm going to life and something happens, and doctrines or promises or principles come to my mind, can I say with 100% certainty that that came to my mind as a result of the Holy Spirit, or did he come through the natural processes of the way our brain works, the way our mind works? I am going to give the Holy Spirit the benefit of the doubt as most Christians do, but you can't answer that question with certainty because we don't know.
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There are many times when unbelievers—many of very brilliant and their brain works just as well as an believers many cases—are studying something, and all of a sudden they get an insight because the brain issue so remarkable, such a high-speed intricate computer, and all of a sudden it starts making connections and all the little pistons start firing off, lights go off; and all of a sudden there is a fresh idea. It doesn’t come from God and doesn’t come from the Holy Spirit, it's just the way God built our brains to work. So people have insights, they have intuitive flashes, they have all these different things and they’re not believers. So how do you know when you have a memory, when something comes to your mind as a Christian, that at that particular instant that particular thought, that particular promise at that moment, came from God the Holy Spirit? And I would challenge you that you don't. We know that generally He works that way, but we can't say that for any specific incident that that was the Holy Spirit who brought that into our mind. We had a good idea and wanted to do something; we had a sense that we ought to do something. Unbelievers had that kind of thing.
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So we have to be very careful that we don't somehow shift. It's very easy for that kind of thing to become a way in which people make decisions. They often say, well you just a gut decision, and a gut decision often is just a combination of your life experiences and all of this is the process for a period of 20, 30 40, 50 years and you have certain experiences, and your brain is processing everything is going around you so quickly that you're not even aware of all the steps that are happening, and these ideas are firing off inside of the brain. And we want to give credit to God and that's great, it's wonderful and we should, but I'm sure that the Holy Spirit is God credit for number of things he has done, and there's another word for that. The Holy Spirit has gotten blamed for a lot of things He hasn’t done. And so that's that that's the path of mysticism, it's looking somewhere other than the authoritative Word of God for truth and for and for answers. And so we have to always go the Word to see the answers to our questions, because the Word’s going to be clear. And we often have values and ideas and norms and standards in our soul that have been influenced by the world, and one of the words that I really just vibrate over, and I’ve vibrated over it for years. I don’t vibrate quite as much, or maybe I just manage to suppress it in righteousness or something so that I keep it buried at the third basement level down. It is when people start talking about being fair. Our president has talked about this several times lately: they want fairness. Fairness is a nebulous concept.
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We sometimes say that God is fair. What does that mean? “Fair” is a really wimpy word. “Just”: now there’s a word you can you can sink your teeth into; “righteous”: those are words that have real content and solid meaning. But fair often brings into it a lot subjective baggage as to what we think is somewhat equitable. And often today there are so many egalitarian ideas, and these are basically influenced by communism, that everybody ought to get the same results. Fairness is not understood as equal opportunity; fairness is understood as equal results. And that no matter what our circumstances maybe we all are to have the same chance to make a lot of money, and be rich and famous as Bill Gates or as some Hollywood celebrity, or somebody else. And often will we never hear the back story on so many people in terms of the struggles that they had in their own life and the difficulties that they overcame, we just see sort of the end results and even with celebrities that had a certain advantages (not all of them did), but even with some that did have had certain advantages we don't see all of the incredible hard work that goes into doing the things that they do. Whether they perform on stage or whether they are in music or whether they write or something like, that they still put a lot of effort into it and that's why they are so successful and have the results that they do.
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This idea of fairness, especially when it applies to God, really is the slippery slope of bad theology and we have to be careful with that. God is righteous, and that means that God is always going to do the right thing. God is just. He is always going to judge every body by the same standard, His standard of absolute righteousness. So when we come to attacks like this where we begin to learn that because Adam made a bad decision, a simple decision, a disobedient decision, and that we bear the consequences for that, there are people that you will talk to who were unbelievers who will say, well that's just not fair. For me to be condemned reborn spiritually dead because of something somebody else did.
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And so we ought to think a little bit in terms of how do we answer a question like that. How do we explain that to people? How do we get them to think that through? And where do you think the best place would be to go in order to understand that? The best place to go is place where Paul always goes whenever he starts explaining anything, and that's always to the character of God and the plan of God. We have to get to understand who God is. Often the hidden assumption or presupposition that unbelievers have is that they have a view of God that is so anthropocentric, so man-centered. It is basically that God is just a enlarged human. He has more capabilities than a human being, a little bit smarter in some cases than human beings. He has a little more power and ability than human beings, but He is basically just a large human being, and we have to disabuse the unbeliever of that because that's part of his truth suppression mechanism. And so helping him to understand that we have to think in terms of how the Bible presents our understanding of God: that God is all knowing and He is perfectly righteous, and so He can devise a plan for the human race that is going to be perfectly righteous, but is going to take into account all circumstances. And so when God sets up Adam as the original human being and delegates that responsibility to him, that his decision would have consequences that would affect the entire entirety of his progeny, then God knows that if any human being any other human being were put in that position that the same results with what would take place.
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That is what Paul is trying to explain here: the significance of this in relation to justification. And what he's driving toward is verse 18 where he reaches this conclusion he says: NASB “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.” So he set up his comparison and contrast of this section, and what is he driving to? There is condemnation on the one hand, and then what's on the other side? The righteous act of Christ on the cross which comes to all men which results in justification. So we are right back to the topic that was at the heart of Romans three and Romans four, which is justification. And then having come back to this he talks about “there resulted justification of life,” and I think that would be the implication of justification resulting in life. And then he uses that to raise the question in the next three versus the first part of chapter 6: Well if Christ has done all of this then what is the implication for us? The reason for saying that is it helps us to see where we’re driving to, trying to understand how Adam's sin is transmitted and passed on to the human race, and that it is all imported because it helps us to understand the depths and the complexity of our of our condemnation.
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As pointed out last time this section begins a comparison and contrast with between Adam and Christ that begins in verse 12 and then there is this break at verses 13 through 17 that basically takes us through a version to make sure we understand why all men can be condemned. And then he's going to come back to it in verse 18. So the first 12 sets up the comparison and contrast, versus 13 and 14 show the contrast in the relation between sin and death, and then 15 through 17 are going to contrast Adam's sin with God's grace through Jesus Christ. Then in 18 and 19 women to connect Adam’s sin condemnation with Christ's obedience and justification. So the main question is how does death spread to all men?
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Last time we went through the details of the exegesis of , and the opening is important because it does set up for us the direction that Paul is going and how the sort of break between the first verse and the other versus comes along. In verse 12 he says, NASB “Therefore …” Literally, for this reason. So he is going to describe the ground or the motive or cause sin coming into the world. He then draws a comparison using the Greek word hosper [w(sper] “… just as.” In Greek grammar when the protasis, the first part of this comparison is set up and is introduced by hosper, the apodosis is introduced by either the Greek word houtos, meaning “this” or “thus and,” but not kai houtos, so its word order is very important there, and that doesn't come into play the down the first 18. So Paul starts out, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world …” Notice the order. First sin enters the world and then death enters the world. There's no death before sin. So first there is that sinful choice of disobedience and then as a result of that death comes into the world, and death then spread to all men. And the term that is used here for men is anthropos [a)nqrwpoj], indicating all mankind, not all males.
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“…death spread to all men, because all sinned—” He concludes by saying “because all sinned,” so there is this intrinsic connection between Adam and his sin and every single human being.
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There are a couple of different ways in which people have tried to explain this. Four observations: a) the reason for death is sin; b) the sin of one man enters the whole world; c) the sin brings death not only the one but to the whole; d) these three aorist tense verbs indicates that the entire race is viewed as sinning in and Adams one sin, so that every human being is participating in some way in that sin, in a way that they are all guilty.
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So thus “death spread spreads to all men,” and that phrase is this word kai houtos. There was a professor of Greek that began his instruction at Dallas seminary back in the late 40 by the name of Lewis Johnson. He was a very well known and loved professor of Greek though a little confused with hyper Calvinism. The man had great integrity and because he understood that this really wasn't the tradition of the school he….
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He wasn’t a hyper Calvinist. People often misuse that term. He was just a high Calvinist. A hyper Calvinist doesn’t believe you need to witness to anybody because if God elected them God is going to save them one way or the other and you don't need to be involved. So hyper Calvinist doesn't believe in evangelism or witnessing whereas a high Calvinist is just a five point Calvinist that has a very strong view of predestination and election.
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….. and Dr. Johnson though taught Greek exegesis at Dallas Seminary for many years and he used to say the most important elements in and studying the Bible are not the big words like justification reconciliation redemption they are the little words like the “ands” and the “thuses” and “therefores” because that tells you how the big words relate to each other. That's what you what you really need to pay attention to, so this is one of those words that's important. houtos usually indicates what comes, and looks forward to something. It is not saying, “Thus and what I just said because what I just said,” it is saying, “In the manner I'm not telling you in this in this manner to follow, death spread to all men because all sinned.” Spread to all men—why? Because all sinned. And this expresses that idea very, very strongly that sin is not something that is individual but refers to a participation in Adam's sin in some way.
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Now there are two views on how this transmission occurred. This is this gets a little technical but you need to learn this language because it helps you think. The first view is called seminalism. Seminalism was frequently associated with a another theological view on the origin of the soul call traducianism. Traducianism is and has that idea that the soul as well as the body is transmitted through the act of human procreation. The first person to first theologian to coin and use the term traditucianism was a second century theologian by the name of Tertullian. Tertullian gave us another word that you use all the time without any difficulty, and if you used it with some of your neighbors they would think you were just a very complex theologian. And that's the word Trinity. He coined this term trinitos, from the Latin, to express the idea that God is one but also three at the same time. He's not three distinct persons and essences, He is one in essence but three in person, and he also had this idea of Traducianism, that the human soul is transmitted through the human act of procreation. But actually the Roman Catholic church made people think that's the foundation for why a Christian should be against abortion, because it is through human procreation that the soul is passed on. But another Roman Catholic theologian by the name of Thomas Aquinas, who was considered the most I authoritative theologians in Roman Catholicism wrote that to think that the soul which is immaterial (he believed it was immaterial) is transmitted to the semen is heresy.
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But Tertullian believed that because Tertullian had a materialist view of the soul. Think about that just a little bit. We get all caught up at this at this sort of surface level in this debate over abortion and abortion rights and what kind of life is in the womb. And in the Christian church often people are not well taught theologically and have never work their way through any of these early medieval debates among very learned theologians in working through these ideas, but in Traducianism this idea was that the soul gets transmitted through procreation. But it comes from a man who believed that the soul is material. Since ideas have consequences the idea that the soul can be transmitted materially is inherently related to the idea that the soul is material, so how can we separate? Can we separate the conclusion that the soul is transmitted materially from its presupposition that the soul is immaterial. I don't think we can. That is one view, called traducianism, and traducianism historically has been associated with a view called seminalism. And you can hear the root word here seminal, semen the word for seed; and so it is the idea that there is a physical genetic transmission. Seminalism is the view that the entire human race, body and soul, was genetically present in Adam. Thus God considered every human being to be physically participating in Adam's original sin and thus receiving the same penalty.
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That is a very prominent view among large number theologians down through history. Now they don't just come up with this in abstraction. This is not just some philosophical idea that they dream up, they have a text that they go to in order to prove this. The text is in Hebrews chapter 7 verse nine, a verse that is in the context of the writer of Hebrews talking about the superiority of the Melchizedekian priesthood over the Levitical priesthood. And the writer of Hebrews is going to give very sophisticated argument and he's going to say that the priesthood of Melchizedek its superior because Abraham, in whose loins Levi was, paid tithes to Melchizedek. Interesting argument.
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NASB “And, so to speak, through Abraham even Levi, who received tithes …” He is talking about not just the person of Levi, he is clearly talking about an individual who is the head of a line. In the first century as one would go to the temple the tithe would be given to a priest. That priest was from the tribe of Levi. So the writer of Hebrews says, You are paying a tithe to Levi through his descendant. “…paid tithes”—through Abraham, so to speak. He is not talking literally. Literally in the Greek it is “in a manner of speaking” or “in a way of speaking.” He's just using this as a metaphorical analogy.
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NASB “for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.” That's the phrase that were looking at; that's the key phrase that they go. He was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. The only way he could be in the loins of his father was in a genetic way. He is genetically there because he is genetically linked in a direct line to his great-grandfather Abraham. So Melchizedek is paid because Abraham sees Melchizedeck is a higher spiritual authority. Since Levi descended from coming from Abraham he could be any higher and greater than Abraham, so therefore Levi's priesthood could not be of a higher order than Melchizedek’s priesthood. The theological conclusion is that God considers every human being to be physically participating in the actions of their forefathers because of this genetic connection. So they would be genetically present.That is the view of seminalism, so there's some foundation for that in in the scriptural text.
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The other view is a view called federalism. It's using the same language, the same vocabulary that we use when we talk about the federal government as opposed to a government of a confederacy. Federal government is talking about one that is a representative government. We have a federal democracy, we have a representative democracy; we don't act like the citizens of Athens the end of the fifth century BC and have everybody go vote on everything. We elect representatives, those representatives go to Washington DC, and those representatives who are voting in our place are voting for laws, and that vote for that law is our vote. Federalism is the view that Adam stood as the designated head and representative of the entire human race, and that Adams decisions were on behalf of all of his descendents, all of humanity. God. viewed Adam's sin as the act of all people through representation, and thus Adams penalty is judicially imputed to all mankind. This view is most consistently linked to the creationist view of the origin and transmission of the soul.
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When we used the word “creation” here, this is not talking about creationism versus evolution as the word is used in discussions of Genesis chapter one. In theology this term was used to describe a view of how the soul came into existence. There was the Platonic view that a soul is pre-existent. That's the same view that you have in Mormonism. For example, in Mormonism there’s a view that all the souls pre-exist and keep getting kind of recycled. It's not up true reincarnation view, so don't push it that far. But for example in an and in Mormon theology there is the view that all of the souls of George Washington Thomas Jefferson and James Madison Monroe—all the founding fathers of the United States were these little pre-existent founding father souls. They use the phrase “God the Father” but it sounds funny when it comes that their mouth because this is Elohim who is not the Elohim of the Bible, they just borrow it name which is the generic term for God. And remember Elohim, God the Father, is the Father of Jesus, and Lucifer as their brothers. God the father, in their view, sent those founding father souls to inhabit those little babies that came along at that time, and with the mission to create the United States. And as a result of that what they wrote in terms of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights was divinely inspired. Not divinely inspired like we talked about well Shakespearean plays are inspired, not inspired like we listen to Mozart, he had this flash a musical genius and boom the right something out, or Handel who wrote the Messiah. In the Mormon view we’re talking about a view of inspiration that is more akin to our view of divine inspiration of Scripture. But it really doesn't go quite that far.
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Then there's the third view, and that's what's called the creationist view that whenever a new human life develops inside of the womb it is God who immediately and simultaneously immediately creates and simultaneously imparts places that immaterial soul inside of the of the newborn baby. When that baby takes its first breath, which is what the Hebrew said was neshammah, “the breath of life.” That creationist view is a view that's been around forever and ever. Now some theologians and people because of the hot debate topic of abortion decided to flip-flop on their view of by the origin of the soul—back when this got real hot in the early 70s and late 60s--not on the basis of exegesis but on the basis of experience, what was going on legally. They didn’t want to be on the side of the pro-abortionists, the pro-choice crowd. And the thing is that that the federalist and creationist view do not justify abortion, although some people are trying to argue that where make it sound that way, because the God is involved intimately in the production of the physical part of man from conception on, what is going on inside the wound is under normal circumstances going to be a full human being, that that no one has the right to interfere with that normative process. That's called the nascent life view and some years ago I taught on this and quoted from and one of Encyclopedia of Judaism that I have, which is exactly the primary rabbinical view on the origin transmission of the soul, that God creates it in imparts it at birth, but no one has the right to interfere with the gestation process because what is the process is inevitably going to end up with a human being and no one has the right to interfere. So there's not a connection necessarily, inherently between the federal view, the creationist view and a view on, abortion. So this is the federalism view.
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The Pelagian view. Pelagius was a British monarch who lived in the late four hundreds at the same time as Augustine. Pelagius believed that every few individual human being is created and born with the same innocence of Adam the day he was created. There is no pain from Adam on any human being, they all come out of the womb pure and innocent and able to make perfect decisions for the rest of their life. Augustine, rightly so, just pounce all over him and he was declared a heretic. The Pelagian view was that people incur death when they sin after Adams example. Se we always asked the question because it is kind of a brain twister: do you sin because you're a sinner or are you a sinner because you sin? For Pelagius you are a sinner because you sin, but for a biblicist you sin because you are a sinner. You were born with that sin nature and as a result of that we sin. But for Pelagius people don't come under the condemnation of sin until they actually sin. They are condemned for their sin, and Adam sin affected only Adam, no one else in the human race is affected by Adam’s sin, and modern adherents of this view are basically the Unitarians, and the very liberal, that is, in terms of theology, very liberal Christian denominations. And the Roman Catholic view is what's called a semi-Pelagian view. The Arminian view: Jacobus Arminius was the opponent of Calvinism—not Calvin; Calvin was long dead by the time Arminius came along. Arminius said that all people consent to Adam sin, then sin is imputed. For Arminian positions, Adam sinned and his sin partially affected humanity. The difference is, for Arminians you're sick, you’re not spiritually dead. You still can do some good things that God can give you credit for. Depravity for them is not total, people received corrupter of nature from Adam but they don't receive guilt or culpability for Adam sin. And this is the most of your Methodists. Wesley held his view, so those of you who came out of the Wesleyan tradition, Methodists, holiness, Pentecostals; these all tend to have a heaven Arminian view.
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The federal view is that sin is imputed to humanity because of Adam’s sin. Dam sins and that is imputed legally to all those who represent the entire human race. Their view is that Adam alone sinned but the human race the whole human race was affected. Depravity is total in the sense that every aspect of human the human soul and body is corrupted by sin. It doesn't mean you're as evil as you can be; it is just that every part of us has been affected by sin and sin’s corruption. In that of the federal view sin and guilt are imputed. This would be Presbyterians and others holding to a covenant theology. You say we are not Presbyterians and we don’t hold to covenant theology. But we are in that tradition. If you look at the historical line that comes down from the Reformation it starts with this shift in the 1500s to Sola Scriptura, the Scripture alone; justification by faith alone. You track this down through the 1600s and 1700s to early 1800s and you end up with a guy named John Nelson Darby who was an Anglican. And the Anglican confession or doctrinal statement at that point was very reform and mostly covenant theology. He says that's not consistent with our foundational theology beliefs and in a literal interpretation of Scripture. Somehow he understands that by the mid 1600s Calvin's theology became sort of a calcified. It hardened into stone with no more development.
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See this is always a problem when you get somebody who comes along who is brilliant in theology and they make various new insights, and then everybody just wants to stop and say, that was it; that was the end; he was the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread, and so we’re going to stop here and just worship at huis feet—which is what they do with every great theologian that has come down the pipe, rather than building and developing on that. So later on repeat when people like Darby, later Schofield, Chafer, Walvoord, and almost all of those men I just mentioned were ordained Presbyterians. L.S Chafer was ordained in the northern Presbyterians and had it shifted to the southern Presbyterians, and they brought them up on heresy charges in 1928 because he was a dispensational. John Walvoord was an ordained Presbyterian pastor of North West Presbyterian church in Fort Worth Texas where the greatest elder he ever had was a man named Bob Thieme. (Walvoord told that to me in his office one day) It was a Presbyterian Church and John Walvoord sprinkle-baptized every one of his children. Louis Sperry Chafer didn’t have any children so he didn’t sprinkle-baptize them, but he was he was an ordained Presbyterian.
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So we come out of a heavy, heavy Presbyterian background in our theological tradition. From that there is an emphasis on this federal view. And then there's the Augustinian view, which is the view that sin is imputed to humanity because of Adam’s sin. Humanity sinned in Adam, depravity is total, sin and guilt are imputed. It's not all hugely different from the federal view but the federal view has certain secondary attributes to it that fitted to covenant theology. The Augustinian view basically is a view that gets adopted by many of the reformers and later Calvinists. What we say here is that the Seminal view tends to show up among the Pelagius and the Arminians. And so this is polarization over this theology between these two views. The reality is that there is elements of truth in both views, so it's not either or, it's both and. But what do we keep from both and what do we throw away from both? In the Seminal we have this genetic connection with the entire human race. That's important because that means that just as Adam sin has a physical biological connection to every single human being, and that affects the transmission of the sin nature, that it means that Jesus Christ who is also born fully human has that same genetic connection to every human being. There is another creation that's important to think about in connection with this and that's the angelic creation. God created every angel individually. That's why they're called sons of God. God creates every angel individually and directly. He did not create momma and daddy angels and they didn't have little baby angels. I don't care what Michelangelo drew on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Cherubs are not little baby babies that have wings, and there are no baby angels. Update: that is, all angels are directly created.
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God can’t provide salvation for the Angels related to a substitutionary atonement because there's no organic connection between the angels. There's an organic connection between every one of us in Jesus Christ because he's fully human, so he can die as our substitute. Now that is important because that that recognizes that there is an aspect where there is a physical genetic link to all human beings. But the other side is true also. The Bible talks about the whole idea federalism, of a representative that pays or performs some action for which the guilt is transmitted or pays the penalty, which is at the core of all substitutionary sacrifices. From the sacrifice in the Old Testament where they sacrificed the scapegoat, and the priest puts his hand on the goat and recites the sins of the nation, and then that one goat is slaughtered (he has his hands on both goats) and the other goat is taken out of the wilderness. There's no organic connection between Aaron and the goat. There's a representative relationship, so that's the federal headship idea. This allows Adam to be the federal head who represents the entire human race and it is in that represent representative capacity that the guilt of his sin is the guilt of all. On the other hand, because of his the physical connection, through the transmission of physical body and DNA that is corrupted by sin, we have the transmission physically of the sin nature, and that capacity and propensity to sin that we all receive. We received from conception a body that is corrupted by sin. This helps explain both aspects, so rather than going either or, if we cut the Gordian knot, so to speak, and splice it together we have a much clearer understanding in Scripture. And then we don't have to throw out scriptural support as a holding to this form of federal representative, there is no problem with , which perfectly with my views. If I hold the literal nature of I don’t have a problem with . It solves the problems.
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So what made it then address these four questions: What is sin? What's the penalty of sin? What is the sin nature's relationship to the corporeal human body? And how is this passed on? Some that is already answered. Sin is separation from God. When sin is disobedience to anything in God's character the penalty for sin is the judicial penalty of spiritual death, it is separation from God. Other forms of death are the consequence of that. That happened instantly when Adam sinned, and all the other forms of physical death: sexual death, physical death, positional death, carnal death, temporal death, eternal death; all these other things are the result of that one spiritual death. And it's passed on genetically through the sin nature, but then that sin nature receives the imputation of Adam's original sin in terms of the guilt at the instant of birth.

Romans 062b-Sin and Death.

Romans 5:12 NASB95
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—
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Romans 062b-Sin and Death.
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What Paul is doing here is developing a comparison and contrast between Adam and Christ. Adam is the first Adam; Jesus is the second Adam. What makes Jesus the second Adam? Adam and Jesus both entered into this world without a sin nature; they both entered into the world in a state of absolute perfection. But what Paul is saying here is that that is not true of any other human being. So Jesus can mirror Adam’s decision in His true humanity because He doesn’t have a sin nature. And even though He is in hypostatic union and is fully God (hypostatic union means that Jesus is fully God and fully man, but that He isn’t using His divine attributes to handle the problems that His humanity faces) when Jesus is tempted He is not accessing His holiness, His righteousness and His omnipotence on the divine side to handle the problem of temptation to sin. He is handling it through His reliance on the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, just like we do. If He was handling it by relying on divine attributes then His pattern of life would have no benefit for us because we have no divine attributes to access. So Jesus is handling whatever problems He faces in life on the basis of the Spirit of God and the Word of God, which sets the pattern for us. That is the whole point of the Kenosis: He is willingly restricting and limiting His access to His divine attributes.
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It is a sort of interesting firewall between the two because there are times when He does access His divine attributes in order to demonstrate that He is God. When He changes the water into wine this is an act of God as the creator to demonstrate that He controls creation and He is God. It is the same thing when He exercises control over the demons, He is doing this from His position of authority as the eternal second person of the Trinity. He is not doing it out of His humanity; He is doing it from His deity. Remember, He is casting the demons out to solve the problem with the demoniac; He is not casting the demons out to solve temptation problems in His life or personal problems in terms of the angelic conflict. That is the difference. Jesus uses His deity to demonstrate that He is God because He has to do that as part of His credentials as the Messiah. But He shuts off that firewall when the issue has to do with His own personal relationship to God or dealing with temptation.
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And so He comes in as the second Adam to do what Adam failed to do the first time. Adam failed to say no to temptation. Jesus is going to say no to temptation all the way to the cross, qualifying Him to go to the cross and pay the penalty for our sin. As the second d Adam He is going to be the one who is able to fulfil the original mandate to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, etc. So in Jesus as the eternal Son of Man, man is finally going to rule over creation. We are in Christ, so the church participates in that rule via our position in Christ.
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So Paul begins this comparison and contrast and then runs off in a rabbit trail in verses 13 and 14 in order to make sure before he builds the analogy that everyone understands the issue of the origin of sin, the transmission of sin and the guilt of the entire human race, and that that guilt is not based on our personal sin or our personal sin nature. The reason we are all condemned is because of Adam’s sin. We are not condemned because we sinned; we are not condemned because we have sin natures. We are condemned because Adam sinned, and in Adam’s sin there is a corporate biological, genetic unity among all human beings, such that Adam as both the physical head (seminalism) and Adam as the designated representative head (federalism), is the basis for our condemnation. So we are born condemned under sin before we ever do anything because of that organic unity back to the first Adam. And this is why Jesus is able to pay the penalty for the sin of every human being, because He is organically, genetically tied to every human being. That is important because that also means that Jesus can’t die for the angels because there is no organic unity there, no connection.
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Then in verses 15-17 there is a contrast between Adam’s sin and grace in relation to Christ. In verse 18, 19 Paul connects Adam’s sin and condemnation with Christ’s obedience and justification.
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NASB “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—” The point he is making is that all sinned in Adam. Adam’s decision is our decision. Death spread to all men positionally.
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The four questions that have to be covered in this section: What is sin? What is the penalty for sin? What is the sin nature’s relationship to the corporeal human body? How is this passed on?
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This is really important. Many Christians think that the sin penalty that is laid down in Genesis chapter three is physical death. There is a real problem with this; it has to be spiritual death.
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The core Hebrew word for sin means the same thing that the Greek word means. It is the word chata which means to miss the mark, miss the target. That is what sin is. We miss the mark; we fail to hit whatever it is we are aiming at, and so man never does achieve that which fits the character of God. NASB “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The phrase “glory of God” is a term that refers to the totality of God’s essence. We just don’t measure up to God’s standard. Cf. ; ; .
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The next word is avar which means to transgress. It also means to pass over, to go through a country, so we see where it gets the idea of transgress or move across a boundary. Both this word and the next is translated in English as “transgress.” That is important for this passage because transgression implies a known law, so it means to violate a specific law. The second word is fesha, meaning a rebellion or a revolt. It focuses on that aspect of rebellion against an authority. Both of them imply that there is a clear standard, a specific command that is being violated.
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Then there is the word ra, which is translated “evil,” and the word aven which is also translated “evil” but also as “wickedness” and “emptiness.” These words describe a sort of complex of issues related to what sin is. It is ultimately missing the mark but it is a transgression of law and it brings about evil and wickedness.
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On the Greek side is the word hamartia [a(martia] which is used three times in and indicates missing the mark. Notice that sin is not defined as something you do to other human beings. We can only sin against God.
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A second Greek word is parabasis [parabasij] which means to transgress, and it means to break a specific law. Then there is paraptoma [paraptwma] which is often translated “transgression,” and it means to violate a moral standard. It is used 19 times in the New Testament and 5 times in Romans chapter five. That tells us that there is a real emphasis on this aspect of sin in this chapter. Then there is parakoe [parakoh], which is an act of disobedience, a specific act. Then plane [planh] which has the idea of wandering away, getting lost, and is used figuratively for error. The anomia [a)nomia] which is the absence of law. It is translated “lawlessness” in . It is a rejection of God’s law. Then adikia [a)dikia] which means “unrighteousness.” NASB “All unrighteousness is sin”—
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adikia. Then paranomia [paranomia], which also has to do with nomos—para meaning to go around the law—also translated “transgression.” All of these are involved in understanding sin.
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“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world…” The word “entered” is not eiserchomai, it is another compound of erchomai [e)rxomai] indicating that it just spreads and mushrooms down through all of humanity. Then it says, “and the death.” There is a definite article with the noun thanatos [qanatoj] for “death” here. Why does it use the article? Why should we translate it “the death”? It is going to bring out something really significant in understanding this passage and why Paul uses the article here. In Greek the lack of the article doesn’t mean it is indefinite, it just means it is emphasising the qualitative nature of the noun. So with death without the article it could be emphasising the qualitative nature of the death, but Paul is using this is a distinct sense. That is going to lead us to the question of what kind of death this is.
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1. These different uses for the word “sin” are also applied in different ways. Some of them are used for personal sins which are the infractions of individuals. Sin itself in the singular can refer to sin in its ultimate origin, or it can refer to sin as the sin nature. There are different emphases in each one of these words and so it is important to pay attention to what words are used.
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2. When it refers to the sin nature it is referring to that capacity to evil that is developed with Adam.
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3. Sin is sin because it violates God’s character and His righteousness. It is never understood as violating some sort of standard that is external to God. God is not holy because His holiness conforms to an abstract standard of what is right; God’s character is what is right, and that is what defines justice.
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4. Sin first entered the universe through a creature. God didn’t cause sin but He created an environment where people could exercise their volition. What that meant was that they could choose to do not just little bad things but really bad things. People who have bought into liberalism and the basic goodness of man also (even though they don’t always realise the connection) have bought into the idea that when certain really evil things happen it must be God’s fault. For example, if God is really a good God and He knows everything then He wouldn’t have allowed the holocaust to take place. What they don’t understand is that God has created the human race with volition and if they choose to do evil things God is not going to move in and pull away the consequences. To do that would mean that God would be controlling volition and ending freedom. So sin entered the universe through a creature, Lucifer (), by his own unhindered volition.
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5. The second determinative sin is that of Adam in Genesis chapter three, which brings the present world into condemnation and all of Adam’s descendants into condemnation, and it impacts us in two ways. It impacts each one of us in terms of an inherited corruption and sin nature and the imputation of Adam’s guilt to that sin nature. That means we are all born spiritually dead.
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So we end with the question we started with. What kind of death is this going to be? There are seven kinds of death in the Bible. How do we know that that core death in is spiritual death? It is because in Paul says, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” That is the status we are in when we are physically alive prior to salvation, but we are dead in some sense. It is not physical; it is spiritual. This demonstrates that there is a clear biblical teaching on spiritual death, and that is mirrored in , .
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NASB “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death [not physical, but spiritual] through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—” Spiritual death is the source of those other deaths. So this is sort of a plenary use of the word “death”; it implies all of them. Death in all of its manifestations comes in through Adam’s sin. And is spreads to all men because all sinned—not their personal sin but their position in Adam.

Romans 063b-Death and Life.

Romans 5:18 NASB95
So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.
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Romans 063b-Death and Life.
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Life and death are continuously contrasted in Scripture. We start in where God laid down the penalty for disobedience to Him. “… for in the day [at that time] that you eat from it you will surely die.” The idiom in the Hebrew is that this is something that is definitely, emphatically going to happen; you will definitely die at that moment. The death that comes on the human race came at the instant of Adam’s decision to eat of that fruit, and it was a qualitative death that separated the creature from his creator so that he could not have a relationship with Him. He was still physically alive but a separation had occurred so that he no longer has source of life—like taking a fan and unplugging it from the wall: it is no longer plugged into the power source but the blades keep spinning for a while and there will be the appearance of life but there is no life there anymore. Death has occurred and it is just winding down.
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Adam was instantly separated from God. And as we see in Romans where there is the emphasis on using the male gender in the nouns it is showing that it is Adam’s sin, not Eve’s, that is the determinative one because Adam was set up by God to be the federal head or representative head of the human race.
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Once Adam dies there is the situation where the human race has the appearance of life but is really dead. This is why there is this corruption that leaks out and impacts government, nations, families, marriage, etc., because they are basically corrupt on the inside, and unless they turn to the solution to be regenerated and made alive all that is produced is just death. Everything is corrupted by that, so the decision for the human race becomes, are you going to live or are you going to die? Are you going to choose life or are you going to choose death? This is what we see in passages in the Old Testament.
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For example, in Moses’ parting words to the Israelites before he went up on Mount Nebo where he died he said to them: NASB “I call heaven and earth [the inhabitants] to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.” In the Mosaic Law there always had to be two witnesses to confirm any legal statement.
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This is what Paul is getting at in terms of the implication of justification. Every day we have the option to choose life or death—not eternal condemnation in terms of death but in terms of whether we are going to experience the fullness, the richness of the spiritual life that God has given us at the moment of salvation, or whether we are going to experience the opposite which is sometimes referred to as carnal death (separation from God because of sin) or temporal death which relates to the ongoing and lengthy time period in carnality in which we are separated spiritually from the source of life because of sin. This is what Paul talks about when he comes to when he says that the wages of sin is death. It is carnal death and temporal death, not eternal condemnation. Then he says in contrast as a reminder of the gift of God is eternal life: “…but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We have been given this gift and we are squandering it if we are not living and exploiting it.
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NASB You shall also say to this people, ‘Thus says the LORD, “Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death.’” Every moment we go through life we constantly decide: human viewpoint or divine viewpoint, are we going to live on the basis of death or the basis of life?
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NASB “The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, To turn aside from the snares of death.” Notice the parallel between that and 14:27, “The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, That one may avoid the snares of death.” The only difference is that in 13:14 it says “the law/teaching of the wise” and in 14:27 “the fear of the LORD.” Everything else is the same. So what is the relationship between the law of the wise and the fear of the Lord? Remember what Solomon wrote in chapter one? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So the way of the wise = the person who fears the Lord in their life. Following our sin nature always leads to the snares of death—not eternal death but temporal death.
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In , Paul has ended the parenthesis and he goes back to his main thought. He is now going to connect for us Adam’s sin and condemnation with Christ’s obedience with Christ’s obedience and justification as the foundation for our spiritual life.
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There are people who really do believe that is talking about physical death. Physical death is included within as an implication of that word in but the reality of what happened “that day” is that he separated from God. In is says “you were born dead in your trespasses and sins.” So it is clearly talking about being physically alive and spiritually dead. Physical death is a consequence of that spiritual death. When Adam sinned the plug got pulled, and every descendant of Adam is born with that plug pulled. There is an appearance of life but there is no life there. The second death is the eternal punishment for those who do not solve the spiritual death problem in this life. Then there is operational death which is when a person is out of fellowship and is just living on the basis of their sin nature. There is positional death which is our identification with Christ in His death. There is temporal death, which is another way of looking at being out of fellowship. Then there is sexual death.
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NASB “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins…[5] even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” This is a non-physical use of the word “dead.”
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NASB “Therefore, just as [for this reason] through one man sin entered into the world, and [the] death through sin, and so [the] death spread to all men, because all sinned—” The death is talking about that initial death in that spreads to all men. But it spreads to all men through the sin of the original sinner, Adam.
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NASB “for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.” This refers to personal sin; it is not imputed when there is no law. Because there wasn’t a statement that X was wrong then you’re not being punished for your personal sins. So why were they being punished? Why were they under condemnation? It was because of Adam’s sin; they were condemned for Adam’s sin.
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NASB “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those [everybody] who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.” Cain did not sin in the likeness of Adam, but he was born spiritually dead. Then Paul makes the connection that Adam is a type or a picture of the one who was to come.
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The use of the article in every reference to death in and 6, and most of the ones in , is called the article par excellence. It is used when there is a specific thing that represents a class of things. It can refer to something that is the best in the class or things that are the worst in the class of things. One grammar points out: If the lexical nuance of that particular class suggests it (it could be the worst) in essence the article par excellence indicates the extreme of a particular class. When Paul said “I am the chief of sinners,” he uses that kind of an article to indicate he is at the extreme end of the category. It could be that he is the best of sinners, but he is the worst of sinners. It doesn’t mean excellence, it just means it is representing the extreme good or bad of a class.
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We have seen that there are three categories of sin: Adam’s sin, individual personal sins, and the sin nature. The point that Paul is making is that we are not condemned for personal sin, we are not condemned for the sin nature; we are condemned for Adam’s sin which is imputed to every one of his descendents. They inherit a sin nature physically but it is Adam’s guilt that is imputed to that sin nature.
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So the point that Paul is making in these verses 13 and 14 is that there was no law from Adam to Moses, nevertheless everyone from Adam to Moses was born spiritually dead—not because of what they did but because of what Adam did. Therefore since they did not sin in the sense of a breech of law their spiritual death must be the result of a greater sin, and that is the death that goes back to the penalty for Adam for his sin. “ … even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.” The word “offense” is a translation of the Greek word parabasis [parabasij]. It is emphasising not sin per se but a type of sin, a transgression of the law.
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NASB “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one …” Notice it is the one man’s offence. The word for man is anthropos [a)nqrwpoj], meaning one human being. But it is “one” and then subsequent pronouns is in the male gender so it is clearly talking about Adam, not Eve. “… much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.” That is our connection and foundation of justification.
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Now Paul goes back to making this conclusion, the same one he was making in 5:12 where he said: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—” Through one man sin entered into the world is the thought he picks up and expands in verse 18. NASB “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation …” In the NKJV the word “judgment” is used and inserted in italics. That is because there is no word for judgment in the Greek text. It says “through one mans’s offense,” and then there is an implication, “to all men, resulting in condemnation.” The word translated “condemnation” is the Greek word katakrima [katakrima] which can be translated simply as “punishment,” a judgment that is applied.
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It is common that when we read in contexts like this the word “condemnation” the thing that jumps to our mind is eternal condemnation. But that is not necessary and it really isn’t what the core meaning of the word is. The core meaning of the word is simply facing a punishment, and that punishment can be temporal or eternal. Here we have a parallelism that is being set up. The one man’s offence results in punishment, even so through one man’s righteous act—and this is an important phrase here because it uses a different word for righteousness that has to do with actions and doing something; so it is talking about the qualification of the Lord dying on the cross for our sins—“the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.” So what he is talking about here is that this is where he is making his transition to talk about the fullness of life in . So the “life” here shouldn’t really be translated justification but the action of righteousness in life. It isn’t talking about phase one justification, and so the life here and the punishment have to be talking about what is experienced in phase two or during life after salvation.
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What we have in this verse is a contrast between Adam and Christ. We have one man’s act of disobedience and one man’s act of obedience. But the word that is used there for obedience is one that doesn’t have to mean just one act, it is referring not to what He does on the cross but what He does in terms of His life prior to the cross. Remember the life of Christ isn’t related to His atonement, it is related to the precedent He is setting, the pattern He is demonstrating for our spiritual life. So when Paul is making this transition here he talks about how Adam’s act of disobedience impacts all human beings and results in punishment—temporal punishment because now they are living in a fallen world, they have marriages that are rotten, they have kids that are rebellious and disobedient, etc. They are experiencing all manner of rot in life simply because of the impact of sin and death. Because everybody is spiritually dead they are experiencing the consequences of this kind of death. We are living in a dead world and we are living in a world that is characterised by dead people, dead institutions and dead things, who have denied the source of real life. This is contrasted to the one man’s obedience that is the basis for His free gift.
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The one man’s offence—verse 17 and repeated in verse 18—(Adam’s offence) doesn’t imply any volition there. But the phrase “the free gift” … When Adam broke God’s commandment it automatically had consequences for all human beings, but when Jesus is obedient it doesn’t automatically apply to everybody. The fact that Paul shifts to using the term “free gift” shows that there is a volition act that must come into play; there must be a reception of that free gift—acceptance or faith in Christ. “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness [or, one man’s righteousness] there resulted justification of life to all men.” The word there translated “justification” is the word dikaiosin [dikaiwsin], and in Greek it is that suffix (osin) that indicates an action. So it is not dikaiosune [dikaiosunh] which is the noun related to justification and righteousness, which is the declaration of righteousness, but this is an action that comes as a result of a person being declared righteous. So we are moving from the state of forensic justification to the foundation for experiential righteousness. So we could say this verse ends, “results in righteousness in life.” The focus is now shifting to the production of experiential righteousness.
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NASB “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners …” They are sinners, they become corrupt and are fallen, and they are born separated from God. “… even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous,” talking about a future event and their declaration of righteousness and justification. He goes back and forth because he is making this transition, so he talks about justification righteousness, then experiential righteousness, because he is moving in his discussion that there is an intrinsic relationship between positional righteousness and experiential righteousness. This is not the kind of intrinsic relationship that you get out of Reformed theology which says that if you are declared righteous you will automatically produce experiential righteousness. That is one of the problems in lordship salvation, that then you can judge whether or not a person is truly saved by whether or not they are performing works that are in keeping with justification. What we are saying here is that there is an intrinsic connection and that because you are now a new creature in Christ with positional righteousness you are saved for a reason, and that is to produce experiential righteousness. You can’t have experiential righteousness unless you are first positionally righteous. And because you are declared positionally righteous there is an expectation and a responsibility to move beyond phase one justification to phase two sanctification, being saved from the power of sin, so that you can have experiential righteousness in your life.
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So this is a transformation also in the concept of life that sees this not just as noting life without end in heaven but a newness or quality of life which is what Paul begins to talk about when we get to NASB “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” This is the shift. This newness of life is real life as opposed to living with a pseudo life, a physical life without a spiritual dimension or quality to it.
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NASB “The Law came in so that the transgression [paraptoma/ paraptwma] would increase …” now you have 613 commandments to break! So there are a lot more overt ways to sin. What God is doing by giving the Law is exposing how sin permeates every aspect of life, so now sin abounds because there are more ways to sin. “… but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” Because there were more ways that people could sin God is exposing all of the dimensions of sin and at the same time God is expanding grace toward man.
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NASB “so that, as sin reigned in death …” That is, had dominion or power or authority in the status of spiritual death. “…even so grace would reign [potential] through righteousness to eternal life …” This is not talking about getting justified. He has covered that in vv. 3, 4. We have moved away from justification righteousness to sanctification righteousness, and so he is talking now about grace can reign through righteousness in the life of the believer to “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” This is not eternal life in the sense of ongoing life without end but it is the same idea that we have coming up at the end of the chapter, that the wages of sin, i.e. that if you are a believer and you are living in carnality, what you are going to reap is carnal death; it is not going to have value.
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Chapter five ends with the same concept that chapter six will end with because that is what he is driving toward, challenging us to have lives that reflect eternal life—a quality of life in this life that is beyond anything that anyone can ever imagine, because this is what Jesus has promised us.

Romans 064b-What is Spirituality? ,

Romans 6:1 NASB95
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
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Romans 064b-What is Spirituality? ,
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Romans chapters 6, 7 and 8 shift us now completely from having talked about and focused on the topic, How is a person righteous before God? to the topic of, how does a righteous person live before God? or, How does a righteous person live on the basis of righteousness? The whole theme that Paul has developed in this epistle of Romans is on righteousness related to the righteousness of God. The starting point is God’s righteousness, so we have to ask the question as His creatures: a) How do we become righteous?; b) How do we as righteous creatures (those who have been declared righteous) experience righteousness in our own lives? That is related to the whole topic of spirituality or, theologically speaking, the topic of sanctification.
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What is fun about the topic of spirituality is that whenever we try to talk about this with anyone we know it is evident that there is a lot of confusion that comes out, because today the word “spirituality” has almost as many different meanings as individuals. And if we are going to engage in any kind of conversation about the spiritual life we really need to begin by defining some terms and making sure that the people we are talking to understand what the spiritual life is, what spirituality is, and what “spiritual” means. We find there is almost an unending number of definitions for spirituality.
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An article appeared on the new spirituality in the Boston Globe that emphasised a principle that is obvious to everyone, that is, people in America now embrace many flexible notions of spirituality; people sort of make up their own spirituality. They want to do what they want to do. It is reminiscent of the period in the Old Testament known as the time of the Judges. The theme in the book of Judges is that there was no king in the land and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. That phrase “there was no king in the land” was a phrase that had a double meaning. First of all there was no physical king but they did have a king, and the king under the Mosaic Law was to be God Himself. But the people had rejected God and in place of God they had substituted their own ideas, their own authority, their own wishes. And this is the essence of any sort of relativism, which is what dominates in western civilisation today. We have this idea that we really do reject any kind of external authority. No one can tell us what spirituality is.
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In opinion polls that have been taken over the last decade or so usually we find that somewhere between 80-90 per cent of Americans claim to believe in “God.” What do they mean by God? A lot of Americans are basically Hindu in their beliefs. What they mean by “God” is not what an orthodox Jew would believe in terms of God. It is not the same as what a Presbyterian would define as God, or a Buddhist in terms of defining God; but they all believe in something like a higher power. What is also concerning is that if there are 90 percent, as one poll suggested, believe in God does that mean that all of the scientists of America are in the ten per cent range? When we think about the whole creation versus evolution type of debate and 90 per cent believe in God that can’t be the Judeo-Christian creator God. It is just an amorphous term for something. So we have to define that.
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What is interesting is that starting in the late eighties more and more Americans believe in some sort of spiritual growth—the necessity of spiritual growth, the necessity of feeding their spiritual life. Then we begin to ask: What do you mean by spiritual life? That, again, takes us just about anywhere. Forty-three per cent said in one poll that their interest in spirituality had increased over the previous year. This is just to point out that this is a popular topic and idea. In 2010 there was a Newsweek belief net poll and according to that 24 per cent of those polled said that they were not religious but they were spiritual. So in terms of its popular understanding for many people spirituality is no longer related to a religious belief. For almost fifty per cent, though, spirituality was still somewhat related to a religious belief. Of course that religious belief could be any of the major religious systems but it was still somewhat anchored to that.
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The impact of the New Age movement (which is just another form of Hinduism or eastern mysticism) in the eighties and nineties really led to this sort of subjective view of spirituality. We will read some articles and spirituality is more related to psychological wellbeing. In other articles it is related to some sort of self-fulfilment, so it is very much related to pursuing one’s own goals and objectives and reaching them. In other contexts it is related to emotional wellbeing. But who determines what emotional wellbeing is? Certain groups of people are very quiet, very cerebral, what psychologists refer to as very obsessive people, career oriented. Then there are others who are very people-oriented. Usually people-oriented types are telling the business and goal-oriented types that they need to get in touch with their emotional self. But what makes them right? What makes their criteria right?
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The point is, once you cut yourself loose from an absolute that can establish the meaning of terms everybody is just sharing their ignorance, their own opinions, and nobody knows what is going on. It once again puts you back into a total state of chaos and anarchy such as what was experienced at the time of the judges. Nobody knows what they are talking about, everybody has their own opinion, none of which is informed or based upon anything that is solid, and everybody wants to do basically what makes them happy at any particular moment. As long as they have that sense of happiness and fulfilment, whatever it is, at that time in their life then they apparently seem to say that they are spiritual and pursuing spirituality. In this context spirituality has come to be defined as anything from making an emotional connection with other people to pursuing some sort of journey, to various contemplation or meditation techniques, to reaching some sort of self-actualisation.
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One blogger recently defined spirituality as that which deals with issues of inner beliefs and feelings and is closely associated with religion and philosophy, but not necessarily so. He also notes that people practice spirituality because they are looking for something—inner peace, enlightenment, success, new girlfriend, whatever. So this is all part of the modern context of spirituality.
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But when we come to talking about the Bible, the Bible is very clear as to what spirituality is. But as we find in other areas of life and other disciplines, whatever the Bible says is something that is somehow excluded from discourse. We’ve rejected the Bible as having anything to say about spirituality, so having rejected that we are just going to start off on our own course trying to figure out what the word means and then pursuing it. Some people go into meditation, various rituals, but these things are also leaking into Christianity. There is the emergent church movement, the latest devolution among Christians that has been on the horizon for at least the last 12-14 years. It is not biblical Christianity at all. It deteriorates into a lot of psychological, feel-good emphasis on entertainment, emphasis on some feeling, emphasis on some characteristics of mysticism, and it brings with it its own vocabulary—contemplative spirituality, being centered, labyrinths, etc. It is just more and more confusion and absolutely no certainty.
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So it is important when we talk about anything to define terms and to define our basis for those terms. This takes us right to the issue of authority and to the issue of how we know anything. How do we know we are spiritual beings? In fact, if you believe in evolution and you try to implement anything on the basis of Darwinian evolution then you really are totally illogical and irrational if you believe in any kind of spirituality. Because at some level spirituality is emphasising something related to the immaterial nature of man. Or even if they are focusing on emotional wellbeing they would be talking about emotions that are not part of a deterministic framework. If you believe in a material origin for man, which is necessary of you believe in evolution, then with a material view of man there is no room for the immaterial. In a materialistic view of man there is no such thing as the soul, there is only the brain. And the brain’s thoughts and ideas and concepts are all determined by various chemical balances and imbalances, various electrical charges, and these kinds of things; and that is where some aspects of modern psychology go: everything is related that which is purely material and physical.
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So “spiritual” by the very nature of the word implies something that is not material, something that is related to something that goes beyond the senses. So therefore it can’t be known and truly comprehended via empiricism, because empiricism restricts the area of knowledge to that which is perceived and understood only by the physical. Spirituality itself would be excluded from that. The conclusion in all of this is when spirituality can mean anything, it means nothing. When any word, any concept becomes so nebulous, so abstruse it loses all content; you can’t have a discussion about it. But the Bible talks about spirituality in several different ways, and it clearly defines spirituality from the very beginning in the Old Testament Scriptures. In Genesis there is an emphasis on spirituality.
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At its most fundamental sense spirituality is being in right relationship with God. It is going to express itself in a couple of different ways. Then the question: What does it mean to be spiritually alive? We can catch a reaction from people if we say that they are spiritually dead. If they are not Christians then they don’t like the idea of spirit beings, spiritually dead, because they feel very much to be spiritual in their lives. And there are some Christians who have some different ideas on what it means to be spiritually dead or spiritually alive, so this is a term that needs to be investigated. What does it mean to be spiritually alive? What does it mean to have a spiritual life? Those are closely related ideas but they are different. You can be spiritually alive but not have a spiritual life. We need to understand the distinction. We need to understand how we acquire a spiritual life, how that spiritual life matures, and how that is nourished. What are the goals, objectives, meanings and methods of spiritual growth and spirituality? In order to do that we have to start investigating some of these terms.
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Throughout the Scriptures, especially starting back in the Torah, there is this contrast between death and life, from the very beginning in and God’s warning to Adam and Eve that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would certainly die. And there is a Hebrew idiom there emphasising the certainty of that death. And it is not talking about different kinds of death there, it is just talking about one kind of death in that particular passage. When Israel is given the Mosaic Law what is emphasised is that there is a path to life, which is obedience to the law, and there is a path to death, which is disobedience to the law. Both Moses and his successor Joshua emphasised to the people that they had a choice—life or death. It is that choice that we find emphasised all the way through Scripture. When we come to the New Testament this is a major emphasis in Jesus’ message—that He has come to bring life. He came to give life and to give it abundantly. So there is a dual sense in the meaning “eternal life.” One is a quantitative sense in terms of what this new life is that is life everlasting, life without end with God. Then there is a qualitative sense to that that is talking about the richness, the fullness of the life that God has given us: experiencing all of the blessing, all of the benefits that God has already given us so that we have the richness, the fullness, the happiness and peace; everything that God has given us in terms of the quality of life.
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So life is contrasted to death and death is brought in and that is the first term we need to remind ourselves of when we talk about this concept of spirituality. Spirituality is the development of that spiritual life; it is in contrast to spiritual death. The penalty that God assigned to disobedience to Him is stated initially in the second chapter of the Torah as God warned Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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The concept of death really starts to get developed in the epistle of Romans in the section we are in, -22. There is an important emphasis on death, the death that comes from Adam’s disobedience and that from that disobedience death spreads to all man kind. Then that becomes contrasted by the end of , 22 with the phrase “righteousness of life.” This concept of bringing in death and then transitioning from the end of to this concept of righteousness of life shows that what Paul is doing in his thinking is moving from the topic of how to be justified before God (related to the doctrine of justification by faith alone) and regenerated to having this new life, and having this new life we are to live as righteous people.
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In the Old Testament, parallel to that, when the Israelites came out of Egypt God redeemed them. And the major picture that God gives them historically is what happened at the exodus event. With the death of the firstborn, the final plague/judgment on the Egyptians, God redeemed the Israelites. They came out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. compares that to baptism; they are identified with Moses, and they have a new life. They have been delivered from the bondage of slavery in Egypt and now they have new life and new freedom. The question is: how are these Israelites who are newly made alive supposed to live? Then God gives them the law at Mount Sinai, telling them how a now-regenerate people are supposed to live. The Mosaic Law wasn’t given to show them how to be redeemed (they are already redeemed), it was given to show how a redeemed people were to live. In the same way the New Testament was given to believers to teach justified believers how they are to live now that they are righteous.
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We go back to the problem of death and understanding what this means. There are several different kinds of death in the Scripture that we have noted. The first is spiritual death. Then there is the first mention of physical death in – “…For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” The point is that this is a minor reference to death and it is part of a stack of consequences that God has spelled out for Adam, the woman, and the serpent. So physical death is not seen as an overarching, defining concept for all of these different aspects. Physical death is part of these ramifications of something that happened when Adam disobeyed God—spiritual death.
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In two passages in the New Testament Paul reiterates this and give us an understanding that there is something that transpires relative to a person’s regeneration. In both of these Paul talks about the fact that there is a previous time when we were dead. NASB “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him [regeneration], having forgiven us all our transgressions.” NASB “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins … [5] even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” The point is that when we are made alive in Christ it is because we are born in a state of death—but we are physically alive. That tells us that that word “death” doesn’t have as its primary meaning physical death in this context. It has as its primary meaning a real death but not a physical death. So we define this as spiritual death, which is being separated from God so that we are separated from the source of life.
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This is the idea that lies behind the last parts of Romans chapter five where Paul is moving in the direction of explaining what spiritual death is. He is establishing this so that by contrast when he talks about the life that God has given us then it stands out in contrast to the present reality of our condition of spiritual death and living in a spiritually dead world, a world under condemnation.
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So in verse 12 he starts the topic: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.” Then Paul explains this in a parenthesis from v. 13 to v. 17 because he wants people to understand before he starts talking about the new life that we have why it is necessary and from whence it comes and what the foundation is. He doesn’t want any confusion over the fact that we are all born spiritually dead and we experience the effects and consequences of spiritual death from the very beginning of our life. We live in the midst of spiritually dead people and cultures produced by spiritually dead people who are just trying to somehow anaesthetise themselves to the reality that we are living in a dead culture and a dead world with dead people. He concludes the parenthesis in verse 17 by stating, “For if by the transgression of the one, [the] death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.” That is what he wants to emphasise. He is not browbeating us with the fact that we are under condemnation or punishment, but by understanding the contrast between the status of death, that that doesn’t produce anything, then we can see that all of the life that we have through God’s grace is brought out in all of its glory.
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Then Paul makes the transition from talking about judgment and condemnation to now showing that when this is solved we can have life and righteousness. NASB “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation [punishment] to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.” The way that we should understand “condemnation” here is by the word “punishment.” It results in punishment. When we read that word condemnation and we are talking about spiritual death we are often thinking about eternal punishment. But that is not Paul’s emphasis here. The emphasis here is that we are living in a state of punishment in a world that is under punishment right now and it is not what it is supposed to be; life isn’t what it is supposed to be. We experience that on a day-to-day basis. That is because we are living in a world, a universe that is under condemnation.
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NASB “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.” So one man’s decision leads to punishment; the other man’s decision leads to the potential that many will be declared to be righteous or made righteous. The verb here “will be made” is one that has not been used much by Paul—kathistemi [kaqisthmi], indicating the idea of will be appointed or will be made, and it also has the same idea of being declared righteous. So there is the contrast between the previous state of condemnation and the present state of being made righteous.
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In verse 18 the word translated “justification” is the Greek word dikaiosune [dikaiosunh] and it has the idea of righteousness. It is righteousness, and then there is the preposition eis [e)ij]—“righteousness toward life.” So the reason we are given righteousness is so that now we can experience life. Life comes from living in the realm of righteousness and producing righteousness in terms of experiential righteousness; it doesn’t occur in the realm of unrighteousness. If we are a Christian living in the realm of carnality, sin, disobedience to God, that is not going to produce life; it is going to produce death—carnal or operational death. But if we are living and walking by the Spirit on the basis of our justification then that righteousness that we have in Christ will result in life, and that life that we have is a life consistent with experiential righteousness. It is that foundation of righteousness that is the platform from which we can produce experiential righteousness and righteous living; we are not against living in a righteous manner.
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NASB “The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” The law doesn’t make sin sin; sin was already sin for all of those generations prior to the giving of the Mosaic law. There was a period of 2500 years before Moses where there was no Mosaic law, so the Mosaic law doesn’t define these things as a sin but in the Mosaic law code many things are identified as sin that weren’t spelled out that precisely prior to that. Sin is exposed in a greater and more detailed way than it was previously, and that is what Paul is talking about here. By defining sin more tightly people become more aware that just about anything that they do can be classified as a sin, because sin is anything that violates the character and revelation of God. By giving the law we have even less of an opportunity to rationalise away sin.
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What happens as a result of that? Grace just super-abounds because even though sin is more evident God’s grace in dealing with that sin becomes even more evident.
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NASB “so that, as sin reigned in death …” That means that during this time of history when there wasn’t a law, and then the time after the law between the giving of the law and the coming of Jesus the Messiah sin reigned in death. People lived in a death-dominated world. “… even so grace would reign …” And here he uses the subjunctive mood verb indicating it is potential; it is dependent upon human volition. It only reigns of we do what God says to do. “... through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The eternal life that is mentioned here is quantitative eternal life, i.e. life without end. The eternal life mentioned here in context has gone beyond the life we receive at regeneration to living in a time of the condemnation and spiritual death on the earth to experience the richness and fullness of the life that God has given us.
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Remember that when Paul wrote this there were no verses divisions or chapter divisions. When we move from verse 21 and down to verse 4 of chapter six we have the transition. NASB “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? [2] May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” There is death and life again. [3] “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? [4] Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” That is where Paul is going. He has left the concept of moving from positional death to positional life back in chapter four and now is moving experiencing the fullness of that life. He uses this same phrase “eternal life” when we get to the end of chapter six: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It is the same concept, and is all about learning how to live as a believer not in bondage to sin but living as a slave to righteousness. If we live as a slave to sin then that produces death but if you live as a slave to righteousness that produces life. That is the life that is talked about in . The wages of sin—a reference to a believer who is continuing to live in carnality and not experiencing the fullness of life, not letting the righteousness reign as eternal or full life in his spiritual life.
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That is how Paul sets this up, talking about life and death. So we see the first two key terms here in talking about the spiritual life in Scripture and understanding the nuances and the distinctions between life and death.

Romans 065b-Spirituality, Sanctification, and Life!!! (overview)

Romans 6:1 NASB95
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
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Romans 065b-Spirituality, Sanctification, and Life!!! (overview)
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, and 8 is the strongest and possibly the most in depth exposition of spirituality and the spiritual life from the hand of Paul. But so much of Scripture really does relate to the spiritual life. Every passage of Scripture is talking about one of two things: how to become righteous before God, and then everything else relates to spiritual growth, sanctification. It relates to somehow learning about who God is and what His plan and purposes are in history, learning how to think, how to live, how to relate to one another, and so many different ways that we reflect on our life the character of Jesus Christ.
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This whole concept of spirituality today is really confusing for so many people because people come into the Christian life with a lot of baggage. There hasn’t been that process of , that we are to not let our minds be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renovation of our thinking. It takes time to have our thinking renovated and some people are more resistant to that than other people. We live in a world today where there is so much confusion. There is a lot of confusion outside of the biblically sound evangelical churches. Then when we get into the “biblically sound” evangelical churches and there is a lot of confusion there. How important it is to clearly understand other views and other ways in which these ideas are taught, because you never know who is in your congregation who just walked in and what their background is.
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If we go back and look at how church was done fifty or sixty years ago it wasn’t different from how it was done 150 years ago, 250 years ago or 350 years ago; but it was radically transformed coming out of the 1960s. That ought to awaken us to the fact that maybe that is not right. If the church is basically focused on the Word as the centrepiece of everything that is done in the church—not in word, because there are a lot of churches who say they do in word but it is not so in deed, and they have changed everything. If a person who was going to church in 1935 in the United States and was plopped down in a church today he would be shocked, appalled at the transformation that has taken place. This transformation primarily occurred coming out of the sixties because a lot of people came into the church with all of the cultural baggage. A church used to be a place where the family of God came to meet to learn how to be effective in taking the Word out to the world—which is the biblical pattern. Jesus said to go, and as you go (going out) make disciples of all nations.
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Today we have a church philosophy that has swept evangelical churches over the last forty or fifty years where you do what you do in church where unbelievers can feel comfortable coming to church. An unbeliever should never feel comfortable coming to church. He shouldn’t hear things that make him feel comfortable because there should be a radical confrontation between divine viewpoint and human viewpoint. He should be aware that the culture of the Christian family is not the culture of the pagan family. Yet when the culture of the local church is made to adapt in such a way that unchurched Harry can feel comfortable then we have a major problem.
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As a result of that we have so many people come in from different backgrounds. They come from good denomination backgrounds perhaps, or weak independent or non-denominational church backgrounds, dispensational backgrounds, Reformed backgrounds, or from no background whatsoever. But they all have in their head an idea of what the spiritual life is, of what it means to be spiritual. So it is important to answer these questions: What is spirituality? What does it mean to be spiritually alive or to have a spiritual life? Learning how to acquire a spiritual life, that the Bible actually teaches that you are born spiritually dead but physically alive; there is no spiritual life there. And yet even among self-identified evangelicals surveys indicate that they think there is a spiritual life prior to trusting in Christ—the vast majority. Obviously they haven’t read the Bible, or been taught anything in the Bible. But that is because of the influence of the world; that is that baggage that they bring with them that hasn’t been dumped yet. They still have thinking that is conformed to the world; it hasn’t yet been transformed by the renewing of their minds/thinking.
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We have to lean how that spiritual life is matured and what their new goals are for the spiritual life, how that life is nourished, what the means of spiritual growth are, what the methods are of spirituality. One of the confusing things is that over 2000 years of Christianity there is just a smorgasbord of ideas that promise that if you do this you too can be spiritual. If you follow this method you can have victory in your Christian life. And it has become even more complicated and distracting in the last 150 years because of various forms of psychology that have been merged with various theological forms to morph into just an innumerable amount of false choices at the spirituality smorgasbord. So it is hard sometimes for people to really get into the Word and to understand some things because we all have this tendency to read something in light of our own frame of reference rather than to read something in light of the author’s frame of reference. We want to fit what he says into what we already understand rather than letting what he says challenge and shape what we think.
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That is the purpose of Scripture according to , . The Word of God is breathed out by God and is profitable for, first of all, doctrine or teaching, instruction, correction and instruction in righteousness. We are to be corrected, rebuked in our thinking by our confrontation with the Word of God. But we live in a world today where people don’t really want that. They don’t want to go some place and be corrected; they just want to go some place and have their ideas, their values, validated and affirmed.
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, and 8 is about how the justified believer is supposed to live. focuses on understanding the foundation for that spiritual life. And that foundation is what happened in that instant when we trusted in Christ as savior, when we were identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, and that just changes everything. The main command coming out of that section is that we are no longer to live under the authority of the sin nature but are to live under the authority of God and are to pursue righteousness. That raises another question: How do we pursue righteousness? Do we do that just by going out and being moral? Do we do that by just taking the ideas in the Mosaic Law and working really hard at doing the right thing? Is that the same as being spiritual? This is where the apostle Paul is absolutely brilliant in Romans chapter 7 because he knew the Mosaic Law inside and out. He had thorough training in the Mosaic Law as a rabbinical student and no one knew the Law more than Saul of Tarsus, and no one attempted to observe it in its minutia more consistently than Saul of Tarsus. In his conclusion of he basically says that even though the Law is good all it did was expose the fact that I was a sinner and I could not obey the Law.
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What is interesting is that is essentially what his conclusion was regarding the Law towards the end of Romans chapter 5. NASB “The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” It is not that people became more sinful but in the explanation of sin and the identification of sin people became more aware of how sin pervaded every aspect of their thinking and being. So if there is this biblically robust idea of what sin is then you can’t ever come up with the idea that we can somehow completely expunge it from our life. In Romans chapter 7 Paul said that no matter how hard he tried to obey the Law he basically came to realise that he was carnal—v. 14, “sold into bondage to sin.” But in the whole flow of and 7 there is one missing element and that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not mentioned until we get to chapter eight, and the Holy Spirit is the key to understanding the spiritual life of the believer in this age. Because only in this age is every believer indwelt by God the Holy Spirit; only in this age is every believer potentially empowered by God the Holy Spirit; only in this age are believers commanded to walk by the Spirit; only in this age are we led by the Spirit; only in this age does the Spirit make the difference between the believer who is progressing and the believer who is regressing. So when we get to chapter eight we get the answer that is important for understanding the Christian life.
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But helps to understand what we are to know as the basis and it is really important to understand some vocabulary. One of the first of these is the idea of death. We have the comparison and contrast between death and life all through the Scripture but we have it in , , .
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At the conclusion of Romans chapter 5 Paul talks about the Law coming so that by further revelation there is a greater understanding of what sin is and how pervasive sin is in the life of the individual. The arrogance of our sin nature always seeks to rationalise sin. We are professional self-justifiers when it comes to anything that we do that isn’t right, and we figure out some way to justify it and make it right. This goes all the way back to Adam after the fall. He told God immediately it wasn’t his fault, it’s her fault; also your fault because you gave her to me. What Paul is saying here is that under the Law we became tremendously aware of sin and its abundance and pervasiveness. In verse 21 he said that sin reigned over everything in our life and everything in the world is dead.
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We have this semblance of life. There is technology, a tremendous amount of entertainment, things that we can do for fun and enjoyment, things that challenge us to great achievement, but everything isn’t what we think it is. No matter what we do or no matter what we buy, everything eventually falls apart, it breaks down, it has to be painted, repaired, and nothing provides us the measure of joy that we think it should. And it shouldn’t, because we live in a fallen world. Everything has been corrupted by sin. Sin reigned in death, but what happened with Christ is that sin is overwhelmed by grace. In terms of the personal application of this our life is that when we trust Christ as savior and we have been justified sin is so overwhelmed by the grace of God in our life that its whole tyrannical dominion over our soul is completely, finally and totally broken. It is not removed, but it is broken so that we no longer have to sin. Prior to salvation we are compelled to sin, we only have one choice but to sin. Paul puts it in as being slaves to sin.
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In contrast to this sin and death grace brings the opportunity to produce righteousness and eternal life. Not just eternal life in terms of after death but life here and now. So this brings up another category which is life. Physical life is talked about in the Bible, and spiritual life is talked about in the Bible. There is also eternal life, i.e. life without end, a quantitative view of eternal life. Then eternal life is used in some contexts to refer to not just life everlasting but to the richness and fullness of life that we have today. Then we also have positional life as seen in Romans chapter six because we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection—that newness of life that we have in Christ.
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There are different words in the Greek for life. One of them is “soul” (psuche/yuxh) and this was a sort of idiom in Greek in the first century. Talking about a person’s life and sometimes the word “soul” is used—don’t lose your life or don’t lose your soul. It stood for the entirety of the person. Your soul is who you are, and so it became a metaphor for the wholeness of a person’s life. We find examples of that use not only in the New Testament but also in secular literature.
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There is the word helikian [h(likian], used in —no matter how much you worry you can’t add a span to your life. It is a measurement term so it is talking about life span. God has determined the length of our life.
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The most common word used for life is zoe [zwh]. In the Greek world it referred to life as that which is animated—animal life and human life, not plant life. You determine where you will go, what you will do, things of that nature, and it is used to describe life in a lot of different ways. This is the word that is often used with eternal life. You have to look at the context to see what the nuance is of this word.
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Another word that is found only eleven times in the New Testament is the word bios [bioj] from which we get our words biology and biosphere. This a word that is really used more in Greek by the first century to refer to a person’s way of life, manner of life, or their living—how they make their living, how they conduct their life/living.
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The word we usually find for life in is zoe or some form of it.
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When we talk about the spiritual life there are about four major groups of words we should be aware of that we find in . The first two are life and death, Life is used three times in (all zoe), eight times in chapters 6-8. So this is a significant concentration focusing on that word. Death is used seven times in and 14 times in chapters 6-8. The words “holiness” or “sanctification,” is not verbiage that is easily understood in our world today. They are commonly used in churches and by Christians but even most Christians don’t understand these words today. The KJV and NKJV usually translate hagiosmos [a(giosmoj] as holiness, and in the NASB it is sanctification. The word is used twice in , three times in . Righteousness is mentioned 5 times in and only one more time outside of that chapter through chapter eight. So righteousness is a major factor in —that we are to live for righteousness.
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Some of the key words that are used biblically that we need to become familiar with are, for example, the Hebrew word qaddash. This is the verb form and it is usually translated “holy” or to be made holy, or to be sanctified or consecrated. It has various uses and word forms that have developed from it. It basically has the idea of being set apart for the service of God. When we think of holiness we include in that word the idea of moral purity, but that has nothing to do with the word “holy.” In the ancient world the same word was applied to the priests and priestesses in the fertility religions, so they were basically cultic prostitutes and not morally pure but they were referred to by this same word group. So these were priests and priestesses who indulged in all manner of sexual perversion as part of the fertility religion. The word just means to be set apart to the use of God. Vessels in the temple were holy; they were set apart to the use of God. In the development of Jewish thought this word is also used in a couple of different forms to refer to prayer.
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The Greek word hagiazo [a(giazw] is used 28 times in the New Testament and it has the same idea of something set apart to the use of God, set apart to the service of God. When we talk about a Christian being positionally sanctified what we are really saying is that at the moment of salvation we enter into a new relationship with God so that by virtue of that new relationship we are set apart for the purpose of serving God. We are saved from God’s perspective to serve Him in this life. That means we have to be not only positionally set apart to Him but also personally and experientially. Usually this word is translated with words such as consecrate, dedicate, sanctify; but basically all those words simply mean to be set apart to the service of God.
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The noun form that we find in is hagiasmos [a(giasmoj]. It is used ten times in the New Testament and it is the idea of holiness, sanctification, consecration. It is use primarily for the process [the mos ending] of how we become sanctified experientially. The experiential part is a process, not positional.
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Then there is the word hagiosune [a(giosunh] which relates to a quality or an attribute, and hagiosune refers to someone who possess the attribute of holiness or sanctification. Thus, if we are a believer in Jesus Christ you are positionally sanctified (hagiosune) and therefore you are a hagios, the word for a saint. So anyone who is a believer in Jesus Christ is a saint.
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Another form of this word is hagiotes [a(giothj], translated “sanctity,” and then there is the noun hagios [a(gioj] which is used many times, mostly to modify pneuma [pneuma] in terms of the Holy Spirit, but also to refer to the believers as saints, some 61 times.
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A different word is hosios [o(sioj], and adjective referring to someone in terms of their practice, their application. It is related to experiential sanctification.
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A word that is quite different is eusebeia [e)usebeia] which is used 15 times in the New Testament. It is usually translated “godliness,” an antiquated English word. When we read a word with “liness” in it in English that is really likeness, an abbreviation, a contraction of the idea of likeness. So godliness was originally God-likeness, and holiness is like holy-likeness. A lot of people in the church don’t understand what godliness is, but it is someone who is manifesting the attributes and character of Christ in them. And that is the fruit of the Spirit. So it is someone who is growing to spiritual maturity. Greek dictionary: “Behaviour reflecting correct religious beliefs and attitudes (we would modify that and say it is behaviour that reflects correct biblical beliefs and attitudes and application), thus the believer’s spiritual life.” So they understand eusebeia to be basically a synonym for the spiritual life.
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Those are our key words: death and life, righteousness, holiness, and understanding some of these different words built off of that for the spiritual life. We are positionally set apart for God’s service because we are in the family of God but we haven’t learned enough to be useful yet. We have to grow and mature, be trained, educated, and that the process of taking our position and learning how to develop it experientially. Positionally we are set apart to serve God but that doesn’t mean we can do it right away. We haven’t gone through that process of being transformed by the renewing of our mind and learning how to truly serve God. That is the process referred to in the Bible as sanctification, also what we would call spiritual growth or the spiritual life.
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Sanctification is a word used of three different stages in the believer’s spiritual life. But the primary way in which we use it here and most of the time is in the area of the second stage which is also referred to as experiential sanctification and sometimes progressive sanctification. The word “progressive” is perhaps not a preferable term because there is a hidden meaning there that often goes with the word, that it is automatic and that you will automatically progress. And that goes along with Lordship salvation, the idea that of you are truly a believer you are going to manifest it in certain ways. But you only manifest it if you grow. If you don’t eat the right food you don’t grow in a healthy manner, and so spiritual growth is not automatic.
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There are three phases in sanctification. Phase one is positional sanctification—instantaneous (justification). Phase two is experiential sanctification, the spiritual life—progressive, growth time when we are going to grow from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity. It is very important to understand that that becomes your goal at the instant of salvation. When we were a child we didn’t want to be treated like children, we wanted to be treated like an adult. But in the spiritual life most Christians want to stay children. They don’t want to do anything necessary to grow up, they want God to treat them like a spiritual diaper baby all of their life. They don’t want to grow up and they don’t grow up.
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Dr Earl Radmacher, Chancellor of Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary once said: “The greatest nursery in the world is the evangelical church. Most nursery workers (pastors, Sunday School teachers) don’t know how to get the babies out of diapers.”
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Most pastors are so busy trying to teach the babies in the church that nobody else can grow because if all you are doing is teaching babies then you are not providing the kind of nourishment that the teenagers and the adults need to grow. In fact, nobody is going to become an adolescent or an adult because they are still needing baby food. The only way you can get the babies to grow up is to teach the adults, and the babies will learn to feed on what they can feed on—and they do. People will always rise to the level expected of them. If you expect the congregation to only function at the level of infancy then that is where they will stay. If you expect them to grow and mature and really know the Word then they are going to get on board with it or go somewhere else.
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The last phase of sanctification is also instantaneous but it lasts forever, it is glorification when we are absent from the body and face to face with the Lord. So we refer to phase one as positional sanctification, phase two as progressive or experiential sanctification, and phase three as ultimate sanctification. In phase one we are free from the penalty of sin. In phase two we have to learn how to be free from the power of sin. We are free from the power of sin but we have to implement that in terms of our experiential growth. In phase three we are free from the presence of sin.
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Sanctification, then, is the technical term used to describe the spiritual life which is the process of the believer’s growth from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity. As the believer grows more and more of his life is set apart for the service of God. That is the goal: serving God in and through our life.
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Often spirituality or sanctification is confused with a closely associated idea which is morality or ethical living. This is where people have trouble because obviously there is morality and ethics in the Christian life. But morality and ethics alone is not the basis for spiritual growth. That is what is all about. It says you can’t get to spiritual maturity by being moral and ethical, because something is being left out. What is being left out is the role of God the Holy Spirit. The Christian life isn’t morality or ethics, it is learning to walk with the Holy Spirit and to let the Holy Spirit develop character in our life. Morality is a system of right and wrong often based on a number of different factors that can be related to culture, social and religious factors. Ethical systems can differ also from culture to culture. For the most part they agree on the basics but it is something that anybody, believer and unbeliever, can do. And it is not going to get us anywhere.
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The highest ethical code revealed to man is what is in the Mosaic Law and it was for the whole nation of Israel, believer and unbeliever alike. So it wasn’t related to spirituality, it was related to the order of the nation.
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Morality in its highest form is designed as a system of ethics for believer and unbeliever to provide stability in government and society, and to protect freedom, property and life. That is the function of morality and ethics. An outgrowth of that is understanding good manners and etiquette. Etiquette is designed to put a social control on our normal self-absorption. That is why people need to teach their children good manners and order. It provides them with a means of structure and self-discipline so that when they’re in society with other people they can function without everything being all about them.
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If an unbeliever can produce a moral life then it is not based on the Holy Spirit. NASB “… And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.” talks about walking in the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, and that is essential for spiritual growth. You can be moral but if you are not walking by the Spirit it is just morality.
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The Christian view of the spiritual life is a system of ethics and virtue based on the work of God the Holy Spirit and uniquely dependent upon Him. He is the critical factor.
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On the other hand, arrogance destroys morality into a system of works designed to impress God or gain divine approval. Arrogance manifests itself in lots of different ways but eventually it gets exposed. Biblical spirituality is grounded upon the realisation that Christ has done everything for us and on the basis of received, imputed or credited righteousness under the filling ministry of God the Holy Spirit the believer advances to spiritual maturity. It is all about walking by the Spirit; that is the essential element.
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We must distinguish between systems of good works, high ethics and morality which can be performed by any unbeliever, and biblical spirituality. There are many systems of spirituality in Christianity that ignore the Holy Spirit. One of these is the Reformed model of spirituality which is usually associated with forms of Calvinism, and up until the late 19th and early 20th century there were not any of the major works on the Holy Spirit even discuss walking by the Spirit, the filling of the Spirit or being led by the Spirit. The Spirit was virtually ignored in these works when it came to the spiritual life. When it came to the Christian life it was all about doing the right thing, being moral and ethical; there was no mention of the role of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 066a-The New Spiritual Life. , ,

Romans 6:1 NASB95
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
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Romans 066a-The New Spiritual Life. , ,
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Romans chapter six is such a crucial section in understanding the spiritual life, the whole process whereby we are sanctified. The focal point here is on sanctification.
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In terms of an overview to give a focal point on how to understand , and 8 here are some summary points:
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The foundation of Paul’s explanation is who we now are in Christ. The first seven verses of ground his understanding of what we refer to as the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. At the baptism of the Holy Spirit at the instant of salvation we are placed in Christ. That means that we are intimately and eternally identified with His death, burial and resurrection. And it is that resurrection aspect that is so vital because that is the point of his analogy. The purpose of that is that as Christ was raised to new life so we are raised to a new life that we are to walk in, . The purpose of becoming saved isn’t just so we can spend eternity in heaven but so that we can have the fullness of life here today, that we can glorify God in our life today, can be a consistent witness for Him and grow to spiritual maturity, serve Him in the body of Christ in the local church, and be used by Him as an outreach to a fallen world.
Living the spiritual life is presented by Paul as being now possible only because of a total break with the power of the sin nature that occurred at the instant of justification. He presents this as an absolute transition that takes place. At the instant of salvation the tyranny of the sin nature is completely and irrevocably broken. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a sin nature and that we cannot yield to it. (All we mean by “nature” is a capacity for something) A sin nature does not refer to a concrete something but it refers to the fact that the human person is under the penalty of sin and has been corrupted in terms of his core constitution by sin, and so there is this proclivity to rebellion against God and to sin. And prior to salvation, because the person is spiritually dead, there is only one option in life and that is to live like a spiritually dead person, separated from God, divorced from the source of life, incapable of doing anything that has eternal value before God. This is how everybody is, no matter how good, intelligent, productive, or kind; the unbeliever is not producing the kind of righteousness that is characteristic of God. It is not until we receive the imputation of God’s righteousness, declared just, regenerated and become a new creature in Christ that that power is broken. But that power is still there and the habit patterns formed as an unbeliever are still there.
The ultimate issue then becomes our volition. We make of our lives what we choose to make of them. It ultimately boils down to responding to what God says is true because God says it is true. He says that we are now dead to the sin nature and we should not yield to the sin nature, we should not put ourselves back into the position of slavery to the sin nature, because positionally we are now slaves of righteousness. So it is our decision. We have this battle that goes on inside in the Christian life. This whole issue of the believer and sin is one that has plagued Christianity from the very beginning. What do you do with a believer who is a child of God but sins like a child of the devil? The basic response of people down through the ages is that maybe they are not really saved. And that reflects a somewhat shallow view of sin and it also reflects a shallow view of grace. We are still capable of as many sins and living like we did before our salvation. This is why we have these injunctions from Paul that we should no longer be slaves of sin.
Spiritual growth is more than simply a choice. It is a choice that is based on biblical truth. There is an emphasis in this section on coming to know everything that God has provided for us, that it is not just a matter of choosing not to sin versus sinning, it is a choice based upon a growing and increasing knowledge of truth. NASB “but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…” Our growth is not apart from knowledge, knowledge alone is insufficient; it needs something else, the Holy Spirit.
The consequences that are presented throughout this section are life or death, not in terms of an eternal (eternity in heaven) or an eternal death (eternal condemnation) but in talking about experiencing the fullness of life here and now in this life. Or, in contrast, being a believer but living as though spiritually dead and experiencing a life of corruption because of living on the basis of the sin nature. So the consequences are not just eternal, they focus on the present realities.
Human effort and morality is not only irrelevant but it is incapable of solving the problem. Human effort and morality can’t do it. There is a difference between morality and spirituality. Spirituality has to do with the walk according to the Spirit which comes into play in the eighth chapter of Romans. In the seventh chapter Paul as a believer is still trying to do it according to the law which is a system of morality, and it doesn’t work. So morality and human effort are irrelevant in the sense that they can’t overcome the problem of the sin nature. In answering the question, how do I live as a slave of righteousness? It can’t be done by just trying to be moral, trying to do the right thing. It can only be done () by walking according to the Spirit.
Paul emphasises that the law is good, but it is limited. And the limitation of the law is that it only exposes sin. It only makes us more and more aware of how sinful we are. The more prohibitions there are the more we are aware of sin in the life, but it doesn’t provide power to overcome the sin.
Every believer struggles with sin. The more mature we are, the more we grow as a believer, the more we realise how exceedingly sinful sin is and how pervasive it is in our life and thinking. The new believer isn’t as conscious of sin as a more mature believer. The more we grow and mature as a believer and become aware of the sinfulness and extensiveness of sin we then realise how totally impossible to live the Christian life. It can’t be done in our power; it can only be done in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Only when we understand the provision we have in Christ and by the Spirit can we relax and have genuine spiritual growth and victory.
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The sixth chapter of Romans focuses on our position in Christ and all that we are given in Christ. The seventh chapter focuses on the fact that we are incapable of solving these problems on our own through morality. The eighth chapter focuses on what we have been given in terms of God the Holy Spirit. focuses on our new identity in Christ; focuses on the consequences in terms of not being able to do this on our own, by just wanting to do the right thing. That leads to a point of tension and complete frustration and the only solution, then, is going to be in terms of the spiritual life.
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The basic foundation in . NASB “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” If sin caused God to give us His grace, to bestow all of this on us freely, then if we sin more God will just give us more, so why not just sin more? That is the antinomian presentation. Paul completely rejects it: [2] “May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” That is the foundation of what he is saying in really the verses down to verse 14: that we have died to sin. That is an important concept to think about. What does it mean to be dead to sin? Does it mean that there is no longer any temptation? Does it mean that we are not longer able to sin like we did before were a believer? Death in the Scripture often has the idea of a separation from something, and what we see here is not an absolute separation but is separation from the power or the dominion of sin.
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Then Paul goes immediately into his explanation of this important doctrine which is basically vv. 3, 4 NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” So he makes this transition based on understanding what happens at salvation. What is important there is he is talking about a non-experiential event, so we have to trust what the Scriptures describe and implement that. That means we have to understand it and then we have to live in light of it. So the faith principle there is that we recognise and live as a new creature in Christ.
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In verse 5 he lays down a condition, “For if.” He has further explanation, v. 7, “for he who has died is freed from sin.” He builds to the next level of his argument, [8] “Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.” Note that there is the phrase “knowing this” in v.6 and “knowing that Christ” in v. 9. So in the middle of both of these sections there is an emphasis on knowing something. And this isn’t just an abstract knowledge; it is a recognition of learning something that actually took place before God. In v. 10 notice that he begins with a “for”: “For the death that He died, He died to sin,” so this is explaining the principle at the end of verse 9, that death no longer has dominion over Christ. Why? “the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.”
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Then he makes his point, his analogy, v. 11: “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” The word “reckon” [consider] is the same word that is used in relation to imputation—logizomai [logizomai] which has to do with drawing a logical conclusion and thinking a certain way. This means that we are to consider that there should be this separation in our life from the dominion of sin and, instead, that we are alive to God in Christ. That phrase “in Christ” is foundational for understanding this shift that has occurred from the death of the old man and the body of sin (v.6) and that now we are freed from sin—but the sin nature is still there.
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In the section from vv. 12-19 there is a conclusion in v. 12, “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts.” That is a direct command to the believer. Don’t let sin dominate your life. Then he adds to that. “13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body [the entirety of your life] to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness …” There is a choice: life or death, righteousness or unrighteousness. Then there is a contrast: “but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members {as} instruments of righteousness to God.” Why? [14] “For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” This is a statement of the way it ought to be, not the way it is. Because you are a child of God you should not let sin have dominion or rule over you, “because you are not under law but under grace.” This is the beginning of the contrast that Paul is going to bring in over chapters 7 & 8, the contrast between law and grace.
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Grace does not mean that because we are freed from sin and the penalty of sin that we therefore are free to sin as much as we like. That is not the idea. He says that sin should not have dominion over us. Because we are under grace it should not be present in our lives. [15] “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be!”
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NASB “Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone {as} slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” Notice here he is not talking to unbelievers. He said, “You’re going to obey God and it will lead you to righteousness.” This is experiential righteousness, he is talking to believers. Or you will present yourself to sin and that will lead to death—not physical death, not eternal death, but experiencing the same death-like consequences in life that an unbeliever experiences. It has no value, no eternal value; it will bring corruption and destruction into your life. There are consequences to sin. Even though there is forgiveness for sin there are still consequences for sin. But the contrast is that God’s grace is always greater than sin.
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NASB “But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, [18] and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” So at the instant of salvation we had an authority shift. The authority before salvation was the sin nature; the authority afterward was God. There is no neutrality. But do we act like an obedient slave or a disobedient slave. Paul is saying that if we act like a disobedient slave we are going to reap all the negative consequences that go to a disobedient slave, and you are going to self-destruct. That self-destruction may not be immediate, there may be some good times first, but eventually there is self-destruction.
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We are alive from the dead in 6:13 and now we are to present ourselves as slaves of righteousness. For what? For “holiness” [KJV]. The Greek is really “sanctification”—for our experiential sanctification. Verse 19 emphasises the fact that we are now to “present ourselves”—a decision-making term. The old term was “yield” and that picked up a lot of extraneous baggage under the old victorious life teaching. It emphasised this “yieldedness” all the time and people didn’t really understand that so much. It is the idea of making a decision to be obedient to God and the Scriptures, and to walk by the Spirit and keeping short accounts in that direction. So we have to be a slave of righteousness to get to sanctification.
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In vv. 20-23 we see a summary of the argument up to this point. NASB “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.” In other words, you couldn’t be righteous. When you were a slave before you were saved you could not produce righteousness, it was impossible. Cf. . We can’t produce righteousness in our status of being unregenerate, unjustified.
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NASB “Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? …” What was the fruit of that activity? Death. “… For the outcome of those things is death.” If we walk according to the flesh [sin nature], as a slave of sin, then the end result is death. That is true for the unbeliever. It would also include eternal condemnation. But it is true for the believer, though it doesn’t include eternal condemnation; it means that in terms of life now there is a death-like experience because we are producing corruption from our sin nature. So it ends up having all sorts of negative consequences in our lives.
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The contrast. NASB “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.” Now there is a production to sanctification, to spiritual growth, and the end result is everlasting life—not in the sense of life in heaven but in the sense of that abundant life that is part of what we are given at the instant of salvation. There are many passages that talk about eternal life as a future reality but as a present possession—; ; , etc. Present tense, it is a reality today. .
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Paul’s conclusion: NASB “For the wages of sin is death…” Here he uses the imagery of a labourer who gets the consequences related to his labour, and so if he spends his labour in sin then he gets paid in kind, which is death. And of he does not then it results in eternal life. “… but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is a restatement of what is clear from vv. 21, 22. He is not talking here about getting eternal life at justification, but the fullness of that life, realising all of its blessings here and now.
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But this raises another question. How do I do this? How do I consider myself dead to sin? How do I experience this fullness of life today? Do I just go out and do what the Scripture says to do and obey all of these commandments? That is just like any other world religion, just go out and be morally reformed and you’ll be okay. But we can’t do that. And Paul coming out of his Pharisaical background recognises that there an absolute incapability to ever have any point in time that is not governed by the sin nature. The law just can’t do it.
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talks about the law, the relation of the law to the Christian life. The law here is not talking about general law, even though it doesn’t have an article in the Greek. In many passages in the New Testament where the Mosaic law is in view it is expressed without the use of a definite article. Here Paul is picking up a thread that he has already talked about back in the previous section. In 6:15 he raised the question: What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” So now he is going to talk more about this issue of not being under law. He is explaining what it means that we are no longer under law.
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NASB “Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?” He is going to use an analogy now from marriage. There are many who go to this as a passage that has something to say about marriage and divorce, and that is not relevant. He is really using an analogy from the law related to marriage that when two people are married that marriage lasts until death. When death occurs the living spouse is no longer under the authority of the person who died, no longer in that marriage. This is a narrow use of an analogy and you never build doctrines off of analogies. He is making a point that when death occurs the relationship ends. That is all he is saying.
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Paul is saying is that because we have died to the law in terms of our identification with Christ in His death there is no longer a relationship to the law in its entirety. There is a complete break that occurs and so the law no longer has a binding nature. But he is not saying that because we are not under law we can therefore be lawless. He is simply saying that we are not under the Mosaic Law as a standard of living. This makes it very clear that God has changed the way that He is administering history, administering His authority to believers. In the Old Testament that administration of His authority was through the Mosaic Law which was a temporary covenant that God made with Israel, and only with Israel. No Gentile was ever held accountable to the precepts of the Mosaic Law.
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NASB “For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were {aroused} by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death.” The purpose of the law is to expose sin and to make it clear how extensive sin is.
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NASB “But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.” There is a complete break. There is clearly a distinction in the spiritual life of the church age from that which went on prior to the cross. This is the first mention of the Holy Spirit.
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Basically the thrust of the rest of is: in vv. 7-12 Paul is talking about his previous experience with the law, that the law could not produce freedom because, as he says, when you had the 10th commandment, You shall not covet, it is not an external thing, it is and internal mental attitude and he realised that that was present in almost everything that he did. So he couldn’t get away from his violation of the law.
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Then in verse 9 something interesting happens. NASB “I was once alive apart from the Law …” That is a fascinating term because you are dead until you are regenerate, and this is a term that relates to regeneration indicating that at this point “I became alive,” or “made alive” once without the law. The law did not bring about regeneration. “ … but when the commandment came,” i.e. after regeneration, when he goes back to trying to live his spiritual life on the basis of obeying the Mosaic Law, “sin became alive [revived] and I died.” He is basically saying it is impossible to live the spiritual life. Carnal death is what Paul talks about in , “The wages of sin is death.” He recognises he is a sinner and he is dead—not spiritually dead but is producing a death-like life—and that following the law could not bring life.
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In subsequent verses from v. 13 on he answers the next question: “Therefore did that which is good [the law] become {a cause} {of} death for me? May it never be!...” No, the law simply exposes sin, and he has become more aware that he has sinned, that he is sinful, that he is carnal, that he still can be controlled by sin. “… Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.”
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In the next passage from v. 15-22 Paul expresses this conflict that many of us have experienced so well. NASB “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I {would} like to {do,} but I am doing the very thing I hate. [16] But if I do the very thing I do not want {to do,} I agree with the Law, {confessing} that the Law is good. [17] So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.” Sin just takes over.
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NASB “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good {is} not. [19] For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. [20] But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.” He builds to the crescendo of vv. 25, 25, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.”
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He expresses total frustration: I want to obey God but I can’t do it. And when I know something is wrong and I don’t want to do it, that is exactly what I end up doing. How can I serve God when I am controlled by this body of sin?
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We get into the solution in chapter eight, which has to do with walking by the Spirit. NASB “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” This is important because often we quote this verse in terms of eternal condemnation. But this section isn’t about what happens after we die, it is about what is going on right now.
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There is a recognition of the principle all through this section of the contrast between the law of the Spirit versus the law of sin and death. Verse 4, not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Verse 5, “For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, [et their minds on] the things of the Spirit.” In other words, it is your mental attitude and mental focus that is going to make a difference. And if you don’t build that mental attitude by taking in the Word day in and day out then you are not going to be focused on the things of the Spirit and the things that have eternal value.
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This continues down to verses 14-17 where he is going to bring in the whole issue of ultimate reward and blessing in terms of inheritance. The next topic, vv. 18-39, is the transition to chapter nine. The spiritual life really ends in verse 17, after which the focus begins on how to handle suffering and the faithfulness of God down through the end of the chapter.

Romans 067b-Our New Identity: Baptism by Means of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 6:1 NASB95
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
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Romans 067b-Our New Identity: Baptism by Means of the Holy Spirit.
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is dealing with our identity in Christ in relation to our spiritual life. Here Paul lays the foundation for how a justified (declared righteous) believer can live a righteous life. And the foundation for that is understanding our identity in Christ. deals with the problem of trying to accomplish the goal of living as a slave to righteousness on our own without dependence upon the Holy Spirit. Most of is Paul’s personal story, his attempt to try to grow spiritually and be spiritual on the basis of just obeying the law, or just basically being moral, being religious. But that didn’t cut it; he couldn’t do it on his own because of the power of the sin nature that was still in his life. He didn’t have the means to really impact that even tough that power was broken. Then we get to which gives the solution: that the real issue is that walk by means of the Holy Spirit, that the Christian life is a supernatural life built on understanding that relationship with God the Holy Spirit. It starts in with understanding our new identity in terms of the baptism by means of God the Holy Spirit.
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In these first two verses Paul is using a time-honoured pedagogical technique. You ask questions. If all of this is true, Paul says, and if God’s grace came because people become so corrupt and sinful in Adam, then let’s go sin some more and we can get more grace. And there are people who think that way: that God’s grace is so great it really doesn’t matter what I do. That is called licentiousness or antinomianism. It ignores consequences and it ignores the fact that we are not supposed to do it because we haven’t been saved so that we can abuse grace.
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Grace means that we have freedom. We have freedom to obey and we have freedom to disobey. God is not making us obey. There are going to be consequences from bad decisions and disobedient decisions but God doesn’t make us; we have freedom.
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NASB “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” What is interesting is the word he uses (“continue”) is a compound word intensification of the basic verb meno [menw]—he adds an intensifying preposition to it, epimeno [e)pimenw]. meno is the word Jesus used (predominant in the Gospel of John) in the upper room discourse when He said: “If you abide in Me and My word abides in you …” It is that word “abide,” and it shows up again in the first epistle of John. It is a word that describes fellowship. We remain in fellowship with Christ. There is almost a tongue-in-cheek here that when he uses meno what is going to come up in a person’s mind is the idea of fellowship. But sin is antithetical to the idea of fellowship and so he sort of catches the attention and says, “Are you going to abide in sin?”—instead of abiding in Christ. He is making a subtle point there. The word for “increase” is a word that means to grow, to increase, be prosperous, something that is expanding a lot. So we are not going to get more grace by sinning more.
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Paul completely rejects that. NASB “May it never be! ...” He uses a word that is a very strong denial of something, e.g. Absolutely not! –me genoito [mh genoito]. Then he raises the real pedagogical point in the next question: “… How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” What he is saying is, is that if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you are a dead-to-sin type of person. That is your new identity. You are the kind of person for whom sin has no place in your life. That is who we are at the instant of salvation. So Paul is asking, “How shall we who are these dead-to-sin kind of people continue to live in sin?” That is not who we are. Peter calls it the dog returning to his vomit. The “died to sin” is an aorist tense verb—past tense; “still live in it” is a future active indicative. So the question is: You died in the past, so why in the world in your future are you going to live in it?
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The problem we have is this thing called a sin nature. The sin nature has a core motivator, and that is a lust pattern. There are all kinds of lusts. We are living in a world where there is an incredible amount of unhappiness, not just because of the way the world is but because we are divorced from God. And there is something in the very core of our being that says that the life I am experiencing isn’t the life that it should be. Every one of us has had that experience at some point or another. Because we are living in a fallen world where is this great vacuum because of the absence of God we are constantly trying to find things that are going to fill it up. That’s the lust pattern. We are looking for something in creation to fill the void that has been left by the loss of that relationship with God. This is what motivates everybody and it produces the actions in our lives. We can go in one of two different directions. We can produce that which is morally good and we can produce that which we understand to be sin. It all comes out of the sin nature. From the time we are born to the time we trust in Jesus Christ as our saviour the only thing motivating us is our sin nature. It can’t come out of any other place because we are spiritually dead and corrupt.
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We also have trends. One trend is towards asceticism, that somehow I am going to make God happy with me by the things that I give up or the things that I do. That is asceticism and legalism, and this can lead to moral degeneracy like the Pharisees in the New Testament. Or there is the other trend toward licentiousness and lasciviousness. And some of us are masters at one second running one way and the next second running the other way. That is just the complexity of our sin nature. Then we like to cover it up with the façade of how sweet and wonderful we are.
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This sin nature is what controls us and it produces habits. From the time we are about two seconds old we start developing habits where this sin nature is helping us satisfy what we think we need to be happy. It pushes all those lust pattern buttons and all the trends, and everybody is a little different—for a lot of different reasons and different factors—but this is what is at the core of it. And it controls us; it is the boss. Then we trust Jesus as saviour and something happens; the boss now has competition. The competition is that we have a new nature because we are born again, we are regenerate, we have a new life in Christ and we have new power source that is more powerful than the sin nature, and that is the Holy Spirit. But we have to make a choice as to who is in control. Understanding that is what is all about.
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NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? [4] Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
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As soon as they see the word “baptism” people get into a bit of a quagmire because this has been such a battleground for so many years that people automatically think of water baptism. But that is not what this is talking about. It isn’t because of the phraseology here related to what we are baptized into. The Greek verb is baptizo [baptizw], a word that didn’t get translated, it got transliterated. The reason it was transliterated was because nobody had the courage to translate it because it would create a huge ecclesiastical battle. They decided to just transliterate it and then nobody would know what they were talking about. If you translated it you would translate with the word “immerse,” and by the time this came along people were not immersing anymore, they were sprinkling. In verse 6 it is used twice in an aorist passive verb. That is important because the aorist again is referring to something that has happened in the past, and the passive means that we received this action. It is something that is done to us; it is not something we do for ourselves. So in verse 3 somebody baptised us but it doesn’t tell us who did. Then this new place that we are put into is in Christ Jesus.
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The word baptizo means to dip, plunge, immerse. That is its basic dictionary meaning. But in its action the word was used in a figurative sense to talk about identifying someone with a particular course of action of a person or an object or a new status in life. It was often used as an initiation rite. For example, in Judaism if you were a male Gentile and you wanted to completely convert to Judaism then you had to go through circumcision and then there had to be an initial rite of ceremonial purification. It was a baptism. So the idea of ceremonial washings and purifications was not unknown in the ancient world but was very much a part of what was going on there. It signified that you were now identified with something new. In the ancient Greek world they would take the spears of the recruits in the army when they had finished their training and plunge their spears and plunge them into a bucket of pig’s blood, indicating that now this recruit was trained and ready to go out and be a warrior. There was that identification there indicating a progress into a new state.
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We diagram this in terms of using two different perspectives of what happens in terms of our relationship with God. One side expresses the eternal realities that we have in Christ and all that God does for us in Christ. At the instant that we trust in Christ we are identified with Christ, placed in Christ, by what is called the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. This is something that happens instantaneously at the moment we are saved. In terms of our experience our relationship with the Holy Spirit is described in terms the phrases “filling by the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, walking in light.” Then we have the option of being out of fellowship which is when we sin and are under the control of the sin nature, in carnality. When we sin we are out in carnality and when we confess our sin () we are back in fellowship. But we are always identified with Christ no matter whether we are in or out of fellowship. We are always in Christ; we are always indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and those realities never change, they are eternal.
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When we talk about baptism there are eight different baptisms. The first three are ritual baptisms which involve water. There is the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist which is a unique, distinct baptism. It wasn’t John’s normal baptism. John was calling people to be baptized for repentance of their sins. Jesus had no sins to repent from, so He was not going through John’s baptism. It was an initiation of Jesus into His new ministry as prophet and priest offering the messianic kingship to the nation Israel. The second category is the baptism of John the Baptist (immersion). Then there is the believer’s baptism which occurs after a person trusts in Christ as saviour, and it is a ritual in order to express the reality of what Paul is describing in . Just as communion uses two concrete objects, the bread and the cup, to express the abstract realities of the hypostatic union and substitutionary atonement, so water baptism is a physical, literal ritual that depicts what happens in the spiritual realm of our identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection.
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There are five real baptisms in the sense that these are baptisms that are not ritual and they don’t involve water, except for the first one which is the baptism of Noah. The ones who got wet died. The ones who were baptized with Noah were dry. Then there is the baptism of Moses. This also involved some water because the Jews who followed Moses through the Red Sea didn’t get wet. They are identified with Moses in his trust in God. The ones who got wet were the Egyptians, and they all were drowned. Then there is the baptism by fire which is the baptism related to judgment which comes at the end of the Tribulation period. The baptism of the cross, which is Christ’s identification with our sins on the cross. Then the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit, which takes place at the instant of salvation. The baptism we are talking about here in is the baptism by the Holy Spirit, because this is the fundamental spiritual reality for the church age believer.

Romans 068b-Why the Baptism by the Holy Spirit Really Matters;

Romans 6:1 NASB95
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
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Romans 068b-Why the Baptism by the Holy Spirit Really Matters;
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One of the interesting arguments following the Reformation was trying to understand the relationship between justification and sanctification. In the plan of salvation there is phase one, phase two and phase three: phase one (justification); phase two, the spiritual life (experiential sanctification). The question is: What is the relationship between those two? We pretty much understand this, but for many people in Christianity, and down through the 2000 years of Christianity, this has not been very clear at all.
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Sometimes when we talk about lordship salvation, free grace gospel and things of this nature, people are not always sure what these terms describe. Basically, lordship salvation sees and integral and necessary connection between phase one and phase two. What that means is that if you are truly justified you will necessarily, because you are justified and a new creature in Christ, show certain signs of your regeneration. And those signs of your regeneration are the evidence that you are saved.
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We have all made the kind of mistake before where we have looked at someone and asked how in the world that person could be a Christian? As soon as we have done that we have stepped away from the divine viewpoint, not because we are judging them but because we are assuming that somehow the actions of a person’s life tell us if he is a member of God’s royal family or not. We all know that there are a lot of children who do not live according the standards of their family. That is as true for God’s family as for any other family.
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What happened after coming out of almost 1500 years of Roman Catholic confusion there was this belief that if you were saved you lived a certain way, and the only way that you could know that you were saved was if you lived a certain way. That was your evidence. It wasn’t the promise of God in Scripture that if you believed in Jesus as your saviour that you were therefore saved and that was all there was to it—which would make the distinction between phase one and phase two. In Roman Catholic theology actually you don’t know if you’re saved because salvation or justification isn’t a one-shot thing; it is not something that occurs at the moment you trust in Christ. You get a little more grace every time you participate in a sacrament, and when you get enough grace them you are justified. But how do you know when you have enough grace? It is going to be exhibited in your life. So the evidence of salvation is your life, not what you believe, not the promise of God.
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When we get to the Protestant Reformation, initially when Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis on the door of the church at Wittenberg he didn’t have a real clear focus on justification by faith at that point. He was close. He was subsequently influenced by a young brilliant theologian by the name of Philipp Melanchthon. He snapped to the doctrine of justification by faith very quickly and understood that there had to be this demarcation between justification and sanctification, and that these were not related in the sense that if you were justified that had certain necessary implications for sanctification. What that is basically saying is that if you are saved you are going to live some form of the Christian life. That is what their view was. And so if you weren’t living any form and there was no evidence in your Christian life then you must not be saved. Melanchthon understood this and he made it clear to Luther.
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When Calvin first wrote his Institutes he had a clear grasp on the separation of justification and sanctification, and he had an extremely clear grasp on justification by faith. This is in the 1530s. By the late 1540s the Protestants began to get a lot of blow-back from the Roman Catholic church, i.e. if grace is true then how are you going to keep everybody under control? How are you going to keep them moral? If all they have to do is believe in Jesus and they are going to go to heaven then everybody is going to go out and live in sin and be as immoral as they can be and you won’t have any moral controls on people anymore.
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Unfortunately, Calvin didn’t have an answer for that. He began to fudge, and so what they developed was this idea that if you are truly saved then your life is going to show it. So he back-doored works. Works weren’t up in front saying that if you want to be save you have to believe in Jesus and be good, so they slipped in that if you have real faith then your life will show it. So they came up with this little cliché that many writers have used that goes something like this: “While we are saved by faith alone, the faith that saves is never alone.” And what they mean by that is that the faith that saves is not the same kind of faith as the faith that you and I exercise everyday. When we get up in the morning and are running late to work we believe (have faith) that when we get out to the car, stick the ignition key in and turn it on the car is going to start. That is just a belief.
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In this whole issue of understanding salvation they got into the issue of defining what faith is. In Calvinism there was the development of the idea that there is a different kind of faith that is saving, and it is not the same as everyday faith. So the kind of faith that is saving, they said, is a gift from God. They began to change the translation and interpretation of , which says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, {it is} the gift of God; not of works …” They understood that “the gift of God” referred back to faith. But “it is” is a neuter pronoun in the Greek; “faith” is a feminine noun, and the basic rule of grammar is that your pronoun has to agree in case, number and gender with its antecedent. You can’t have a neuter pronoun referring to a feminine noun, so it has to refer to something else. Grace is also a feminine noun, so to what does the “it” refer? It refers contextually to the whole process of salvation as being the gift of God. It is not saying that faith is the gift of God, but that is how Calvinists will present it. They say that God will only give the gift of faith to the elect, and if you are not the elect then God doesn’t give you the gift of faith.
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All of that is to emphasise why it is important to understand this distinction between phase one and phase two. Phase two does not automatically come out of phase one. Just because you have trusted in Christ as saviour doesn’t mean that you are automatically going to grow. The lordship position says that you are.
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Getting into the eighteenth century under the influence of revivals, which were really mixed in terms of their impact—the first great awakening was more positive than negative, the second great awakening around 1800-30 was probably a lot more negative than it was positive—revivalism took over when people wanted to imitate what had happened in the second great awakening because they had their eyes on experience, and all through this period they were asking the question: How do we live to please God? It can be a good question but it can also lead off on the wrong trail. As they did that, for the first time really in the history of theology, theologians, pastors and others starting probing the whole doctrine of the spiritual life. What is interesting is that within the whole Calvinistic Reformed tradition, through most of the Lutheran tradition, and through the Wesleyan tradition, there wasn’t anybody really talking about the Holy Spirit.
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Then in the mid-19th century there was a woman Methodist Bible teacher by the name of Phoebe Palmer who was teaching ladies’ Bible studies in New York at a time when there was a tremendous decrease in church attendance. People were asking what was wrong; they could observe it. So they did what most of us do and became very self-absorbed and said: ‘Oh, it’s all our fault; we must be doing something wrong, we are not walking with God. God is punishing us.’ They didn’t lift their head up to look around to see what else was going on in the world. What had happened was that people were going west. They were leaving their churches and homes and everything else and going west in a mass migration and so the churches on the eastern seaboard were losing their membership. And what happened with Phoebe Palmer and others was a decision to seek a “second blessing” after salvation. The idea was, “We’ve missed out on something.”
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As soon as you hear people say we want to figure out how to get more of the Holy Spirit, or that we have somehow missed something in our spiritual life because somehow things are not quite as enthusiastic, exciting or as wonderful as they were when we were first saved, your radar ought just start pinging loudly that something is seriously wrong. It always leads to a problem.
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Then out of the 19th century revivals was what was later called holiness theology, the idea that you get justification and blessing at the cross but then you have to “bring it all to the altar.” (The pulpit and communion table is not an altar) There was the influence of Charles Finney’s revivalistic techniques coming out of the second great awakening, the idea that people need to do something. All of this kind of merged together to develop this two-step theology of one step where you get justification at salvation and another step subsequent to salvation where when you dedicate your life to Jesus, where you lay it all on the altar, you go through some sort of post-salvation secondary experience, and then you are going to make it, that is where you get the second blessing.
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That was holiness theology. Then at the turn of the century and the development of Pentecostalism that is when they identified that second blessing as the baptism of the Holy Spirit that was necessarily evidenced by speaking in tongues. So there was the development of Pentecostal theology.
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Into that whole matrix there was another trajectory that went off into what became known as Keswick teaching or victorious life teaching. Victorious life teaching had elements, some similar to Keswick and some that wasn’t, and Roman Catholics also developed within that stream something called the mystical, contemplative view of spirituality, and that has really made a huge recovery in the last thirty years.
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Some of the Keswick speakers were also dispensational and pre-Trib. and they spoke at a lot of the huge Bible conferences that were held. This was the era of Dwight Moody. Others were C.I. Scofield, Louis Sperry Chafer, and others. L.S. Chafer fitted into this because he heard these men and he picked up some of the vocabulary, but he doesn’t really approach it the same way. He doesn’t have a victorious life, Keswick view of the spiritual life. He had a solid understanding of grace and the spiritual life which he got from C.I. Scofield. This is our heritage. It is built on this understanding and as you go from generation to generation these theologians are thinking through these issues and each generation becomes a little clearer and a little tighter on their understanding of what the Scripture is saying. And those who held to some form of human effort or works in the process are the ones who are headed off on sidetracks.
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With what is called the Chaferian view there is a clear distinction between justification and sanctification. It is not that they aren’t related because at the instant of salvation we are positionally sanctified, but then it is in the process of our spiritual growth we become experientially sanctified. The difference is that in our view of the spiritual life spiritual growth, fruit bearing, is not necessarily connected; it is not an automatic consequence of being saved. In the lordship view it is an automatic consequence of being saved, which means they end up being fruit inspectors because they have to figure out if they have enough fruit. In other words, you don’t know if you are really saved unless you have the right kind of fruit. It is not so much that you are looking at other people’s fruit; you are just trying to examine your own fruit to know if you are really saved.
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The late 70s was when the lordship view was really beginning to bubble up in evangelicalism, but it was not until about the late 1980s that it really reached a sort of fever pitch. Zane Hodges at Dallas Seminary wrote a book called The Gospel Under Siege, which really opened the door, and then there was a response to that by John MacArthur with a book called The Gospel According to Jesus in 1988. MacArthur was invited to a large Christian bookstore in Irving, Texas, to talk for an hour on the basic ideas of the book. They also invited pastors for Q and A. Dr Tommy Ice and Dr Robert Dean sat dead center, right in front of John MacArthur. At the end Dr Dean ask him a question: How sure are you that if you were to die right now that you would go to heaven? He said: About 98 or 99 per cent sure.
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Why isn’t it more than that? Because he doesn’t know if he might apostasize in the rest of his life. He doesn’t know if the fruit is really qualitative fruit of the Holy Spirit because he is putting his faith in the fruit and not in the promise of God. That is really the issue.
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Question: What were all these people mentioned above looking at—the ones that were not quite on target on sanctification? They were all looking at their life as a criterion for whether or not they are saved or are growing in Christ. It is experience-based over and over and over again, and it is based on how they feel about their relationship with God. Ultimately when you get right down to the bottom line it is how they feel about it.
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When we look at what Paul says in Romans chapter six this has nothing to do with how any of us feel about Jesus. He is answering the question: How do we live this spiritual life? How as a justified person do we live a righteous life? Paul says, we are going to get right down to the basics. And the basics are that we have to understand some profound spiritual realities that occurred at the instant of salvation that are completely non-experiential. What we have to do is understand something that God says happened the instant we were saved, and we need to make that a reality in our thinking. That is the foundational faith-rest drill for the Christian life. It is to recognise that I am completely a new creature in Christ and I am dead to sin. My relationship to sin and my sin nature that I have always had has now been totally broken, and I have to believe that is true every moment of every day.
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We are justified but that is not a necessary connection to spiritual growth. Just because we are justified doesn’t mean we are going to grow one little bit. We are going to be born again, regenerate, but if there is no feeding then our spiritual life isn’t going to go anywhere. We are not going to lose our salvation, our justification, but we are never going to grow. Feeding comes from the Word of God. We have to learn something about the Word before we can grow.
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When we go through Paul says, v. 3, “…do you not know?” The first thing out of his mouth almost as he sets up this discussion has to do with knowledge. We have to know something; we have to learn something; we have to learn what happened at salvation. We have to learn the dynamics of what Jesus Christ did on the cross and the dynamics of what happened when we trusted in Jesus Christ as saviour. And that is described in under this term “baptism into Christ, baptism into His death”—the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Paul starts of in his transition asking the rhetorical question: “How shall we say (in light of all that he has said in chapters 4 & 5)? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” No, how shall we who died to sin still live in it?” That is his basic point, the topical sentence. If you are a Christian you are dead to sin; if you are dead to sin you have no reason to continue to live in it. His language here is a complete and total break.
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The problem is, experientially that is not true in our lives. The reason is that the sin nature isn’t removed from us, it is still there and we have a habit pattern from the day we took our first breath of letting the sin nature control us. The sin nature becomes our primary security blanket, our comfort zone. We are all minus and no matter what happens we can’t give up our security blanket. The sin nature is our security blanket because that is what gives us our comfort zone from the time we are born until the time we are saved. All of our habits of thought are formed under that. Every one of us was abused growing up, sone one way and some another way, but unless our parents were immaculately conceived they had sin natures and they abused you. We all come from dysfunctional homes. The sin nature put the dys in dysfunctional. There is no home and no parent that is not dysfunctional. We all grow up responding to the issues in life out of our sin nature. We find techniques and skills and habits from our sin nature that give us security and comfort in life.
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Then when we get saved and all of a sudden we understand what sin is and begin to understand the different categories of sin and learn that we can’t operate on that basis anymore. This sets up a huge conflict in our souls, because what we are told we can’t do is what we feel like we must do in order to have security and comfort in a world that is against us. And the orientation of our sin nature tells us it is all about us. So we have to learn and believe what this passage says: you have died to sin. There is a real break that took place there. It is not experiential but nevertheless it is real, and as we have grown up since Immanuel Kant in the late 1800s then we can’t really understand what real is apart from experience because we have been brainwashed by western culture to think that real is what we’ve experienced. Only by studying the Word can we ever break out of that mindset.
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In verse 3 Paul starts to explain that. NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? [4] Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death …” Notice that. We were baptized into His death and we are buried with Him. Baptism means identification. Identification with anything in Jesus is identification with everything in Jesus; it is not just part. We are identified with the totality of who Jesus is; we are in Him. “… so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
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What Paul has done in vv. 2-4 is taken us from an extremely abstract doctrine called the baptism by the Holy Spirit and has ended up in something that is extremely practical, the newness of life. How do we have a changed life? There are many of us who are rather cynical and sceptical and think that people can’t really change. But of we believe that it runs 180 degrees opposite to what the Word of God promises: that there is real change. But there is only real change if it is done God’s way. Real change from who we were as a fallen creature, totally dependent upon the sin nature to give us security and comfort and strength to a person who gets security, comfort and strength from God and God alone takes a long time. We have to be really digging into the Word and learning how to think biblically. It involves a lot of different categories. It is not a direct linear sort of thing where you just run these 10 or 15 things and we are there; it is a process and it is more circular. It is a learning process because we have to learn things that may not appear to have anything to do with what we are facing at the time, but they are laying a foundation and changing the way we think and approach life and it is more practical in that sense.
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There was a man by the name of Miles Stanford who wrote some books on the Christian life called the Green Letters. He was a dispensationalist and he loved Louis Sperry Chafer but he thought Chafer was a fool on the spiritual life. He held the Keswick view and just didn’t understand Chafer’s view and he kept saying that Chafer didn’t emphasise the identification truths of Scripture. And that is not true. But the identification truths of scripture in are not isolated from the Holy Spirit emphasis in ; they go together. It is not an either/or; it is both. Our role is to understand who we are in Christ. It is our role then to depend on the Holy Spirit and make sure we are walking by the Spirit. That is where comes in.
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The foundation goes back to the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit where we are identified with Him and that connects us eternally and irrevocably in Christ. But the temporal reality is that we still have a sin nature and we have to learn how to be filled by the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit, to walk in the light; but we have this terrible habit that we develop from the instant of birth to live out in the black zone. Before we were saved there was no white zone, just the black zone in carnality. But after salvation we can walk in the light as He is in the light, but we have to confess our sin.
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Baptism by the Holy Spirit is an eternal reality. This is an abstract doctrine that has been misunderstood in the past by many people but it is foundational. Paul spends virtually the first eleven verses of Romans chapter six developing everything on this, and if we don’t understand the baptism by the Holy Spirit we can’t understand or . He doesn’t mention the Holy Spirit here, he just mentions baptism. “Or do you not know that all of us … have been baptized into Christ Jesus.” How do we know that is the baptism of the Holy Spirit? Basically because that is what baptises us into Christ. But there are two types of baptism in the Scripture. A lot of people think that baptism always involves getting wet, and that is not true.
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So what kind of baptism is Paul talking about here in ? Baptism was really important in the early church—Christian baptism. There has been a lot of confusion about that since but that doesn’t negate the reality and the importance in the early church. If we think about Acts, in Acts chapter two Peter preaches a sermon and there are 5000 who were saved. They are immediately baptized. Then in Acts chapter three there is more baptism. In Acts chapter eight when Philip explained the gospel to the Ethiopian and he trusts Jesus as the Messiah. As soon as they found a pool of water he was baptized. We see the same kind of thing in when Peter went to Caesarea and explained the gospel to Cornelius and the Gentiles in his home. They trusted in Christ as saviour— NASB “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were listening to the message. All the circumcised believers who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. For they were hearing them speaking with tongues and exalting God. Then Peter answered, ‘Surely no one can refuse the water for these to be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we {did,} can he?’” So there was this pattern from the very beginning that if you trusted in Christ they didn’t wait a week, two weeks, two years before being baptized; it was instantaneous. We see it in , NASB “A woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple fabrics, a worshiper of God, was listening; and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul. And when she and her household had been baptized …” Immediately after their salvation there is baptism. In the same chapter 16 there is the account of the Philippian jailer. NASB “And he took them that {very} hour of the night and washed their wounds, and immediately he was baptized, he and all his {household.}”
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The point is that in the early church water baptism was something that should be done immediately. There are a lot of people who over the years have thought that what Paul is talking about in is water baptism. This isn’t water baptism. Baptism is used in other places, e.g. in the Gospels. It is also used for death and that is the focal point here. We are baptized into Christ’s death, and it is that death separation from the sin nature that is being emphasised in . Jesus used it to refer to His death on the cross on ; ; . That was His baptism of death where He was identified with the sins of the world.

Romans 069b-Identification means the end of the sin nature’s tyranny.

Romans 6:3 NASB95
Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?
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Romans 069b-Identification means the end of the sin nature’s tyranny.
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If we come to understand what Paul says in the first eight verses of Romans chapter six the rest of the chapter is fairly easy. We see that at the instant of salvation Scripture says that we are baptized into Christ. Normally when we read passages that talk about being in Christ that is the Greek preposition en [e)n], but what we have here when we are identified “in Christ” is the preposition eis [e)ij]. It is important to understand the implication of that. It is very similar; these two prepositions often overlap. What it is focusing on is our identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, which means that there is this radical break and transformation in relation to the sin nature that is the foundation for our spiritual life.
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The key words we see here are sin and grace, died to sin, and then the contrast “how shall we live in it?”—the contrast between death and life—and then the phrases related to baptism in v. 3, “baptized into Christ Jesus” and “baptized into His death,” and in v. 4 “baptism into death”--all of these have to do with that basic idea of identification—for that ultimate goal of living day-to-day, moment-by-moment in “newness of life.” This promises real change, true transformation from what we were before we were saved to what God intends us to be.
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There are a lot of people who are sceptical because they look around and see people who don’t change very much, and they don’t think that real change is possible. But this is the promise here that radical transformation is not only possible, it is expected of anybody who is a believer in Jesus Christ. We see that the verb baptism here is expressed as a past tense, indicating that this is something that has happened in the believer’s life. It is something that has occurred in the past and the way Paul talks about it is present results that are the result of this previous action. And the result is that we are to walk in newness of life. This is expressed as an imperative. It is a subjunctive but it is expressed as something that we should be doing.
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We have seen previously that the word “baptism” means to dip, to plunge. When John the Baptist baptized in the Jordan River he was literally immersing people in the water. But it is not the physical immersion that is important, it is what it represented. It was a ritual that had a symbolic meaning and it was designed to teach something. It is a ritual that has the sense that it proclaimed a truth in the same way that communion does. It only has a reality for people who understand the significance. It is not the baptism that does anything, it is a teaching tool so that we understand what we also refer to as positional truth. Positional truth is a term that goes right over a lot of people’s heads because they don’t understand what the position is and what the truth is. Paul is talking about this as the foundation for understanding everything that we are to do in Christ.
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To understand this is to give us the foundation for thinking about who we are and how we are supposed to live in terms of what Christ has done for us. It is re-tooling our thinking. Whatever image we have of ourselves, however we think about who we are, this is the image that is foundational: that we are transformed and have been identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection so that there is this definitive break with the tyranny of the sin nature.
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At the instant that we trust in Christ God uses the Holy Spirit to identify us with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. That is an eternal reality, an eternal position, the foundation for the Christian life. We are to walk in the light, and when we are walking in the light we are being filled by means of the Spirit with God’s Word. We are walking by means of the Spirit, walking in the light, walking in the truth, abiding in Christ; all of these terms mean roughly the same thing. But we sin, and when we sin we are out of fellowship and are walking in darkness. But positionally we are still “children of light.” That is why Paul said in that we are children of light and we are to walk as children of light; we are to live as children of light. Walking indicates day-by-day, moment-by-moment lifestyle. And the way to recover from carnality is to confess our sins () and we are instantly forgiven and cleansed of all unrighteousness and restored to fellowship.
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The act of baptism is a radical reality, but it is not experiential. We have to walk by faith, not by feeling, not by sight, not by experience; we have to make this a foundational element in how we think about who we are and what we are supposed to do in our Christian life.
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The baptism of Noah is a baptism that a lot of people have trouble with. It is connected to the incident in Genesis chapter six where we are told that the sons of God looked upon the daughters of men and saw that they were good to be their wives, and they cohabited with them. Later in the passage it talks about the product of that—men of renown and giants were on the earth in those days, indicating that there was some sort of monster children from these unions. Who were the sons of God? There are three different views and the only view that makes sense biblically is the view that these were the fallen angels, because that term “sons of God” in the Hebrew always refers to angelic beings in the Old Testament. The implication from various passages of Scripture is that angelic beings had the ability to transform themselves into human bodies with normal human biological functions. The 1 Peter chapter three passage is a reference back to those fallen angels who were identified as the sons of God, a term that refers to both fallen angels and elect angels.
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NASB “For Christ also died for sins once for all, {the} just for {the} unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; [19] in which also He went and made proclamation [kerugma/khrugma = announcement] to the spirits {now} in prison …” (“spirits” – pneuma in the plural often refers to angelic beings). So who are these spirits who are in prison? In and we have this phrase that they are in prison in bonds of deep darkness. But in the parallel passage in it is translated “into hell,” but literally in the Greek it is Tartarus, which is a compartment in what the Bible generally describes as Hades. It is viewed as the domain of the angels, part of which is the abyss where there are certain demonic armies confined until the second half of the Tribulation. This gives us a picture of Sheol or Hades as it is described in . Abraham’s bosom is where Old Testament believers went when they died, because the door hadn’t been opened to heaven yet because Christ is the firstfruits and is the first to open that. They were there until Christ dies, and at that point we are told that Paradise goes to heaven—. So Paradise as a compartment in Hades or Sheol is vacated after the resurrection when all the Old testament believers are led into heaven. Torments remains as well as Tartarus. Torments is the holding cell for all unbelievers until they are resurrected at the end of the Millennial kingdom for the great white throne judgment. “ … [20] who [the spirits in prison] once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah …” This clearly states that these spirits did something at the time of Noah that is the cause of their incarceration. What could it be other than the sons of God and that infraction as they took on the form of human beings and sought to pollute the genetic pool of humanity. This was a satanic attack in order to prevent the seed of the woman being truly human. “… during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through {the} water.”
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The eight persons are Noah and his three sons and their four wives. They are brought safely through the water. The NKJV translation there is not accurate when it says “brought safely through the water.” The verb is an aorist form of the preposition dia [dia] plus the verb sozo [swzw], which means to be saved through something. So it should be translated “they were saved through the water.” They didn’t get wet though. Nobody gets wet in the real baptisms except those who are judged by God. But in the case of Noah they were saved through the water, it becomes a means of delivering them. They are elevated above everything in the ark and they are saved through the water.
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Then we have an interesting statement that is difficult to capture in the next verse. NASB “Corresponding to that …” What does that mean? Corresponding to what? The ark? Salvation through the water? English breaks down there because we don’t have relative pronouns and pronouns that have gender and indicate precisely the word to which they are referring. It is not “ark” because that is a masculine noun. It has to be water because water is a neuter noun and the antitupos [a)ntitupoj] and the pronoun translated “that” is a neuter pronoun. So “that” has to refer back to a neuter noun. The only neuter noun in the immediate context is water, so it is corresponding to the water. antitupos means a copy or a symbol. In the Lord’s table there are two elements: the symbol and what the symbol represents. The term that is used for the symbol is the Greek word tupos [tupoj] meaning a type, an image, a mark, a mould for something. Then what it represents/pictures is called the antitupos. So the type is the symbol and the antitype is the reality that the symbol represents. For example, the Passover lamb is the type, the symbolic representation. The Lamb of God, Jesus, is the antitype. That is what the type is depicting. In the same way what this is saying is that the flood water is the type; it is picturing something. Noah and his family are saved through the water.
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We should ask another question. What kind of “saved” is this talking about? For Noah and his family that salvation is a physical deliverance. But when we get to and it says, “Corresponding to that, baptism now saves you,” is this phase one (justification) or is this phase two (sanctification)? What is Peter talking about in this chapter? He is not giving us a dissertation on how to be justified or how to be regenerated. He is not talking about phase one in this chapter at all, he is talking about phase two—spiritual life truth. What Peter is saying here is that corresponding to that act of the deliverance of Noah and his family through water baptism now in the Christian life is the basis for our sanctification growth.
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What baptism is he talking about? He tells us: “not the removal of dirt from the flesh.” This isn’t about ritual baptism; it is not believer’s baptism because it is not talking about that physical water baptism. It is “not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience,” and that relates to the cleansing of sin. Is that phase one or phase two? It has to be phase two. Then he says, “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Is the resurrection of Christ related to justification, phase one, or the spiritual life, phase two? Resurrection is a spiritual life illustration. The death of Christ and His payment for sin is a justification focus—phase one. When we trust in Christ the penalty of sin is removed. But we still have the presence of sin. We have to be saved from the present reality of sin, and that is sanctification—newness of life.
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The antitype is a baptism that is a present tense reality. There are only two options: water baptism or baptism by the Holy Spirit. It can’t be water baptism because Peter makes it clear it is not the removal of dirt by the water (it is not a physical thing) but it is a cleansing of the conscience. That is what it stands for. And it is through the resurrection of Christ.
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NASB “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death …” Justification. That is identification. “… so that as Christ was raised from the dead (resurrection) through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Resurrection is related to newness of life. That is phase two. So is saying the same kind of thing that is said by Peter in . So Peter is saying that the baptism by the Holy Spirit has an ongoing reality because of our new position in Christ that is related to the resurrection model and imagery that is the basis for our new life in Christ. It is the same thing Paul is saying, that the baptism of the Holy Spirit, while it happened instantly at the time we were justified, the reality is that we have to understand this because it is going to revolutionise how we think about ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves anymore as someone who is a sinner (we are, by the way), that is not our fundamental identity anymore because our real identity is in Christ and we have been identified with His death, burial and resurrection. So we are no longer a bond slave to sin; we are a bond slave to righteousness. So why keep going back and making ourselves a slave to the sin nature? We don’t have to, but we all make those choices far too frequently.
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All through the early church baptism was not viewed as something that was optional for the believer. If you trusted in Christ as your saviour you were expected to be baptised almost immediately.
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is at the end of Paul’s second missionary journey. Paul finds that there is a group of people who have learned about John the Baptist and his baptism and they come to him to hear what he has to teach. So he is asking questions to find out what they have understood and what their background is. NASB “And he [Paul] said, ‘Into what then were you baptized?’ And they said, ‘Into John’s baptism.’” Remember that John’s baptism was for the Jews in relationship to the kingdom message, so they are Old Testament believers. They don’t know anything about Jesus, about the day of Pentecost, anything about church age doctrine. So Paul tells them, [4] “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is, in Jesus. [5] When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.”
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At the same time roughly he has written in his opening chapter to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians, a passage that sometimes has been misunderstood. The Corinthians divided up into little factions. Paul asks: NASB “Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? [14] I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius.” He is saying he is glad that he was not getting into this divisive battle that is going on in their church. [15] “so that no one would say you were baptized in my name.” His associates did the baptizing. But he is not making a blanket statement here that there is something wrong with baptism. What is wrong is the Corinthians’ attitude of using it as a foundation for division. At the same time that Paul is making this statement he is also baptizing the disciples of John the Baptist in Ephesus.
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Getting back to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, there is a lot of confusion about just what this is since the beginnings of the holiness movement and the Pentecostal movement. Pentecostals and holiness people believed in two baptisms because they were building their doctrine off of the translation in the KJV which basically translated the same Greek phrase with two different English translations. So in John the Baptists said that some body would come after him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. In the statement is made: “For by one Spirit …” It is “with” the Holy Spirit in ; “by the Spirit” in . But the Greek phrase is exactly the same in both places—en [e)n] with the dative of the Greek noun pneuma [pneuma] for Spirit, indicating means. They are not two different baptisms, but the Pentecostals made the mistake of thinking that because there is with in one passage and by in another passage that there must be two different baptisms; one you get at salvation and one you get sometime after salvation.
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What we have in is a clear statement: “For by one Spirit we were all [all Christians] baptized into [eis/ e)ij] one body …” The verb is an aorist passive indicative, which means we are receiving the action of that verb. That is important because in the passage it is an active voice—Christ will baptize you. So who performs the action there? Christ, not the Holy Spirit. Jesus performs the action and He uses the Holy Spirit. Just as John used the water to indicate the new state of the repentant Jew, Jesus uses the Holy Spirit to identify us with His death, burial and resurrection, and to bring us all into one body.
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The baptism of the Holy Spirit is first prophesied by John the Baptist. In all the Gospels it is a prophecy and then Jesus Christ reiterated it in , and in all of those times that baptism of the Holy Spirit was future. In Matthew the subject, the one who performs the action, is Jesus: “He will baptize you by means of the Holy Spirit.” Just as John performed the action, so Jesus performs the action of baptism. And He uses the Holy Spirit just as John used the water as the instrument for the baptism. “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body …” It states the direction of the baptism, which is into Christ, i.e. the new body of Christ which is the church. That is what is symbolised by water baptism but is the abstract doctrine that is the foundation for the new spiritual life.
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Paul now states the reason for this in 6:4, which is that we should now walk in new ness of life. This break has occurred so that each of us has the capability to live this new life that he is talking about. It is not just magic, it is a reality, but we have to get into out head what has happened. That phrase “newness of life” is indicated by the noun kainotes [kainothj]. It is used in NASB “But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit …” So we connect the new life with the Holy Spirit. They are both talking about this new life that we have and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible.
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Conclusion: The purpose for the baptism of the Holy Spirit is to break the tyranny of the sin nature by identifying us with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. That authority of the sin nature in our life is broken. Unfortunately, it is still there. But it no longer has the right to dictate terms. The problem is we let it all the time.
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What Paul says in these first four verses is that believers should no longer abide or continue to walk by the sin nature. Just stop it. Believers have been separated from the authority of the sin nature, or died to sin, vv, 2, 9, 12. This identification with Christ’s death equals a death or separation from the authority or tyranny of the sin nature. It is a reality. Believers are also identified with Christ’s resurrection to new life, which means we now have this new life for ourselves. It is a new mode of living and we have a new authority: we are slaves of righteousness. That is who we are. We can’t act as slaves of sin anymore because we have been freed from sin.
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This is stated in a hymn we often sing:
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O for a thousand tongues to sing,
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My great Redeemer's praise,
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The glories of my God and King,
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The triumphs of His grace!
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He breaks the power of cancelled sin, Notice how brilliantly that is written. “He breaks” is a present tense. When we trust Christ that is when it is broken in our life. “Of cancelled sin,” it is already cancelled—expiation, which is the cancelling of the debt which occurred at the cross.
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And sets the prisoner free: -- present tense, it is when we trusted in Christ as saviour.
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His blood [indicating His death] can make the foulest clean;
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His blood availed for me.

Romans 070b-The Old Man, the New Man, and the Sin Nature.

Romans 6:5 NASB95
For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,
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Romans 070b-The Old Man, the New Man, and the Sin Nature.
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Paul asks two rhetorical questions that focus the topic. NASB “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” That is the topic. What is the believer’s relationship to sin now that he is justified? He answers this with a rhetorical question: [2] “May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” The question then is: What in the world does he mean that we are dead to sin? Because in one sense if we just take that terminology “dead to sin” like we do in almost every-day conversation it would imply that sin is no longer in existence, because that is one of the meanings of death. There have been those over the history of Christianity who have taken this to be a statement sin has gone, and this leads into a view called perfectionism—you, too, can reach a higher plane of spirituality where there is no sin. This is what chapter six is all about: What is your relationship to sin?
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He lays the foundation in vv. 3, 4 NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” This is foundational here, and baptism has a literal meaning in terms of immersion into something and in terms of the literal act of baptism—water baptism is a physical immersion into water—but it has a connotation or a figurative sense of identification with something. You were entering into something new, a new state or new status.
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This is clearly the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It is not talking about water baptism here but it is talking about a spiritual transaction, a spiritual change that takes place. It is not experienced, we don’t feel anything, but it happens to every believer at the instant of salvation. But in understanding this term “baptism with the Spirit, baptism by the Spirit” in the Greek the two phrases “with the Spirit” and “by the Spirit” translate the same identical Greek phrase—en pneumati [e)n pneumati]. In the Greek it is very clear that this is an instrumental meaning. It is used in where the translation “with,” i.e. by means of or with the instrumentality of the Spirit and fire. In that sense “the one who comes after me, He will baptize you with the Spirit,” who performs the action there? Who does the baptising? It is Jesus. What is the role of the Spirit? The Spirit in that passage is the instrument that Christ uses to perform that baptism.
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When we get over in to we read: NASB “For by one Spirit …” The English used a different preposition which cause non-Greek-knowing pastors to think that these were two different baptisms by the Holy Spirit—one with and one by; one is at salvation, the other is after salvation. So because of a misunderstanding of Greek they ended up with two different baptisms. The “by one Spirit” in the English of looks like the one who does the baptising is the Holy Spirit. In English we express the person who performs the action with the preposition “by.” So English grammar makes it look like the Spirit is the one who is doing the baptism because it is a passive voice construction. The trouble is Greek uses a different preposition, the preposition hupo, to indicate the one who performs the action. It is very clear in the Greek that the one who performs the action is going to be designated not by the preposition en, because that still designates the instrument, but by the preposition hupo [u(po]. And hupo is not used with relation to the Spirit in that passage. And since Jesus, the one who performs the action in , isn’t mentioned in what we see here is simply a statement that we are all baptized by means of the Spirit; and Paul is focusing just on the baptism by means of the Spirit and he is not talking about who is doing it. Christ uses the Holy Spirit to identify us with His death, burial and resurrection.
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The Holy Spirit doesn’t act autonomously. He is an instrument for bringing us into that new life. Part of the symbolic function of baptism—because you are going into water—is a picture of cleansing. We are becoming positionally cleansed of sin at that instant of identification with Christ and that relates to the phrase that we are “dead to sin,” and that power is broken.
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Romans chapter six focuses on the believer’s relationship to sin. The basic message of Paul here is that we died to sin. However we want to understand that term “death” there is a monumental significant break that occurs at that instant of salvation in terms of our relationship to sin. However we were related to sin before we were saved we will not ever relate to sin the same way again.
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When Paul addresses this he raises the issue in verse 1: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” The question he is asking is: Should a believer continue to sin? And what he means by that and by the way he phrases that is: Should a believer have a somewhat cavalier, licentious or permissive attitude towards sin in his own life? Just because it has been taken care of by grace and just because you confess your sin, should you therefore minimise the significance of the struggle with sin in your own life? The reality that Paul is painting here is that we have a moment-by-moment, day-by-day struggle with sin. It is not something that we have to go all legalistic about but it is something that we have to pay attention to seriously, because of what happened at the cross. The more we understand what happened with that act of baptism where we were identified with the death of Christ, which makes us dead to the sin nature, that is the foundation.
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We need to look at some various terms that come up here, and one of the things we have to do is look at this translation in verse one. What does “in sin” mean? In the Greek text it is interesting that there is no preposition there. One might expect a preposition for clarity but all we have is the noun for sin with the definite article, and it is in the dative case. A dative ending, a locative ending, an instrumental ending all look the same. Basically the exegete has to make a decision which one of those three broad categories it is, and then each one of those broad categories has sub-categories. We can’t look at the text on the basis of an objective word ending what that is. If we were to take this as a locative (location; sometimes it is referred to as a dative of sphere) ending we could translate it: Should we continue in the realm of sin, or in the sphere of sin. That might work. If we are talking about positional though we are positionally outside of the realm of sin. We are not in darkness anymore but are children of light, and we are to walk as children of light. So there is the distinction there as to whether you are talking about the locative option, whether it is positional or experiential. Then the other option is instrumental, and it would be translated: What shall we say then? Shall we continue to live by means of sin? Both are getting close to the idea and we can capture it without slicing the grammatical baloney too thin by saying that basically the idea here is that Paul is saying: Are we to continue a lifestyle as characterised by our sin nature in order that sin might abound?
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The answer is resoundingly, not at all. We are not to continue to live our life with the manifestations of the sin nature. Most of us are saying, wait a minute. I don’t know about your sin nature but mine is pretty active and I don’t know how I can ever live my life apart from certain sins that seem to be my area of weakness and I don’t ever seem to have any control over that. Well Paul doesn’t seem to make any exceptions here, and when he mentions this about sin there are things we ought to identify here because this isn’t the only place Paul talks about it this way.
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In he says, NASB “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live…” That is a radical statement because what he is saying is, on the basis of that crucifixion with Christ (baptism of the Holy Spirit) that took place at the instant I was saved I don’t live anymore; it is not about me; it is all about Christ. It’s not about what I want, it’s not about what I don’t get, it’s not about getting my way or not getting my way; it’s all about Christ. “… but Christ lives in me…” Here we are moving into a fellowship aspect. “… and the {life} which I now live in the flesh…” There he is using “flesh” not as the sin nature but the mortal body—and we can’t exclude the overtones of the sin nature. The flesh is corrupt and as long as we are living in the flash we are always going to have that struggle. “… I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” He is not talking about justification there. He is not talking about the fact that he has eternal life; he is talking about phase two living, living on the basis of the faith-rest drill. That’s the foundation. In this section of Galatians he is transitioning from justification to sanctification. NASB “Now those who belong to Christ Jesus …” That is an person who has trusted in Christ. If you have trusted in Christ you are Christ’s, you are owned by Christ (Christ lives in you). And he says, we “… have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
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Those who have been crucified down crawl down off the cross and walk away. This is a clear statement that the sin nature, the flesh, is dead. What does he mean, it is dead?
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NASB “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Now he is saying not only am I dead to the sin nature, I’m dead to the world. We have to make that a reality, but that is what happens at the cross, this death that happens, and we have to understand that.
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What is really important to understand is what Paul means by sin. The noun “sin” is used 25 times in , & 8. It is the word hamartia [a(martia] which has the idea of missing the mark. The verb is used one time in NASB “What then? Shall we sin [verb] …” There he is talking about committing acts of sin. In all of the other places where the noun is used it is used to refer to this sinful nature, a sinful disposition. In terms of this passage what we are talking about by sin nature is a constitutional defect that entered into the human nature of every single person at the instant Adam disobeyed God. And it had a corrupting effect throughout his entire immaterial and material nature. The result of it is that he is totally separated from God, and that state is called spiritual death.
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In , sin is pictured as a ruling tyrant (This fits the idea of a sin nature as opposed to an act of sin) whose human subjects offer themselves to be ruled by the monarch—the sin nature. So here we have a picture of a ruling disposition, it doesn’t fit the idea of an act of sin. NASB “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members {as} instruments of righteousness to God.” Members of unrighteousness refers more to acts of sin but the word “sin” relates to the sin nature. In , , , Paul portrays sin as a master who orders slaves to act however the master demands. Thus, sin is viewed as a governing or controlling disposition, not individual acts of sin.
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NASB “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with {Him,}…” That means the old man is dead. Is your sin nature dead? No. “… in order that our body of sin [sin nature] might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” The old man is dead for the end result of doing away with your body of sin, with the result that we should no longer be slaves of sin.
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NASB “For sin [sin nature] shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”
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NASB “But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin [as an unbeliever], you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed.”
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Then in , sin produces covetousness. NASB “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET.’ But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin {is} dead.’” Sin produced in me all manner of evil. That first sin has to be the sin nature; that is the origin of sin.
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We all have lust patterns, and that is the driver in the sin nature. And it can move us in different directions, those are the trends. Some have a majority trend in one direction such as asceticism and legalism; other people have a trend in the other direction. But most of us have major trends and minor trends. Most of us major in one trend or the other and we minor in the opposite because we are very contradictory. The core of that lust pattern is, it is all about me. So when we trend toward legalism and asceticism it leads to a moral degeneracy. The classic example are the Pharisees—very moral overtly, but there is an arrogance towards God in that they think they can be good enough to qualify for God’s approval. The licentious ones are all the tax collectors and prostitutes and partiers that Jesus would associate with. The reason Jesus went with them is because it is a lot easier to convince the licentious crowd that they are sinners than the legalistic crowd. It is very difficult to convince arrogant, legalistic people that they are sinners; they just don’t want to accept that.
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We also produce morality from our sin nature. Morality isn’t the same as spirituality. Then we have personal sins that we all commit. It all comes out of the sin nature. We are born spiritually dead, this is what controls us from the moment we are born, and so from the time we are born until the time we trust in Christ this is the only option. This was the tyrant in your life and you couldn’t do anything that didn’t come from your sin nature no matter how good it was, how nice it was, how sweet and glorious it was; it came right out of your nasty, black sin nature.
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The second thing we want to see here is that as Paul depicts the spiritual struggles of the believer with the sin nature, i.e. this disposition to sin, he dramatises it in this passage by personifying it. Personification of something that is a non-person, a physical thing, an immaterial thing, is just another figure of speech like an anthropomorphism or an anthropopathism, or something like that. You are taking something abstract and are trying to communicate to people in such a way that it is going to wake them up and it is not going to be a sort of academic treatise. It is going to personify and dramatise what the sin nature. And it is the master, the slave master, the slave owner. NASB “I am speaking in human terms …” He is just using a figure of speech to help us to understand and to dramatise the whole point.
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The sin nature is spoken of as sin, as the body of sin, and it is viewed as either a master—it was our master before salvation—or a potential master after salvation. While the individual believer or individual person is viewed as a slave prior to salvation, or is a potential slave, what we see here is that every time we sin (we are not conscious of this) what we have said in the thinking of our soul is: I’m more comfortable being a slave to the tyranny of the sin nature than I am walking by the Holy Spirit. Any time we sin what we are basically saying in our soul is: I want to be a slave of the sin nature.
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This idea of master and slave is something that we should understand in light of the context or the culture at that particular time. Under Roman law a master is someone who is in the legal position of authority. The slave had to do whatever the master said he had to do. The slave, on the other hand, is an individual who has no individual rights but was legally bound to obey the authority of the master. The imagery that Paul uses here is that when we got saved that legally binding authority of the sin nature ended. But we just want to trot back and act like that is it. We hear stories every now and then related to Jews from the former Soviet Union, from Ukraine and Russia who have gone to Israel where all of a sudden they have all this freedom, but they are not comfortable. Eastern Europeans who have come to the US or Western Europe like the East Germans when the wall came down, and they don’t know how to handle freedom. They were much more comfortable with a government that told them what to do and how to do everything, and living in fear, because that was their whole frame of reference. They didn’t know how to live in a different environment.
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That is what happens with a lot of Christians. Rather than studying the Word where they can learn how to live in the new life that we have in Christ they are more comfortable with all of their old habits and sin nature patterns. They would rather run back and let the sin nature control their life because they have a sense that somehow that worked, rather than taking the risk to do something different and walk in total dependence upon the Holy Spirit—like Peter out on the waves trying to walk on the water. It is threatening to trust and ignore our whole background and experience, but that is what Paul is getting at here.
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For the non-Christian they are born with only one nature, the sin nature, that sinful disposition. We are all born that way. That is the controlling factor in our lives. If you got saved when you were twenty or thirty or forty it is so much harder. That is why it is important to get the gospel to children.
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We see allusions to this in NASB “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with {Him,} in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” This is amazing; Paul thinks that we should quit sinning! We shouldn’t be a slave to that sin nature anymore. [16] “Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone {as} slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” It is our choice. Are we going to be a slave to Christ or are we going to be a slave to the sin nature. We are never independent. At every nanosecond in our lives we are choosing to either be a slave to Christ or a slave to the sin nature; we are never just doing what we want to do.
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NASB “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.” What that basically means is that when you were a slave to sin there’s no righteousness in life. No matter how good you think you are all our works of righteousness are as filthy rags, .
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What Paul says, however, is that old man is crucified. What is the old man? There are two basic views on this. One is that the old man is a synonym for the sin nature, and that is not it. The other is that the old man is a term for everything you were when you were an unregenerate, spiritually dead sinner. That is the only option it can be. Why? Paul said that the old man was crucified. That means he is dead. He is either dead or he is not, and if you still have a problem with him he is not dead. But he says the old man is dead, so he can’t be talking about the sin nature. The entire context of is talking about persons, not dispositions. The sin nature may be a disposition, which is what we have said, but the focus all the way through here in is on “we” as a whole person. We were buried with Him in baptism into death, and just as Christ was raised from the dead so we should also walk in newness of life.
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The second aspect here is in NASB “or he who has died is freed from sin.” What is dying? The old man. He is freed from the power of the sin nature. But we still have a sin nature, don’t we? That first phrase, “he who has died.” Is an aorist participle in the Greek. And the main verb, “has been freed,” really doesn’t mean he has been freed; it is not what he says in the Greek. It doesn’t say “freed” at all. The verb is dikaioo [dikaiow]—justification. It is the verb to be declared justified. So it should be translated to get it accurate: “For he who has died has been declared justified in relation to sin.” The NASB and the NKJV both get this wrong. That gives whole new sense of what that says. The main verb there is a perfect tense verb, indicating an action that is completely over with. It happened in the past and it is talking about the present results of that completed past action.
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You were justified. It happened at a point of time when you trusted in Christ as saviour some time in the past. It was completed; we are talking about current results. “He who has died” is an aorist tense. The action of an aorist tense participle precedes the action of a perfect tense verb. Aorist tense come before the action of the verb, present tense is at the same time, and future tense is after the action of the main verb. So what this is saying is, the person “who has died” comes after justification logically. But it is talking about being justified from sin. Not being freed from sin. The person who has died is justified in relationship to sin. What died was the old man.
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If the old man is the sin nature then the literal meaning is that the sinful disposition died with Christ, and if that is true then none of us are saved because we are all still sinning.
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When Paul applies this to the individual in he challenges us to reckon ourselves dead to sin. He said: The old man died, now you have to reckon yourselves dead to sin. The implication of that is that you and I can now reckon ourselves dead to sin, which means we keep on sinning. But if we keep on sinning then the sin nature is not dead. But the old man is dead. These are two different concepts. In , Paul declares that the believer is dead to sin but not that sin is dead to the believer. We can still sin. The old man is dead but the sin nature is still there.
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What happens is spiritual circumcision is you put off the body of the sins of the flesh. , NASB “and in Him you were also [spiritually] circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism …” That is the death of the old man. [20] “If you have died [and you did] with Christ …” The old man died at the instant of salvation. NASB “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The old man died, not the sin nature.
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NASB “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead [NKJV: ‘put to death’]…” Something died positionally but something is still active and needs to be put to death. What died and what needs to be put to death? [8] “But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, {and} abusive speech from your mouth.” Then in verse 10, because you have put on the new man. That is past tense. When did you put on the new man? You put on the new man at the cross. That removed the old man. If the old man is the sin nature, which it is not, then if you put on the new man at the cross it means you are sinless. It doesn’t fit. We put off the old man and put on the new man at salvation. But we still have this problem with the sin nature.
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NASB “and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ … [3:10] put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him.” So all of this is to say that what is crucified with Christ is the old man. That is the totality of who we were, our whole identity prior to regeneration is gone. We have a new family, a new identity, we have been sealed with the Spirit, given all the spiritual gifts, we are regenerated, justified, reconciled; we are a totally new person in Christ. says the old man is gone.
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The nature of death. Death is fundamentally a separation. The old man was crucified; we are separated from everything we were before we were saved. There is this wall that is up there and what we want to do is go back. It is like somebody comes here from the old Soviet Union and they just can’t handle the freedom, so they still live like they did when they were behind the wall. But they are not that person anymore; they are not living in that environment anymore, but that is their comfort zone. The old man is gone but we want to go back there because we are just like the Israelites who wanted to go back to the leeks and the garlic of Egypt. That is what that illustrates. They wanted to go back to slavery rather than pushing on to freedom.
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NASB “For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”

Romans 071b-Are You Trying to Resuscitate Your "Old Man?"

Romans 6:5 NASB95
For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,
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Romans 071b-Are You Trying to Resuscitate Your "Old Man?"
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There is one school of thought that pastors who refer to Greek and Hebrew are just showing off. That is not true—or it shouldn’t be true. It is a point of validation of translation. It is important to understand these things because translations, especially in difficult passages, are often victims of the translator’s theological proclivities or limitations. We need to always be careful of that. It doesn’t mean we can’t understand the text in the English translation without going to the Greek or Hebrew but sometimes there are passages that need a little more help in getting to what they are saying because a strict translation can’t fully grasp all of the nuances that are embedded in the original language. We certainly never want to communicate that we shouldn’t read out English Bible because we might get confused. If we are reading Greek or Hebrew we are going to get confused over other things. No language is perfect and Greek does not solve every problem; it can muddy the water as much as clear the water.
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The foundation in Romans chapter six is understanding the baptism of the Holy Spirit. If we don’t grasp that in terms of our foundational, mental framework for interpreting the details in our lives, if that is not the glasses we are wearing when we look at our life, we are not going to respond biblically in terms of our spiritual life and spiritual growth. Everything must be placed within the context of who we are as image bearers of God, what that means and who God is. Once we grasp that then the application gets fairly simple.
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There are two basic ways to understand the term “old man.” One is that it is the sin nature, but that just doesn’t work because the sin nature is still alive and well in our bodies. But the old man is dead. There is a real separation there that has occurred and that is the foundation for Paul’s who argument.
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If the sin nature is dead then we have a problem with -25 which depicts the believer’s struggle with sin. We have a problem with sin, it is not dead, but the old man is dead. teaches very clearly: the old man is dead, crucified with Christ in the baptism by the Holy Spirit.
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In the long discourse Paul had in Colossians chapter two is a depiction of the positional removal of the power of the sin nature, which is what occurs in the baptism by the Holy Spirit. What came out of that was some conclusions. For example, NASB “If you have died [and you did, 1st class condition] with Christ …” That is picture that Paul talks about in in relation to the baptism by the Holy Spirit. , “How shall we who died to sin still live in it? [3] … all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? ()… [6] knowing this, that our old self was crucified with {Him}.” So again, we died with Him. [7] “for he who has died is justified from sin.” That is what , , are all talking about. We died with Him; we are raised with Him.
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NASB “For you have died …” It is not you died if you act like it. You died; it is a statement of reality. You died at that instant; the old man died. “… and your life is hidden with Christ in God”—present reality. [5] “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead …” He shifts from positional to experiential. The reality is that you are dead to the old man, not to the sin nature; you are dead to everything you were before you were saved. But you are still living that way. We all do that, we put ourselves back under the tyranny of our sin nature. Now we have to experientially separate ourselves from that power of the sin nature; we have to put to death our members which are on the earth.
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NASB “But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, {and} abusive speech from your mouth.” He uses the term apotithemi [a)potqhmi] which has this picture of removing clothes. It is experiential. But what we are removing here is certain actions, certain sins that characterise sin nature control; not the old man.
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NASB “and have [past tense, statement of reality] put on the new self …” Aorist participle, it is a done deal and not a process. We have put on a new identity, a new person.
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NASB “Do not lie to one another …” It is a present tense command, which means that right now we are not to lie to one another. “… since [because] you [already] laid aside …” Past tense, so the action of that participle occurs prior to lying to one another. He is stating a previous reality. “… the old self with its {evil} practices.” That happens because the old man is dead. And you have “put on the new man” – also past tense, so he is referring to a positional reality. This is so important. You are not the person you were. That is the old man; you have a new identity and a new capability, new disposition.
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As a result of that, NASB “So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” These are specific virtues; it’s not talking about the new man here. The new man was put on. Because you now have a new identity, now you need to take control of actions in terms of your own life in producing those virtues. That is produced by your walk by the Spirit.
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The old man died when we trusted in Christ and we became a new person in Christ. . The passage tells us that the old man has been put off; the new man has been put on. This happened at salvation with the baptism by the Holy Spirit.
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When we go to the parallel passage in it gets a little funky. The reason is that the grammar in the Greek is different; it is fuzzy. In the key verbs related to putting off the old man, v. 22, and being renewed, v. 23, are infinitives. Then “put on” in v. 24 is another infinitive. Infinitives have, to say the least, a little bit of a complex grammatical function.
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In the first three chapters of Ephesians Paul goes through the underlying doctrines related to the spiritual life. Then in chapter four he starts talking about the practical implications of what he has said in the first three chapters. NASB “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called.” He is obviously talking about the Christian life. The imagery of the walk is, how do you live moment by moment in the Christian life? In the next section from verse 7 to 14 he talks about the foundation for this. And the foundation is that first of all you have to have a pastor-teacher who is going to equip you to do the work of the ministry. A pastor-teacher is going to teach you the Word and until that happens you are as lost and as hopeless as you can be in trying to figure it all out.
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Then he is talking about what has happened in terms of the Gentiles. NASB “So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, [18] being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.” So that tells us that there is a twofold problem: ignorance because their heart is blind. ( says they are blind because they have chosen to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.)
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NASB “But you did not learn Christ in this way.” In other words, you didn’t Christ this way, i.e. in terms of the perverse behaviour of the Gentiles. [21] “if indeed you have heard Him [and you have, 1st class condition] and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus.” He makes this statement that you have been taught by Him and you have been taught this truth. What truth have you been taught? In most Bibles verse 21 ends with a colon. That is important and good grammatical identification, because what it is telling us is that verses 22-24 are identifying that truth/doctrine that we have learned about Christ. This truth is related to our life in Christ. So he is not talking about how to get into Christ. We are in Christ and this is the truth that we have learned.
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NASB “that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside [should be understood as: have already put off] the old self, which is being corrupted [ongoing process] in accordance with the lusts of deceit.” The sin nature corrupts and corrupts and corrupts. The “deceitful lusts” is the core motivator in the sin nature. [23] “and that you be renewed …” Now he changes from a past tense or an aorist infinitive to a present infinitive. What he is really saying is: “you are to be renewed in the spirit of your mind”—not in the spirit of your feeling, not in the spirit of you notions, your mystical liver-quiver, but in your mind. The Christian life starts with knowledge again and again and again. [24] “and [you have already] put on the new self, which in {the likeness of} God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” This sounds if it is just read in most English translations that you “put off”—that sounds like a command—and “put on”—that sounds like a command. That is the fuzziness here. It is not an imperative; it is an infinitive. But the odd thing is that there is the use of the infinitive that can be imperatival, and so there are many people who take this as an imperatival infinitive, which means that it contradicts and .
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There are four key verbs here. Remember that in Greek grammar infinitive and participles are always tied to explaining something about the main verb. The main verb here is “taught” (v. 21), and what follows v. 21 is an explanation of the truth that they have been taught in the past. There are three of these infinitives that are mentioned there. Put off and put on are both aorist tense infinitives, which is a past action, although outside of the indicative mood time is not that important in terms of understanding tense; it is more the kind of action that is there. Then “be renewed” is ongoing action, a present infinitive. Put off and put on reflect apotithemi, the same word as in . And “put off” is an aorist middle infinitive. The aorist means it is past action, the middle voice means that the individual receives the benefits of the action, and it is an infinitive, which means that it is not a finite verb, and that is where we get into the grammar problem. And enduo [e)nduw] which is the opposite (put on) is the same grammatical construction; it is an aorist middle infinitive. But in contrast to those that are in the past there is a present passive infinitive, “be renewed.”
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So what is the thrust of this? Verse 21 is really introducing a prior statement, a prior teaching, something that Paul taught them before. But he is couching this in indirect discourse. Example: ‘I told him to go to the store.’ That is indirect discourse. If I say: ‘I told him, go to the store,’ that is direct discourse; giving a direct quotation. If it is indirect discourse I am simply saying, I told him something; it is not giving the direct quote. If you move from the indirect to the direct, at least in the Greek, there is something significant that goes on there. If you go from the direct command, I told him, ‘Go to the store’ and then say it as indirect, ‘I told him to go to the store,’ the tense of the original command is preserved. Another example: ‘He claimed to have gone to the store’ is indirect discourse, and then, He made the claim, ‘I went to the store’ is a direct discourse.
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In Greek you do the same thing, you have direct and indirect discourse. And indirect discourse is not giving a quote of what was said in the past, it is saying for example, ‘I taught you this: that Christ died for your sins’ or ‘You are to forgive one another.’
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A second example: In the first statement we say, ‘I taught you that you put off the old man.’ The “that” in there tells us that it is indirect discourse. If it was direct discourse it would be like, ‘I taught you, you put off the old man.’ It is referring to something that was said in the past; it is a statement of reality. But if I transferred that statement to an indirect I would say: ‘I taught you that you put off the old man.’ But there is something ambiguous in this, because in the Greek it could also be translated, ‘I taught you, put off the old man’—an imperative. So the grammatical structure could go one of two ways. You could legitimately translate it as a statement of reality: ‘I taught you that you have put off the old man’ or, ‘I taught you to put off the old man.’ Both are legitimate translations.
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In the early 20th century (several errors crept into our understanding of Greek grammar around the turn of the century) an error crept into Greek grammar that there was no instance of an aorist infinitive in the New Testament that represented an original statement of an aorist indicative. Going back to our previous example, the original statement is: I taught you. That is past tense. But when I taught you this in the past I said, You put off the old man. That is referring back to that; that is the original statement. This would be an indicative mood when it was originally stated, but when converting this into an indirect discourse and use an infinitive it would be, I taught you that you put off the old man. Now it gets fuzzy.
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The statement that “There is no instance of an aorist infinitive in the New Testament that represented an original statement of an aorist indicative.” We are saying he is wrong.
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Historically all such aorist infinitives were translated as aorist imperatives, including . That is why when we read it in our English translations it reads like it is an imperative: I taught you that you put off. It comes across sounding like it is an imperative because of this principle. But the problem is not only a grammatical problem: it contradicts the usage in and . The solution to this is that the mood, i.e. trying to decide if this is imperative or indicative, actually derives from the mood of the controlling verb. The problem is that about 95 per cent of the uses where there is an aorist infinitive in an indirect discourse statement in the New Testament, the controlling verb … in the others it is, I urge you to [colon]. The main controlling verb has an imperatival sense which is transferred to the infinitive, but when it is just stated here ‘I taught you” there is no imperatival sense in that main verb in v. 21. It is just a statement of reality. And there are only about two or three of these in the New Testament.
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This is important because it has serious theological implications. Because if we are still trying to put off the old man then the old man isn’t dead. But on this basis we can understand that what Paul is saying here is, I taught you something—I taught you that you have already put off the old man. That is what he says in and . Why? Because the old man is dead. That is what happened at the baptism by the Holy Spirit.
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What this means is this. Historically error crept in in the early 20th century, that all aorist infinitives should be translated as an imperative. That may be true in 90-95 per cent of the uses in the New Testament but that is because the main verb is imperatival. But there are about three or four cases where the main verb is not an imperative, and in those it is talking about a past action that was simply described as a reality. So we translate in this way: “If indeed [and you have] been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: [22] that you have already put off the old man …” That is what Paul had taught them previously. Then he describes the old man here, the same way he did in Colossians. “… which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.” That is the characteristic of the old man, the unbeliever, the person before regeneration. In [23] he shifts to a present infinitive, “and are being renewed in the spirit of your mind.” Present tense action: you are being renewed. [24] “and have already put on the new self [man], which in {the likeness of} God has been created [past tense] in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” We are being renewed according to the image of Christ because we have put on this new identity.
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Paul is declaring what he did in : “I have been crucified with Christ.” The old man is dead, and we have to grasp that if we are going to understand our new identity in Christ. “…and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the {life} which I now live in the flesh [physical life] I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” The old man is dead; now the issue is our volition.
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Spiritual death is separation from God; positional death means we are separated from our old man and we are separated from the tyranny of the sin nature. Now the new man has to learn how to live like a new man. We have to learn that new identity. This is clearly stated in passages like NASB “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, {he is} a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” It is final; it is not a process. NASB “For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.” NASB “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” That is the whole point of this. We can walk in a new quality of life.
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The next six verses in consist of two sets of three. NASB “For if we have become united with {Him} in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with {Him,} in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.”
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Verses 5, 6 and 7 have the same grammatical structure as verses 8, 9, and 10. Both begin with an “if” clause stating the reality of something. The middle verses in both sections start with a verb for knowing. It is ginosko [ginwskw], oida [o)ida] in the other. It is a causal participle, emphasising that because we know something—again it is emphasising that we have to know certain things if we are going to go anywhere in the Christian life. Then the last verse explains an implication.
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These also pick up some main ideas, like death and resurrection. In v. 5, “if we have become united with {Him} in the likeness of His death.” We were united with Christ by baptism by the Holy Spirit.
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Notice it is a logical structure. It starts with an assumption in verse 5, then a principle we should know in verse 6, then a concluding implication inverse 7. The concluding implication of verse 7: “for he who has died has been justified from sin.” This becomes the assumption of verse 8: “if we have died with Christ.” He is going to build on that to a conclusion.
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NASB “For if we have become united with {Him} in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection.” Probably at first blush every one of us would say that this is talking about phase three. That would be wrong. This is not talking about the future resurrection but the experience of that new resurrection life and power now. What this passage is talking about is our new life in Christ now. The future tense at the end of the verse, “certainly we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection,” –resurrection is the picture and the portrait of our new life in Christ. Death is analogous to our break with the old man; the resurrection is analogous to our new life in Christ.
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So we have those same ideas, death and life. If we died with Christ we believe that we shall also live with Him. That theme all through is that the life here is not future life after we die but the quality of life that we have here and now—the abundant life that Jesus talked about in .
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In verse 6 he talks about the principles of something: “knowing this, that our old self [man] was crucified with {Him,} in order that our body of sin might be done away with [abolished], so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” It has the idea of nullifying the power of the sin nature so we won’t be experientially slaves to sin anymore. That is parallel to v. 9 which talks about the fact that after Christ was raised from the dead death no longer had any authority over you. So the point is, your sin nature no longer has authority over you.
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is the explanation: “for he who has died is justified [declared righteous] from sin.” Verse 10, “For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all …” It is a point in time action that changes everything after it. “… but the life that He lives, He lives to God.” Death means that the sin nature no longer has the right to rule, so why keep trying to resuscitate the old man and give the sin nature power? What this is saying is that the sin nature is a tyrant and whenever we sin we are just saying, it is okay for the sin nature to dominate my life. We are just going to live like a dead person with the corrupting influence of the sin nature. This is what happens with a lot of believers who are living in carnal or temporal death. They put themselves under the authority of the sin nature and as a result are still living like an unbeliever.
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The point in using is that you can recover from sin, not so you can continue to sin. The emphasis is staying in fellowship, not getting back into fellowship.
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NASB “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” The most irrational thing any of us can do is to let the sin nature dominate our life.
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Romans 072b-Mindset: Where's Your Focus?

Romans 6:11 NASB95
Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
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Romans 072b-Mindset: Where's Your Focus?
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What we see in is where Paul comes to a conclusion based on all what he has said in the previous ten verses which state the reality of what God has provided for us. Suddenly when we get to ve4se 11 we run into imperatives, commands. In light of what God has given us there are things we have to do in order to utilise those assets and to maximise them, and to turn them from just things that are potential to things that are actually in our lives.
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As we looked at the end part of the opening section of Romans section we saw that the parallel argument in and then 8-10, building off of the whole concept of what happened at salvation, understanding this radical, non-experiential identification that happens at the instant of salvation where we are identified with Christ in His death. So a death occurs in us, a death to the old man. Scripture says we are dead to sin, it never says the sin nature is dead. The old man is dead but we still have to recognise that we are dead to sin. The old man is all of the things that we were before we were saved—our thoughts, our opinions, our values, our habits, etc. We are separated from them. The main idea of death is that separation. NASB “For if we have become united with {Him} in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection.” Identification with Christ in His death is always related to justification; identification with Christ in His resurrection is always related to sanctification, the spiritual life—we are raised to new life.
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This is the same kind of thing that Paul talks about in when he talks about the resurrection of Christ. It is very important to understand that in terms of some other issues in the content of the gospel. But the content of the gospel focuses on trusting in Christ as the Messiah, the substitute, the sacrificial Lamb without spot or blemish that pays the price for our sins. That is the gospel we believe. It is important to believe the resurrection but the resurrection is not connected to justification. The resurrection is connected to new life and sanctification and spiritual growth. “…we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection.” It is that new life that we have in Christ. It is a future potential that we have in 6:5, realised not after death but at the instant we are saved.
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Then he uses a causal participle [v.6] “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with {Him,} in order that our body of sin [sin nature] might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” As long as we are not dealing with the sin nature in our lives we are still going to be slaves to sin, but the old means is dead and we have to die to sin. [7]”for he who has died has been declared righteous from sin.”
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Then is 6:8-10 we have the repetition of this in this form in applying the conclusion of 6:7 to Christ in our spiritual life: “Now if [and we have] we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.” That is the abundant life. [9] “knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. [10] For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.” That last verse is important because that sets the pattern for understanding verse 11.
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NASB “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” This is the analogy to what we are to do. The reality is that Christ died for sin one and for all. It was a permanent break. Now He lives to God. Then Paul is going to build on that. There are some other verses and passages of Scripture that in terms of some specific areas of the Christian life are arguably more significant. But in terms of the foundation for the spiritual life there is not a more significant passage than . It is so foundational to understand this. It is talking about the mindset that we have to have so that that becomes something more than just something we do every now and then but most of the time we are out of fellowship rather than in fellowship. If we really are going to grow we have to capture this mental focus that is here. It is all about our mental attitude.
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We see a couple of things related to the verb here, “reckon,” or in some translations “consider” or “think.” It is first of all an imperative mood verb, a command to every single believer (second person plural). So it is not an option, it is a mandate. We can’t get to what we want, which is to experience the richness, joy, happiness, blessing , everything that God promises us in this life, unless we do this. It is foundational. And so it is addressed to our volition, which means if we are not experiencing it is not God’s fault, it is our fault. We are not completing the task that God has given us; we are not following through on this imperative.
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A second thing we need to see about this is that this is a mind-related verb, a mentality-related verb, a thought word. It is logizomai [logizomai] in the Greek, and the noun logos [logoj] comes from the verb logizomai. logizomai means to think, to reason, to calculate, to utilize logic in something, to add something up and come to a conclusion. All of that is part of the meaning of this word. Even though in the English and in the Greek it is only stated one time it is the verb for both clauses of this verse. It should read: “Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin but reckon yourselves alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It governs both parts of this. So it is a verb that is related to thought and it is related as such to our mental attitude.
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A lot of decisions that we have made in life are decisions that we make because we are influenced somehow by what we want other people to think about us. We want to gain somebody’s approval in the sense that we want them to think well of us. So often the decisions we make are made because of how we want other people to see us and think about us.
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When we look at this passage God is telling us how we are to be thinking about ourselves spiritually. Up to the point of salvation we thought of ourselves one way, whether it was conscious or not. That whole culture of our life related to the person were before we were saved has been left behind. There is this break, this separation, that has occurred here because that person has been crucified [is dead]. We are separated from that person.
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Whatever our experience is, whether it is an experience of having learned discipline and self-mastery and a focused life, or an unfocused, undisciplined life that went just any direction you wanted to go in, you developed habits. And until the day that you were saved all of those habits were formed from the sin nature. That is what Paul says here. We adopted a lot of those patterns from a lot of different sources. Some of them were genetically influenced. As we grow up we learn a lot of these different patterns and sometimes when we are not disciplined well or we just get angry we act out the lust patterns of our sin nature. Every one of us are constantly acting out those lust patterns and prior to salvation when we were totally controlled by the sin nature everything that we were acting out, good or bad, is all coming from that core root evil of that corrupt nature. And in the process of that, especially if we have a trend towards asceticism and morality, our sin nature tricks us into thinking that somehow we control it. And we still think that. Long before anything really changed spiritually for us, i.e. long before we were ever saved, we became the master servant of the sin nature that controlled us. That is what Paul says through all this. We were slaves of the sin nature and we did what that sin nature said to do. Then one day we heard the gospel, understood it, and believed it. What the Bible tells us is all of those patterns, habits, and all of those things that made us happy and comfortable and worked for us, even though at times we think it still does, the Bible tells us that that person is dead and gone, we are separated from that person totally and completely and we have a new identity. Something radical has happened.
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What God tells us in this passage is that we have to come to believe that when it says “consider yourselves dead to sin” it means we have to believe that we are dead to the sin nature. When the sin nature is wrapping its tentacles of desire around out thinking so that we really want to do or react or whatever in ways you know you shouldn’t you can say no. We have to say, I believe that this is a promise of God that on the basis of what Christ did for me on the cross I don’t have to carry through as I have done in the past. If we don’t learn this principle when we are a young believer and don’t begin to put it into practice until later, which is true for most of us, then we just get more and more ingrained in those sin nature patterns. We have to learn that we have to think differently about who we are. We are to think of ourselves as a dead-to-sin kind of person, a person who has been completely separated from everything that that pre-regeneration person was.
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NASB “ … For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in {further} lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.” We present ourselves for sanctification. If we want to be sanctified this section from v. 11-19 is telling us the foundational way to think, the foundational focus of our mindset so that we can be sanctified experientially. We are already sanctified positionally but we have to be sanctified experientially.
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The command in verse 11 is to “reckon yourselves,” a present imperative. Present imperatives emphasise something that is a general or universal truth that should be the standard operating procedure for every believer. This is a universal absolute for every single believer. Up until the time that we get a hold of this principle in this verse we have different ways of thinking about who we are. What Paul is saying here is that we need to start thinking of ourselves as this new creature in Christ. And it is not going to change over night. We are going to easily go back to the way we used to think about ourselves because that is the default position that has been carved into our thinking through so many years of sin nature habit patterns. We have to change that habit pattern. It is not easy but it is possible.
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“… to be dead to sin.” The idea there is not that we don’t exist anymore, that sin doesn’t exist anymore, but that we are separated from the sin nature. (Remember, sin in the singular in this chapter here refers to the sin nature) We are now to think of ourselves as separated from sin. The way this is expressed in the Greek if we were to translate it literally is, “You also you reckon yourselves dead to sin.” There is the insertion of the second person plural pronoun there and then the second person emphatic there for “yourselves” to emphasise the fact that it is up to the volition of each and every one of us.
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On the other hand, positively, we are “alive to God in Christ Jesus.” We are not just saying we are not going to sin, it is that we are alive to God. We are replacing the negative of “I’m separated from the control of my sin nature” with the positive, “I am living for God.” We have a new identity as members of the royal family of God with new assets, new capabilities and a new identity, and we have to learn how to exploit that if we are going to have any joy and happiness in life whatsoever. That life that we have toward God is “in Christ.”
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Verse 11 is the conclusion of everything that has gone before and then we have a transition paragraph in vv. 12-14 before we get into the second half of the chapter. Here Paul draws a conclusion. NASB “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts.” This isn’t legalism. Legalism is saying God blesses us because of what I do, not I do what I do because God has already blessed me with every blessing in the heavenlies. The person who is a legalist is saying he has to do these things in order to get God to bless him, rather than God has given him all of the blessings but He is not going to dole them out to him experientially until he has some maturity in order to be able to handle them. He has to develop the capacity for them.
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Paul starts off with the negative: don’t let sin reign; don’t let sin have dominion in your life; don’t let sin rule your mortal body. He is talking about any kind of sin. All sin is usually expressed through our body—anger, resentment, bitterness, gossip, slander.
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NASB “and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members {as} instruments of righteousness to God.” We are not supposed to let sin rule over us because we are not under law but under grace.
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The first verb in v. 12, “do not let sin reign,” is the verb basileuo [basileuw]. It means to rule, to be the king, to reign. When we look at our life, does the sin nature control it? The answer to that is here: don’t let sin reign. How do we do that? That is what the tension is. Do we just prop ourselves up by our bootstraps and say we are not going to do it? That is the frustration that Paul experiences in because he doesn’t mention the help that we get until chapter 8:2 when he brings in the Holy Spirit. “Don’t let sin reign” is a present active imperative, which means this is to be the standard operating procedure, our code of conduct as a Christian.
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“your mortal body” – the sin nature is passed on genetically, physically. But it is through the body that we express our sin nature. The body is the tool the sin nature uses in order to bring its lusts to conclusion. NASB “If [and it is true] Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin…” What he is saying there, as we shall see, is that the body is separated from the control of the sin nature and we have got to not let our body be the instrument of the sin nature.
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Then we get to the next two commands in verse 13, both are the same verb, paristemi [paristhmi] which means to present or to offer yourself. It is a term sometimes used in sacrifices. One is a present active indicative but it is a negative command. The idea there is if you want to be able to let sin stop ruling your life you have to do two things. They are mutually exclusive. You have to stop presenting your members as an instrument of unrighteousness, and when you do that you start presenting it to God as an instrument of righteousness. You can’t do both at the same time. You just have to say yes to God and no to the sin nature. That is how you stop letting sin govern in yhour life. Another thing that is interesting in this passage is that there is a military nuance to this word of presenting yourself to something. There is a command in the military, in the arms manual, called present arms. It is a salute. It is that idea. Then there is the word “instruments,” and that also has a military sense. There are a number of people who take this and fit it into a broader context of spiritual warfare. Remember, spiritual warfare is what happens between your ears. Spiritual warfare has to do with the decisions that we make and so the idea here, translating it with that sense, is don’t present your weapons—thinking of the body as the expression of your sin nature. The body is the expression of your sin nature as it seeks to impact the world system. So if we think about it in that sense it has a little more concrete image—Quit presenting your members as weapons of unrighteousness for sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead and your members as weapons of righteousness to God. So who are we going to serve here? That is the issue. Who do we want to be the commanding officer in our life? The sin nature or God?
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NASB “For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” Here we have a different word for ruling, kurieuo [kurieuw] which means to rule over something or to dominate it. It is a future active indicative, and future active indicatives are used to express commands. So what Paul is saying here is that the reason you are not to present your members as weapons for the sin nature but as weapons for God is because you are not to let sin have dominion over you. Why? Because you are no longer that kind of a person. That is a command, not a suggestion.
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What does he mean that we are not under law but under grace? Options: What a lot of people think here, well we are not under the Mosaic Law (that is what this is referring to here) and the question we need to ask is: how is being released from the Mosaic Law free us from the experiential control of the sin nature? That is how this is usually read, and just because the Mosaic Law has been cancelled it doesn’t mean anybody is any freer. We haven’t interpreted this dispensationally. Under law refers to the dispensation of the Mosaic Law; under grace refers to the church age. Under the Mosaic Law there was no provision, no capacity for freedom from the sin nature.
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How do we become free from the sin nature? When we trust Christ as saviour we are identified with Christ’s crucifixion in something called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Did John the Baptist experience that? Did Moses experience that? Did Daniel experience that? No, they didn’t have that. They didn’t have their sin nature crucified with Christ. They didn’t live in a dispensation where that was a reality; they were still under sin because they were in the dispensation of the Mosaic Law. But in the church age we are not under the Mosaic Law anymore, we are in a different reality. And because we are living in a different reality we can have freedom from the sin nature. But it is not a freedom to sin, it is a freedom to not sin. That is Paul’s whole argument here.
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We have something in the church age that no one has ever had before. That is the foundation of our spiritual life. That is why that the spiritual life of the church age believer is so unique; it has never been like this before. Never, before the day of Pentecost, did any believer have the power of the sin nature broken. That is the reality but we have to get that into our thinking and think of ourselves according to thiks new identity that we have in Christ.
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Matthew 019b-How to be Happy, Pt 2. ; -23

Romans 6:12 NASB95
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts,
019b-How to be Happy, Pt 2. ;
 
The term disciple is a term that is sometimes used of unbelievers. Judas Iscariot is the most prominent example of someone in the Gospels as someone who was not a believer, but he was also referred to as a disciple. But primarily in the context of Matthew a disciple is viewed as a believer who has accepted the challenge to go forward in spiritual growth to spiritual maturity. As we will see, this is not necessarily inevitable. Just because someone trusts Christ as savior does not mean that they will continue to grow. And even though those who at some point in their life accept challenges of being a disciple and pursuing spiritual growth and spiritual maturity it does not mean that they will continue that. For ever single day is a new test for us, a new challenge as to whether or not we are going to stay the course, whether or not we are going to continue to go forward in our spiritual growth, or whether we are going to lapse back into a walk according to the sin nature. 
 
In Matthew chapter four there is the challenge to at least four disciples that they should follow the Lord Jesus Christ. The way Matthew is organizing his Gospel is designed to teach us something: that the call of the disciples precedes the challenge to the disciples in Matthew chapter five as to how a disciple shall live. Discipleship is a major sub-theme in the Gospel of Matthew. The primary theme is the presentation of Jesus as the promised Messiah and the offer of the kingdom and what happened to that offer of the kingdom because the Jews rejected Him as Messiah. So a sub-theme has to do with His teaching, His instruction, His guidance of His disciples. It begins in terms of His public ministry with the call of the disciples. Then there is instruction several times in Matthew in relation to the disciples and what it means to be a disciple, and then Matthew closes the Gospel with the command of the Lord Jesus Christ to His disciples, that they are to go and make disciples of all nations by baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things. It is that emphasis on instruction that is also at the core of the Gospel of Matthew for there are basically five different large blocks of instruction from the Lord Jesus Christ, the first of which is in what is called the Sermon on the Mount.
 
At this point, at least in Matthew’s organization, Jesus has not called the twelve. Luke’s organization has Him calling the twelve prior to this, but there is some debate as to the chronological order of these events and whether actually the Sermon on the Plain, as described in Luke, is identical to the Sermon on the Mount. I think they are parallel, at least at this point in my study. It seems to be that Matthew organizes his material more topically than  chronologically and so we can’t necessarily base a conclusion on the structure within Matthew, whereas Luke consistently follows a chronological pattern. So when Luke puts the calling of the twelve prior to the Sermon on the Plain, Matthew will put it later on in Matthew chapter nine. But remember Matthew tends to lump events together in order to express certain themes or ideas rather than putting them in sequential events. As westerners today we think only in terms of sequential events. But that is not necessarily the way writers in the ancient world wrote and it is certainly not how some of the Gospels are written. They are not written to be sequential histories or biographies but to present the claim of Jesus as the Messiah.         
 
As we looked over the beginning of chapter five we saw that Jesus emphasized three character qualities, and all three seemed to emphasize the core character quality of humility. The first speaks of being poor in spirit. This is someone who recognizes that they bring absolutely nothing to the table that should bring any approbation from God. We recognize that we have nothing for which we should gain approval and we live a life based on that humility. We recognize that God is the one who supplies everything. Remember He is talking to believers, not unbelievers, and so He is talking about something that is in addition to the initial humility that they had when they trusted in Him as savior, or at this time in His ministry believing in the gospel of the kingdom. So they have already believed that; they are already regenerate. What Jesus is teaching them here is something in addition to getting eternal life or becoming regenerate.
 
In verse 4 He says, “Blessed are those who grieve for they shall be comforted”. This, too, has a reference to humility—a recognition of grief over sin, over failure in our own life, and the fact that it is God who supplies the real comfort for us. And then the third character: “Blessed are the meek”. This is the idea of humility, which in the Scripture really emphasizes authority orientation. The result of being meek is that you will inherit the earth, again a term related to future rewards and responsibilities in the coming kingdom.
 
 NASB “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
 
In interpreting the Sermon on the Mount when we understand, first of all, that Jesus is addressing believers on how they should live and not addressing unbelievers on how they get eternal life that changes the dynamic a tremendous amount. Secondly, we recognize that this is given to those who are anticipating the coming of the kingdom. For they have responded to the message to repent for the kingdom of heaven in near, and so Jesus is giving them the ethic or standard of living for those who are being prepared to live in the kingdom. All of these connect together in terms of how the person anticipating the kingdom should live. So it is not necessarily dispensationally restricted. Even though at this time Jesus is talking to those who are under the Mosaic Law the ethics here are for all time.
 
Verse 6 is the first time Jesus mentions righteous in the sermon but this is a major theme within the Sermon on the Mount. What Jesus is showing is that the righteousness that God is expecting in the lives of those who would be the citizens of the kingdom is a different kind of righteousness than that which is being proclaimed by the scribes and the Pharisees. It is not a superficial righteousness. What took place during the latter part of the second temple period in Israel was that under the teaching of the Pharisees experiential righteousness was reduced to basically the observance of ritual and some basic principles of external morality without any emphasis on the heart or mentality of the individual. Remember they are under the Mosaic Law. The Mosaic Law treated the Israelites as believers in Deuteronomy, and Moses said that their responsibility was to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. The core spirituality of the Mosaic Law was an internal relationship with God that was to be manifested through the externals of the ritual, the observance of the ritual in the temple and not just an external ritualization. This is why later on as Israel became rebellious to God and succumb to idolatry they nevertheless still went through the external acts of sacrifice. The Lord rebuked them saying that He demanded love for Him, not just sacrifice. So the emphasis in the Old Testament was always on the core internal spiritual relationship with God, not on just an external ritual. But by the second temple period under the Pharisees righteousness was restricted to just an external ritual obedience.
 
Jesus is countering that in each of these beatitudes and talking about the value of hungering and thirsting (a metaphor for having a passionate desire for something) for righteousness. But it is a particular kind of righteousness, not the self-righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. The scribes and the Pharisees were often concerned with enforcing some kind external standard on the people. It was a superficial and hypocritical righteousness and they were more concerned about the righteousness of those around them as they defined it rather than this internal change or transformation that came as a result of someone’s personal relationship with God.
 
And so the hunger and thirst for righteousness, while it is primarily directed to an individual’s desire in his own life, also has an implication for the world around us. We see a world around us that is characterized by unrighteousness and we desire to live in an environment characterized by righteousness. But true humility based righteousness does not go out and try to impose that on other people; that is arrogant self-righteousness.
 
So Jesus ties these things together, and we should notice the connection here. In verse 6 there is the emphasis on the passion for righteousness, but in verse 7 there is an emphasis on mercy. Mercy runs counter to those who are self-righteously imposing their standard of morality on other people, because they are not treating them in grace. Mercy is grace in action to those who are in dire straits, spiritually or physically. Then the next beatitude, v.8, talks about those who are pure in heart. Pure here is not necessarily the best connotation of the noun that is used there—katharos. katharos is the word for ritual cleansing (sometimes translated ritual purification) and it is the noun form of the word that is used in —to “cleanse” us. This is talking about someone who is constantly making sure that they are cleansed from any sin in their life because they are consistently confessing their sin because they want to walk by the Holy Spirit so that experiential righteousness can be developed within them. So we see that these attitudes in vv. 6-8 are based on the foundational attitudes in vv. 3-5 related to humility. 
 
From there we build the next beatitude.  NASB “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Again, this is a verse not talking about a positional reality in the believer’s life or something that we have just because we are believers, it is something that we apply in our life. We will see a connection to that as we go through our study on experiential righteousness.
 
 NASB “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
When we read in v. 6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst we must recognize that there is a warning that comes at the end of the beatitudes that those who truly hunger and thirst for righteousness and pursue righteousness run the risk of being persecuted for righteousness. And yet there is a reward for that: “… for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
The word “blessed” is the Greek makarios, which means to be blessed or happy. It is a word that emphasizes a mental state, not an emotional state. It emphasizes one’s relationship to God which brings stability, tranquility, contentment and enjoyment of life, not on the basis of ephemeral circumstances or fleeting emotions but on something that is immutable. We cannot have a stable state of happiness if that happiness is based on that which changes. Everything in creation changes; only God is unchanging. And so only by basing our happiness on the things of God can we have happiness and share that happiness with God.  
 
We are told that this happiness is based on another value, another character trait: hungering and thirsting for righteousness. We have two different verbs here, both are present active participles used with an article, which indicates basically that they are describing a particular kind of person. The literal meaning of these terms refers to actual hunger and actual thirst but they are often used metaphorically. Metaphorically they describe a passion; they describe someone who craves something, have an intense desire for something. Often it is used to express something that should be a priority in our life. That is how it is used here. This is someone who has a passionate desire for righteousness. The word dikaiosune has the connotation of righteousness: a moral, ethical value. 
 
Righteousness comes in two kinds, two flavors. The first is what we describe as imputed righteousness, the righteousness that every believer possesses at the instant of salvation. At the instant of salvation God the Father in a legal transaction credits to our account the perfect righteousness of Christ, so that when God the Father looks at us He doesn’t look at us in terms of our own personal immorality or unrighteousness, He looks at us in terms of the fact that we possess the righteousness of Christ. That is our position in relation to God’s justice. However, experientially we all fail. We have a sin nature and we still sin. We can sin grievously and in ways that shock us. But the grace of God provides a solution. Because we are believers in Christ, and Christ died for our sins, the sin penalty is paid for. We can’t impress God with our penitential attitude because God knows how many more times we will commit that sin or sins. What we do is simply remind God and ourselves through confession (acknowledge those sins to Him) and God forgives us and cleanses us from all unrighteousness. The basis for that is , that the blood of Christ (His death on the cross) is the reason we are cleansed from all sin.
 
But Scripture says that we are to walk by the Spirit () and when we fail to walk by the Spirit we are walking according to the sin nature. These are mutually exclusive. Sin permeates everything when we are walking according to the flesh and so there has to be a means of cleansing to reverse the failure. That is confession, .  
 
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are not hungering and thirsting for imputed righteousness because that is ours completely and totally and irreversibly at the instant of our faith in Christ. The other kind of righteousness mentioned in Scripture is experiential righteousness, the righteousness that is produced in our lives as a result of our walk by God the Holy Spirit. As we apply the Word of God through our lives and as we follow the leadership through the Word of God of God the Holy Spirit then He produces this experiential righteousness in our lives. This is in contrast to the kind of righteousness that the scribes and the Pharisees were emphasizing.
 
is Paul’s summary of the false righteousness that was dominant in 2nd temple Judaism. Speaking of the Jews and the Jewish concept of righteousness under the Pharisees he says: NASB “For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.”
 
The result of hungering and thirsting or having a passion for righteousness is that we will be filled. The word for filled here is the verb chortazo. It is used often to refer to feeding or fattening cattle. It is derived from the basic root word which means green grass and it comes to mean to be fully satiated or satisfied. When we hunger and thirst for righteousness then God will satisfy us. It is a future passive indicative. That means that the fulfillment is at some point in the future and God is the one who supplies it. It is a passive verb. We do not fill up ourselves, we receive that satisfaction and that comes from God. This tells us, in line with other aspects in the beatitudes, that the ultimate reference point of the beatitudes in their fulfillment is in the future kingdom. Inheriting the kingdom is emphasized in vv. 5, 10 and so it is a future fulfilment. It is challenging us to live a certain way now in light of a future destiny. This connection of experiential righteousness today with the future kingdom is also expressed in NASB “for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” He is not talking about a present kingdom. There is no present form of the kingdom today; it has been postponed. The verb “eating” is not a verb like we have in , it is the noun for food. It should be translated: “for the kingdom of God is not food and drink”. Both are nouns in the Greek. “ … righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” is what will characterize the future kingdom. So by walking by the Spirit today where He produces righteousness in our lives we are in training and being prepared for the future kingdom.
 
The passage which gives the most instruction related to experiential righteousness is found in Romans chapter six. In Romans chapter six Paul is laying the foundation for the spiritual life of the church age believer. That spiritual life is based, according to Paul’s logical development of Romans, first on being justified. Justification from God comes as a result of having received the righteousness of Christ in imputation. This is described in Romans chapters three and four specifically. So in Romans chapter six what we see is the result for the believer, those who have been justified in Christ. At the beginning of the chapter Paul lays down the foundation for our spiritual life. This is quite significant. Nothing like this ever happened in the Old Testament. He is describing something unique to church age believers and it distinguished church age believers from every other believer in every other dispensation.  
 
NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?” No Old Testament saint was ever baptized into Christ. No Tribulation saint will be baptized into Christ. This is a distinguishing feature of church age believers. No millennial saint will be baptized into Christ. There might be something similar but nothing that has been described in the Scriptures. Here Paul lays down the foundation for the sanctification or the spiritual life of the individual believer. It is grounded upon the fact that we have been identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection.
 
The implication from that: NASB “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might [should] walk in newness of life.” It is important to note the Greek verb there. It is potential, not actual. Paul is not saying that it is inevitable that the believer will walk in newness of life. He is saying that the reality is that at salvation we are identified with Christ so that we might walk in newness of life. We should walk in newness of life is the point that he is making here, but we know that there are believers who do not walk in newness of life. Many times it is because they are never taught about it. Other times it is because they are rebellious children (they are still children nonetheless).  [5] “For if we have become united with {Him} in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection.” So in those verses he lays down the foundation for our spiritual life.
 
Another implication: NASB “for he who has died is freed from sin.” Literally this does not mean that he has been freed from sin. That term isn’t in the text; it is actually the perfect passive indicative of dikaioo which is the word for righteousness. By receiving imputed righteousness this righteousness has delivered us from the tyranny of the sin nature, not the presence of the sin nature. A break occurs. It never occurred before in history. No Old Testament saint had the power of the sin nature in his life broken. It never happened. They were just as much a slave to the sin nature after salvation as before salvation. The only thing that can break the power of the sin nature is to become dead to the sin nature. The only thing that can allow us to be dead to the sin nature is to be identified with the death of Christ. Until this happened that never occurred. This is why the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a distinguishing mark for the church age believer. As a result of that, the fact that we have died to sin, we have a conclusion drawn in verse 11: “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” In other words, don’t live like you did before you were saved, when you were a slave to sin. That master-slave relationship has been broken; now live in light of your new master who is the Lord Jesus Christ.    
 
 NASB “ Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts.” The fact that he continues with these imperatives—to consider ourselves to be dead to sin, to not let sin reign in our mortal bodies, and other imperatives that we will see coming up—indicates that Paul does not consider this to be an inevitability in the life of the believer. If it was inevitable he wouldn’t have to tell us to do it. He tells us to do it because it is not inevitable. We have to come to understand the dynamics of the baptism by the Holy Spirit and then we have to incorporate that into our own thinking and implement it when we face temptation. We may not always be successful but the more we attempt to apply it and the more we are successful we will grow. It takes time to reorient our thinking to this new reality of being free from the power and authority of the sin nature. 
 
NASB “and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members {as} instruments of righteousness to God. [14] For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”
 
In v. 13 Paul uses two different forms of the word “present” in order to express his imperatives. He says, “Do not present your members.” This is a present active imperative, which means he is stating this as a standard operating procedure for every single believer. It should be the ongoing reality in the life of every believer—that we are not going to offer our members or our lives as unrighteousness and sin. This is not talking about salvation; it is talking about experiential unrighteousness. As a believer we should not let unrighteousness characterize our lives. He goes on to say, “but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead.” The same verb is picked up as in —“present yourselves a living sacrifice”. But the second “present” there is an aorist imperative, which means that this is stated as the highest priority for the believer. We are to make sure that we present ourselves as being alive from the dead because we are alive from the dead. Too often many believers are still walking around as if they are still dead. This is analogous to someone who has grown up under the tyranny of the Marxist totalitarian system that characterized Soviet Russia who manage to get out and come to the West where they have freedom, and yet they can no longer think in terms of freedom because their freedom was destroyed in them under the Soviet dictatorship. So they are very unhappy under freedom just as many Jews were unhappy under freedom when escaped from Egypt. They couldn’t live as free people because they rejected the teaching of God and wanted to go back and live as slaves rather than learn to live as free men.
 
We were delivered from the tyranny of the sin nature and we have to learn to live now as those who are free to live in a different environment. We don’t want to go back and live under a system of slavery which is what we had before we were saved. We are to live the life which is characterized by the righteous standards of God.
 
 NASB “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be!” He uses these rhetorical questions in order to focus our attention on what he is saying. Should we use this as an excuse for sin now that we are under grace? Of course not! Then he has another question. [16] “Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone {as} slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?”
 
When we sin now what we are basically saying is, “I prefer to go back under the master-slave relationship of the sin nature.” It is a choice. Before we were saved we only had one nature, a sin nature. We only had one option and that was to sin. Now we have an option not to sin. Paul is challenging us that we are not to go back to that old relationship because what it implies is that we prefer the slavery to the sin nature. What we should do, as he states it in the second half of the question, is that we should present ourselves through obedience that leads to righteousness. Because when we are walking by the Spirit and are obedient to God, God the Holy Spirit uses that to produce experiential righteousness in our lives.  
 
NASB “But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, [18] and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” Having been set free doesn’t mean we don’t sin otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary to say these things. Freedom from sin simply means freedom from the tyranny of the sin nature. “… you became slaves of righteousness.” That is our new position. We shifted owners at the point of salvation.    
NASB “I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh [sin nature]…” We still have a weakness because we still have a sin nature. Paul recognizes that.  “… For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in {further} lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.” Again he uses an aorist imperative, indicating that this is a priority. Because it is an imperative it necessarily implies that we can choose to be disobedient. Sadly, too many believers choose to be disobedient and live their lives in the same way that they did before they were saved. But the challenge for us now that we are new creatures in Christ, members of God’s royal family, is to live as if we are members of that family and not as we did prior to the time we were saved.
 
What Paul is saying here is that we can present ourselves to sin as believers and it leads to death. Not to spiritual death but to a death-like existence in life. It is not a life of happiness. It is not the blessed life that Jesus is talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. If we present ourselves to sin then the sin nature produces corruption and death in our lives and we eviscerate our own spiritual life. We don’t lose our spiritual life but we are living it as though we don’t have it. Obedience, though, leads to righteousness. The Holy Spirit produces that righteousness in our lives.
 
NASB “But thanks be to God that though [because] you were slaves of sin, [but] you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed”. That is the contrast. [18] “and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” We can translate that as a temporal participle: “when you were set free from sin (the point of justification) you became slaves of righteousness”. This is our new identity.
 
In verses 20-23 we see various explanations indicated by that particle “For”.  NASB “For when you were slaves of sin [as an unbeliever], you were free in regard to righteousness.” There was no righteousness in the life. No matter how much morality was there it didn’t produce anything of righteous value for God.
 
NASB “Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death.” In other words, the things that you did before, the things you are now ashamed of, the things you now recognize as wrong. Did that produce any eternal fruit in your life? No, of course not. He says the natural result of that is death. It produced an unsatisfied life; it produced unhappiness. It might have produced ephemeral moments of joy or happiness but it didn’t produce true tranquility and contentment and joy in life.  
 
NASB “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.”
Here is the question. Is the everlasting/eternal life talking about the eternal life that we gain when we trust in Christ as savior, or is it talking about something else? If it is talking about the eternal life that new get as believers we have a problems, because faith in Christ is not based on works. But here the fruit to holiness is talking about experiential righteousness that gives us a quality of life. The term “everlasting life” has two dimensions to it. It has a quantity dimension, i.e. ongoing, never-ending life, but it also has a quality dimension, a depth dimension to it. This is what Jesus speaks about in “ …I came that they may have life, and have {it} abundantly.” This is the life of the mature believer.
 
Having been set free from sin we can pursue real life. If the result of our life after we are saved, living according to the sin nature is a death-like experience, then the opposite, i.e. living according to God’s Word and applying it in our life, will produce true depth of life and quality of life. Neither the death nor the life here, which are being contrasted, are talking about eternal condemnation or eternal life in heaven. One is talking about the believer who produces self-induced misery and self-destruction in his life because he continues to live according to the sin nature, and the other is the believer who is living according to the Word of God and experiences that blessed state that Jesus is speaking of in . If we want to have true happiness and joy in life and experience abundant life, then this is the result of an ongoing walk by the Holy Spirit, presenting ourselves as slaves to obedience and righteousness rather than slaves to the sin nature after we are saved.
 
That leads us to verse 23 which is often taken to be a salvation verse but in context is not talking about getting justified; that was discussed in . It is talking about the results of living and presenting ourselves as slaves to the sin nature. The wages of sin is death. This is the same thing Paul was saying earlier: the end of those things was death before we were saved, and if we still live according to the sin nature it still produces death. Not eternal death; we can’t lose our salvation. Our destiny is still heaven but if we are living like an unbeliever we are going to have the same consequences in our life today—misery and unhappiness.
NASB “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Eternal life doesn’t just have an eternal dimension to it, a quantity dimension to it, it has a quality dimension to it. And the only way we realize the quality dimension is to walk by the Holy Spirit.
 
This emphasis on pursuing righteousness is brought out numerous times in other epistles. For example, and Paul commands Timothy to pursue righteousness. That is the same idea as hungering and thirsting for righteousness. 
  
 NASB “But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance {and} gentleness.”
 
NASB “Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love {and} peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.” This is the same idea Jesus is talking about in .
 
As a result Paul says in NASB “in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.” The emphasis is no the judgment seat of Christ. Those who love His appearing are not just those who anticipate and desire the Rapture to occur but it is to those who recognize that at the time of the Rapture we are going to be taken to be with the Lord in the air, and following that is the judgment seat of Christ. We are looking forward to the judgment seat of Christ because we have pursued righteousness and there we will receive rewards, and there we will hear those words from our savior: Well done thou good and faithful servant.
 
, also emphasize this. Talking to believers, John says: NASB “Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous”. He is talking about experiential righteousness. “ … By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.” These are fellowship verses, not salvation verses. The person who is a believer and practices righteousness is going to demonstrate his family relationship in terms of his relationship with God. The one who doesn’t is living as if he is a child of the devil.
 
What we see here is a challenge to each of us, that we are to take our salvation lightly but that at the instant of justification we are also adopted as royal family where there is a standard of living. We are to live according to that standard which includes a hunger and thirst for righteousness so that as a result of that we can experience the abundant life that God has provided for us and that we can enjoy all of the blessings in time that God has for us, summarized in the term “blessed” which means to be happy or to be fulfilled in this life because of our relationship to God.

Romans 073b-Freedom to NOT Sin;

Romans 6:14 NASB95
For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
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Romans 073b-Freedom to NOT Sin;
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Let's turn in our bibles to Romans, chapter 6. I think I got just about this far last time and I wanted to stop here and talk a little more about what's going on. In this section of Romans Paul is really laying down for us the foundation for the spiritual life. This is something that I find a lot of people, a lot of churches, don't really spend a lot of time thinking about. We're so concerned about doing the right thing and having the right code of conduct externally that we don't teach the real abstract foundation for why we can live the Christian way of life which is what Paul does. Especially in these first fourteen verses of , he is grounding his argument in the baptism by the Holy Spirit, the one-time event that takes place at the instant anyone believes in Christ. We don't feel anything, we don't experience anything, but it's one of any number of things that God does for us at the moment of salvation.
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Lewis Sperry Chafer said there were 32 things God did for us at the point of salvation. Later that was expanded to 36, 38, 39, or 40. Some people have taken all the sub-points of some because Chafer would have like seven works of the Holy Spirit, so some individuals have 80, 90, or 100. I don't get caught up in the numbers. There's a lot of things that God did for us, simultaneously, and instantly, at the point of salvation.
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One of the things that happens as we studied in the first part of Romans was that we were declared just. At the instant that we trust in Christ as Savior, God the Father imputes to us the perfect righteousness of Christ. We don't feel anything but we are given new righteousness. At the same instant that all of this takes place, simultaneously, we are regenerated. We're given a new nature. We move from being spiritually dead to being spiritually alive.
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At that same instant we are also adopted into God's royal family so we have a new identity. We are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit and at that same time we identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. That identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection is the topic of verses 2-6 in . In the identification with Christ's death everything that we were prior to salvation is crucified and is dead and is identified with that death of Christ on the Cross which is the foundation. That has to die, just like a seed has to die before new life come out. That real death occurs, and real death is a separation from all that we were before we were saved. Real death occurs so we can realize the potential of our new life in Christ. says that "we have become new creatures in Christ. Old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new." That's the foundation.
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Understanding this is why Paul can say now that you know this reckon or consider or think or yourselves as dead indeed to sin. So it's not that the sin nature is dead but that we are dead or separated from its tyrannical powers. Something has radically changed there and so, prior to salvation, all we could do was follow the dictates of that sin nature. After salvation, after we trust in Christ as Savior, that tyranny is broken and we are free not to sin. That's really the focus of the next part of the second half of this chapter from verses 15-23, is that we are free not to sin.
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It's funny how people get the idea, "Well, we're free; we're free from the Law." Can we sin with impunity? No, we're not free so we can sin. That's actually what the licentious position is, "Oh, goody, we have grace so we're free to sin." No, we're free not to sin. So this is what develops in this second half of Romans, chapter 6.
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So just to bring us back to where I ended the last time, Paul draws this conclusion in verses 12-14 from what he has said in the first eleven verses in the chapter. He says therefore, because this has happened, because this break occurs between the person you were before you were saved and the new person you are now with all the potential you and I have in Christ, because you're this new person in Christ, don't let sin reign, dominate, control your mortal body that you should obey it in its lusts. So he's basically saying, quit sinning. I don't know how else he could say it. He's just saying quit, quit sinning. You no longer have to sin.
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Our problem is that we will never realize perfection because we will always, to some degree, succumb to the sin nature but we don't have to. That's the challenge. Then in verse 13, he adds to this command (CHART), don't let sin dominate your life. The circles there indicate the conjunctions which help us understand his argument. This is in addition to not letting sin dominate your life. He says, don't present your members as instruments of unrighteousness. Members refer to our entire body. Don't let it be the tool of your sin nature. This involves everything. Don't let our feet run to mischief, not letting our hands do evil things, not letting our tongues gossip and slander, all of the different sins we can commit overtly. The body is not to be an instrument or a tool or a weapon of unrighteousness for the purpose of leading to sin. Instead, we are present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead. So the pattern again is that in resurrection life we are alive, we have this new life.
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(CHART) On this chart I emphasize the basic commands. Don't let sin reign, dominate, or control. Don't present your members as instruments of unrighteousness. In other words, this is something you need to stop doing so that you can start presenting yourselves to God as being alive from the dead. These two words are the same words in the Greek. The first is a present tense imperative with a negative which may imply stop doing something you're doing. It's that we can't present ourselves to two masters at the same time. You can't serve the sin nature and God at the same time. You have to stop one in order to do the other. It's a very simple idea. You have to stop one so you can do the other.
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We have to realize that we are now alive from the dead and we are to present our members as instruments or tools or weapons of righteousness to God. That's our task as believers. That's our mission. And then he explains, one more time, the principle in verse 14, "For sin shall not... [this is a command and he's really saying for sin shall not have dominion over you.]" You shall not let sin rule over you. He's just repeating the same command of verse 12. He uses a different word but it's the same command. He uses a synonym that we're not to let sin have dominion over us.
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And then that phrase that I ended on last time which is kind of a new thought for most of us, "...for you are not under law but under grace". Now that is an extremely interesting concept and a difficult phrase to understand And the reason is because for many people the way that we often heard this taught is that we're not under the Mosaic Law any more but we're under grace. And that's sort of true; it's sort of like the ball is in play but it's just going down the foul line. It's partially true but it hasn't really captured the essence of the significance of what Paul is implying by this contract of being under law and now being under grace. In what sense, should we ask, is that if we are no longer under the Mosaic Law that we're somehow free from the sin nature? How does removing the commandments of the Mosaic Law as a mandate for our life give us freedom from the control of the sin nature?
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All that the Law does, according to , is exacerbate and highlight our sinfulness. The law wasn't given to Israel so that they would have a way to get to heaven but to expose the fact that sin pervades everything in our life and we can't save ourselves. It's impossible. No one can live a sinless, perfect life. Nobody can obey the Law. The Mosaic Law, by its simple removal, doesn't free us from the sin nature. It might free us from the exposure of more elements of the sin nature but it doesn't free us from the dominion of the sin nature. So how can that be the main idea here?
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Another idea, though, is possible by this phrase that I think makes sense. I've come back and put together a rudimentary chart here that would get his point across. (CHART) This is a dispensational chart or how God administers the ages. Now there's some things that are the same in every age. That is, that God is the One Who provides salvation and salvation is always provided on the basis of faith alone in the promise of God. Now in the Old Testament the promise of God was unfulfilled. It was in the future. The promise was that a Messiah would come. God would provide a deliverer who would take care of the sins of the word. And this is pictured in numerous ways, the most clear of which would be the sacrificial lambs. The Passover lamb, the goat at the Day of Atonement, the substitutionary sacrifices... as we've studied in our study of on Tuesday nights. All make it very clear that a substitute was necessary; a death was necessary in order to provide salvation.
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Now we look back. In the Old Testament period they looked forward to a future solution, a future redemption. When Jesus came He fulfilled all those types and all those pictures and all the prophecies. He was indeed the promised Messiah, the redeemer for Israel. He went to the Cross as a lamb without spot or blemish. As John the Baptist called him, "He was the lamb of God who took away the sins of the world." Once that perfect sacrifice took place on the Cross, now we look back to that event and again we believe the promise of God. It's not the same promise, though. The promise in the Old Testament was: I will, in the future, provide a Savior. That promise now is: Jesus is the Messiah. If you believe on Him, you will have eternal life. It's still the principle of faith alone in the promise of God. So God doesn't change the basic nature of salvation. It's still by faith alone. It is by grace through faith.
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There were also other expectations that God had for people on the earth but there were different circumstances. Generally speaking, the bottom line refers to large time periods that I refer to as ages based on the Greek term aion [a)iwn]. These are the large Ages of the Gentiles which are really sub-divided into three Dispensations as the original Creation Covenant was modified. You have the Dispensation of Innocence, which is really an appropriate term because man was judicially innocent before God. He was not guilty of sin. He wasn't just not guilty; he was truly innocent. There was no sin yet.
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When Adam sinned () there's a modification of the original Creation Covenant and this is usually referred to as the Adamic Covenant now. That introduced a new dispensation, usually called the Dispensation of Human Conscience. That ended at the Flood. There's another covenant at the end of the Flood, a covenant with Noah which brought in the Dispensation of Human Government. These three dispensations make up the Age of the Gentiles because there's no special people of God in terms of the Jewish people yet.
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With the failure of the Tower of Babel, God called out Abram. Abram is the father of the Jewish people and from the moment that God called out Abram in , God is no longer working as a whole through the whole human race. He is working specifically through the Jewish people. God has chosen and revealed to us that He would bless all the people, all of mankind, only through the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham Isaac, and Jacob. So the Dispensation of the Patriarchs is a dispensation in the Age of Israel because Israel begins with the call of Abraham. After the Exodus event at Mount Sinai, God gives a new covenant to the Jewish people and this is the Mosaic Covenant and that introduces the Dispensation of the Law.
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This is what dominates until Christ comes and then we're told in Romans that Christ's death is the end of the Law. The Law goes from Mt. Sinai to Golgotha. At Golgotha we have the end of the Law. Then we have a new dispensation starting with the Day of Pentecost. The new dispensation is co-terminus or identical with the Church Age or the Dispensation of Grace. We are now under grace.
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Let me ask you a question? Was there grace in the Old Testament? Of course, there was. Again and again and again, you have grace in the Old Testament. Is there Law in the New Testament? Of course, there is. There's hundreds and hundreds of imperative mood verbs and hundreds and hundreds of other ways of expressing the imperative concept in the New Testament. So there are commands in the New Testament, even though its the Age of Grace. There's grace in the Old Testament, even though its the Dispensation of Law. So what are we getting at here? What is the essential difference here? I believe, based on this passage, that it has to do with the
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whole issue of the slavery to the sin nature.
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Remember what Paul's foundational argument is? His foundational argument is that the way we recognize that the sin nature is no longer in control is because the old man has been crucified with Christ, and that has broken the power of the sin nature. With the old man crucified, the body of sin (verse 6) might be done away with. So the power of the sin nature is broken at the Cross. Was there anything comparable to that in the Old Testament? Nothing. Not one thing comparable to that in the Old Testament because they didn't have the baptism by the Holy Spirit. The first time that happens is on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descends upon the Church.
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There's no freedom from the sin nature in the Old Testament. I don't know about you but that's been around the edges of my thinking for a long time. To really come to grips and think about that makes us realize how radically different the spiritual life that we have is from the spiritual life that Moses, Noah, Abraham, David, and everybody else in the Old Testament had even including John the Baptist. That's why Jesus said that John the Baptist is the greatest of Old Testament saints but he is much less than anyone in the Church Age because we have been given so much. We have true, genuine freedom from the sin nature which nobody had in the Old Testament because they didn't have this baptism by the Holy Spirit which breaks the power of the sin nature. The hymn, "Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing" with its line, "breaking the power of cancelled sin." is excellent verbiage because it was written by John or Charles Wesley and he says, "It breaks the power of cancelled sin." Breaking the power is in the present tense but he uses the past tense with the word "cancelled" to indicate that the sin was already cancelled at the Cross. That's . The certificate of death was wiped out at the Cross but it is only when we trust in Christ that that power of the sin nature is broken. The sin has been cancelled so that's great doctrinal terminology in that hymn.
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So we have the two dispensations in focus here: the Law and Grace. Under Law there is not a dynamic, there is not a methodology, there is not the indwelling of the Spirit, the filling of the Spirit, the baptism by the Spirit. There is nothing related to God the Holy Spirit. In fact, He is promised to Israel as part of the New Covenant when God brings the nation to its final redemption at the time of the Millennial Kingdom. But that's only future. There's no reality there.
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I want to go back now and read through those passages in and the corollary passages dealing with the New Covenant because in those passages there's a realization of the actual hopelessness that Israel had in terms of being able to deal with sin. The hope is in the future promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Now we have something similar but its not that same thing because that that's tied to that New Covenant doesn't come into effect into God restores the Jewish people to the land at the end of the Tribulation and at that time the New Covenant goes into effect for the Jewish people.
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We have something similar but distinct in the Church Age now. So this breaks this down for us and the more we think about this we more it should awaken us to the absolutely profound nature of this new life that we have in Christ. Paul ends this section talking about the fact that we have this new life and we're no longer under the dominion of sin and why. Because we're not under Law. We're not living in the Dispensation of the Law. We're now living in the Dispensation of Grace.
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Then in verse 15 he asks the question, What then? What's the big deal? Why is this so important that I understand this really abstract thing called baptism of the Holy Spirit? After all, I went to a Baptist Church or a Methodist Church or an Episcopalian Church or whatever kind of church most of my life and they never even talked about it. Of course, if you went to a charismatic church, they talked about it all the time but they didn't get it right either. Why is this so important?
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That is what Paul says. So what? Should we sin now because we are not under Law but under grace? Now that we understand what Law and Grace describe under these two dispensations we can understand Paul's question a little more clearly. He says now that we're not under the Mosaic Law, we're not in bondage to the Mosaic Law, our sins are paid for, the power of the sin nature is broken, the old unregenerate person that we were is crucified. We're separated from him and that person is gone. We're locked into a new life, a new identity and new provisions and new powers by God the Holy Spirit.
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Now that we have all this, wow, this is great. Can we just go on sinning? "Shall we sin because we're not under Law, but under grace? NO! Not at all. See, we're not saved or given freedom so that we could sin. We're given freedom so that we won't sin. Not that we can't sin or don't sin but so that we won't sin. We now have an ability to say no to the sin nature. And then he asks the next question which is a long, multi-parted question. Do you think Paul would have a convoluted sentence? He says, Do you not know? He uses a perfect tense verb to say this is something they already know. He's sort of referring to a general principle taken from an analogy with life. The analogy is one with slavery.
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Now slavery doesn't communicate well with us because we live in a post-slavery world. Yet it communicated very well to a person living in the first century. He uses this verb here, a different verb from back when he says "do you not know". Here he's saying do you not know in the sense that this is something you should know because its evident from our culture, everything around us that when you present yourself as a slave to somebody to obey them that you are that one's slave whom you obey.
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Now stop a minute and think about that. Any time we give ourselves over to follow the lusts of the sin nature we're basically saying I'm going to let the sin nature dominate and control and tyrannize my life. Any time you let someone else control you, you're letting them control you and you are essentially making yourself a slave to them. This often happens in a lot of relationships, where you think that having someone respond to you in a certain way is essential for your happiness. What you've just said is that how that person responds to me determines whether or not I'm happy. So you become a slave to someone else's opinion of you. One day they're in a good mood and they like you and you feel great. The next day they're in a bad mood and they don't like you and now you're in the dumps because you've tied your emotional well-being to how someone else views you.
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We do that with our circumstances. If things are going the way you think they should go you're happy. You've just made yourself a slave to whatever the circumstances are: your job, your friend, your social life, your romantic life, whatever it might be. You've just made yourself a slave to those circumstances. You think, if the circumstances are positive, then I'm happy. If the circumstances are negative, then I'm sad and so we put ourselves on an emotional rollercoaster because we've tied our emotional well being to something that is always in flux.
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We can only have perfect stability in our emotions if we connect our emotions to something that can never change. There's only one circumstances that never changes. That's the immutability of God. Because God is immutable and never changes, when our emotional well-being is locked onto the glory of God, then the circumstances can change from extremely negative to extremely positive but our stability and emotional well-being never changes because its locked into God. It's locked onto His character. So whenever we focus on something as the one in control, and we can place circumstances or people in control or the sin nature in control, we basically enslave ourselves to them. They're the one who hold all the reins and we can do the same thing with our sin nature.
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Paul alludes to this common situation that if you present yourself as a slave to obey someone then you're the slave to that person you're obeying. Today it might be one person in one area. Tomorrow it might be another person. Today if you're obedient to the sin nature then you're enslaving yourself to your lust pattern. Tomorrow you decide, well I'm going to walk with the Lord so then you enslave yourself to the Lord but you're always a slave. That's one thing you should get out of this whole picture here. You only have two options. We're either going to be a slave to the sin nature or we're going to be a slave to God.
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We're either slave to our own arrogant, self-absorption, and all the lust patterns of our sin nature, or we're a slave to God. There's no third option. So Paul says don't you know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey whether of sin leading to death (when we sin, it leads to death). Now who is he talking to here? Is he talking to believers, to Christians, or is he talking to unbelievers, non-Christians. Who is he talking to? He's talking to believers.
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So the sin leading to death here isn't eternal death in the Lake of Fire. It is carnal death, it is experiencing the death-like consequences of living on the basis of the corruption of the sin nature. If we're going to sit down in the house of corruption and the sin nature and live as a slave to the corrupting sin nature then we're going to experience all the death-like traits as if we were spiritually dead. We may be saved and our eternal destiny is Heaven but our experience in life isn't going to be any better than the unbeliever that is spiritually dead and experiencing all that corruption.
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So we have two options there. (CHART). In this slide I've highlighted those present words again. In verse 16 you're a slave to whom you present yourself to obey and then its used again in the indicative verb in verse 19 and it comes down to the last verb in verse 19. He once again refers to the aorist imperative "so now present your members as slaves of righteousness." If you take out everything from about the middle of verse 19 through verses 14 and 15 then you just come right back to everything in between which is just explaining what he says in verse 13 where he says we are to present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead and presenting ourselves as members of righteousness to God. Everything in between explains that and he comes back there and says "See, now that you understand this you are to go on presenting yourselves as slaves of righteousness for holiness."
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That's the King James version but the best translation is "for sanctification" or to bring it down even more "for spiritual growth". So that's the key to spiritual growth: presenting ourselves as obedient to God as slaves of righteousness. So the issue: the question he asks is shall we continue in sin? He answers it, "do you not know?" We have to understand and know and make a part of our thinking the things that happened at salvation. We didn't experience them and we're so used to basing our opinions and actions on things we experience that this runs counter to that. It's faith. God says, "this is what happened. You didn't feel it, you didn't experience it, you were regenerated and you were given new life. You're a new person in Christ with new capabilities and potentials and you need to live on that basis.
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This is the principle, if you let the sin nature run your life then you are willingly enslaving yourself to the sin nature. It's your volition, it's your responsibility. You may end up destroying yourself. You may end up with a lot of self-induced misery. You may end up neurotic. You may end up psychotic. You may end up completely removed from reality and in an insane asylum. Isn't it interesting that the Bible never talks about being crazy? Why? Because everything that led to being crazy is a result of your volition. So craziness and insanity are not options that get you a "get-out-of-jail-free card", like our legal system say. You're nuts, you're crazy, you're psychotic because it's the result of hundreds if not thousands of small bad decisions. After a while it snowballs into the fact that you have so fragmented your soul and so destroyed yourself that you can't deal with reality anymore. That was all your choice to do that. So it all comes down to this issue of knowledge.
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Notice what Paul does in verse 16. He says, "we are the slave of the one we obey, whether of sin...[notice its that singular of the word sin indicating the sin nature]...sin leading to death." Okay, that's the top line. Notice what he does here. He says whether we're presenting ourselves to the sin nature and that results in death or to obedience. Notice obedience is in contrast to the sin nature. He uses a figure of speech here to refer to the ultimate cause of sin as disobedience.
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The ultimate cause of leading the Christian life is obedience. So the contrast is between sin which is a result of disobedience versus obedience. But instead of saying disobedience versus obedience he's saying sin versus obedience. Sin produces death but notice obedience doesn't produce life. He's talking about that which is the foundation of life, which is righteousness. We don't have the kind of life God talks about in Scripture apart from righteousness. You can't have the kind of life God offers on the basis of unrighteousness and immorality.
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You can only have it on the basis of spirituality and the virtues produced in a believer's life by God the Holy Spirit. So he is saying you're going to go one of two ways. You're either going to obey your sin nature and enslave yourself to your sin nature but the end result of that is the corrupting influence of the sin nature on your life and you're going to be the walking dead. Or you're going to obey God and the result of that is that experiential righteousness is developed in your life which leads to real, substantive life, the life that Christ promised. Not the imputed righteousness which leads to justification but this is the righteousness that is the result of someone living out the consequences of their justification.
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Before we go any further, I want to show you this distinction. Let's go over to . James talks about the fact there are two types of righteousness. We have to understand that there is a righteousness that is the righteousness of Christ that is credited or imputed to us at the instant of salvation. God sees that in us and declares us righteous. We're still fallen; we're still sinners, but we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, as it were. On that basis, not on the righteousness we have done, but on the basis of His character we're declared righteous.
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In this discourse on faith and works in . He asks the question: what's the relationship of faith to works? The basic conclusion of James is that there's not a relationship. I know that may surprise you because it seems that's what he's trying to say. But what he's saying is that there's not necessarily a relationship between being saved and producing experiential righteousness.
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In vs. 21 he says, "Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works when he offered Isaac, his son, on the altar?" Now remember, when this episode occurs in , Abraham is an old man. Isaac has grown to maturity. He's either a late teenager or a grown man in his 20's or 30's, somewhere in that time frame. He was the promise that God made to Abraham back in that "through you I will make you the father of many nations." Then he adds to this promise that this seed is going to come through you and Sarah.
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Abraham is saying, "Look, I'm an old man. I'm way past the years of child bearing and Sarah's an old woman and she's way past the age of child bearing." God says, "That's why I've waited so long; basically so a miracle can take place. But you had to learn to trust me that I would fulfill the promise." That happens when Abraham is a hundred years old.
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Now Abraham is about 120 to 130 years of age and he had to learn to trust God. God had promised him a seed. He gave him Isaac as a son. There have been numerous threats to Isaac's life but in the meantime, God has protected him and provided for him and now God's going to see if he had learned all his lessons and he really did trust Him to preserve Isaac. Now when was Abraham originally justified or saved? Before , in , before Isaac was born, it says remember that Abraham was justified by faith and not by works. He was justified by faith alone. So that's when he's declared righteous.
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He had to grow and mature to realize or to let that justification produce experiential righteousness. He's declare righteous on the basis of his first faith in God but then he's given new life and he begins to grow and we see the maturity of that in . That's the justification that James is talking about here when he says, "wasn't Abraham justified by works?" He's not talking about being justified before God but he's talking about the justification which he already had which is coming to maturity because in the next verse James says, "do you see that faith was working together with his works and by his works, that is, by his obedience to God, faith was made, not made perfect but brought to completion.
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See his justification had started but he had to come to maturity. That idea, TELEIOS [teleioj] means has to come to maturity. Then the next verse says, "And the Scripture was fulfilled or brought to completion that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness." That's . He believes God; it's accounted to him for righteousness when he's first saved but all he has at that point is the imputed righteousness of Christ. To grow to maturity, he has to obey God and that's the growth of experiential righteousness.
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So we see these two categories of righteousness in Abraham in . Let's go back to . is talking about the same thing. and 4 talks about how we acquire the righteousness of God. It's by faith. But now what Paul is talking about is not imputed righteousness but experiential righteousness. It's how do we realize this in our own lives so that we can realize not just this eternal life, which is unending life with God in heaven, but that fullness of life, that abundance of life, that quality of life which God has for us. So in verse 17, Paul says, "Let God be thanked because you were slaves of sin but you obeyed from the heart." So it makes that contrast.
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It's very strong in the Greek. God be thanked because you were slaves of sin but you obeyed, that is, you responded by faith and you obeyed the teaching that you were given and as a result of that you started growing to maturity. Verse 18 says, "Having been freed from sin... [actually this is an aorist passive participle that's temporal; it should be "when you were set free from sin.] When were we set free from sin? We are set free from the power of the sin nature at salvation. "When you were set free from sin you became..." The word there indicates you became something you weren't before, "you became a slave of righteousness."
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The point he's making is that when you and I trusted in Christ as our Savior, at that instant, we quit being a slave to the sin nature in terms of our position, and in terms of our identity, and in terms of legal ownership and we became the legal property of God. But we still like to run away from God and go back to our old master. The point he's making here is that when you were set free from sin which is when you trusted in Christ as your Savior, you became a slave of righteousness. When you become a new creature in Christ, part of that is you become a slave of righteousness. Now he says in verse 19, "I'm speaking in terms of..." What he means is that he's using a human analogy from our common experience to try to help understand this difficult concept. So he just says, "I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh."
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Then he explains this a little further by saying, "For just as you presented your members (your body) as slaves of uncleanness...." That's just another term for talking about the works of the sin nature. "Just as you offered your body as slaves of uncleanness and lawlessness...which led to more lawlessness, that's as an unbeliever, so he says, "Now present your members as slaves of righteousness for sanctification." So a change has taken place because now we're a new creature in Christ rather than making a decision to let the sin nature control us, we have to make a decision to not let the sin nature control us.
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There's more to it than that. We have to be empowered by the Holy Spirit. That doesn't come in until . Here in , he's laying the foundation so we understand the whole transformation that's taken place from the moment of our salvation. Then he lays it out in the last four verses of the chapter. He says, "For when you were slaves of sin..." That is, when you were an unbeliever you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What that means is, you were independent of righteousness. In other words, when you were a sinner, there's no righteousness in your life. That's "All our righteousness is as filthy rags." . "All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way." We're all sinners so when you were a slave to sin, an unbeliever, you were free. In other words, there was no righteousness in your life.
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Notice how he explains this. I've circled "for" as an explanation and then there's a question at the beginning of verse 21 and he answers it "for the end of those things is death but...[contrast]. Then a last explanation stated in verse 23. The goal of all this is the idea of fruit of holiness. Remember the last part of verse 19 says we're to be slaves of righteousness for holiness, or sanctification. We're to be producing fruit for sanctification. Let's go to verse 20, "For when you were free from sin, you were slaves to righteousness." Now in verse 21, he asks the question, "What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now saying?" What was the production?
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Fruit is the end result of a growing plant. It's the production, so he says, what was the production, what was the end result of all those things you did as an unbeliever, under the power of the sin nature, of which you're now ashamed? For the end result of that, he says, is death. For the unbeliever living under the power of the sin nature just produces corruption. It just produces death. Everything is negative.
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The contrast in verse 22 is, "having now been set free from sin...that is, set free from the control of the sin nature...and having become slaves of God, you have fruit or production to holiness or to sanctification and the end is everlasting life." Now, wait a minute, you say. Didn't we get eternal life when we were justified. Well, yes. That's just life without end with God. Here, because the topic starting in the middle of chapter 5 was no longer how to get to heaven or how to be justified, it's how does a justified person experience the fullness of life.
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Now we see that he has shifted and he's clearly talking about how we experience sanctification which brings us the fullness of everlasting life. Not just quantity but quality. And so I've charted this (CHART) this way that sin produces death. That's the end result of living as either an unbeliever under the power of the sin nature or as a believer under the sin nature. The end result is corruption and death and destruction.
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But obedience produces the fruit of righteousness which brings with it sanctification, or spiritual growth, and the experience of eternal life. Now this righteousness here that comes from obedience isn't the righteousness of justification because that's by faith. This is by obedience. This is the experiential righteousness that comes with spiritual growth. So the righteousness here is experiential which means the sanctification is experiential and the eternal life is experiential.
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He's not talking about what happens after we die here. He's talking about happens between now and the time we die. Between now and the time we die physically, we can grow and the Holy Spirit produces genuine righteousness, experiential righteousness in our life. This is sanctification and spiritual growth and its eternal life that we can enjoy right now.
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Well, how do we do that? This is the big struggle for the Apostle Paul in the next chapter. How do we do that? Do we just go out and make ourselves be obedient? And the answer, of course, we know to that is that just doesn't work. So chapter 7 to me is one of the dark chapters in the Bible because it's a hopeless chapter. It's Paul trying to fulfill without the Holy Spirit, just on the basis of his own morality, just on the basis of his own will and he ends up just absolutely, totally frustrated and depressed because he can't do it.
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Then we get into which is the high point because in we learn it has to be done through the power of God the Holy Spirit. So we'll come back next time to get into chapter 7. But just as we close, and this makes it clear, that the fruit we're talking about in verse 22 to sanctification is to everlasting life. That's not what happens after you die but before you die. That means when you get to , the gift of God is eternal life, that's not talking about the life after we die. In context, it's got to be the life before you die. "The wages of sin...."
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He's explaining the principle so it has application to the unbeliever because he's stating a universal principle because the payment, what you earn from sin, is death. Whether you're an unbeliever living totally under the power of the sin nature, you earn what you get paid... it's death. It's temporal but for the unbeliever that ends up in eternal death. For the believer, because sanctification is by grace just like salvation is, it's that free gift of the abundant life we have, the potential of which was given us at the instant of salvation.

Romans 074b-Freed from the Law

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 074b-Freed from the Law
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I want to start off tonight by talking about presuppositions. This may not be a word commonly used by you so we need to determine if this is just a fancy word or a critical concept. A presupposition is an assumption. These are often unconscious assumptions, beliefs that we have accepted as true, that act as a traffic cop in our thinking in ways that we don't always appreciate.
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We all have presuppositions. We have a couple of recent examples with this that have to do with all the things going on with the attacks in Libya last week. On 9/11/12 we heard news reports about attacks going on at the Embassy there. Then later that evening we heard the attacks had caused the death of our ambassador to Libya plus three more who were associated with the embassy. This is an extremely significant situation.
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The next morning I listened to two mainstream media news stations. I didn't necessarily agree with their take on the situation so I switched over to Fox News. They had a panel of three, including one who usually represents a more liberal viewpoint, and they were all agreed that this was an act of war. I never heard this on the other news shows that morning. That reflects how these two different groups of people, not necessarily all conservatives, interpreted the events that they saw. The mainstream media did not see the lowering of the U.S. flag and the raising of an Islamist flag over the American Embassy as an act of war. Up until recently, that would certainly have been viewed as an act of war.
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All of this has to do with the mindset that people bring to certain circumstances. That's governed by a presupposition. The presupposition that has governed this administration (I'm not doing this to pick on this administration but it's just such a wonderful example of how presuppositions affect our decisions) has been to not mention Islamists in connection with terrorism. We pick up many assumptions from the culture around us, family, friends, peers, and professors that shape our thinking and our opinions. Some of these are human viewpoint, some are Divine viewpoint, and these been the controlling way we immediately perceive and interpret events.
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Last week immediately after these things become known on Wednesday morning, Romney came out and criticized the administration because their initial reaction was apologize, apologize, apologize. Once he came out and commented on the fact they were portraying a weakness toward Islamist countries by apologizing then Romney became the target. The fact that there was this initial response that it was our fault because someone did something that offended them, shows a mindset, an assumption about reality that has become increasingly embedded in certain segments of our culture. With this administration, there has been a conscious removal of any mention of Islamists, radical Islamists, Koran-believing Islamists, as the source of terrorism. According to them, all this terrorist activity is just a coincidence that happens to involve a lot of people who have gone to training camps in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who knew they would have this belief? What a coincidence but we're not going to identify them in any way as being Arab or Muslim. We're only going to identify them as criminals.
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As a result of that presupposition in this administration, as they've gone through all the training manuals in the FBI, counter-terrorism organizations, they've removed any verbiage related to Islamists, Islamist terrorists, anything like that. It's just expunged from the official documents. That's the presupposition that there's no Islamic terrorism out there. So when you get warnings, like we received about things that might happen in Cairo and Benghazi, that there may be a terrorism event, because you've put on the wrong-colored glasses governed by this presupposition, you discount it. They firmly believe that Islamic terrorism does not exist.
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Now, a week later, the evidence is overwhelming. The administration and spokesman, Jay Carney, have had to do a 180 degree turn. They never admit they've had to change their mind and they're still claiming Mitt Romney just shot from the hip. He drew and he fired without taking aim. Wait a minute. The reason you see a difference is because the presupposition from the conservative objective is that the terrorist are energized by an Islamic worldview and they do exist. So when something happens on 9/11 and there's an attack on the American Embassy, we can pretty well put two and two together and assume this was an orchestrated assault that had something to do with their marking of 9/11 and instantly label it as a terrorist event. Why? It's a totally difference presupposition. It's just an underlying, deeply-submerged belief system about what's going on in reality. When people see certain things they can change their presuppositions if they'll be objective. Those presuppositions can shape how they interpret certain things.
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Another example that came out in the news yesterday were stories about an ancient text that talks about Jesus' wife. The person who is really behind this story of a fragment of a manuscript is a woman, Karen King, a professor at Harvard. The news media do not understand any of these issues. The Daily Mail says, “if genuine, this document casts doubt on a centuries-old, official representation of Mary Magdalene as a repentant whore and overturns the Christian ideal of sexual abstinence.” If you read the fragment, you can't see any of that out of it, but there's just this presupposition negativity toward Christianity. They believe that Christianity is just a lot of mumbo-jumbo that Christians hold on to.
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Karen King is extremely liberal and she's the Harvard professor who came up with this. One article said, “Karen King needs Jesus to have a wife so she can have a future career.” That really nails it. Her presupposition is that nothing we have in the New Testament is trustworthy at all. You can find fragments of gnostic gospels from 100-400 years after Jesus lived that tell more about Jesus than you can by going to first century documents by people who actually witnessed the life of Jesus. That's her presupposition.
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(CHART) Here's the fragment that seems to be the suggestion but no one knows who owns it. It's provenance is unknown; no one knows where it was found. It wasn't discovered in its original location so no one knows how to properly evaluate it. Once any archaeological artifact is removed from its original location it becomes basically useless for demonstrating anything because you no longer have a context for it.
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It's written in Coptic which is the original language used by Egyptian Christians in Egypt. It's a derivative of a hieroglyphic language and one scholar expressed tremendous skepticism. Scholars are quoted in a Tyndale House press release on the topic and they're not even sure it's good Coptic. I was reading on a textual literary discussion group that I am a member of and they were just scoffing at this. They said it was written by someone who barely knew Coptic; someone who barely spoke it. It's just a patchwork quilt, really bad Coptic. Most believe it's some kind of forgery and the fact that no one knows who owns it, where it came from, or where it was found makes it seem as any claim to anything but a forgery would be impossible. Yet the media is making a big, big deal out of this because they're going to say “Oh, so Jesus had a wife. We can prove the New Testament is wrong, etc. etc. etc.”
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This is the translation of it. Each of the numbers represent a line on the text. You have the front and the back. The brackets represent where there's something missing so in between those brackets are all that we have. The first line reads, “Not to me. My mother gave to me.” Then you have “li” and the word is assumed to be “life”. The second line, “The disciples said to Jesus...” The third line, “Mary is worthy of it...” Fourth line, “Jesus said to them, my wife...” Fifth line, “She will be my disciple...” Sixth line, “Let wicked people swell up...” Seventh line, “As for me I dwell with her in order to....” Eighth line, “An image....” Then on the back, “My (looks like it might be mother”) then three and a couple of black lines and then “forthwith.”
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It doesn't really say a whole lot but they extrapolate that this gives us some basic information about Jesus. Why do they do that? Because they have this mindset, this presuppositional framework, that the New Testament can't be what it claims to be. It can't possibly be an even accurate historic document. Karen King was a member of what was called the Jesus Seminar which started back in 1985. This was a group of extremely liberal scholars who took 10 to 15 years evaluating the New Testament with their colored pens, going along and trying to decide what the historical Jesus would have said. Now the term “the historical Jesus” doesn't mean what you think it means. In scholarly code language that means the information we know to be true about Jesus that didn't come from anything in the New Testament, which we can't trust. In other words, what they mean is anything we get outside the New Testament which we trust. Their presupposition is that anything we get outside the New Testament because, their presuppositional-grid is, the New Testament can't be trusted. When they see something like this, they get all excited and all a-quiver because they're going to trust this more than they're going to trust something from 150 years earlier. If you're not careful or aware of your own presuppositions, then you lose all objectivity.
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That happens in all kinds of studies and that happens in the passage we're looking at tonight in . is a transitional paragraph from which gives us the foundation, the doctrinal foundation, for the spiritual life in the Church Age, that leads to another discussion in where Paul is going to show that simple morality or following the moral aspect of the Mosaic Law just isn't enough to give us spirituality. forms the transition there and in the middle of that, Paul uses an illustration from just a small snapshot of what the Old Testament teaches about divorce. Unfortunately, because of the presuppositional grid of a lot of Christians, they come to this and they look at verses 2 and 3 as if Paul is giving us a definitive explanation of the doctrine of divorce and remarriage and he's not. All he's doing is taking one small aspect of what is taught in the Mosaic Law and he's using that to illustrate a principle that he's talking about in .
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We always have to be careful at those little presuppositions and study the text and let it speak for itself. As we get started here we have to remember that if we ever take the text out of the context we're left with a con job. Context in Bible study or any kind of literary or legal study is like location in real estate. It's the same thing. In real estate it's talking about a physical, geographical location and its context is talking about a literary location so when you read a paragraph its always in a context. The context of is in the context of this three chapter section where Paul is dealing with the basis for and how believers are to live the Christian life.
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In , the context is on the foundation for our spiritual life which is what happens at the instant we trust in Christ as Savior. At that instant we are legally identified with Him in His death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus Christ uses the Holy Spirit to identify us with His death, burial, and resurrection so that the result is we become a new creature in Christ and we are entered into the body of Christ. Now that last phrase is important because Paul refers to this again in , “My brethren you also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ” so that connects it back. So contextually comes right out and flows from what he says in . We have to understand what Paul is saying in .
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I've put up this little chart (CHART) here to compare the two. talks about the way we were before we were saved. We were “alive to sin”. We were a “slave of sin” in . That means there's no positive righteousness in our life as an unbeliever. We are completely controlled by the sin nature. The sin nature not only produces those horrible nasty things that we talk of as sin, whether they're overt sins, such as murder, or genocide, or criminality, or rape or things of that nature or whether we're talking about sins of the tongue, such as slander or gossip, or whether we're talking about emotional sins/mental attitude sins such as anger, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, sexual lust, any kind of lust, all those make up unseen and immaterial sins.
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Those are all produced by our area of weakness in our sin nature but out sin nature also produces good because there are many good things done by our sin nature. There are many unbelievers who have a great sense of moral rectitude. They have a great sense of moral integrity. It’s not necessarily spiritual. There are Islamic believers who are very rigid in their observance of their law. That is a sense of moral rectitude. It would differ from us.
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Jehovah's Witness is a Christian heresy that does not believe in the full deity of Jesus Christ. For them there was a time when Jesus began as a human and then they think he receives deity so they don't believe Jesus is fully God. They don't really have payment for sin. They believe you have to work your way to heaven so you better be good. You have many people in works-oriented religions like Islam or Jehovah's Witnesses and they're working their way to heaven. Sadly they're much more trustworthy than many Christians because they're afraid they're going to lose eternal salvation if they commit certain sins.
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The same thing is true with Mormonism. Mormonism is not a monotheistic religion as many people claim because in Mormonism, any Christian can eventually be good enough to become a god in the next life. They really have a polytheistic religion, a works-oriented religion. The only way you can make sure you're good enough to get into the next life is to make sure you're fulfilling all the ritual and all the moral requirements of Mormonism. Unless, of course, you're a woman. You have to do all of that plus you have to please your husband because when's he's resurrected in the next life he will ask you to join him. That's the sad thing in Mormonism. Women can't get there without the men. That's one of the reasons why in the 19th century, Mormonism had polygamy as part of their doctrines because there were many more women than men and if women can't get into heaven without a man, then they had many wives per man. The other reason was that Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were sexual perverts. Joseph Smith made his elders give their wives to him to sleep with as a sign that their loyalty and devotion to him. So there's a lot of really strange things that went on. Usually, modern Mormons try to cover that up, ignore it. It's not part of what they do today that we know of. Who knows what goes on inside the secret temple services in a Mormon wedding? So there are many moral things that an unbeliever can do. So just because someone is not a believer doesn't mean they don't have a sense of moral rectitude. But they're still a slave to their sin nature and they cannot produce any kind of righteousness.
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After we're saved, Paul says, we're dead to sin. It doesn't mean the sin nature is gone. It doesn't say the sin nature is dead to us but that we're dead to the sin nature. The sin nature doesn't have the same control. In
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he says, “We're justified or freed from sin.” In 6:19 he shifts to the word “freed” “eleutheroo” and we are no longer a slave to the sin nature; we're a slave to God.
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Nobody is free. You're either a slave to the sin nature or you're a slave to God but you're not free. There's no in-between position. There's no neutrality there. You're one or the other. Before you're saved, you're exclusively a slave to the sin nature. After you're saved you're positionally a slave to righteousness but we use our volition to say, “Yeah I want to go back to the leeks and garlics of my sin nature, so to speak, I want to go back and put myself under its control. It was so comfortable there. I had so many wonderful, comfortable habits that my sin nature provided for me that when life gets a little tense it's a lot easier to let my sin nature solve my problems so I'll just go back to the dominion of my sin nature rather than to try to trust Christ.” That gets awfully threatening to actually trust in a promise of Scripture. Therefore rather than trust in the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and living in the power of the Holy Spirit, I'm just going to go back to my comfort zone of the sin nature.” And that's the real challenge for us to make that kind of decision.
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So the argument in is that we're dead to sin. We're justified from the sin nature; we're free from the power of the tyranny of the sin nature and we now become a slave to God and a slave to righteousness. . In Paul simply advances that in relation to the Law rather than talking about being dead to sin, he moves our thinking down the field a little bit. He also says we're dead to the Law. In , he doesn't say the Law died; we are dead to the law just as we have been justified from sin and freed from sin we are now free from the Law in 7:3. That tie to the Law has been abolished, removed. It's been completely nullified in 7:7 for the purpose that we can now live in the Spirit. That's the end game.
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We're not free from the Law so that we can go fulfill every fantasy, every lust of our sin nature. We're freed from the Law so that we can now serve God, so we can be slaves of righteousness and so we can put into practice in our life the principles that God has revealed in Scripture. We're not free to do as we want to do but so we can serve Him.
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As we get into and we look at this transition, the focus has shifted now from being free from the authority of the sin nature and free from the authority of the Law. There are basically two issues that have to be resolved as we look at these first 6 verses. The first is: what is the meaning of Law? says, “Or do you not know brethren, for I speak to those who knew the Law....” Who would that be? Who knew the Law? Is it Mosaic Law? Is it Roman or Greek Law? Or is it just law in general? So that's the question.
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The second question is: What's the significance of this marriage illustration that he brings in in verses 2 and 3? Let me give you a little hint in terms if you're reading something and you're not sure how it fits, go to the conclusion. Take a look at how the author uses it to reach his conclusion and that will tell you the way that he is using that illustration. Just because an author uses that illustration doesn't mean he's talking about everything related to that illustration. If he's a very good writer he may just be focusing on a very fine point in that illustration and that's what allows him to go to his conclusion. And the conclusion narrows our understanding of the illustration.
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Let's look at the first issue which is this word “law”. The Greek word is “nomos”. We use the word “anti-nomian” sometimes. “Anti” means against and nomian comes from this word “nomos” for law. It means someone who is lawless, someone who just wants to live anyway they would like to. It's translated a number of ways and has a number of meanings, depending upon the context. It can refer to a law in general, a principle, it can refer specifically to the Mosaic Law. It can refer to any law code in general. It can refer to natural law or it can refer to revealed law or revealed principles or revealed absolutes.
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So this is part of the question. Now when we look at this, we have to ask who Paul is addressing. He's addressing a group of believers who are in the capital city of Rome. And a large segment of this congregation have a Jewish background. They are Jewish background believers so a lot of what Paul has said in this epistle is directly related to those who come to Christianity with a previous mindset which was shaped by the Torah, their study of the Mosaic Law.
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He spends a lot of time in the last part of , , and the first part of showing that righteousness cannot come from the observance of the Law. He's not talking about law in general but about the Mosaic Law in specific. When he finishes , he builds to this tremendous crescendo in a couple of verses that are well known to us where Paul concludes by saying, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”
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He's built to this great conclusion but there's some questions in the back row. “Now wait a minute. We're Jewish. God said He would always love us but He's getting ready to kick our butt. God doesn't love the Jews anymore because we rejected the Messiah. How can you say that God's love can't be lost?” So Paul then in , , and 11 answers that question why God's love has not been finally or totally lost by the Jewish people. God still has a plan and a purpose for the Jewish people and they will ultimately come to salvation. That's how , , and 11 fits within that particular argument.
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So this Jewish background of his audience is really important for understanding what Paul is saying. When you realize that, it's a little less likely that when Paul talks about law in this epistle, that he is talking about Roman law or Greek law or just law in general. As a matter of fact, the word “law” in Romans never refers to anything but the Mosaic Law. is a highly debated passage for almost everything that's in here.
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When the word “nomos” appears in this verse, it doesn't have an article with it. In English the definite article “the” identifies something in terms of its uniqueness or singularity. For example if we just use an indefinite article “an apple” could be any apple in the category of apples. But if we're talking about “the apple” we're talking about a specific apple. The definite article in English identifies a specific entity within a group or category. In Greek the article has nothing to do with how it's used in English. There are a lot of different ways how an article or the lack of an article can be used in Greek. In a number of contexts, including this one, the absence of an article makes the noun more specific than the presence of the article.
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It sounds backwards but we have somewhat of a similar example in English, especially British and Canadian English. They don't go to “the hospital” or “the university”; they go to “hospital” or “university”. It's because that is viewed as a certain kind of noun that is of a certain class that is more definite inherently. Like the word “God” in . “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” There's no article there.
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Jehovah Witnesses, when they come knock on our door, will tell us that because when it says “the Word was God” there's no article there it's not the God, it's a god. See, they say it's not saying it was God, it's just a god. That's because they don't understand the role of the article in Greek; that the absence of the article emphasizes the quality, the uniqueness of the noun itself. There are many places in Romans where the law “nomos” does not have the article with it yet it clearly is referring to the Mosaic Law. Passages such as , , and 2:25, the whole section we covered in chapter 2 and in 3:31, 4: 13-14, . These are all places where “law” occurs without the article. Clearly from context, it refers to the Mosaic Law.
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The word “law” refers some 195 times in the New Testament and 180 of those 195 uses refer to the Mosaic Law so your presupposition when you see the word “nomos” in the New Testament is that it's the Mosaic Law. There's only 15 out of 195 uses; that's about 7 and a half percent that are not referring to the Mosaic Law. So if you think it's the Mosaic Law, it's got about a 93 percent chance of being the Mosaic Law. In Romans, it never refers to just law in general or Greek Law or Roman Law. It always refer to the Mosaic Law.
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The Mosaic Law was this covenant God made with the Jewish people. That's also important to understand because the Mosaic Law isn't all of the Old Testament. The Mosaic Law comes into effect at a certain point in history. When did that occur? It occurs on Mt. Sinai when God gave the Law to Moses. It's much broader than the Ten Commandments. There are actually 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law.
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It was designed to be temporary but it was like a constitution for a country. In the United States we have our Constitution and our Constitution defines the laws of the United States. In the United States it is illegal; it is a felony, to commit murder. Does that make murder wrong in England? No. British Law provides the basis for why murder is wrong in Britain. In other countries you have similar laws. What they reflect, though, is a universal principle behind that. So murder doesn't become a sin because it's in the Mosaic Law. It was a sin all the way back when Cain killed Abel in Genesis, chapter 4. It's not stated in terms of a negative until you get to in the Noahic Covenant and then “thou shalt not murder” which is literally what the word means in the Ten Commandments in Exodus.
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So the Mosaic Law is a law code defining how the Jewish nation, the Hebrew people, would live. Remember what happened in the Old Testament. God called Abraham and He said, through you I'm going to develop a people through whom I will bless the entire world. There's going to come a time, He said, when they're going to spend 430 years outside of this land that I promised you but I will be faithful to My promise and I will bring them back.” So Abraham and his son, Isaac, and his son, Jacob, and Jacob's boys all lived in the land that God promised and then God brought this famine into the Middle East and He provided a way by all that through Joseph for them to be taken out of the land down to Egypt where over a period of 400 years they developed into a mighty nation of about two and a half to about three million people.
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When they came out of Egypt, Egypt became a picture in the Old Testament of slavery to sin. God's bringing them out and providing freedom for the Jewish people was a picture of what God would do in future salvation in freeing us from the tyranny of sin. The Jewish nation is viewed now as a redeemed nation. Not that everyone in there is redeemed; not that everyone in there is justified but the nation is treated as a redeemed nation.
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The next thing that has to happen after everyone is redeemed or saved is what: how do you live? So the first thing God does is give them the Mosaic Law to show how this unique, holy nation or set-apart nation is going to live, set apart to the service of God. God called them to be a holy nation, a holy priesthood, a nation among nations that God would work with. The Mosaic Law was designed to set them apart as a nation. What's a more Biblical word for set apart? Sanctified. God would sanctify them as a nation. That didn't mean that's how they got saved or justified but that's how a justified nation, a set-apart nation positionally, would live practically by the observance of all the commands and prohibitions in the Mosaic Law.
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So the Mosaic Law was a covenant or contract that God made with Israel and this is how they were to live. Those stipulations, while they, the laws relating to murder, might reflect universal attributes reflecting in other law codes, the laws in the Mosaic Law did not apply to Assyrians, Egyptians, or to anybody else in the ancient world. Just as the British laws do not apply to citizens of the United States. It's a different law code. The reason I'm saying that is because when we get into the section on marriage in verses 2 and 3, he is specifically talking about the stipulations in the Mosaic Law. He's not talking about any other law code and there were stipulations in every other law code in the ancient world related to marriage and divorce because this reflected a Divine institution, something we're forgetting today. That's why I'm belaboring this particular point that we can understand this. The other question that's going to come up in this chapter is: why the Law? Was the Law good? I'd had people say the Law was really bad. No, the Pharisaical interpretation of the Law was really bad but the Law was good. That's the testimony of the New Testament. That's what Paul will say later on in Romans, chapter 7. In he says through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. The purpose of the Law was not just to justify or it wasn't really even to provide spiritual growth. Ritual observance taught things but it didn't provide spiritual growth in and of itself. Through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. It was through the Mosaic Law that we learned how sinful we really are. Before the Law we had a pretty good idea we were sinful but the Law teaches us about all the things that can make you unclean and if you're trying to observe the Law, it's like, “wow, I can't do anything; if I touch certain things, if I go certain places, I'm always got this problem of uncleanness.” Yes, God's making the point how sinful we are. That sin permeates everything. , Paul says, “The Law came in that the transgression might increase.” See, the more we understood the Law, the more we realized how sinful we really were.
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, Paul said, “We know that the Law is good, inherently good, because it came from God. The Law is good if we use it lawfully.” The Pharisees were not using the Law lawfully. They were making it a means of righteousness so that is why it was used wrongly and was distorted. It wasn't designed to make us righteous. Now as we look at this context by way of introduction, Paul makes a statement in where he comes to a conclusion in that first major section in chapter 6 where he says, “for sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace.”
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That's the first mention of Law in this discussion of the spiritual life. A change is taking place. Immediately Paul realizes there's somebody in that audience that is going to distort what he says. If you've ever taught anything, you always wonder what people actually hear. Every now and then someone will say, “I remember when you taught this.” I don't think so.
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I've been in situations like when I taught in Russia the first time, August of 2000, and we were teaching in just this very primitive building and it was about 110 degrees outside and we'd landed at 2:00 in the morning and I had no idea where my brain was. The room is jammed with students with one small window unit to try to cool the temperature down so it was all the way down to 95 degrees and there's not a place where you could put another body in the room. Pam hadn't slept any at night. She was sitting on the back row and I could tell she was sound asleep with those sunglasses on so nobody could tell.
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One side of the room spoke Russian only and the other side spoke Kazak only so I had two interpreters. What I didn't realize going in was that only parts of the New Testament had been translated into Kazak and none of the Old Testament had been translated into Kazak. So the Kazak interpreter was listening to the Russian interpreter. When the Russian interpreter would cite the text and verse, the Kazak interpreter is translating it on the fly without knowing the Old Testament. I just wondered if anyone was getting anything even close to what I'm trying to communicate.
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It's always interesting to hear what people get. Paul recognizes this. He says, “For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace.” He sees the wheels turning between the ears and he knows people are going to say, “We're not under Law. Let's go party. We can do whatever we want to do.” So he immediately stops his main line of thinking and goes off on a slight tangent to deal with a possible distortion which is stated in verse 15, “What then, shall we sin because we're not under Law but under grace? Certainly not. May it never be.” So verses 15-23 is really dealing with that issue.
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takes us to this point where it says “You're not under Law but under Grace.” picks up the train of thought where he says, “Don't you know, brethren, for I speak to those who know the Law, that the Law has dominion over a man as long as he lives?” He's dealing with the fact and can say that the Law ends. Because the Law ends we have a new relationship with God that's not related to the Law. As I pointed out when we studied that, “under Law” relates to the Dispensation of the Law prior to the Cross. The Cross was the end of the Law, Paul says in . The Law ends at the Cross and what begins after that is the Age of Grace or the Church Age. The terms are used somewhat synonymously. The Church refers to the main group that God is working with in this dispensation. Grace is His primary modus operandi in the Church Age.
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That doesn't mean there wasn't grace all through history. We've all been saved through faith by grace. But grace wasn't the dominant feature under the Mosaic Law and just as we're not under Law any more doesn't mean there aren't any absolutes or principles or mandates. There are probably more or as many commands in the New Testament as there were in the Law. We still have absolutes and there's still a protocol plan God has given us. There's still a standard of behavior for members of the Royal Family of God.
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He comes back to this point in verse 1 to show that Law has dominion as long as a man lives but after you die you're not responsible for observing the Shabbat and resting on the 7th day of every week. You're not responsible for tithing. You're not responsible for observing all the feast days. As a male, you don't have to make your pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year because when you die, the Law no longer has any application to you. You're free from the Law. That's his point.
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He then makes an illustration in verses 2 and 3 and then we get to a conclusion in verse 4. Note the conclusion: “Therefore, my brethren...” The fact that he uses the term brethren indicates he's talking to believers, not unbelievers. There's a clear assumption here that believers cannot do what he's saying to do which means believers can sin just as badly and just as perversely as they did before they were saved. Just because you're saved doesn't mean you're not going to be able to sin in certain ways or that you won't sin in certain ways.
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That's important because there's a lot of people in Christendom who think that if you're truly saved then there are certain things you won't do. So, you think “so and so did that. He must not be a Christian.” No, they're just living like they did before they were saved. Verse 4 says, “Therefore my brethren, you also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ.” That's his whole point in this illustration is that a death separates us from the authority of Law. That's all he's saying.
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He's going to use an illustration from marriage that marriage is a contract but when death occurs, that contract ends. It's no longer applicable to the husband and wife once death occurs. He's not giving a discourse on divorce and remarriage. He says too little or not enough for this to be a discourse on divorce and remarriage. There are too many other things that need to be talked about. You have to go to , . You have to look at 1 Corinthians, chapter 6 and 7. You have to look at some Old Testament passages to get the whole doctrine of marriage in the Scripture. He's only focusing on one thing; that when there is a legally binding contract, when death occurs, that contract is not binding anymore. So he uses that one aspect of marriage to illustrate that.
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This is seen in the conclusion when he says, “You also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ that you may be married to another, which is Jesus Christ.” All he's talking about here is that now we have a new authority. Before we were saved in chapter 6, he talked about the fact that we were under the authority or dominion of the sin nature and now after we're saved, we're slaves to righteousness, slaves to God. This is just saying it in a different way.
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Like a wife is under the authority of her husband before he dies, after he dies, she's free to marry another. She marries another and that's the new authority. He's just building on the same concept we have in chapter 6 that we now have a new authority. Notice what he says that there's a purpose in this, “...for the purpose that we should bear fruit to God.” That's why we're saved, to grow to maturity and to produce fruit for God, both in terms of our own spiritual maturity, in serving God in many different ways.
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Bearing fruit to God is a broad concept related to both an internal character, fruit of the Spirit, as well as external service. It does not imply what Lordship people say, “See, if you don't bear fruit, you're not saved.” No this isn't saying that. It's saying that the purpose for your justification was so that you would have the potential to bear fruit. It doesn't say that you will necessarily bear fruit. That's your decision. You've been saved for the purpose of bearing fruit unto God. That's why God made all this incredible transformation in our lives. So are we going to activate that or not? That's our decision.
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Next time we'll come back and finish up the transition opening and get into the whole problem with the Law and confusing morality with spirituality in the rest of the chapter.

Romans 075b-If the Law was Perfect, The Spirit is Beyond Perfect

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 075b-If the Law was Perfect, The Spirit is Beyond Perfect
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Open your Bible to Romans chapter 7. We'll continue our study of how the believer is dead to the Law but first a couple of announcements. One is to give you a little update on my dad. Not much has changed. Just little glitches here and there show up. He is still in the VA Hospital and still waiting on alternative places to send him. Because he's under VA care, my options are limited to places, nursing homes and medical foster homes that are contracted with the VA. That will involve places to go look at and will probably involve a lot of time. Fortunately, as I mentioned last week, I have good health. He is comfortable and not in pain and doing well. He continues to surprise them. One day they think he's going to die in 36 hours, because they don't know him, and when he gets a little more rest, he springs back.
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We are, as human beings, incredibly tenacious about hanging to life. That's how God made us. It takes a lot longer for us to go. It's all in God's hands. So I'm very comfortable with that. There's things that I learn as I go through that; that when we minister to people I'm always thinking about when the apostle Paul talks about how we comfort others with the comfort which we've been comforted. So there's an important learning process we all go through which helps us as we encourage, comfort, and minister to one another in the body of Christ.
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One of the things I have noticed before but it's always a little different when you go through it yourself, is that as we deal with people who are strong believers and they are facing loss in their life, they go through it in different ways. It may be loss of parents, loss of spouse, loss of children and that loss impacts their life in different ways so they go through their grief. Strong believers understand that when this person dies, they're absent from the body and face to face with the Lord, especially when you're looking at an older person such as a parent who has lived a good life and is a solid believer. It's hard to watch them suffer because you don't like that but you know that they need to go ahead and be with the Lord but there's a reason why they're there even though you don't understand it. There's a reason why God leaves them there to teach others things.
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It's not the fact, as it is with unbelievers, that someone is dying; it's the fact that all of the collateral issues in life, the legal issues, the hospital hassle, and all of the other stuff that comes along, is distracting. It often seems overwhelming because you just don't know what it is. Even in my own thinking I find that it's not that I'm worried. There are levels of uncertainty. You trust the Lord but it's a matter of all this extra stuff that needs to be done.
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So often I think about our Lord as He went to the Cross. He was under such emotional pressure in the Garden of Gethsemane that he sweated blood. The pressure was there. He felt it. There's nothing wrong with those feelings. Sometimes we get the feeling that if we're really trusting God we're going to just be peaceful and have joy and we're not going to feel the overwhelming reality of the circumstances. We think it's not going to get heavy and maybe even oppressive. I didn't say depressive; I said oppressive because it's serious; there's a lot that's there. Our Lord never sinned even when He felt that pressure and that should comfort us.
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You don't deny the loss; you don't deny all the pressure and everything else that may go with it at different times when it weighs on you. That's not a failure to trust. It's the reality of the circumstances. I hope that encourages some people as we all face these things. It's not a problem to feel the weight of the circumstances; our Lord certainly did. The problem is when we let that move us into areas of carnality. It's how we respond to that that's important. It's not that we have those feelings or those emotions.
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The other thing I wanted to update you on was this little nasty thing that made the front pages last week about this scrap of a fragment of an alleged gnostic gospel. It was allegedly the scrap of a 4th century gnostic gospel. From my readings in the past week a couple of things have come out. There's a lot of doubt whether it is indeed legitimate. This evening when I was trying to find Prime Minister's Netanyahu's speech on TV, I happened to catch an item in the scroll going across the bottom that the Vatican had come out with a paper claiming that this was a fake. So they've looked at it; they think it's a fake. Another aspect of this is that it seems to be a line copied out of part of a gospel of Thomas. The line that's in there that alludes to a wife for Jesus is a really an obscure line but that kind of language is often used as the Church is the Bride of Christ. You find that in some of the orthodox literature at the time just because of that phraseology. The wife of Christ could be translated to mean the Bride of Christ. Anyway, it's written in Coptic and it's bad Coptic. Scholars I've read about have dismissed it as a complete fake or fraud. Now they haven't had the time yet to do the test on the ink and parchment it's written on and things of that nature. In terms of just the superficial evidence, it seems like this is a fake. So I just thought I would update you on that. You don't have to lose any sleep over that in the coming weeks.
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We're getting into some great material in Romans chapter 7. I was talking to Dan Inghram on my way to class tonight. We were just going over some things and I was telling him a little bit about the conference next week about dispensations. I'm on this panel next week to say some things about how dispensational theology impacts how and what I teach from the pulpit. I was just reflecting on this as I was studying today.
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In Romans 7, I wonder how someone can work their way through without at least a rudimentary dispensational framework. What we understand going back to is that Paul lays the groundwork for talking about sanctification with the Baptism by the Spirit. When we reflect back what we've gone through as a congregation in the last three years as we've studied Colossians, Romans, and Acts, we saw the same type of argument in Colossians, chapter 2 starting in about verse 5 or 6 where Paul lays the groundwork for the Baptism by the Holy Spirit and continued to use that kind of language through the core section of Colossians.
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At the same time we're in Acts where we have issues related to covenants; we've dealt with issues related to the New Covenant, the whole message of the Kingdom and repentance and how these things have all come together. As a pastor, as I've been studying this, it comes together and things get clarified in my thinking. It's not that I didn't understand something; it's just that it comes into brighter light and it comes together as Scripture is compared to Scripture and more light is shed on these passages.
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is one of those particular issues, especially in the first part, such as . Just to direct your attention to the end of this opening introductory hinge paragraph, as I pointed out last time. Paul says, “But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died to what we were held by...” So we were held by the Law. The Law's not dead but we are dead to it now. He goes on to say “...for the purpose that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit.” Notice here he mentions the Spirit for the first time in these 3 chapters and it's a contrast with the Law. Now that's very important to understand... that the Law is contrasted with the Holy Spirit. And then he says, “...that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter [of the Law].”
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Now that terminology to refer to the letter of the Law is really developed in where he talks about the “Spirit gives life but the letter kills.” This is a really difficult passage that I've often had questions about but all of these are related. It all is important to understand because these passages address this issue that Christians have had such problems understanding this down through the years. What is the role of the Mosaic Law in the Church Age? What is the purpose of the Mosaic Law in the Church Age?
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Beyond that we even have problems understanding what was the role of the Mosaic Law in the Age of the Law. How many of us have been under the impression at one time or another that the observance of the Mosaic Law was a means to salvation in the Old Testament? Or a means to sanctification in the Old Testament? How well do we understand the concept of personal experiential growth in the Old Testament under the Dispensation of the Law when they didn't have the Spirit? This whole concept of the Baptism by the Spirit being foundational to understanding the distinction between this dispensation and the previous dispensation becomes larger and larger in my thinking.
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With no Baptism by the Spirit in the Old Testament, the sin nature isn't dead. We don't die to the sin nature. The old man isn't crucified. We're not delivered from the tyranny or dominion of the sin nature because there's no Baptism by the Holy Spirit. That was really a new thought to me as I looked at it from that perspective, realizing that without the Holy Spirit, what's the trajectory going to be in your spiritual life? It's not going to be a whole lot of success.
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As we go back rethinking the Old Testament in light of that, outside of a few key individuals in bright lights in the Old Testament, the history of Israel under the Law is a negative trajectory. They never get there. There are times when they are close but they are few and far between. The Law just can't do it. It's a huge negative lesson that morality just isn't enough. Not only is it not enough, not only is it not going to elevate the culture for any length of time, morality, as we see, is probably going to just stimulate the sin nature. It's going to just lead to greater regression and that's how the Law is described in this chapter. It's through the Law that we know sin and the Law sort of aggravates the sin nature.
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I know no one here has ever had this experience but every now and then when I'm driving along on a major thoroughfare and you're approaching an intersection and the light turns yellow, you see people who are far from that light just suddenly put the pedal to the metal in order to beat that yellow light and usually its pretty orange, if not flaming red, when they go through the intersection. It's something about the law that when it says don't do this, it makes us want to do it. I remember when I was a kid at the time they built the Flagship Hotel down at Galveston and they put up signs about not fishing out of the rooms. They didn't want the weights coming back and breaking the windows. They didn't really have a problem with people fishing out the windows until they put up the signs. “Don't fish out the window. Hey, what a great idea. Is anyone looking? Let me try.” When the law says, “Don't do something” it gives us ideas. We want to see if we can get away with it. It aggravates the sin nature.
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That's what Paul is going to say in . So the Law wasn't the means to personal holiness in the sense of experiential righteousness. It's a failure. is kind of a negative between 6 and 8. Six is all about what we have in Christ; eight is what the Holy Spirit provides, and seven is “you really can't do it on your own by just trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps by the Law. It's always going to lead to frustration and failure in the spiritual life. So it's sort of a negative.
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As I've been going through some things today, I've gotten excited. I've gone through and connected some dots with some other passages which always helps us get a little further clarification of what the Scriptures teach. So I want to start where Paul is going to say some negative things about the Law in this chapter. He says some very positive things about the Law in this chapter, too. In verse 12, he says, “Therefore the Law is holy.” I want to start with the emphasis on that passage because it's easy for us, in light of some of the negative things said in the New Testament about the Law, to walk away with the wrong impression and that somehow the Law was just not quite there.
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But if we go back to the Old Testament, the testimony of the Scriptures in the Old Testament, again and again tell us that the Law is perfect. But if the Law is perfect, the Holy Spirit just goes beyond that infinitesimally. It's beyond anything we can imagine. That's what I mean by the title, “If the Law was perfect then the Spirit is beyond perfect.”
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As I pointed out last time, and I've done a little more work on this chart (CHART) to bring the issues out. focuses on the fact that when we're saved, we're dead to sin. In we're dead to the Law. It's not that Law died but that we become dead to it. It breaks that authority.
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That's why he uses the illustration for marriage in verses 2 and 3. All he's saying there is that we recognize that when two people are bound together by the law and there's a death of one that legal binding is broken. That's all he's saying in that illustration. The analogy he draws from that comes out in verse 4 where he says, “Wherefore my brethren, you also have become dead to the Law.” That conclusion tells us that the purpose of the illustration is just to make the point that with our identification with Christ's death there's no longer a tie with the Law.
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We looked at two issues defining Law and then the significance of the illustration and the word Law here is not a general sense of law, a universal principle such as Roman law or Greek law, but Law in Romans is all about the Mosaic Law. It is the focal point. This is talking about the Mosaic Law. Now what was the view of the Old Testament in terms of the Mosaic Law? I think this is so important for us to be reminded about and as I went over these verses in preparation, I realized these are some of the greatest verses and chapters in Scripture. If you don't have them underlined in your Bible, you should underline them.
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I want to go through some of these passages in the Old Testament talking about the value of the Law. It's easy to remember that the key Psalms related to the Word of God are and then . In there's two parts to the Psalm. The first part talks about the nonverbal revelation of God as revealed in the Heavens. “The Heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.” Then in verse , the focus is on the verbal revelation of God. So we have general revelation, non-verbal revelation, and special revelation.
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(CHART) Look at what David says. I've underlined the different terms that David uses to talk about the Law, the Torah, that God has revealed to Moses. He calls it the “Law of the Lord”. In verse 7 he calls it “the testimony of the Law”, in verse 8 “the statutes of the Lord”, the “commandments of the Lord”. Verse 9: “the fear of the Lord”, “the judgments of the Lord” and then there's a conclusion in verse 10. He says regarding the Law that it is “perfect”, “sure”, “righteous”, “right”, “pure”, “clean” and “true and righteous”.
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All of that is true about the Mosaic Law so we shouldn't get a negative idea about the Law. It is spoken of in only the highest terms of value in the Old Testament. “It is more to be desired than gold, yea, much fine gold, sweeter also than the honeycomb.” There is nothing of greater value than the Law. Then we get into . We learn that in the Old Testament Dispensation the Law was the means of cleansing from sin. How is one cleansed from sin? By observing the Law: the ritual cleansing, as well as confession before God. tells us “ how a young man can cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your Word.”
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If you go through there are some 176 verses. This is the longest chapter in the Bible and it is preceded by which is the shortest. is an acrostic which means the first word in each section starts with the next letter of the alphabet. There lots of different words here used for the Law: words, statutes, ordinances, ways, precepts, commandments, righteous judgments. They are all talking about the Law.
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Then the other way in which we are cleansed is not just in taking heed and obeying the Word but in hiding it in our heart and memorizing it. “Your word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against You.” It's preventative care. It's not just the word for cleansing but for staying in fellowship. Then we have other verses that talk about the study of the Law as the highest value, the greatest thing that a person can do. The psalmist says, “I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies, as much as in all riches.”
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How much time we spend pursuing wealth, pursuing money, pursuing security, the things that money can buy and there's nothing wrong with that but here the psalmist is saying he values the Word as much as all that, if not more. He says, “I will meditate on Your precepts and contemplate Your way.” He only gets that from the Word. “I will delight myself in Your statutes.” Now how many times have you read through Deuteronomy and thought, “I'm just delighted to read this”? Attitude check. Verse 17, “Deal bountifully with Your servant that I may live and keep Your Word.” He sees the Law as a path to life. “Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your Law.”
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There is such a sense of excitement here to know the Word. I know many of you can remember back to a time, not that you're bored with it now or you wouldn't be here, but you remember a time when you were so excited. Most of us were that way when we were young. I think that's typical of when we first began our growth as Christians because it's all new and we have a lot of questions we want answered so we're very excited about it. I believe as we get older that our motivation changes and it's at that motivation shift that people fall out. You start off wanting answers to questions like most young people have. Why am I here? How do I know it's true? How can I solve these problems in my life? We seem to have so many problems when we're 20- 30 years old: problems such as “who am I going to marry?”, “why did I marry this person?” to “how am I going to deal with these babies who keep me up all night and then I have to work 14 hours?”
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All these things are coming along and hitting us with the details of life and yet, we want answers. We want to be able to solve problems in life but somewhere after 15-20 years in the Word, we get most of those questions answered and there's some maturity there. The issue isn't coming so much to learn new things to satisfy the questions but that I need to be reminded every day of God's faithfulness, of the importance of His Word, of His provision for me so that I can stay the course. I can't just fall away. I'm not motivated because I'm trying to learn new things, though I will, but I'm motivated because I need to be reminded of the many things I've already learned, that God is faithful.
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It doesn't take more than about 12 hours to forget that God is faithful. Then I forget the promises and try to handle all the issues in life on my own instead of depending upon the Lord. The Psalmist goes on to say that it's the Law that is the means of dealing with the hostile world. In , he says, “Princes also sit and speak against me.” This is David writing, most likely, and he's talking about princes who speak against him. He's talking about rulers, maybe within his own kingdom, conspiracies of all kind against him. He goes on to say, “But Your servant meditates on Your statutes.”
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How do you handle the pressure of people problems, attacks, slanders, all of these things whether its coming from friends, co-workers, people you thought were your friends, family members. How do you handle when you live in a country where the leadership is all going in the wrong direction? Every now and then I hear people on the left or on the right, say, “If so and so gets elected I will move.” I don't know where I would move to because the things that are coming to the U.S. that I don't like are in place everywhere else. We're just trying to be like the rest of the world.
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People in the U.S. have forgotten that what made us great is that we weren't like anybody else. What's going to destroy us is when we become just another copy of the same old basic socialism that everybody else has. We are distinct and what keeps us focused when everything going on around us is chaos is the Word. says, “My soul melts from heaviness.” I spoke about this earlier tonight. We go through times when the pressure is very real and we feel it and there's nothing wrong with feeling it. David says “My soul melts from heaviness. Strengthen me according to Thy Word.”
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In verse 92, David talks about if he hadn't spent a lot of time in the Word, he wouldn't have been able to handle all he's handled. “Unless Your Law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” It's the study of the Word that is the source of good judgment and knowledge. If we want to make wise decisions, then we need to immerse ourselves in the Word. “Teach me good judgment for I believe Your commandments.” “The Law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of coins of gold and silver.” It illuminates our path, our life, “Thy Word is a light unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” This is the Law.
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How can we think negatively about the Mosaic Law? This is the Torah. How can we think negatively when the Old Testament under Divine inspiration extols the Law as such value. Look at some other passages: Deuteronomy 6:1-9. I'm not going to read through all those verses but it talks about the commandments, the statutes, the judgments and that the Lord has commanded Moses to teach the people that they may observe them when they come into the Land. Why? So they can fear the Lord and their days may be long, (verse 2) and that it may be well with them and that they may multiply greatly. If you want to have genuine prosperity, success, and a rich, full life, it comes from knowing the Law and being obedient to the Law.
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So what do you have to do? It has to be with you everywhere you go; when you stand up, sit down, lie down, drive, work, walk, watch TV, when you go out to eat, everywhere. That's what you see in the famous passage in , “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One. You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk in your way and when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, on your eyes, etc.”
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Is the Word of God that real to you? This is just talking about the Law and if the Law was perfect, as I pointed out at the beginning, the Spirit is even better. The Holy Spirit is more perfect, more better. , “The Lord is well pleased. For His righteousness' sake He will exalt the Law and make it honorable.” And then almost the last verse in the Old Testament, , “Remember the Law of Moses which I commanded you in Horeb for all Israel with its statutes and judgments.”
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The value of the Law could not be stressed more in the Old Testament. That is why it is so valued by the Jews when Jesus comes. What's the problem? The problem is that they misunderstood the purpose. It's not that they valued something they shouldn't value; it's that they valued it for the wrong reason. They thought that the Law was the path to righteousness before God. That by observing the Law, they could acquire the same righteousness that only God could give.
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In the New Testament, we find that the people value the Law and respect it. In and 19, Jesus said, “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For surely I say to you that until heaven and earth pass away not one jot or tittle will by no means pass away until all is fulfilled.” That's the high value that Jesus placed on the Law but not the Pharisaical interpretation of the Law. That was what was wrong.
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A very interesting passage takes place in . This is when Paul is returning to Jerusalem. He's going to take a vow and there's nothing wrong with him going to Jerusalem and observing these days because he's not doing it to gain righteousness. I think that is something that has been difficult for people to comprehend in the past but there's nothing wrong with that.
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Look at this first. “On the following day, Paul went in to us to James and all the elders were present.” This is a power meeting between Paul and James, the half-brother of Christ, who is the leader of the church in Jerusalem and all the leaders in the churches in Jerusalem. When he greeted them he “detailed those things which God had done through his ministry and that all that God had done to the Gentiles.” So he gives them an after-action report of his previous missionary journeys. And when they heard it, “they glorified the Lord.” There's no indication that anybody is off-base or focused on the wrong thing.
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They glorified God because of what He has accomplished through Paul and they say to him, “You see brother, how many myriads of Jews there are who have believed.” These Jews have trusted in Christ and believed and they are zealous for the Law. They're not trying to use the Law the wrong way which is what the Pharisees did but they still have a passion for the Law. Only about half of the New Testament is written at this time. The only thing these believers have at this time as the Word of God is the Old Testament and they value it. They're still observing it. They're in that transition zone. The Temple is still there and as far as Jews are concerned, whether they're believers or not, there is still a responsibility to the Mosaic Law to fulfill those ritual commands.
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It would mean how you understood it made a difference. If you were a Christian versus a Jew who had not understood it correctly and were trying to gain righteousness through the ritual. In just a few verses after this as Paul goes out and the crowd reacts to him, they cry out to him. They are misrepresenting his view of the Law. There's no correction from Paul after verse 20 when he says, “Look, there's thousands of Jews who have believed and they still observe the Law.” Paul doesn't say, “They're all screwed up, they're wrong, they're a bunch of Judaizers.” There's no correction there. There's no hint in the text that they have a wrong attitude.
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What happens after this is that Paul goes out and all of a sudden rumors go our through the crowd that Paul was there, then they start crying out and they misrepresent his view of the Law. He's still respectful of the Law. That's why he's there. They say, “Men of Israel help, this is the man who teaches all men everywhere against the people, against the law, and against this place and furthermore he also brought Greeks into the Temple and has defiled this holy place.” This is just all a lie. Lying didn't start in the last twenty years in politics or in religion. It's been around for a very long, long time. All the way back to Cain, there's been lying. They're lying for their own cause and their own agenda. It's not true at all. He's not against the Temple. Has he said anything against the Temple? He's not against the Law at all. You have to understand it right.
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This was the same charge that they brought against Stephen. Remember in ? “They also set up false witnesses to accuse Stephen saying this man seeks to speak blasphemous words against this holy place, the Law.” But Stephen did not speak blasphemous words or anything like that against the Law or against the Temple. In , when Paul was on his second missionary journey and went to Corinth he followed his normal standard operation procedure. He went to the synagogue first, and then after that when he would usually get kicked out, he would gain a hearing from a certain segment of the Jewish population who would respond to the Gospel message and believe Jesus was the Messiah.
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They created such an uproar in Corinth that the Jews in the synagogue tried to bring charges against him in court and they took him before Gallio, the pro-consul of Acacia and brought these charges. Their charge was that this fellow persuades men to worship God contrary to the Law. What we're going to see is that Paul has a high view of the Law. He just doesn't have the Pharisaical view of the Law. He doesn't look at the Law as a means of righteousness.
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Before he believed that Jesus was the Messiah, before he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus, he did believe that the Law was a means to righteousness. That's what he says in Philippians, chapter 3, that he was a seeker of righteousness from the Law. That's what was wrong. It wasn't that the Law wasn't valuable, wasn't important, wasn't perfect. As I said in the title, the law is perfect but the Spirit is better, more perfect, beyond perfect.
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Now part of this was because there was this misunderstanding in terms of the role and the purpose and the function of the Law under Second Party Judaism, as the Pharisaical party developed after the return to the Land in an attempt initially to protect the people from violating the Law as they did before the Fifth Cycle of discipline hit them in 586 B.C. They had good intentions, as my mother used to tell me the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It never gets you to where you're going, it always diverts you.
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The role of the Law was good. It was holy, perfect, and righteous, as Paul says. But it's purpose was first of all, , “For through the Law, comes the knowledge of sin.” The Law's purpose wasn't to give us a path to righteousness but to expose our incredible need for righteousness. That there is none righteous, no not one. Not one person can live up to the standard of the Law. , “The Law came in that the transgression might increase.” The more “thou shalt nots” there are, the more we want to see if we can get away with it when no one's looking. But that doesn't mean the Law isn't good. As Paul says in , “For we know that the Law is good if one uses it lawfully, [according to its purpose].” In , Paul says, “Do you not know brethren...” speaking to the Roman Christians, a large segment of which were converted Jews who had trusted in Jesus Christ as Savior, “for I speak to those who know the Law...” He's speaking here to Jewish background Christians making sure they know the limitations of the Mosaic Law. “...that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives.” shows that when death occurs the Law no longer has dominion.
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But before we get into that, I want to divert our focus a little bit to this whole question of what is the role and relationship of the Law and the Church Age believer. This will take us to about six passages, a couple of which we can hit fairly quickly but we won't get through all six of them this evening. At least we can get started and wrap this next week.
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The first is a passage we will get to this year in Acts, chapter 16. I'm pretty sure we will because there's a lot of redundancy in the Cornelius episode so that won't take months to get through those three chapters. It's amazing how much there is in . All these things happen to Peter and then Peter comes to Cornelius and rehearses for him everything we've already heard so it's repeated a second time. Then when Peter gets back to Jerusalem, he tells the whole story a third time. The Holy Spirit wants us to read it three times to make sure we get the point. As we teach our way through it, we don't need to have quite that level of repetition.
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In , there is another high level meeting that occurs with the leaders of the church in Jerusalem, usually referred to as the Jerusalem Council. Now in the Jerusalem Council, the question is now that Paul has gone out into the Gentile countries and has had such a tremendous response from the Gentiles in terms of their response to the Gospel, the question is: what are we going to do with all these uncircumcised Gentiles? What's their relationship to the Law of Moses to be? Do they have to obey the Law?
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This forms the background for the second passage we're going to in . Paul is going to be plagued by a group of Jews who follow him and antagonize him and stir up the Jewish population against him as he teaches because they're claiming he is against the Law, that he is against their interpretation of the Law that one can be righteous by means of the Law. So the Jerusalem Council there have to answer this question.
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We're told that the apostles and elders come together to consider the matter and they each have their say. Then Peter stands up and talks to them and again, he goes back to the and 11 episode with Cornelius and talks about how God opened the door to the Gentiles through him. In verses 8 and 9 he says, “God, who knows the heart, gave the Holy Spirit to them just as He did to us.” Notice it's a foundation there. It's the Baptism by the Holy Spirit that brings us all into the body of Christ. That's the foundation for Biblical Christian living for New Testament sanctification and spiritual growth, that act of the Holy Spirit. “..making no distinction between us and them.”
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You can hear Paul in the background saying, “..neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, for we are one in Jesus Christ.” That's the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So Peter says, “Why do you want to put the Law on the Gentiles?' That's a great verse, verse 10, when he says, “Therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?” Think about that a minute. Peter is saying that the Law, which is good and perfect and holy, and more to be desired than anything in life, that it was a yoke which we couldn't bear.
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What he's saying is that it put us under a bondage because we couldn't achieve it; we couldn't fully, completely obey the Law and that it ended up destroying us. Now he doesn't say it quite like that but that's the perspective I'm picking up by looking at some of these other passages: that without the Holy Spirit, without the Baptism by the Holy Spirit, without the death of the tyranny of the sin nature the Old Testament believer was really doomed to failure. There's no way that on the basis of the Law or morality, they could ever overcome the sin nature.
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What happens in each dispensation, God in his administration in certain periods of history, gives certain assets to humanity. There's a different set of assets in each dispensation so that when all of history is said and done, we're going to look back and see that every variable was covered and under no variable was man able to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and solve his own spiritual problems apart from God. Apart from God, there's just failure, man can't do it on his own and even under perfect environment, with a perfect political system, and a perfect king, because man is flawed by the sin nature, there will be a massive rebellion against Jesus Christ at the end of the Millennial Kingdom and God will have to destroy the rebels by fire from heaven.
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The problem isn't education; it's not the economy; it's not the Democrats; it's not the Republicans; it's not the Iranians; it's not the Russians; it's not the Czech's. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We're the problem. It's the sin nature in every human being and every volition that's the problem. But God sets up every type: little provision from God to maximum provision from God and under every option, man fails.
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Now there are greater failures and lesser failures. There are people who rise to great heights as spiritual heroes in some periods of history than at other times in history. But what Peter is saying here is that the Law was a yoke on the neck of the Israelites. They couldn't achieve perfection; they weren't able to bear it; they were destined for failure so why would they repeat a failure option. They had something better in this dispensation. That becomes the thrust of what he says.
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Emphasis shifts in verse 11 to grace. So after all the discussion, after Peter talks, after Paul and Barnabas talk, after James talk, they come back and they come to a conclusion in verses 19 and 20. Their conclusion is, “Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood.” In other words, things that would be genuinely offensive to the Jewish sensibilities among them. This is bringing in the law of the weaker brother before it's spelled out by Paul.
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So the Jerusalem Council decree is written out and in verses 24 – 29, it's spelled out and they say in conclusion, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit to lay upon you no greater burden, i.e., the Law, than these necessary things that you refrain from things offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood. If you keep yourself from these things, you do well.” The conclusion of the Jerusalem Council is a conclusion based on grace, and not based on Law.
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So the Law by , is clearly seen not to be related to either salvation or sanctification. Their understanding is that the Law has been replaced by the Holy Spirit and by grace. Not that there wasn't grace in the Old Testament and not that there aren't mandates in the Church Age but that the Law represents a dispensational orientation to Israel and the Mosaic Law as all that there was. It was perfect but it wasn't enough.
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So a new dispensation came in with new aspects. Paul uses a different model in Galatians, chapter 3. This is a crucial chapter and it's going to take more than 3 or 4 minutes to go through this. It's very important to understand because here Paul uses the analogy of a Roman or Jewish household where the child is treated as a child until he reaches a certain age. During the time of childhood, he's treated as a child, talked to as a child, addressed as a child; he's under the control of a pedagogue or a tutor but when he reaches maturity, which in a Jewish household is the age of 13 and he's bar mitzvad and he becomes the son of the commandment.
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At that point he becomes an adult. He's to be addressed by his parents as an adult; certain kinds of discipline are no longer possible. That boy is now a man. And in a bar mitzvah ceremony, he will say, “I am now a man.” His voice usually cracks while he's saying that because he's going through puberty at that time. So that's the analogy. The Law was treating the Jewish race as a child but with Christ coming, it's the end of the Law, and that tutor dispensation is ended and now we're adults, under freedom and responsibility, and grace.
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We'll start with the second point next time in terms of the Law and the Church Age believer in . Galatians is the first epistle that Paul wrote and I think Romans is the crystallization and expansion of everything Paul taught in Galatians. If you want to get a quick, easy orientation to Romans, you go through Galatians. All those basic themes are hit in the right order. We'll come back and start here next Thursday night.

Romans 076b-Understanding the Church Age Believer's Relationship to the Law ,

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 076b-Understanding the Church Age Believer's Relationship to the Law ,
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I want to start off briefly telling you about the conference/seminar. I'm not going to go into it in tremendous detail. This seminar was started about five years ago as an academic outreach ministry of the Baptist Bible Seminary which is a GARB, Greater Association of Regular Baptists, school in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania. I think I saw a few furrowed brows going, “What is GARB?” The Northern Baptist kicked the Southern Baptists out in the early 1850's because they couldn't support missionaries or pastors or any kind of ministry by anyone who might have a slave. All the denominations in the US split between the north and the south between the late 1840's and 1860. Gradually over time in the 19th century they tended to merge back. Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists did not.
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The Northern Baptist Church basically went liberal, starting in the 1890's in what is known as the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. In the late 1920's and 30's, about every three years or so another group of conservative, and I mean that lower case 'c', conservative fundamentalist in the classic sense of the Word, were the ones who believed in the basic infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture, Deity of Christ, virgin birth, miracles, and the literal Second Coming of Christ. Conservatives in the Northern Baptist churches would get fed up with their liberalism and leave. One of the groups that left in the mid-thirties is a group that came to be known as the CBA, Conservative Baptist Association. One of the three men who started that was Dr. Richard Beale, who had a daughter named Betty Beale, who married a man named Bob Thieme.
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Another conservative group that split off the Northern Baptist were the Regular Baptists. They became known as the Greater Association of Regular Baptists, GARB. Some of us who worked at Camp Peniel met a few people from the school called the Grand Rapid School of the Bible and Music. They were a GARB school. They were as legalistic as Bob Jones. They couldn't watch TV or go to movies or anything like that. They would come down and work at this Christian camp in Texas with a bunch of grace-oriented Christians and they would just walk around the first couple of weeks with their eyes wide-open. They just couldn't believe these Christians, who, when they got a night off, would go into town and go to a movie. And they wouldn't even think there could be anything wrong with it. The GARB students would be pretty much converted to grace by the end of the summer and then they'd have to go back up north and it was a rude awakening for them.
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They're not quite that legalistic any more. Bible Baptist Seminary is an excellent school. The academic dean of the seminary is a classmate of mine from Dallas Seminary, Mike Stallard, who is very committed to dispensationalism. They started this academic study group bringing together top scholars and some pastors who were committed to traditional dispensation theology who meet together on an annual basis to further probe, develop, and understand critical issues within dispensational theology. I went to Clark's Summit last year; this year they're meeting at the College of Biblical Studies and next year they'll be back in Clark's Summit.
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Each year they pick a little bit different topic. This year the topic was on dispensationalism and Biblical preaching. The first session we had yesterday morning had two main presenters: Dr. Rod Decker, who teaches at the school up there, and Dr. Christopher Cone who is now the president of Kendell Seminary in Fort Worth. Their topics were complementary, although they didn't agree on every detail. Dr. Decker spoke on preaching in the Biblical languages and emphasized the importance of the languages for the pastor. A pastor must know the original languages.
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Chris spoke on integrating exegesis and exposition. He subtitled it: Preaching and Teaching for Spiritual Independence. Most of us in this group would have a lot more sympathy for what Chris said. Dr. Decker, although I appreciate a lot of his scholarship, is unfortunately, I believe, like too many great scholars. I know of some academicians who when they're in a seminary or academic classroom, they are as technical and as detailed in the languages as possible. In a response to a question someone asked Dr. Decker about the use of the original languages in the pulpit, he said, “Well, I've been in a pastoral ministry for thirty years and I don't think I ever referred to Greek or Hebrew in the pulpit more than ten times.” I continue to challenge him on this.
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When it came to dealing with the importance of knowing the languages he had many good things in his papers. I thought I would read to you some of the excerpts from it. He had a two and a half page ten point-typeface from Martin Luther, who initiated the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Luther, like every other pastor who has a sin nature, did not get everything right. In fact, dear old Martin didn't get a lot of things right. But he did get two things right. One was sola scriptura, the Scripture alone and sola fide, by faith alone. Those were the Latin terms that were two of the five phrases that became sort of the marching banners for the Protestant Reformation.
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At this time Luther is moving away from Roman Catholicism and he had been an Augustinian monk before he came to an understanding of the gospel in his study of Romans so he doesn't move very far but he moves far enough to understand the line between the gospel of grace. He is so embattled over just this one doctrine of justification by faith alone. He doesn't have time to explore all of the other doctrines of Scripture that gradually developed over the next century. He said some important things about the preparation of a pastor.
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Luther said, “In proportion we value the gospel let us zealously hold to the languages.” That needs to be emblazoned over the door of every seminary in the world today because somehow they fail to understand how that really relates to what you do and say in the pulpit. He says, “Let us zealously hold to the languages for it was not without purpose that God caused His Scriptures to be set down in these two languages alone. The Old Testament in Hebrew; the New Testament in Greek. Now if God did not despise them but chose them above all others for His word, then we ought, too, to honor them above all others.” What a great statement. The Bible wasn't written in Hebrew and Greek “just because it just happened that way.” God oversees the project. There was a reason for that. God chose Hebrew and Greek to be the vessels used as the best vehicle to communicate the content that's in those two testaments. When God considered it important to communicate in those two languages, then we should honor that and should know that.
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There's just a footnote in our country that up until the late 1800's it would be typical that in a congregation the size of ours on a Sunday morning, there would be at least eight or ten men in the congregation who could follow along in the Greek text because Greek and Hebrew and Latin were all taught in the classroom so they grew up studying these languages so they could read it. Today we do well if we can find a pastor in this computer age who can deal with Greek, much less Hebrew.
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“Nevertheless,” Luther goes on, “we shall be sure of this, we shall not long preserve the gospel without the languages.” What a profound insight. “The languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained. They are the casket in which this jewel is enshrined. If through our neglect, we let the languages go which, God forbid, we shall not only lose the gospel but the time will come when we will be unable to either speak, write, or correct Latin, German or even the English. Then you say, 'but many of the fathers became teachers without the languages. That is true. But how do you account for the fact they so often erred in the Scriptures? How often does not St. Augustine err in the Psalms and his other expositions and all those who have undertaken to expound Scripture without a knowledge of the languages? Even though what they said about a subject at times was perfectly true, we were never quite sure if it was really present there in the text whereby their interpretation they sought to find. When our faith is thus held up to ridicule, where does the fault lie? It lies in our ignorance of the languages and there's no other way out than to learn the languages.”
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He goes on to say later on, “A simple preacher, it is true, has so many passages and texts available through translations that he can know and teach Christ, lead a holy life, and preach to others.” But when it comes to interpreting Scripture and working with it on your own, disputing with those who incite it incorrectly [and that should go to every single pastor who thinks he can go far without the languages.] he is lost. What Luther is saying here is that you may be able to get so far without the languages but when it comes to interpreting Scripture, working with it on your own, or disputing with those who recite it incorrectly he is unequal to the task.
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“That cannot be done without the languages. Since it becomes Christians to make holy use of the Scriptures as their one and only book, it is a sin and a shame not to know our own book and to understand the speech and words of our God. It is still a greater sin and loss that we do not study languages, especially in these days when God is offering us and given us books and every inducement to this study”. This was in 1520 or so. They didn't have computers. They had just discovered the printing press about fifty or sixty years earlier so because of that they had just had books and tools to study. He's not talking about Logos and Concordance and Bible Works and all those other tools today so get that out of your head.
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We live in an age that's gone way beyond that and yet, the more that's available to us, the less we emphasize it and the less that we use. He goes on to say, “The teacher or preacher can expound the Bible from beginning to end as he pleases, accurately or inaccurately, if there is no one there in the congregation to judge whether he is doing it right or wrong. But in order to judge, one must have a knowledge of the languages that cannot be done in any other way. Therefore, although faith in the gospel may indeed be proclaimed by simple preachers without a knowledge of languages such preaching is flat and plain. People finally become bored with it and it falls to the ground but where the preacher is versed in the languages there is freshness and vigor in his preaching. Scripture can be treated in its entirety and faith finds itself constantly renewed by a continual variety of words and illustrations. Hence, there is great danger of speaking of God in a different manner and different terms than God Himself employs. In short, they may lead saintly lives and teach saintly things among themselves but so long as they remain without the languages, they cannot but lack what all the rest lack, and to be useful to other nations. Because they can do this but will not, they have to figure out for themselves how they will answer for it to God.” Good words from 500 years ago.
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Let's get into our study in Romans tonight. There's no slide presentation with it. I want to take you to some passages where I ended last time to understand the relationship of the Christian to the Law. At the seminar today, this morning, we had a session on hermeneutics as it applies to the Old Testament and the New Testament. The three speakers were Joe Perle, the academic dean at the College of Biblical Studies. He did a good job but he was up against two oldie, moldie, goldies: Bob Thomas who's the best and Elliott Johnson, who's just half a one thousand point decimal point of Bob Thomas because he's younger.
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When we introduced ourselves to the panel, I was going to start off saying that compared to the other guys on the panel, I was older than dirt. But considering that Elliott was there, I was the dirt but he was older than me because he was my professor. Elliott Johnson is the hermeneutics expert at Dallas Seminary whereas Bob Thomas, before he retired, was the hermeneutics guy at Master Seminary. They have different perspectives and they don't always agree. I'm not always sure what the difference is because they're slicing the baloney very, very thin but it's significant.
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Sometimes it's not always as clear and I really appreciated some things that Elliott had in his paper, not that I didn't appreciate Bob Thomas's paper which was excellent, but Elliott was dealing with a number of passages like and and , which are passages we're in right now. So he was scratching where I was itching. He had some interesting things to say which I'll read as we go through these passages.
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In Paul is talking about the fact that we are dead to the Law. Not that the Law is dead but that we are dead to the Law. In other words, the Law no longer has power or authority over us. This is so foundational for us to understand that I hope you understand how important it is to get to this. This isn't just abstract doctrine. When you go to many, if not most, churches in this country, the pastors do not know how to distinguish between Old Testament and New Testament teaching to begin with. Beyond that they don't understand what has really happened in terms of the Cross and the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. They may understand it to a degree but as I pointed out in our last few lessons what Paul says in and 15, “sin shall not have dominion over us because we're dead to the sin nature.” It's still alive; it's still there. But we're dead to the sin nature. That's . says we're dead to the Law. That's why we have a problem with legalists on the one hand and people who are licentious on the other hand. But he's making the statement that sin shall not have dominion over us because we're not under Law, we're under grace.
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As I pointed out when we hit that passage a couple of weeks ago, what he is saying is that there has been a dispensational shift. There has been a change in the way God relates to human beings because of what happened at the Cross. Because of what happened at the Cross, there is something radically different that happened to believers since the Day of Pentecost. It happened to the Church Age believer but never happened to anybody before that Day of Pentecost.
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On the day we believe Jesus died for our sins, at that instant, God the Son uses God the Holy Spirit to cleanse us, to identify us positionally with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. We call that doctrine positional truth which means we're dead to the sin nature. Because of that we're free from the power and dominion of the sin nature. That's . That never happened before 33 A.D. Never! David didn't have that happen to him. Saul, in the Old Testament, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Abraham, Moses. Name your hero. None of them had that happen to him.
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So the lesson we get from the Old Testament is that the Law really doesn't work. Israel is under the Law, but what happens? Failure after failure after failure. There are a few bright lights. There are times when they step up to the plate and they go above and beyond their fallen natures. That's why they're heroes. That's why they're listed in .
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I want to talk a minute about heroes. I'm been reflecting on this the last few weeks because of one sentence I heard on a talk radio show that I think it was accurate. We live in a era since the fifties and sixties where a certain segment of our intelligentsia and academicians have been in full mode to destroy American heroes, to assault the founding fathers, to attack them. This is to be expected from a liberal. Why? Because as Thomas Sowell so clearly points out in his book Conflict of Vision, ultimately what makes a difference between the person who looks at the world and comes to liberal conclusions and a person who looks at the world and comes to conservative conclusions is that the liberal thinks that man is basically good and improvable. Conservatives believe that man is basically evil, not that he can't do good things but that his nature is basically evil and so he needs to be controlled. Even government must be controlled by law; otherwise evil will have its day. Either the people will become evil or the government will become evil but law is what controls evil and controls the sin nature.
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Now if you're a liberal and you believe everybody is basically good then you're going to look at Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or Benjamin Franklin or any human hero and you're going to say, “They're not all that heroic. Look at all the things they did that were wrong. Look at the sins in their life. Look at their moral failures.” You just tear them down because your assumption is that everyone is basically good and they did bad things so how can you say they're a hero? The reason they're a hero is because they're a corrupt fallen sinner and they had moments when they rose above their nature and they lived and operated above their sin nature. That's what made them heroes. They didn't stay there the whole time.
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You look at those heroes in . Those men that are listed there all had tremendous spiritual failings. Every single one of them from Abraham to Moses to Isaac to Joseph, all the way through to Gideon and Jepthah and the judges and David; they all had great moral failures. That's to be expected. They were fallen sinners and we know from that they didn't have a sin nature whose power was broken by the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. So it's just amazing they rose to the level they did but they rose above their natural sin nature inclination and they did what God wanted them to do. They obeyed God. Maybe they did it just for a moment, just for a day, just for a week, but there was an instant or more when they were above their nature. That's what made them heroes.
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Heroes are people who rise above their natural sinful inclinations. It may not be a lot but that's what's heroic. When everyone just goes along and does what their sin nature leads them to do then they're just being normal. When the Founding Fathers or any other great hero in American history failed, that's only to be expected because they were fallen sinners. What's not expected is for them to rise to the level of the heroics of the Founding Fathers or the great military leaders we had or the great civic leaders that we had in the our history. That was exceptional. That's what makes a person a hero.
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What we see here in Romans is the great, clear exposition is that we have to recognize the fact that we're sinners. You're married to a sinner. Whether I'm talking to the wife or the husband. That person you love is a lousy, corrupt sinner and you need to be realistic about that. They're going to fail and fail miserably; sometimes or many times, depending on the person. That's what you should expect not in a way that excuses it but that they're just a sinner, just like you. Guess what? You're going to fail too. Many times.
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The grace of God is that many times we won't fail; maybe because of the Word of God and maybe there'll be a few times of significant failure. That's the reality. That's why we have to forgive one another in marriage because that other person is not any better or worse than we are. Their sin, whatever it is, their failures in the marriage, whatever it may be, and we all have them, on either side, is just to be expected by a sinner. What's exceptional is that we rise above that because we love that person. That's what makes it significant.
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We can do that in the Church Age because of what happened at salvation when we're identified with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. That's revolutionary. That had never happened in 4,000 years of human history. All of a sudden on the Day of Pentecost and from that day to now the power and dominion and tyranny of their sin nature is ended. If it operates fully in our lives its because we choose to let it happen. It's only because you choose to let it happen and I choose to let it happen. It's our responsibility. We put ourselves back under that tyranny but that tyranny is broken for the first time in human history. That is mind boggling.
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The Law never handled it. The Mosaic Law was a complete failure. Look at what it produced in terms of the history of Israel, the bondage, and the failures. There had to be something different and what's different is the shift from Law to grace. It doesn't mean there wasn't grace in the Old Testament. It doesn't mean there aren't mandates, ethical, moral absolutes, in the New Testament. But now, as Elliott pointed out today, we're going to emphasize truth with grace. Because we recognize we're all fallen and we have to deal with each other in grace. That's what makes for successful relationships in any area because we deal with one another in grace and humility.
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In this early transitional period, in the early part of the Church Age, especially the Jewish believers were wrestling with the whole idea of what is the role of the Mosaic Law to believers. Last time we looked at in terms of the Jerusalem Council and there I pointed out that the issue there wasn't just the issue of whether or not male Gentile believers should be circumcised but really the whole issue of the role of the Law in their life. As the apostles met and worked through the issues, understanding God's call to Peter to take the gospel to the Gentiles and how God had used Paul and Barnabas in their first missionary journey to bring the gospel to the Gentiles, they realized there was no longer an obligation to the Mosaic Law placed upon believers in the Church Age.
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However, there were problems of offending Jews because of their belief in the Law. This is what we see in that passage as one example of many of how the more mature brother should be sensitive and aware of problems with a weaker brother. That's all that is. I read the issues last week where they should avoid eating meat sacrificed to idols and adultery and immorality. Why? Because that offended the Jews. Not because it was not spiritual and not because they couldn't grow and mature if they did those things but so they would not offend the Jews.
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That's the basic argument that's there: that the Law as a rule of life, as the basis for any sanctification, had ended so neither Jew nor Greek was under it any more. However, the moral laws, the eternal spiritual laws, that the Mosaic Law reflected were still in effect. Now from there I want to look at a second important passage in the New Testament dealing with the relationship of the Law and that's in Galatians. Galatians is between 2 Corinthians and Ephesians. Galatians is the first epistle that Paul wrote. It is one of my favorite epistles because of the simplicity of it, the way it's laid out.
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The first few chapters focus on the fact they distorted grace in the gospel. The remaining chapters deal with the fact they distorted grace in sanctification. In the first chapter Paul doesn't mince words. He just basically assaults them very strongly, telling them that they deserted the gospel of the grace of Christ for a different kind of gospel, not the one he preached, but one that was taught by the Judiazers. “It's okay to believe in Jesus as Messiah but he's not enough. You also have to follow the precepts of the Law,” the Judaizers said. It was grace plus something. Whenever you add anything to grace, you destroy grace. It was another gospel, not the same kind of gospel.
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It's a heteros gospel, a gospel of a different kind. That's how we get the word heterosexual. You have a relationship with someone who is a different sex. Not a homosexual, who is someone of the same sex. So you have two different Greek words for' other', heteros, which is means another of a different kind and allos, which is someone of the same kind. So they desert to a different kind of gospel.
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The issues in chapters one and two really relates to grace and the gospel of justification by faith alone. That's why you have the great passages like , “Knowing that because a man is not justified by works of the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ. Even we have believed in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the Law.” Notice how he completely juxtaposes faith in Christ with the works of the Law. Works of the Law cannot get you the kind of righteousness that He requires. He expands on all of this in and 4. He goes on to say in verse 20, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live...”
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See that relates to . He's making a transition here at the end of chapter 2 to talking about sanctification. He says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live...” What does he mean? Does he have a multiple personality syndrome? No, what he means by that is that the old man is dead. It's not me, the unregenerate person I once was who lives but Christ who lives in me. We have been identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, that power of the sin nature is broken, I'm a new creature in Christ so that I live on the basis of this new empowerment. Christ lives in us. The Holy Spirit lives in us.
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He now says, “The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith.” See, the spiritual life is still by grace, through faith. It's not by works. Does that mean there aren't things we have to do? There aren't mandates to follow? No, but we follow those mandates by faith. God said, “Do this.” I say, “I believe it so I'm going to do it.” We fulfill the mandate by faith; it's not legalism. It's only legalism if you think that's what gets you credit with God or if you think you can lose your salvation if you don't do it or something like that.
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Paul says, “The life I live in the flesh [he means in this corporeal body] I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God for if righteousness comes through the Law then Christ died in vain.” Righteousness doesn't come through the Law either as justification righteousness, that is, imputed righteousness, or experiential righteousness. It doesn't come through the Law.
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Then he changes his focus in . Chapters 3 – 6 focuses on the spiritual life and it's fabulous how he focuses our attention on this. Look at . He says, “The only thing I want to learn from you is did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law or by the hearing of faith?” Based on what he just said in chapters one and two, we received the Spirit, not because of what we did, not from following the Law, not through the ritual, but by faith alone in Christ alone. That's how we received the Spirit. Then he says in verse 3, “Are you so foolish, having begun in the Spirit [at regeneration when we're identified with Christ in the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and as a result we're indwelt by the Spirit, the Son, and the Father] are you now being completed or matured by the flesh?” You got saved by faith, do you grow by the Law? No.
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What's important about this question is [and you should circle these words 'Spirit' 'perfect' 'flesh']. The next time these words show up is in . Everything between this verse and which says “we are to walk by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill [perfect] the works of the flesh [the sin nature]. Everything between verse 3 and 5:16 is to help us understand what he says in 5:16. talk about an anocaluthon, “going down a rabbit trail”. That's a three chapter “rabbit trail”.
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It's important to understand what he says so we can understand the command to 'walk by means of the Spirit'. If you just go out and start saying, “I've got to walk by means of the Spirit”, you're going to fall flat on your face because we have to understand all these things that are going on. The most important thing to understand is what he says in verse 3 as the starting point which has to do with the purpose of the Law and how it functions in our life. He goes on to say, “Have you suffered so many things in vain?” In other words, was it in vain? They've had opposition because they became Christians and if you're just going to opt for the Law then you went through all of that for no reason whatsoever.
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He says in verse 5, “Therefore, He who supplies the Spirit to you...” Who's that? That's the Father who sent the Spirit. And it's Jesus who sent the Spirit. “...and works miracles among you, did He do it by works of the Law or by the hearing of faith?” If it's the works of the Law, then how you grow up as a Christian is really different. If it's by faith then it's different from anything that's preceded it in history. You can understand why they might have been a little confused. “Since Adam fell, we haven't done it this way before. It's a new way,” they say. It's a new dispensation. For the first time in history their sins have been paid for. He says the comparison is, one familiar to you if you've sat in this Romans class for long, “...Just as Abraham believed God and it was accounted and imputed to him for righteousness.” That's a quote from .
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This verse simply refers back to Abram's original trust in God for salvation. He simply believed the promise of God and God imputed the righteousness of Christ in him on the basis of faith alone. So Abraham becomes foundational here. Abraham is the first Jew; he is the head of the Jewish race and he becomes the covenant partner with God in what is known as the Abrahamic covenant. God said, “Through you, Abraham, I will bless all nations.” That's the promise. Remember that, because we're going to hear that word 'promise' about six or seven more times before we finish this chapter.
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It all relates to inheriting the promise of Abraham. Here's the issue: do we as Gentiles have the inheritance as physical descendants from Abraham? No. We're not physical descendants of Abraham. But we are heirs of the promise in this passage. How do we become heirs of the promise? Paul says the promise was given to Abraham and his seed. And he says that the fact the word 'seed' is in the singular means it's referring to Jesus. When we enter into Christ through the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, we become heirs of the promise to Abraham, not by our physical relation to Abraham but by our spiritual relation through our position in Christ.
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Paul is going to end this chapter talking about the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. God has a plan that's consistent in every one of these books. Isn't it incredible how it all comes together? But if we don't immerse ourselves in the Scripture, then it doesn't show up. This is one of the things Elliott brought up today which I thought was very insightful, just adding a few little things together, he said, “In the gospels the Lord applies promises from the Law to Himself, but not to the disciples.” Wow, that's good. That's what teaching at Dallas Seminary for fifty years will get you. You see things.
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He says, “Now Paul in illustrates how two different promises can be applied to believers whether Jew or Gentile. The promises belong to Israel. , right? Paul says, “The covenants belong to Israel.” They don't belong to the Gentiles. So how do we get them? That's the issue. The promises belong to Israel because they're addressed to Israel in Genesis but they're applied through and in the Israelite, the seed, through Jesus Christ. Elliott went on to say, “The first is a series of promises addressed historically to Abraham in . One is a promise to bless Abraham and a second is a promise to bless Gentiles through Abraham.”
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Turn to . Elliott says, “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify [ in the indicative mood in the Greek] which says that seeing God justifies the Gentiles by faith...[ see, it's that continuous action] God justifies the Gentiles by faith, preaches the gospel to Abraham beforehand.” Now did God tell Abraham that Jesus, the son of Mary, is going to be crucified on a cross called Golgotha right outside Jerusalem which is right on Mount Moriah where later on you're going to sacrifice Isaac? And by believing in that substitutionary death of Christ on the Cross you're going to have eternal life? Did He tell that to Abraham? No, He didn't give all that but what Abraham understood is that man has a basic problem because he's a sinner and God, and only God, can solve that problem so I have to trust Him through His promise. More details will be added later. Stay tuned. Film at eleven.
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So what was the good news that came to Abraham in the context of ? Think about it. Through you, I'm going to bless all the nations. That was the good news. I'm going to bless you and through you, I'm going to bless all the nations. That's the gospel, the good news. So Elliott writes that there are three things to note: first, that Abraham believed God and was blessed as his faith was credited to him as righteousness; second, the promise extends to all nations through you []; the ambiguity of 'through you' at least means through Abraham. But those addressed directly through Abraham were limited. He was about maybe 70 years old at this time and he lived about another 100 years so there were just a finite number of people he could personally bless. That's what he's saying there.
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Isaac was blessed through Abraham's faith () and those who read about Abraham's case and followed his faith are blessed as Abraham's son () which reads, “Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham.” Elliott then says, “Third, it is then clear that all nations were not influenced directly through Abraham. That awaited Abraham's descendant, Jesus Christ, who would ultimately provide redemption, through which blessings are ultimately available to the Gentiles. While Christ is the basis for blessing all nations, ultimately Israel will also be the messenger through whom all nations will hear. [ and 14: 4-6 which refers to the 144,000].
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So let's look at what the text says, “For seeing that God would justify or would declare the Gentiles to be just before God, proclaimed the gospel to Abraham beforehand saying 'in you all nations will be blessed'” That's the gospel as Abraham understood as its stated in the context. “So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.” That would be Jew and Gentile.
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Verse 10, “For as many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse [that is, those who think they get righteousness from the Law are under the curse] ...for it is written, 'cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the Law to do them'.” []. Then Paul says, “Then that no one is justified by the Law in the sight of God is evident...” He then quotes from , just as Paul did in the beginning of Romans, “For the Scripture says the just shall live by faith.” 'To live by faith' deals with post-salvation spiritual growth.
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Then in verse 13 he says, “Christ has redeemed us [purchased us, bought us so we are no longer in the slave market of sin, under the curse of the Law.]” How did Christ redeem us? By becoming a curse for us. And again Paul quotes from the Old Testament in Deuteronomy 21:33, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”
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What we learn here is that freedom isn't free. Somebody has to pay. Always. There's no such thing as a free lunch. When the Federal government gives money to anybody, it has to take that from somebody who worked for it. And somebody who earned it. Somebody always has to pay. There's no such thing as free money. The government can't just sit up there and print money because they're in charge of the treasury [hello, Mr. Bernanke]. There's got to be some value there. Verse 14 says, “That the blessing of Abraham...[so the purpose for Christ becoming a curse on the cross is so the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles]...in Christ Jesus.”
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No one got in Christ Jesus before the Day of Pentecost, before A.D. 33. It only comes when you're baptized by means of the Holy Spirit, identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, and placed in Christ. “The blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus that we [Church Age believers] might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” I don't recall the Spirit being mentioned in . But it's the blessing by Abraham but not because we're in Abraham but because we're in Christ. So we receive that promise because we're in Christ, not because we're physically related to Abraham.
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Verse 15, “Brethren, I speak in a manner of men, [I'm telling you this in terms of human language] though it is only a man's covenant, yet if it is confirmed no one annuls it.” He's saying that when you enter into a contract with anyone else, once the contract for your credit card, your mortgage, whatever is signed, you can't go in and change it. “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made.” He does not say seeds, but seed. This is one of those verses that emphasize verbal inspiration extends down to the very letters, plural versus singular. Paul is making a major doctrinal point on the fact that the word 'seed' in Genesis is singular and not plural. That's how inerrancy extends to the minutia. So we participate in the blessing, not because of our relationship to Abraham but because we're in Jesus, the Seed.
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He says, “And this I say that the Law, which was 430 years later...” See all these promises were made to Abraham out of grace. Law doesn't come along for another 430 years so how can Abraham's salvation or the promises made to him have anything to do with the Law? These precede the Law by four and one half centuries. “...the Law which was 430 years later cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ.” Interesting. The Abrahamic covenant is confirmed by God in Christ. “...that it should make the promise of no effect.” So the covenant that comes later can't nullify the earlier covenant. It's still in effect. It's an eternal covenant.
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Then, Paul says, “For if an inheritance comes from the Law it's no longer a promise but God gave it to Abraham by promise. What purpose then does the Law serve? It was added because of transgressions.” Notice he says that the Law was not added to get you to heaven or to get you spiritually mature. It was added because you were dirty, lousy, rotten, corrupt sinners and you needed a Law to control your sin. And to make it clear to you that you couldn't be perfect.
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“It was added because of sin until the seed [Christ] should come and to whom the promise was made. And it [The Law] was appointed by through the angels by the hand of a mediator. tells you nothing about angels being up there on Mount Sinai but this passage does. “Now a mediator does not mediate for one only because God is one. Is the Law then against the promise of God? Certainly not. For if there could have been a Law given that could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the Law. But Scripture has confined all under sin that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.” The promise comes to us by faith and that promise is the promise of blessing to Abraham which relates to the inheritance.
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We don't get it. It's not a physical inheritance for us because we're not related to the physical seed. It's a spiritual inheritance. And he says, “But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the Law, which would afterwards be revealed. Therefore the Law was our tutor...” The Greek is pedagogue. A pedagogue is a slave hired to train a young child until he reached maturity at age thirteen or fourteen in Greek culture. And then he was to be treated like an adult. In Hebrew culture he was bar mitzvaded and then he became a child of the covenant. Mama couldn't scold him anymore like a boy. He had to be treated like an adult. He could not be disciplined the same way as he could have as a child. '
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but as an adolescent if he mouthed off at his mother too much, he could be taken out in the square and stoned. So the Law is compared to that temporary period before maturity. After faith has come, the tutor function no longer exists, Paul says, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus and heirs according to the promise.” But that inheritance doesn't come by physical relation to Abraham but by being spiritually placed in Christ by the Baptism by the Holy Spirit, which is what verse 28 is talking about. That takes us right back to and , the foundation for the spiritual life. Then Paul goes on to talk about other things in chapters four and five but chapter three is what tells us about the believer's relationship to the Law.
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Next time we're going to look at and 6:14 and connect those together. This is fantastic stuff because it leads up to that great statement that Paul gives in because this is the foundation of our freedom in Christ. Not freedom to do whatever we want to do but because of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and the death of the tyranny of the sin nature, we have what nobody else in history had and that is the freedom to live apart from the sin nature and to truly serve God. That's the point of freedom.

Romans 077b-Sanctification: Law versus Grace ,

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 077b-Sanctification: Law versus Grace ,
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We are going to start in Galatians this evening. We're still studying Romans 7. I want to contextualize things for you just a little bit. In , , and 8 we have, I think, the greatest passage in the New Testament dealing with the spiritual life. focuses on the fact that we are dead to sin. focuses on the fact that we are dead to the Law.
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There's some important things brought out here. I think that we don't always grab their significance. They don't shake us quite as much for a number of reasons. Number one: we've been taught many times about the significance of the spiritual life in the Church Age. I've emphasized this again and again. So in many ways and in many aspects, this isn't new truth.
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For Jews and Christians in the early church, this was just phenomenal. This was revolutionary in a tremendous way. It was a radical shift and a major paradigm shift so that they had to think about their relationship with God and their ongoing walk with God in a way that they had never thought about it before. The whole dynamic of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit was new to them. I used that word because I'm including both the indwelling aspects and the filling aspects of God the Holy Spirit. These were something they truly wrestled with, especially those who came from a Jewish background because they had been drilled to honor and respect the Law so much. In fact, it puts us to shame because as Gentile members of the we don't seem to have the same respect in terms of knowledge and in terms of memory and in terms of our thorough going understanding of what God has revealed to us.
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We don't emphasize memory like the Jewish community has over the centuries, especially in many circles. A young man was expected to have the entire Pentateuch memorized before he had bar mitzvah. He memorized the entire Torah. If I just ask some Christians to memorize ten verses in a year, they scream as if I'm a legalist. That wasn't done out of legalism, which is a common misconception of many Christians who want to avoid responsibility in the Christian life.
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Legalism is thinking that what God commands us to do somehow gets us approval from God, and we get blessing. That's legalism. The difference between legalism and grace in the life of an individual in relationship to Divine commandments often won't look any different. The difference is the motivation and how it is appreciated by the individual. One person prays, memorizes Scripture, goes to Bible class and they think they're getting brownie points with God for doing all that. The other Christian knows that God already gave him everything and they need to learn about it. They're there as a response but in terms of watching what they do on a day-to-day basis, they're doing pretty much the same thing. That's the difference between legalism and grace. We're going to get into that a little later in one of the passages we're studying here.
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Legalism is not just a matter of obeying the Law. Otherwise, God would be a legalist because God expected the Jews in the Old Testament to obey the Law. That wasn't legalism. In the same way God expects believers in the Church Age to obey all the commands and prohibitions that are in the New Testament. It is an expectation of conforming our thinking to His thinking [].
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This has been a problem ever since the beginning of the Church to understand the relationship, first of all, of the believer to sin, and second, the believer to the Law. In relation to sin, it's because we have problems with [I use 'we' as a broad term for Christians in general] understanding how someone after they claim to be a Christian, after conversion, continues to sin in certain ways just like an unbeliever and continues to live and act like an unbeliever in many ways. Usually these are defined in overt terms rather than mental attitude sins. Nobody sees our mental attitude sins so there's a lot of covert activity going on there and we think we're fooling somebody but spiritually it doesn't fool anybody.
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We have to understand that relationship to sin, that there's forgiveness because sin was paid for on the Cross, but we have to think now in the sense that we are dead to sin. Nobody prior to the Cross and the Day of Pentecost could think of themselves as dead to sin. Couldn't do it. That's based on the Baptism by the Holy Spirit and because that didn't take place until the Day of Pentecost, that identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, sometimes called retroactive positional truth, because of that action, we're dead to sin. That's a hard concept to get our mental fingers around. We're also dead to the Law and we have to understand what that means.
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((CHART)) I put up this little chart. The left hand part talks about . The top part talks about before we're saved. We're alive to sin and a slave to sin and we're free in regard to righteousness. There's no righteousness in our life. The unbeliever, the fallen, condemned “in Adam” individual, an unbeliever, can't perform anything perfectly righteous. There's no positive righteousness in his life.
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He can do good things. Jesus is the one who said to His disciples, “You, being evil [fallen, condemned, corrupt] know how to give good gifts to your children.” You can do good things, you can do wonderful things, you can do altruistic things but they're just not the basis for your standing before God. So the top three are our situation before we're saved. After we're saved, we're not alive to sin anymore. We're dead to sin. We are justified from sin, , translated in most English translations as 'freed from sin' but it is justified, dikaioo [dikaiow], the same Greek verb, used all through the justification passages. We are free from sin, eleutheroo [e)leuqerow], in and now we're to consider ourselves a slave to God and a slave to righteousness. That's all .
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Then Paul advances what he's explaining to help us understand that we're now dead to the Law. In beings this statement of Paul's that “we're no longer under the Law but under grace.” There's been a shift. The rest of that chapter deals with this idea of being dead to sin and a slave to God and to righteousness. Now he comes back to what he means when he says we're no longer under the Law in , where he says we're dead to the Law. We're free from the Law just as we are free from sin. The tie to the Law is abolished so we can live now in the newness of the Spirit.
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I want you to look at this verse very carefully because this becomes a foundation for some of the things we're going to cover tonight. Something that I hope I'll be able to shed some light on our thinking because this goes to a passage and a metaphor that I think has been very confusing for a lot of people. It is terribly misused culturally. The verbiage is drawn from the Scripture and you hear cultural idioms related to it. It's misused in those idioms and it's misused by a lot of Christians. In fact, I'm not sure if I've ever heard it taught correctly. I haven't heard it really taught that much. That comes out of the verbiage we find in , “But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died [that means we're separated completely] to what we were held by [that is, the sin nature] so that we should serve.”
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See the purpose for that severing of that authority of the sin nature is for the purpose of serving. That's the Greek verb, diakonia [diakonia], also translated ministry. It's related to the noun, 'deacon', and it has that idea of serving God. Hold on to that. That is really important. We're saved for the purpose of serving or ministering in or by the newness of the Spirit. That is contrasted to the oldness of the letter. Spirit versus letter? Now what does that mean? Those of you have been around a while and read your Bible more than once or twice know that there's a development of that idea in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3, and we're going to go there. But I just want to point out that this passage in context is not condemning the concept of the 'letter of the Law'. When you get over to that's how most people want to interpret that but I just want to nail that down for you because there's only three or four passages that even use this metaphor where it talks about the letter versus the Spirit. This is not a condemnation of the letter of the Law.
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First of all because the letter of the Law was exactly what God expected the Jews to obey. Secondly, Paul states in this passage in verse 12 that the Law is holy, the commandment is holy, just, and good. So that means the letter of the Law has to be holy and just and good. Nothing that is said in this metaphor about the Spirit versus the letter implies that the letter is bad. Yet that's how a lot of people want to take it. They want to interpret that phrase, the Spirit is grace and the letter is legalism. But Paul is not talking about legalism in .
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Legalism is not in the context. What's in the context is that there's a change. We're not under the Mosaic Law. Being under the Mosaic Law was not legalism. The Pharisees were misusing and misapplying the Mosaic Law. That's why Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount. All through the Sermon on the Mount he uses this pedagogical technique where he says, “You have heard it said that such and so.” What he means by that is that this is what the Pharisees have told you. “But I say to you...” What's he's doing is giving God's interpretation of the Torah, in contrast to the Pharisees legalistic interpretation of the Torah. But they're both interpreting the Law.
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The Law is from God. The Law is good. Obeying the Law is not legalism. Thinking that obeying the Law is your means of salvation or your means of gaining God's blessing or getting God's approval is legalism; it's excluding grace. That's an important concept to grasp because it is not clearly understood. I think in the thirty-something years I've been teaching the Scriptures and in the pastoral ministry that's something I've had to deal with with every group, every congregation. People get that notion in their head that legalism is “thou shalt do something”.
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There are all kinds of 'you shall do this': pray without ceasing, giving, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Those are all 'thou shalts' which are all through the New Testament. There's 700 or 800 imperative mood verbs in the New Testament plus many other ways you can express a command other than just imperative mood verbs. I'm not including the gospels in that number. That's in the epistles between Romans and Jude. We see this contrast between being under Law and under grace.
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Under Law is relating to the spiritual life under the dispensation of the Mosaic Law from Sinai to Pentecost. I've looked at some other passages here and come up with some other terminology. What we find is this phraseology 'under Law' meaning that the Mosaic Law dictated through ritual and through moral mandate how a person was to live. But the Law didn't enable the person to fulfill the command. In the Church Age we still have commands but we're under grace and we're given the Holy Spirit who enables us to fulfill the commands. That's part of the difference.
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Under the Law we were still slaves to the sin nature. In the Church Age we're free from the bondage, the tyranny of the sin nature. Not free from the sin nature, still there, but free from the bondage and the tyranny of the sin nature. Under Law everything was pretty much still functioning out of the flesh, the sin nature. That raises questions for us because we think if everything comes from the sin nature, how did Old Testament believers have things like divine good? Well, you always had that problem but you just didn't know it.
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When we get into the New Testament we say the only way you can produce divine good is by walking by the Spirit. You just excluded that from a possibility in the Old Testament because if divine good, which is rewardable in Heaven at the Judgment Seat of Christ...oh, that's right: Old Testament saints don't show up at the Judgment Seat of Christ, do they? No. They don't get resurrected until the end of the Tribulation. They have a different basis for accountability.
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So the issue of divine good is a Church Age issue. I just love it when I get everybody thinking like this. If we're going to be true to our dispensational assumptions, not because of dispensations, as Dr. Waldorf used to say to me, “Because that's what the Bible says, Mr. Dean.” We have to be consistent and that means that the basis for the spiritual life we have in the Church Age, and everything related to it, is walking by the Spirit versus walking according to the flesh. Walking by the Spirit is how you produce divine good, that which is rewardable as good, silver, and precious stones.
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None of that relates to an Old Testament believer. They didn't have that. They had a different dynamic. They were to obey God. God's teaching different principles to them through that. God's teaching that you really can't do it on your own. When I don't help you, you really can't do it. That's why you just have this negative trajectory all the time in the Old Testament that they cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The purpose of the Law was not to show them how they can live and be blessed by God, even though that's the theoretical reality there, because they can't. They never do and they never are.
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As we'll see in these passages, the purpose of the Law was to condemn them, show them they were condemned under death. They were in bondage to that sin nature and they just couldn't do it. The Law wasn't given to enable them to live for God but to show them they really can't do it. You can do some things but mostly you can't. So you're either always in flesh under the sin nature but now under grace you're led by the Spirit.
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We'll see that in and I'm front loading this so we get into the passage in and . In these passages you're going to capture this, see this right away that this contrast is that we're no longer under the Law but we're under grace. “If you are led by the Spirit,” Paul says in , “you're no longer under Law.” Well, they're not under the Spirit at all in the Old Testament and they are under Law. It was a completely different dynamic.
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For us to go back and understand that, it's like trying to understand what it was like in the Garden of Eden before there was sin. We've got no frame of reference for it so we can't do it. We can get a general idea but not a specific idea. The result of living under the flesh is hostility and deviousness which just summarizes the work of the flesh. See . Love then summarizes the fruit of the Spirit.
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I pointed out Sunday morning in case you weren't here and missed it, when it describes what the works of flesh in are and then you have a list of the works of the flesh. Then it says but the fruit of the Spirit, a singular noun, not the fruits of the Spirit, is love. Love becomes the topic in this section in . The other characteristics that are listed there are not other fruits. They are all related to love in some way, some fashion. They are different facets of love.
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So we have the deeds of the flesh versus the fruit of the Spirit. The Law is engraved on stones, and I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but mine would go up ,that that is something often depicted as negative. It's not written on stone but now it's written on the heart. Oh, amen, aren't we good? But, see, in the Old Testament, they honored the fact that the Law was written on stone because it was permanent. That brought glory to God. That was a good thing. Paul is not saying that's a bad thing. He is saying that's characteristic of the spiritual life that was temporary, that didn't get you life, didn't save you, but that was characteristic of the Law in the Old Testament. But we're not under the Law anymore. We're under grace.
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It's a different dynamic because the Law is written on the heart. It's embodied in the life of people. It's a different dynamic. He's not contrasting one as bad and one as good. He's contrasting one as characteristic of the old dispensation which doesn't continue anymore and the other is characteristic of the new dispensation. I know, we have to think this through a little bit. It's really a fascinating deal. In the Old Testament the Law was a ministry of death. But the Law was good and holy and just. Don't forget that verse.
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I got into a discussion with someone one time and they said, “You know the Mosaic Law was terrible.” That's not what the Word of God says. The Pharisees distorted it and made it terrible but it wasn't terrible. It had a purpose in the overall progressive revelation of God. Under grace we have life so that's what we're going to look at here. I think it's great to study this because it really opens things up and helps us to see things more clearly. Not that we're seeing things we haven't seen before. It's just that we're going to connect the dots a little more consistently.
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Last time I took us through Galatians 3. I want to go back there to touch on that as we begin and continue our progression through these passages. Galatians was Paul's first epistle and he lays out in sort of a seed form a lot of the main doctrines that are in Romans. So these two different epistles help illuminate one another. In , Paul says, “Is the Law then against the promises of God?” Of course not. The way he forms the question, the answer would be no, it's not against the promises of God. “For if there had been a law given that could have given life [the protisis], truly righteousness would have been by the law.” What he's saying is that if it was at all possible that people could get life by obeying commandments, they could have done it by the Law. That means it's the highest and best, you couldn't improve upon it in any way, shape or form to have given someone a law code that would have gotten them life. It was the best it could possibly be.
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“If there had been a law given which could have given life [if that were possible] truly righteousness would have been by the Law but the Scripture has confined under judgment that all sin that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe but before faith came, we were kept under guard; we were confined by the Law.” Was that bad? No. See, we have a tendency to think that was bad. There was a purpose for the Law. It was holy and just and good. It was designed to be a teacher, a divine teaching mechanism in the flow of progressive revelation, the flow of history.
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Paul uses the analogy of the teacher, the pedagogue, in a Roman household. The pedagogue was a slave who had a dictatorial type of authority over a child until the child reached the age of manhood, at which point the pedagogue had no authority over the child anymore. The analogy is to the Law. The Law had complete authority and it was good. The Law's purpose was to teach us something, not teach us how to be saved, but teach that you can't do it yourself. Your sufficiency comes from God, not from your own ability.
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This is what Paul starts off with when he goes into this 'letter versus the Spirit' in . The first part of his argument is that his sufficiency is in Christ. So that's the point of the Law, to teach that it's not in us, it's in Christ. Now we're going to go over to . Paul says, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law.” The 'if' there in Greek is a first class condition. That's one of three different ways the Greek language can express a condition and here it has the sense “if and it's true”. “If you're led by the Spirit, you're not under the Law.” Now since those Galatians are just like us; they're Church Age believers and they are led by the Spirit because when you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you're led by the Spirit. So we're led by the Spirit; therefore, we are not under the Law.
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I want to take you back to pick up the context of this. As I pointed out last time in , Paul lays out the basic question, the basic issue that he's addressing in talking to the Galatians. The problem was that they had these Jewish non-Christian Jews who kept following Paul. They would come in and say, “Oh, it's great that Jesus is the Messiah. It's great to think that you're going to get to heaven by believing in Jesus. But you still have to obey the Law. The Law isn't over yet. Men have to be circumcised. You have to obey the Law and it's still important. You can't do away with the Law; you still have to obey it.” So they were called Judiazers.
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That idea of the Law was a legalistic use of the Law, that you had to apply the Law in order to really be saved. It was 'believe in Jesus and obey the Law' to be saved. You had to obey the Law to be sanctified. So Paul has already addressed the confusion and the distortion of the gospel in the first two chapters saying in very harsh terms that this was not the true gospel. This was another gospel of a different kind and therefore those who proclaimed it are accursed.
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Now he's going to shift talking about post-salvation growth. He says, “Are you so foolish, having begun by means of the Spirit [that is, you were regenerated, you were born again by means of the Holy Spirit] are you now being made perfect, teleoo [teleow], being brought to completion or matured by the flesh, or the sin nature?” I pointed out last time that there are three key words here… spirit, perfect, and flesh...which are not used again until we get to . Everything between and 5:18 help us to understand his answer.
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So sometimes if you think I take side trips every now and then and it takes me a long time to get to the answer of something, I'm not nearly as bad as the apostle Paul. In he says, “I say again, walk by means of the Spirit and you shall not fulfill [make perfect or bring to completion] the lusts of the flesh.” Now he's going to tell us how, if we began by the Spirit, we're not going to be matured by the flesh. We're going to be matured by the Spirit. We have to begin by the Spirit and continue by the Spirit.
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Did they have the Spirit in the Old Testament? No. They couldn't do this; it's completely different. The precedent for the Church Age spiritual life is not in the Old Testament. It's unique. It's absolutely, totally new. He leads to this in this last chapter talking about the Law, the role of the pedagogue, the Law as a covenant. He uses the analogy at the end of chapter 4 about Hagar and Sarah. Sarah represented grace. Hagar represented Law. Law brings bondage. That's the whole point at the end of chapter four. He says, “Nevertheless, what does the Scripture say? Cast out the bond woman and her son.” He clearly says he's using this as an allegory and he can do this because he's writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
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Scripture is not to be interpreted allegorically, because the way we use allegory today denies the literal meaning. What he means by allegory does not deny the literal historicity and actuality of the original events. He's just saying I'm going to use this as an illustration to make this point by analogy that you have to completely cast out the Law in order to go forward. Otherwise, you're going to get trapped and you're not free. Under the Law, you're not free.
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That's why he then says in , “Stand therefore in the liberty whereby God has made us free and do not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” So the Law which is holy and just and good is also a yoke of bondage. Not in its legalistic application, although it becomes that truly, but it is a yoke of bondage because it doesn't give you the ability to do the commands of the Law.
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God tells them all these things to do and not to do but he didn't infuse them with the ability to do it which is what He does in the New Testament. We get into this discussion about liberty. In verse 4 he says, “You have become estranged from Christ.” You believers in Galatia have become separated from Christ because you have attempted to become justified by Law. You have fallen from grace. It doesn't mean they've lost their salvation; it means they've departed from the grace message. Verse 5, “For we, through the Spirit, eagerly await for the hope of righteousness by faith, not by Law, for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything but faith working through love.”
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Love is the key word here, second to Spirit, that you have to trace down through this section. So we're going to skip from there down to verse 13. Verse 13 says, “For you brethren have been called to liberty [liberty doesn't mean you can do whatever you want to whenever you want to; it means now you're free to serve Christ, to truly love one another.] only do not use liberty as an opportunity to the flesh [to sin, or antinomianism or licentiousness] but through love serve one another.”
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Usually when we get into this section of Galatians, no one talks about that verb but you have love mentioned in verse 6; you have love mentioned here in verse 13 where you are told through love to serve one another. He then gives an illustration of that command in verse 14 where he says “for all the Law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
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Look at that verse. Is verse 14 there to tell you to love your neighbor as yourself? No. It's an illustration of the command in verse 13, “In love serve one another.” The quote that is there in verse 14 is from . It's part of the Mosaic Law. Remember when Jesus is asked what's the greatest Law, he says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” That summarized the whole Law so all of the Law related to other human beings are simply different specifics on how to love your neighbor as yourself.
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The term he's emphasizing here is “through love serve one another.” Who's the one another? Does that include your neighbor? Only if your neighbor is a Christian. See Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.” One another in context is talking about the body of Christ. It's not talking about outside the body of Christ. It's a higher standard. The standard isn't love your neighbor as you love yourself. The standard now is love one another as Christ loves you. It's a much higher standard and it's restricted.
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Does it mean we don't love our neighbor as our self? No. Those mandates are still there but that's not what Paul is emphasizing here. It's love again. Then he says, “If you bite and devour one another [which is just deviousness and nastiness in the congregation] be wary unless you be consumed by one another. What's the solution? The solution is verse 16. “I say then walk by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.”
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What you've been trying to do, Paul is saying, is try to live the Christian life and grow up and mature as a Christian by obeying the Law. Where has that led you? It's led you to internal squabbling and deviousness and biting and devouring one another. That's because you're not trying to complete or mature by the Spirit. Did you begin by the Spirit and now you're trying to be completed by the flesh? So, he's back to that now and he says the solution is “Walk by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.”
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There is a contrast between the flesh and the sin nature on the one hand and the Spirit on the other hand. That's the contrast of “under law” and “under grace”. “For the flesh [sin nature] lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh.” That's the warfare that constantly goes on in the believer's life because when we're in fellowship we're walking by the Spirit and when we're out of fellowship we're walking by the sin nature or flesh. They're contrary to one another. They're mutually exclusive. “...so you do not do the things which you wish.” Now I'll come back to that when we get into . That's what Paul says, “I tried to grow as a Christian using the Law and I did what I didn't want to do and I didn't do what I wanted to do.” That's the whole frustration of trying to do it yourself without the Spirit is that it doesn't work. We don't have the capability within us to fulfill the Law.
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Then Paul says in verse 18, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you're not under the Law.” We're not under the Law anymore because as Christians in the Church Age, the Law is no longer operational. It's been fulfilled in Christ. And then so you can understand whether you're walking by the flesh or by the Spirit, he gives you some manifestations. He says, “The works [plural] of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, hatred, contentiousness, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envies, murder, revelry, these and the like.” Those are all manifestations of the sin nature.
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Then in verse 22 he says, “But the fruit [singular] of the Spirit is love..” What are we talking about in chapter 5? We're talking about liberty, love, and it's only realized by walking by means of the Spirit. This is your next dot to connect. In your Bible you can circle love in verse 6, love in verse 14, love in verse 15, and then love here. This connects the dots. He's asking, how do you have this love that he's talked about in all these verses? It's the result of walking by the Spirit. That ties it together for us in those verses and connects back to .
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In , Paul said, “For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace.” In terminology, the flesh shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace. So we're trying to understand the dynamics of what these mean, that we are under grace. It doesn't mean we can do whatever we want to. It doesn't mean there are no absolutes, no mandates, that there aren't stipulations. It means that in this dispensation, God has gone above and beyond the call of duty by giving us what Paul talks about in , “blessing us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies”. It's already done. He's given us every conceivable capability and asset to obey him and to walk with him.
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That's how fits into this whole sort of mosaic in terms of these different patterns. Now what I want you to do is turn to our next passage in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. This is a great passage. 2 Corinthians is one of those books that is rarely taught. What are your five favorite books? Nobody lists 2 Corinthians. What are your ten favorite books? Nobody lists 2 Corinthians. It just seems to be overlooked. It's overlooked in the Commentary tradition as well. There are not that many great commentaries on 2 Corinthians because it's one of the last epistles that someone writes on. You get a commentary series that comes out on every book in the Bible. One of the last commentaries that gets published is 2 Corinthians.
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Its almost like a spiritual stepchild but there are great things here. These things are hard to understand. Often when people read Peter saying that Paul wrote some things that are hard to understand they're thinking about election and predestination. I think Peter had 2 Corinthians in mind. One of the chapters that is very difficult for people is this particular chapter. I want to go through about the first nine to eleven verses just to help us understand it. I want to do a little flyover first of all. The context here is this ongoing correction of the Corinthians. The Corinthians were the bad boys of the early church and they lived in a community of Corinth that had been a Roman colony and was settled by a lot of retired Roman soldiers. It was a seaport, not unlike Houston.
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Back in the day if you hung out down by the ship channel in Houston a lot you really understood what that meant, I think. There were just so many different dives and bars. I don't know what all was down there. It was just nasty. That was Corinth all over. Anything went in Corinth. It was proverbial in ancient Rome that if you were driven by lust, were homosexual, were licentious, a party-boy, you were a Corinthian. That's what it meant. That's where that idiom came from. If you felt like anything went, if you were basically a typical American college person who had no values and no absolutes, then you did whatever you wanted to do, however your sin nature drives you, then that's what a Corinthian was. They had no moral background.
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The Corinthian converts had to learn all this from scratch, as it were, because they weren't even taught good establishment morality prior to being saved. So they were divisive and in the first part of 1 Corinthians Paul is having to correct all of these different problems that are going on inside the congregation. They're saved but their sin natures are running away with them. After he dealt with several of those problems, there was apparently another epistle that was not going to be preserved in Scripture that is the true 2 Corinthians and then there was a response and then there's this one. There was also some correspondence from Corinth.
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They tried to straighten some things up as so often happens with people who are learning and growing. They made more mistakes in trying to straighten things out. One of the mistakes they continued to make was this sort of people worship. They got focused on the messenger and not the message. I've heard a lot of people say, “I believe it's the message, not the messenger.” Let me tell you one thing. Their focus is so much on the messenger it's unbelievable their self-denial. Ninety percent of the people I've heard emphasize that had their eyes on the messenger.
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Paul is saying: quit following Apollos, and Cephas and me. It's not about us; it's all about Christ. Quit making a big deal about this but they continued to go after anybody who came along who had a winning smile, a popular personality, and a pleasing message. They would run after him sort of like Americans and their current president. They were consumed with the surface and not the content. They would have fit in very well in our television, superficial image-focused culture that cares more about what somebody looks like than their message.
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This was evidenced by one of the first television debates between Nixon and JFK. Everybody is pretty familiar with that. Nixon didn't want to put his makeup so he came on looking like he was coming off a 3-day drunk with a heavy dark beard and that made him look negative. It was just a false image. That's why Paul's writing. He's got these false apostles that are coming with all their made up credentials and he says in the beginning of this third chapter, “Do we begin again to commend ourselves?” Are we puffing ourselves up? Are we blowing our own horn? Are we the ones making ourselves significant? Or do we need some others epistles as commendations?
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Apparently they were showing up with made up resumes. Then Paul says in verse 2, “You are our epistle written in our hearts.” He says the evidence of the genuineness of our ministry, the authenticity of our ministry, the veracity of our message is that when they believed it and applied it, it changed their lives. Then in verse 3 he says, “Clearly you are an epistle of Christ administered by us.” God worked through Paul and it was on the basis of that divine work of God that the gospel was taught in Corinth and the church was founded.
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He says, “You are an epistle of Christ administered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh.” See, this is where we get into that stone versus flesh, which means heart. It's not the sin nature; it's talking about a human life. Now skip down to verse 9 so we get the overall view here. One other thing, when he says you are an epistle of Christ administered by us, that's diakonia or service, ministry. That's that verb which shows up several times going through here, either the noun or the verb form. We see it again in verse 9, “for if the ministry of condemnation...” What's the ministry of condemnation? That's the Law; one purpose of the Law was condemnation. You didn't get life by the Law; you learned you could not live up to God's standards so the Law was a ministry of condemnation and a ministry of death.
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He says, “For if the ministry of condemnation had glory [and it did] the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory.” It's not that the Law didn't have glory but we have greater glory in the age of grace. “For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels. For if what is passing away was glorious [the Law]; what remains is much more glorious. Therefore since we have such hope...” This isn't hope and change; this is real Biblical hope which means a certainty, a confidence of a future reality.
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Now let's go back and just look at this a little bit. In verse 3 Paul gives four characteristics of this epistle. First, you are an epistle from Christ. An epistle is not the wife of an apostle; it's a letter. You are an epistle from Christ. So the letter is from Christ. But it is mediated through the human writers of Scripture. Second he says, “…ministered or served by us”. In other words, God doesn't work directly; He works indirectly through the leaders of the church and the apostles. So the word here is diakonia and it should be translated “being ministered by us.” The New King James probably has the better translation of it. Some others try to use service or other circumlocution to let it come across in English a little better but that's the main focus there. The idea of ministry here implies that the ministry of Paul, the apostle, and his associates is crucial and foundational to producing the letter.
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Remember, the letter is really their life. It's embodied in their life and the impact the gospel has had on them. The third thing Paul says here about the letter is that it's inscribed or written by the Spirit of the Living God. Written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God. Now let me ask you a question. This is a hard question. He's contrasting writing something with ink and writing something by the Spirit of the Living God. Is there something wrong with writing with ink? No. Now the analogy of writing with ink is analogous to writing on stone. Neither one of those was wrong. The point wasn't that that is wrong and this is right, which is how this idiom through here is often misinterpreted. The issue here is that writing in stone is past; that was right and good but we're not in that dispensation any more. We're in a new dispensation.
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So he says, “written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God.” Of course, how did Paul write his epistles? With ink on papyrus so we can't say that writing with ink is wrong. He's just using this as an analogy of the dispensational shift that is taking place, which is exactly what I've been emphasizing in and 7. Paul is saying we're not under Law anymore; we're under grace. We're in a new dispensation, new realities, new dynamics, new empowerment because God is taking the human race to the next level because He can now that salvation is completed on the Cross and the authority of the sin nature is crucified. It had never happened before.
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The point of this contrast, not that writing with ink is wrong but that the impact now is that the Holy Spirit drives the doctrinal truth embedded on the page to be embodied in our life. There was no Holy Spirit, no God given dynamic in the Old Testament to enable them to apply the Law. They had the standard but God didn't give them anything to make it happen. In the Church Age we have the Spirit to make that happen. So he goes from that point in the first part of verse 3 to the second point in verse 3 which is the contrast between what is written on stone and what is written on the heart. “Not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh.” He's just contrasting that the Mosaic Law was written on tablets of stone and there was nothing wrong with that but it didn't give the people the inner ability to apply it. Now it's written on the heart. Now there's language that comes out of this that's related to the covenant passages in Ezekiel. We'll get into that next time. But that's the main idea.
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Now we'll just have a little survey of the next three verses. Verse 4 he says, “and we have such trust through Christ toward God, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything being from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God.” What did I say the point of the Law was? To show that we had no sufficiency. That's what he's coming back to here, this concept of sufficiency that our sufficiency is not anything we've done. It doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility to teach and to explain the Word and the gospel but we know that everything we do, if it's to have any success, it's because God does it. We're not relying on human techniques.
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We're not going to go out and learn the twenty-five points of the Purpose Driven Church so we can build a church. We're not going to go to any of these other churches that are exploding so we can imitate their technique. We're going to make sure that when this church grows it's because people come because they want to know the Word of God. A lot of people don't want to know the Word of God today. They want to have the trappings of knowing the Word of God. They want, perhaps, to have a pastor who seems like he knows the Word of God or uses the right verbiage but they really don't want to know the Word of God.
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I, and some of you as well, have been around Christians and Christianity long enough to recognize that that is true. If you think back to the kind of people that were adults in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they had a hunger to know the Word of God, so much so that in some cases, they went to church 4, 5, 6, 7 times a week to study the Word. You don't find young people today doing that. They're not willing to give up all their night life and their iPads and iPods and computer games and everything else in order to come to church to learn the Scripture. They think Sunday is good enough. Well, Sunday is not good enough. Once a week never has cut it and never will cut it.
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Scripture has to become embedded and embodied in our hearts, our thinking, and our souls. That doesn't happen once a week. It doesn't even happen once a day. It has to be part of our life, day in and day out, and everything else in life, somehow is secondary. I know that becomes challenging because we have to live and work and all those other things but we have to make the Word of God that primary passion in our life to live for the Lord Jesus Christ and to have our life changed. So Paul says the sufficiency isn't from us, it's from God who also made us ministers of the new covenant not of the letter but of the Spirit.
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Is there something wrong with the letter? You've heard this for years...saying we're not going to follow the letter but the law. Somehow they think this is legalism versus grace. Paul still wrote with letters as far as I can tell. It's not about a style of interpretation. Often this verse is taken out of context, ever since Origen in the 3rd century ripped it out of context to justify allegorical interpretation. We're not going to follow the literal interpretation…we're going to follow the spiritual interpretation. That's not what Paul is talking about here. This is not a discussion of interpretation. This is a discussion of what changes a person from the inside out. Is it the letter which doesn't give you the ability or is it what happens in the New Testament era where you have the internal indwelling of God the Holy Spirit who is the one who give you the ability to fulfill the letter? That's what he's saying.
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We'll get into those details a little more next time. You're going to have to hear this four or five times just as I've had to study it several times to grasp what it's saying. The conclusion isn't really anything different from what you've heard before. It's just that I'm telling you this passage isn't telling you what you've heard before. It's talking about some other things you have heard before and it's going to make a lot more sense when you understand that's what Paul is talking about.

Romans 078b-Sanctification: Law versus Spirit , 2 Corinthians 3

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 078b-Sanctification: Law versus Spirit ,
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Open your Bibles to 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. While you are turning there I thought I would just mention someone that some of you know. About 15 months ago a good friend of mine, a pastor we ordained at Berachah Church last century, a couple of decades ago now it seems, by the name of John Hite, just dropped off the radar. John and I were very close and we communicated a lot. Then all of a sudden I just couldn't get a phone call returned; I couldn't get an e-mail returned. John had been doing various things to help us with the ministry. Then John called me tonight. I looked down at my phone and saw John was calling me after 15 to 16 months and hundreds of e-mails and phone calls. I thought, “You know if John is calling me, I better answer.” It turns out that right at the beginning of that time, he and his wife were moving into a new house. His oldest son who's very bright and is a professor of music in a small town in Wisconsin was at a movie theater where there was a lot of activity going on behind him. It was a young couple, the girl was 13, and they had been having sex during the movie. He reprimanded them. The next day the police showed up at his house. The girl had found out who he was and accused John's son of rape and kidnapping and Lord knows what else. So John went up there as a good father and ended up spending the next year and a half working to do the research to get the evidence to help the lawyers get everything they needed to clear his son. His son was acquitted. There was actually no physical evidence other than the girls charge. So that's why I hadn't heard from John..
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I thought that was so remarkable and it's an example of how God prepares things in our life. We never know what happens, why things happen a certain way. Sometimes we get a glimpse of this. About three years ago John started to drop off the radar about 50%. He is a retired Army sergeant and he had been asked by two or three soldiers to help defend them in a court-martial case where they were accused of forging documents for various things. I forget the details now. In the military you can ask anyone to defend you. It doesn't have to be a JAG officer, a lawyer, and so John did work on that for two years and got them all off in the process. It exposed the facts and I think a bird colonel and at least one general had to retire. I think criminal charges were brought against a couple of other field grade officers who were involved in this forgery cover up.
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So John wondered why is this going on and on and everything gets deeper and deeper? It was preparation for what would happen with his son so it's just really interesting to see how God works those kinds of the details out in a person's life. Some of you think you have problems in your life or maybe you don't. Your problems are better than other people's problems.
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We're in second Corinthians chapter 3 because I am taking the time to look at the other key passages in the New Testament that emphasize the end of the Law. This is important for several reasons. One is because there are a group of conservative Christian scholars who go by the name of the Theonomous who seek to resurrect the law of God as the normative standard for society. That's what Theonomy means. theo, the first part of the word for God, nome from nomos meaning God's law. Their position is that only the ceremonial part of the Law ended at the cross but the civil part of the Law is what God expects all nations to come under and apply to all civil society. That position is usually associated with a prophetic position or eschatological position known as Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism, in their view, is that the mission of the church is to reconstruct society according to the norms of God's law, according to the norms of their Theonomic position. They are post-millennial. They do not believe, as is often misrepresented, that it's the role of the church to bring in the kingdom not in an active sense. But that it is the role of the church, as the Holy Spirit works through the church, to expand Christianity until it brings in the kingdom. Then Jesus comes back after the kingdom is positioned.
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Tommy Ice's first book, written with Wayne House, was a critique of theonomic post millennialism. That's a lot of big words. Now and then just say that and you'll impress yourself. Now that's one group. One reason that's important is because there are a lot of people of an anti-Christian persuasion in this country, a lot of liberals within the Democratic Party and some within the Republican Party, who want to take that extreme position and spin it. It truly is a minority position among conservative Christians; there are very few who hold that position.
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Two of the men who are best known for their writings promoting theonomics are Rousas John Rushdoony who most of you have never heard of before and his son-in-law, Gary North, who is also well known as a conservative libertarian type economist. Rushdoony is dead now but they didn't speak to each other for years over some minor disagreement over the observation of the Lord's table. That view is usually resurrected when you read certain articles dealing with Christian evangelicals, the Christian right. That's what they go to. This is like one half of 1% of all conservative Christians who would even come close to holding their view. Very few people read Rushdoony or Gary North or any of their material. They get a lot more play because of their websites and they're on some of the libertarian websites, Gary North writes a lot on Lou Rockwell and his economic advice is sometimes colored by his theological viewpoints but I understand a lot of time it's not. At one time Gary North accused me of standing naked in the public square and then in Y2K he sold everything he had up in Tyler and moved to the deep dark backwoods of the Ozarks and built a compound so his family could survive Y2K. If you read him he's the most convincing writer. You just knew that the world was going to implode at midnight. Nothing happened so that's the scary Gary as we sometimes call him.
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That's one group who believe that God's Laws are for today. Then there's another group of Christians who have held that the moral law of God is in effect for today. They don't see a real distinction between the Old Testament Mosaic law economy and the Church Age economy or administration of God or dispensations. Often this group, usually just simply referred to as legalists, are the ones who often try to observe the Sabbath but they do it on Sunday. Somehow they switch the Sabbath from the seventh day Shabbat on Saturday to Sunday.
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I remember some years ago a conversation with one of the better-known and better respected Old Testament scholars who was the head of the Old Testament Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by the name of Gleason Archer. He was a brilliant man, probably knew 30 to 35 different languages. He observed the Sabbath on Sunday afternoon and when asked how he did that he said, “I don't watch television or watch football.
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I had a retired missionary in my first church who was a Moody Bible Institute graduate. See a lot of people pick up these ideas and she didn't think you should work or do anything like that on Sunday which is the Sabbath. But she and her three or four elderly friends who came to church every Sunday and, of course, they are always there on Wednesday night prayer meeting, had a ritual every Sunday of going to Wyatt's Cafeteria.. And as I became aware of her views on the Sabbath I asked her if she had a problem with the fact that Christians who work at Wyatt's Cafeteria were having to come into work and to serve for her Sunday meal. She quit going because the food never tasted the same again. I believe she didn't quit right away but it just put such a load of guilt on her. I'm not making fun of people like this. There's a superficiality to it. I've heard other people like Michael Berry go off on something about this. Yesterday morning he was dealing with liquor stores not being open before 12. His arguments were totally inane. Not that he was advocating for a legalistic position; he was attacking it. His information was all wrong and that's usually the kind of thing that happens.
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Historically since the first century, since the time of the Jerusalem Council in , actually since Peter walked into Cornelius's house, the church has had a problem with how to apply the relationship of the Mosaic Law to the Christian. That is what Paul is showing in these passages, that there is no relationship. The Law ended. The Law had a limited, temporary purpose. The Mosaic covenant was a finite covenant that was only given for a specific people for a specific length of time and that purpose was completed and fulfilled by Christ on the cross. It's been replaced by the new covenant and it's been replaced by a new factor in the spiritual life of Christian believers in the Holy Spirit.
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As we've seen in our study in Romans chapter 6 what Paul emphasizes is that what makes the difference for our spiritual life is what occurs in a judicial sense at the cross instantly the moment we trust in Christ. We're identified with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. That identification is known as the baptism by the Holy Spirit and in that identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection the sin nature is crucified with Christ. It's not dead but its power is broken and we move from being the old man we were before we were saved to being a new creature in Christ.
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The sin nature is still there. We still live in a mortal body. We still have the corruption of the sin nature. But the authority and power of the sin nature is completely broken. So when we feel those urges, when we feel those seemingly overwhelming emotions that we really can't avoid responding to them and going with them, the reality of Scripture is that yes, we do we have a choice. And that's what Paul is hammering home in Romans chapter 6.
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I don't think, at least for me, that until we did this last study in Romans six that I fully appreciated the fact that the Old Testament believer did not have that kind of an ending for the sin nature. There is no identification truth for the Old Testament saint. The sin nature's power is not broken for the Old Testament saint. He has the Law which simply tells him what the standard of God is but there's no internal empowerment or transformation to enable the Old Testament believer to apply the Law and to do the Law. It is truly a different dispensation in every single facet. This is why Israel always has this negative spiritual trajectory even though there are high points that we see in certain heroic individuals in . They knew they never have a positive trajectory and that is because the Law was not designed to give them that. It wasn't designed to show them how to live but that they really can't live that way and that there will always be failure.
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I have taken the time to look at . We'll probably come back to that part in tonight to help us understand just these dynamics because I think with this study in contrasts between what we have and really understanding what every believer up until the day of Pentecost had, we don't appreciate what it is that we are able to do as believers today. It is absolutely remarkable. It is a complete renovation. This terminology that Paul uses in Colossians and in Acts of a transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light is what happens.
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There is a metaphysical shift that occurs that impacts the entire universe with the death of Christ on the cross. There really is a sort of a shadow, a veil of darkness over the human race until that is broken at the cross. The power of the sin nature is truly broken so that we do not have to be slaves to the sin nature. That's what has brought us to this passage in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3. In this passage there are things that Paul brings out that relate to the permanent aspect of grace and to the shift to the new covenant in contrast to the limitations of the Old Testament.
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Paul starts off asking a couple of rhetorical questions. In verse one he is just simply asking do they need to commend themselves again. No, they don't because he truly establishes his credentials as an apostle in the first epistle to the Corinthians. The backdrop for this is, as I pointed out last week, these false apostles who had infiltrated the congregation in Corinth claiming to be the true genuine apostles of Christ and claiming that Paul was a fraud. They attacked his authority; they attacked his credentials; they attacked his testimony; they attacked Paul's doctrine again and again and again. So Paul has been put in a position of defending and validating his claims to be an apostle.
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So he gives them an experiential argument in verse two, saying, “You are our epistle...” In other words, everyone knows the transformative impact of “the gospel that I preached among you when I was in Corinth.” When I came and proclaimed the truth that Jesus was the Messiah and that by believing in Him you would have life in His name, you changed from darkness to light, from death to life, and that was manifested to everybody in the community in Corinth. They saw the change that took place. It was a real change that had a flesh and blood impact.
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“You are our epistle, written in our hearts.” Notice how he shifts. “You're our epistle [our letter] written in our hearts.” I want you to notice this contrast. He talks about “this epistle written in hearts and read by all men.” See that's that visible testimony to all human beings. Then he goes on to say, “Clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God...”
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So there's this contrast between an epistle written with ink and an epistle written not with ink but by the Spirit of God. “Not on tablets of stone..”, which is in contrast with the Old Testament that the Law which was written on tablets of stone but now this contrast is the present epistles were written on tablets of flesh which is the heart, the inner life of a person. So what he's emphasizing here is that what is new is this internal dynamic transformative change that occurs in people's life when they are saved because they instantly become a new creature in Christ. Then when there is spiritual growth there is a transformation. If anybody here is thinking, then one thing you should think about is that when you read first Corinthians you don't really think there's a big change that's taken place in the church at Corinth. Remember their divisiveness; they've got problems with being judgmental toward one another; they've got problems with licentiousness in the congregation. They've got problems with being judgmental towards weaker brothers and eating meat sacrificed to idols. They've got problems with mystics in the congregation who were speaking in tongues. There are all kinds of divisions and problems and in the church. Sometimes it's easy to sort of focus on that but that's normal because every Christian and every church and every congregation made up of fallen sinful believers is going to manifest different problems like that but there is a radical shift that's taking place in their lives because of grace.
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That's what he's describing here and when he responded to their first letter with his first letter he's saying that it had an impact. They changed to conform to the instructions he gave them in that first letter. So he says you are an epistle of Christ ministered to by us. As I pointed out last time, the couple of words that we need to pay attention to includes this one “ministered'. It's the verb on which the noun deacon, diakanos [diakonoj] is based on. This is an important word because it has to do with this aspect of Christian service, serving one another in the body of Christ. And so they, as apostles and those who are serving with Paul, have ministered, have served the believers in the congregation in Corinth. This is empowered by God the Holy Spirit. It is not based on their power, their credentials, their background, their intelligence, their achievements, their academics, or any of those things.
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When we get into verse 4, the topic shifts a little bit and Paul begins to emphasize the foundation of his trust. Actually that should be translated confidence. On the basis of their confidence, this is a Greek word based on the root of the word, a synonym for confidence, that is related to the word for faith, pistis [pistij]. I think confidence is a much better concept there. That's what we have here in where Paul talks about we are the circumcision who worship God, that is, the spiritual circumcision, “We are the circumcision who worship God in Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” See this is the emphasis here that he's bringing: where's your confidence, where's your strength, what do you think enables you as a believer to obey God? He's saying that confidence is not in the flesh, it's not in our natural abilities.
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In he goes on to say, “though I also might have confidence in the flesh” [this is the same word, pepoithesis [pepoiqhsij], and then he lists all of his credentials. It's not based on academic achievement; it's not based on native intelligence; it's not based on past accomplishments; it's not based on the possession of certain natural skills or talents but it's based on what God provides and that's true for every Christian. It's true for you. It's true for every Christian you know and not just for the apostle Paul, not just for pastors, but for every single Christian.
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Our confidence has to be in God. He's the one who gives us that ability in order to carry out God's mission. It's His work and He provides the means for doing so. So in , he uses that same word that was used in , “We have such confidence through Christ toward God.” This is a radical departure from the kind of thinking that dominated second Temple Judaism. This is a bold, brazen confidence but it's totally based in God, not upon our works. It's a radical departure from the kind of confidence that Paul had as a Pharisee where all the emphasis was on his genealogy, his background, his training, and all these other things. That's not to minimize those as unnecessary. It’s to say that is not the focal point. The focal point is on the provision of God.
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So we come now to the next couple of verses in and 6. Now Paul says, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves.” That excludes anything we can come up with, everything is excluded, nothing comes from our own abilities, our own natural talents. Everything is excluded that comes from us, “but our sufficiency is from Christ.” Now the word that's used here for sufficiency versus the word that's used for sufficiency later on in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 11, is a different word. It is the word hikanos [i(kanoj], meaning enough or worthy. It's sometimes translated 'ability' or 'able' or 'competent' or 'qualified'. I think the idea of ability or competence is what is emphasized here in and 6. It's not that we have the ability in and of ourselves to fulfill the ministry of Christ. None of us can do that. We can't do that in our spiritual life. The spiritual life is not a system of morality. This is the problem with Theonomy; this is the problem with various forms of legalism; this is the problem with all of covenant theology because covenant theology does not talk much about the Holy Spirit as the centerpiece of the spiritual life. This is true of reformed theology which is those theological systems that have their root in John Calvin, one of the great leaders of the Protestant Reformation. What day did the Protestant Reformation start? That's right, it started October 31. I had a conversation with my chiropractor about that today. He said you can come in next week and see me on October 31. He said, “Do you celebrate Halloween?” I said, “No, I celebrate Reformation Day.” He asked, “What's that?” So you see you get an opportunity to witness about all kinds of things. You just have to know stuff. We had a good conversation and he asked me all kinds of questions. He's a real sponge.
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Martin Luther was the father of the Protestant Reformation. He nailed the 95 theses as debating points on the door of the church at Wittenberg on October 31 because it is the day before All Hallows or All Saints Day, which was a holiday. And on a holiday people would come to the Catholic Church, to the Cathedral, and there would be discussion points that they could debate on that day. The night before the event is All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, which is how the name derives. It is the night before when all the spooks and goblins and ghosts were running around. But that night, at midnight, they would all have to go back to the grave because it was going to be All Saints Day, just medieval superstition and mysticism.
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Luther led the charge. Calvin was the number two leader that came out of a different geographical area. He was in France, southwestern Germany and Switzerland primarily. His main service ministry came out of Geneva. Out of Calvin's ministry you have Presbyterianism and Congregationalism and several other different kinds of denominations. A lot of the Anglican historic, not modern Anglican, beliefs were grounded on Genevan Calvinism. In historic Calvinism there was no recognition of the role of the Holy Spirit because they didn't see this heavy dispensational shift between the Old Testament and the New. So it wasn't until the end of the 19th century and the 20th century when the charismatics and Pentecostals began to emphasize the Holy Spirit a lot. Then some in the Calvinist tradition began to wake up and to start spending some time on it but in a strict Calvinist reformed theology view of the spiritual life, it's all about just doing the right thing, just obeying Scripture. It's a 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' kind of Christianity.
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This is not what Paul is saying here. Our sufficiency is not of ourselves. We can't just go out and do what the Bible says to do. That's the problem he's going to come up against in Romans seven. That the more he tried to do the Law, the more he realized what a failure he was. The more he tried to obey the Law on his own without dependence on God or the Holy Spirit, the more he realized that he did what he didn't want to do and he didn't do what he did want to do. He was completely, completely frustrated so and 6 is emphasizing this confidence that Paul has in God. God is totally sufficient. He is the one who gives us our ability and our capability.
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So as we look at this we recognize that Paul isn't looking at the topic here of contrasting legalism versus grace but Law versus grace. He is contrasting the age of the Law as being insufficient. The Law is insufficient but now because of grace and the provision of the Holy Spirit, our sufficiency is in God. So he says, “ Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
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Now that brings in a whole other realm of doctrine that's very important to understand. We went through this a lot in our study of Hebrews and we need to go through it again just in terms of review as we go through this chapter because understanding the new covenant is extremely important for our spiritual life. It's emphasized in Hebrews. It's emphasized here but it's something that is terribly misunderstood today. I'm not sure that even though we have studied this several times that we have got a good grasp on the new covenant. I want to review that to some degree as we go through this and after I finish looking at these verses I'll come back and take a look at the new covenant. What Paul does here is he connects the fact that under the Law we were incapable; we were unable to do what God wanted us to do. The Law was insufficient but in the age of grace, because we have been given the Holy Spirit, our sufficiency, our ability comes from God because it is the Holy Spirit who enables us, who gives us the strength and the ability to live a spiritual life and to have true victory over the sin nature. Not just legally in terms of our position in Christ but actually in terms of our day to day experience. The sad thing is that there are too many of us who don't seem to ever quite grasp how we see this applied in our own lives. The sin nature still seems to be just as powerful for us now that we're saved as it was before and so Paul emphasizes this distinction.
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We have to understand this. Paul says that the our sufficiency is from God in , “Who...” [that is a reference back to God], “who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant..” So as I've taught before, remember the new covenant doesn't go into effect until the future. The new covenant, everywhere it is mentioned in Scripture, is a covenant between God and the house of Judah and the house of Israel. There is not a new covenant with the church. Well, wait a minute. It sure seems like that's what Paul is saying here that we're ministers of the new covenant. But this is what is known as a proleptic, a future type reference. Something's not going to happen until the future. The new covenant between God and Israel and Judah doesn't go into effect until Jesus Christ returns at the Second Coming. What laid the foundation for the new covenant? The sacrifice of Christ on the cross; that is the foundation of the new covenant.
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We say this once a month, “This is the new covenant of my blood which is given for you.” That's the legal basis for the new covenant. The new covenant doesn't go into effect until the Second Coming but because of the new covenant and its future certainty we have a related application of it today. It's not much different from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament God made a contract with Abraham and God said, “I'm going to make this contract with you and on the basis of this legal contract with you, I'm going to bless your next-door neighbor.
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Let's just think of this real simply as a mortgage contract. You have one person entering into a mortgage contract with somebody else and on the basis of this contract he says, “I'm going to bless your next-door neighbor.” Is the contract with the next-door neighbor? Not at all. The legal contract between these two parties is the basis for the benefits that go to the next-door neighbor. That's the Abrahamic covenant. God is the party of the first part. He enters into an unconditional, unilateral covenant or contract with Abraham and tells Abraham that “through you I will bless all the nations.” That's the foundation for the salvation of Gentiles from that point all the way through the Old Testament and all through the New Testament and until human history ends and the last human being is saved. It's all because God made a contract with Abraham, that through Abraham and his seed He would bless everyone else. It doesn't mean that they are a party to that contract. Now that's the Abrahamic Covenant.
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The new covenant is the same kind of thing. It has different provisions. It's between God and Israel and on the basis of that contractual arrangement God says, “I'm going to be able to bless with a new spiritual life and a regenerative spiritual life, something that never was experienced before. Now they had regeneration in the Old Testament but it didn't come with all of the extras, all of the optional benefits that we get in the Church Age. They were made a new creature but they weren't a new creature in Christ. They were transformed from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive but they didn't get all of the other accessories and assets that you and I get as believers in the Church Age.
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So anyone who is involved in evangelism is a minister of the new covenant because that new covenant, which goes into effect in the future, is the foundation for all of the blessings that accrue to believers today. It doesn't mean the new covenant's in effect. It means that because the foundation for that sacrifice has been completed on the cross that certain benefits accrue today, but not all. They're similar in many ways to the new covenant and this goes back to some of those difficult things that we covered at the beginning of the study of Acts.
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We talked about the promises of the kingdom to the Jews which is specifically related to the establishment and the activation of the new covenant with the House of Judah and the House of David. So these things are related but what we get today is a confusion on the part of a lot of Bible teachers. I'm not holding myself up today as someone who's arrived. This is historic dispensationalism and it's been taught by numerous people. It's just gotten muddied today. We've lost sight of this and people are teaching that we're in this 'already but not yet view the Kingdom' and its dialectics applied to Biblical theology so that we're 'something but we're actually not that' or 'we are in the kingdom but we're not in the kingdom.' This kind of terminology is the foundation for what some at Dallas Seminary are now teaching called progressive dispensationalism. It's the idea that the kingdom is progressively coming in today but those who are pre-millennial historically and dispensationalists believe that the kingdom was postponed completely when Christ was rejected as the King and the kingdom won't come into its own until Jesus Christ returns.
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Jesus is not yet crowned as we saw in our study in Revelation. Jesus isn't crowned until the Second Coming. He goes to heaven and in Revelation chapter 3 verses 18 and 19, He is seated on His Father's throne but He is not seated on His throne yet. He does not become the King of Kings and Lord of Lords until the end of the Tribulation. So there's no kingdom until the end of the Tribulation. There's no new covenant until the King comes to establish the new covenant. We become participants with Him with a new covenant by virtue of our position in Christ, not our identification with Israel and Judah. That is the point that comes out of Hebrews chapter 8. We’ll get into that a little more in just a minute.
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So Paul emphasizes the fact that God has made us sufficient because of the Holy Spirit as ministers of the new covenant. Here we have the noun form, diakanos [diakonoj]. This relates to that verb earlier where he said they were ministering to the church in Corinth. In verse three he says, “clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us...” That's their role serving the body of Christ. And then he says “It's not of the letter but of the Spirit [Spirit is rightly capitalized] for the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.” Now what in the world does this mean? I'm going to try desperately in the coming weeks to work through this, not to confuse you too much, but we have three different doctrines that come together in this particular passage. It's really exciting when we can work our way through this.
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The First Doctrine is this whole issue of the new covenant and the promise of the Spirit that comes out of Old Testament prophecy. The Second Aspect that comes out of this is the role, the unique and distinct role of God the Holy Spirit, and the Church Age. Then the Third Thing that comes out of this relates to the ending of the Law as it's replaced by this much superior spiritual life of the Church Age. We can't understand what's going on in this passage if we don't understand the role of the Law, if we don't understand what's going on with the new covenant and its replacement of the Law with something new and we don't understand the role of God the Holy Spirit.
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So let's look at just a couple of passages in the Old Testament. I don't want to drill down as deeply in this study as I did in Hebrews. I covered it in about 11 or 12 hours in Hebrews and that's a good sufficient study but we'll hit some of the same high points. In , which is one of the passages that would form a background to Paul's thinking as he's writing these verses to the Corinthians, we read, “When He had made an end of speaking with him on Mount Sinai [referring to God speaking to Moses] He [that is God] gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone written with the finger of God.”
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Now is there anything negative about the fact that God wrote on tablets of stone? Not at all, as I pointed out last time, this is one of the negatives in this study that people have said, “Well, stone on the heart that means it's got to be bad.” It's not that it's bad; it's that it's insufficient but it was good because Paul says in Romans seven that the law is good and just and holy. So I don't want you to forget that the law is good. It's just not sufficient; it didn't provide everything. It had a limited purpose, both in scope and time. Now the law was clearly seen to be temporary. This is the argument that the writer of Hebrews uses when he cites the passage in Hebrews, chapter 8. As I pointed out when we studied that, even though he quotes four or five verses from . the only thing that he's making a point about is that because the writer in Jeremiah uses the term 'new' that shows that the old covenant of the Mosaic covenant was always understood to be temporary. It was never understood to be permanent. It was a temporary covenant and was going to be replaced by a greater permanent covenant.
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Now this covenant is emphasized in several passages in the Old Testament. ((CHART)) A couple of these verses I'm putting up here before we get into a little more detail. Ezekiel speaks of this in , “Then I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them, and take the stony heart out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh.” We have many of the same kinds of imagery here that we have in . A stone versus flesh and the reception of a new spirit. What God says in Ezekiel is that at the time [even though the word new covenant is not used here, this is new covenant terminology]. This says that when the new covenant is put into effect they will, in the future, have one heart. Is that true today? Is that true in the church? No, we don't have one heart; we're not united. We don't have one heart. I remember when I first went to seminary getting confused because I would hear some professors say things like in Acts this is the beginning of the new covenant because there was unity there; they were all one heart. But it doesn't really fly; it's only a superficial unity; it's not what is described by Ezekiel in . “I'll put a new spirit within them.” Did we receive a new spirit at salvation? Yes, but it doesn't bring with it the same qualifications or the same characteristics that we get in these passages in Ezekiel and Jeremiah.
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That's what I want to pay attention to because there are similarities but there are differences and it's the differences that tell us that what is happening in the Church Age is similar to what will happen in the future. It's based on that future new covenant but it's not the new covenant. We're not in the kingdom. In God says “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take a heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” That's very similar to the kind of thing we have in the Church Age where we are a new creature in Christ. says “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days says the Lord. I will put my Law in their minds and write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people.”
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Now see that restricts the covenant to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It says that God puts the Law in their minds and goes on to say that no one will need to teach their neighbor the Law because everyone will know it. See that's not true today. If that were true then you wouldn't need to be here and I wouldn't need to be here and I would not have needed to go to seminary because we would just automatically know the Law. So that tells us that whatever we're experiencing today, even though it has similarities of regeneration, that we have become a new creature in Christ and we have a new heart, but it's different because we're not given the innate knowledge of the Law that is described in these passages.
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We have to understand that there is a new covenant in the future. That new covenant will bring about certain spiritual transformative events in the life of believers under that new covenant in the kingdom. While they are similar to what's going on today, they are different. Actually what we have today is even greater than what there will be in the kingdom. Now the other thing we need to do is understand a little bit about this metaphor that Paul is developing here about the letter. If you look at he says, “Who [that is God] also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit...” So he's contrasting the letter with the Spirit. Now the letter is physical and that is related to an epistle written with ink or written on tablets of stone and it is talking about something that is literal and is contrasted to that which is written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God [verse three], not on tablets of stone or papyrus but on tablets of the flesh.
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Then he says that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, so how in the world are we supposed to understand this? Is Paul talking about interpretive methodologies? Let me rephrase that a little bit. Is Paul talking about how to interpret and understand Scripture? Not at all but that's how a lot of people take this particular verse so I've listed out here four options. ((CHART)) You've probably heard at least one or two of them for how to understand this 'letter versus the spirit' analogy in this chapter. The first is that the letter is the Law and the Spirit, of course, is grace in the New Testament. But this is wrong. Under this view of what Paul would be saying is that we're not ministers of the letter, that is the Law, but of the Spirit for the letter kills. Now the Law didn't kill. The Law wasn't bad. That's the implication here that the Law would be bad. The Law condemns though and the Law puts us under the condemnation of death as a result of the Law and so that is true. The letter kills, in that sense, but the Spirit gives life. It is not saying that the letter is the Law and if we abide by the letter of the Law we're not going to have life. That's the implication of that position and that's what's wrong.
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The second wrong approach is to say that what Paul is saying here is that we shouldn't obey the literal sense of what the Scripture says but a spiritual or allegorical sense. This is very popular and became very popular in the history of Christianity. It developed in the late second century or early third century. It was developed mostly by an early church father by the name of Origen. Origen bought us some good things and a lot of bad things. But Origen, like many in that day, was heavily influenced by what's called Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism was sort of an upgraded version of Platonic philosophy and in Platonic philosophy the physical was just a shadow of the real which is in the realm of the ideal. So the physical really wasn't significant or important. It's the ideal, the spiritual, that's important. So there are two different levels of reality and material is inherently evil and the spiritual is inherently good. What Origen did was he took it another step further. He said there are three levels. Just as we have the body, the physical, the literal, we have a soul which is somewhat immaterial and spiritual but then we have a spiritual. So there are three levels of meaning in the text. There's the literal meaning, so if it says that Jesus went to Cana in Galilee, that would be the literal meaning.
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Then there would be a soul meaning that would have to do with something allegorical and that slips off and becomes subjective so anybody could come up with any meaning because it wouldn't be anchored to a literal walk to Cana of Galilee. And then the spiritual meaning would be even deeper than that. So it gets completely cut off from the literal, historical, grammatical interpretation of the text. So there are those who see this terminology “the letter versus spirit” as having to do with interpretation that if you interpret the Bible literally according to the letter it will kill you. You can't do that.
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Then that leads to the next meaning which is that kind of literalist interpretation just leads you to legalism. So they then understand the letter to be a reference to a legalistic interpretation, in contrast to a grace sense, based upon the spiritual meaning which is an allegorical meaning which has no relation to the grammatical, historical, exegetical meaning of the text. Then there's the fourth way where letter refers to usually some sort of warped sense of twisted interpretation, in contrast to whatever interpretation the teacher is espousing at the moment. But that's in contrast to passages such as : 27and 29 where letter refers in those verses to the possession of the literal Law.
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So what Paul is really saying here is the letter kills, the Law written on stone kills, not because of the hermeneutic issue but because the letter, the Law tells us what to do but does not enable us to do it. So we're shut out under the condemnation of death but it's only with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Church Age that we're enabled to fulfill the commands of God. It's not talking about how you interpret Scripture at all; it's not talking about legalism versus grace at all; it's talking about the limitations of the law and the sufficiency of grace in the Church Age. That's what this is emphasizing: “so we've been made ministers of the new covenant.”
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Now we have to connect this and I'm going to wait until next time so we can cover that at one time. This is going to be very important, extremely important, because it will connect some dots for us as we look at this and as Paul covers this in the epistle of 2nd Corinthians, which is not taught that frequently. He brings us to a point where it emphasizes liberty. Just skim down to verse 17 in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3, he says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” There's true freedom. Now where does Paul end up when he goes to all this discussion on the Law versus grace as you go through Galatians? Where does that end up? Galatians chapter 5 verse one says that in Christ we have liberty. Christ died to set us free. And in Paul ends up, “there is no condemnation now to those of you who are in Christ Jesus” so it helps us to understand the foundation of true spiritual liberty, not licentiousness. We're not free to do whatever we want to do but we're free to do what God wants us to do because he has given us the divine enablement to do so through the transformative power of God the Holy Spirit who indwells us.
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All these passages mirror one another but they come at this from a completely distinct viewpoint. We'll come back to this next time. I won't spend an inordinate amount of time on the new covenant because I've done that in detail in the past but just enough so we remember to focus on this in contrast to what we had in the Old Testament before we're able to go forward in Romans seven.

Romans 079b-The Holy Spirit: New Covenant and the Spiritual Life ;

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 079b-The Holy Spirit: New Covenant and the Spiritual Life ;
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We're in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3, just briefly tonight. The reason we're here is because this is part of a broader study, wherein we are looking at the relationship of the Law to grace, as taught in the New Testament, specifically by the Apostle Paul but also by the writer of Hebrews, by Peter, by others who have addressed this issue of Law versus grace. It's one of those things that really hasn't been thoroughly understood, both by those who would agree with us in our basic theological framework and those who don't. In this era, where we have a lot of new ideas and scholarships, some good and some not so good, it just goes way beyond the amount of time I have in my life to look at all the new literature that's been written on this topic in just the last ten years. It's just amazing what's come out. We don't always have to read everything that's come out as long as we understand what the Scripture says. The Scripture really isn't that difficult. It's very clear.
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Now some of the ways I'm handling and focusing on some of these passages may be a little different from how you've heard them taught. That's because some of these passages, especially in this passage, it's been a little fuzzy. That's not unlike what I discovered some twelve or fourteen years ago when I was approaching a study of John, chapter 15 with the “abiding in Christ” metaphor. I went back and listened to several different people who I had studied under in the past and read a lot of different material and realized that there was not a lot of clarity. was not talking about salvation but was only talking about the Christian life. It seems very clear now but in the sixties and seventies the issues related to the free grace gospel and all of its ramifications and how that impacted the Upper Room discourse were not as clear so a lot of times people said one thing and then five paragraphs later, they said something else, one of which fit with the free grace gospel and one of which didn't. That's one of the fascinating things about the Word of God which should always excite us, is that there's so much to learn. We think we have a real handle on some things and then we come to realize 'maybe not'. It's not that we were that wrong but we can always get a greater, tighter focus on what the Word says.
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The principle, though, is clear. The age of the Law ended. What was provided for believers in the age of the Law, in the dispensation of the Law, in the age of Israel, to be more precise, was very little for the individual believer. He didn't have the power of the sin nature broken, which is broken only in our identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. That was clearly a new thought for me, a new thought for many of you, to realize that in our study of Romans, chapter 6. Then to build on that and to come to understand they don't have the indwelling of the Spirit at all, we knew that. They had regeneration but what comes with regeneration isn't the same thing that comes with regeneration today. And guess what! What we get with regeneration today isn't what comes in the Millennium Kingdom. They're going to get more under what is called the new covenant which is what I'm going to look at this evening. We may go into another Bible class on it, just to help clarify it, because there's this connection between when the new covenant comes into effect, when it is fully here [not that it's partially here now but some people teach that], but when it is enacted.
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We know from those passages that the covenant is made with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. The new covenant has a heavy Jewish flavor to it. It is not what we're experiencing today. And yet, when I was a student at Dallas Seminary back in the seventies, and even reading men who wrote in previous generations [I'm not going to mention any names because I'm not sure who taught what at this point], it was often thought and said, that in some sense, the new covenant went into effect on the Day of Pentecost. The problem with that is it means that, in some sense, the Kingdom would have come in. There was some spiritualization of these terms in terms of the Church Age. And yet as dispensationalists we realize that dispensationalism emphasizes a consistent, literal interpretation of Scripture. And to allegorize or spiritualize anything, even if it’s the new covenant and the kingdom, is to compromise on a basic foundational principle that we always interpret literally.
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Now that's an issue that's often been misunderstood. Literal interpretation doesn't mean a wooden or artificial type of interpretation. It doesn't deny the use of figures of speech, but figures of speech have literal meanings. They're just an idiom so that when somebody tells someone to “go jump in the lake”, he doesn't literally mean for them to go jump in the lake. That idiom has a literal meaning and that means to “go away”, “leave” or whatever they're saying is irrelevant and nonsense so they need to not be involved in the conversation any more. So even though it's an idiom, it has a specific meaning. You can't just assign any meaning to that idiom. You talk to one person and then talk to another person, they're all going to assign the same meaning to that idiom. That has a lock down, figurative meaning.
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So when we talk about literal interpretation we use that kind of meaning. Now that's important because a lot of modern religious talk is allegorical. You go to many different churches, Roman Catholic churches, Lutheran churches, some Presbyterian churches, Episcopal churches, you will find a lot of spiritualization and allegoricalization taking place in the sermons because it's nice to take an event in the Bible and try to universalize it to apply to people and then people think it's something relevant to their lives. Because you sacrificed its literal, original, historical, grammatical integrity does not rally make it relevant because what you're applying isn't what the text says. It's important to understand that.
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One of my favorite quotes I ran across several years ago was when Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, was speaking to a group of judges in New York City at a law conference and he made the statement that “if you don't interpret the law, the Constitution, in light of the original intent of the writers of the Constitution then you're just making it up.” That's just so simple. That's just exactly what happens in 90% of the churches in America, maybe 95%, in this country. Without paying attention to the writer's original intent and really digging into the Scripture to understand it's literal meaning, you're just making it up. So people go to churches week after week and they hear a pastor just sort of make up what they want the Bible to say.
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When you get into passages like the one we're in in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3, where we're talking about the letter of the Law and we're talking about the Spirit and we're talking about that which is written in stone, that which is by the Spirit, then this has lent itself to a certain amount of non-literal or allegorical interpretation. And yet, this passage is often gone to by people to support the idea of a non-literal interpretation and they will misquote from this passage that, “Well, the letter kills but the spirit makes alive, so let's not interpret the Bible literally. Let's do it according to the spirit.” They act as if the spirit is some sort of wishy-washy, here it means one thing, there it means another thing, some kind of influence on the writers of the Scripture.
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We have to understand that first of all this passage isn't talking about interpretation. It's not giving us a basis for interpretation. What it is talking about is that there's a contrast between the Law, which was given to Moses, and what was given to Church Age believers. What was given to Moses was something that was temporary. It was not permanent. What was given to Church Age is permanent. And the distinction is that in the Law, while the absolutes of God were revealed, God doesn't provide a means in the individual believer to fulfill the Law. But in the New Testament period, He does provide a way whereby the believer can fulfill the Law. So that leads to life.
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This is what is meant when we look at the sixth verse that the letter kills [it kills because all the Law does is bring judgment] and the Spirit makes alive because with God the Holy Spirit we can experience the fullness of life. In verse 6, it says, “That God made us sufficient...” He gave us the ability; that's the sense of this particular word in the Greek hikanos [i(kanoj] which means to be able or to be competent. Now that's a little bit different idea than the idea you have over in where God tells Paul, “my grace is sufficient for you.” There you have the word arkeo [a)rkew] which has to do with the idea that it is enough. Here the emphasis is on its ability to enable someone to accomplish the task.
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So God has made us “ministers of the new covenant”. Now that's that word diakonos [diakonoj]. So Paul is talking specifically about the apostles but I think it has application to pastors, to anyone who is proclaiming the death of Christ. Remember Jesus said at the Last Supper when He took the third cup of wine, the cup of redemption, according to the Jewish tradition. He said, “This is a new covenant of my blood which is given for you. As often as you drink this, do so in remembrance of Me.” What Jesus is saying there is that what happens with His sacrifice establishes the basis for the new covenant. Covenants are established with a sacrifice. But that did not bring the new covenant or enact the new covenant. We learn that from looking at other passages which is what I want to do this evening.
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So as we look at these verses here that Paul is saying that God gave us the ability. He's recognizing the fact that as apostles, as ministers, as pastors of the Gospel, anyone proclaiming the gospel, our ability is not based on human factors. It's not based on education. There have been some wonderful pastors and theologians who have had great influence in their generation, like Charles Haddon Spurgeon in England in the 19th century, and had no formal training and not much formal education. But he had a powerful impact on England and with the spread of the English empire throughout the world. Then men like Lewis Sperry Chafer who did not know Greek or Hebrew at all yet he understood his ability to handle the Word of God would have been much better if he had known the original languages so he founded a seminary that would emphasize the original languages and the importance of knowing Greek or Hebrew. Just because people do well without knowing certain things does not mean that should be the standard. Sadly, in our tradition and in the tradition of many evangelicals the high standard of education has been 'dumbed down' tremendously in this last generation.
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There's a number of different reasons for that but we have to hold the standard high. We have to maintain an attitude of excellence. That doesn't mean you can't function as a pastor; that God can't bless you, if you haven't studied hard, if you haven't gotten a formal education, if you don't know the original languages but you're limited and the better the education, the better the training, the more opportunity a person has and there are ways that God can use them that can't be used otherwise but ultimately, it's God that gives that ability. This is what Paul emphasizes. It's God who gives the ability to ministers; it's not based on our IQ, it's not based on where you went to seminary, it's not based on how many degrees we have. Ultimately none of those are the determinative factor, though they are all very important. The sufficiency, the competence comes from the Holy Spirit as we minister the new covenant.
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That's the connection here. We're ministers of the new covenant which means we are announcing something. We are announcing God's plan for human history, that sin has been paid for, that we're in the Church Age and where we're headed down the road is to the kingdom. It's not here now but it's down the road. Now there are some that teach that it's already here but not yet fully. So sometimes that's called the “already but not yet view”. There are non-dispensationalist pre-millennialists who hold that view. There are dispensationalists, for example at Dallas Seminary who hold the view called progressive dispensationalists. I've always liked what Bruce Waltke said, “I don't know how they came up with this. It's neither progressive nor dispensational.” In fact, when Bruce Waltke defected from dispensational theology a couple of decades before this, when he read about it said, “You know, they've just become a-millennial theologians and don't know it and don't want to admit it.” This means they have shifted so far away from a literal interpretation of Scripture that they were beginning to interpret key Scriptures just the way a-millennialist interpreted those Scriptures, focusing on some sort of spiritual kingdom.
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Now that spiritual sense of a kingdom is often related to some present enactment of the new covenant. But what we see in Scripture is the new covenant is clearly characterized by certain things that are not true today. Now there are some things that are similar but similar is not identical. It's just similar. So what I want to do is take a little time to look at that. We looked at . We see that “We are ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter [that refers to the Mosaic Law] but of the Spirit [that is the Holy Spirit]. The Mosaic Law didn't give the ability to obey but the Spirit now indwells every believer, identifies every believer with the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ so that from the instant of salvation the power of the sin nature is dead and you are given new life. The letter kills; all it can do is point out judgment and failure. But the Spirit gives life.
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Verse 7 says, “But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones...” Notice now he moves from the letter kills to the ministry of death, the Mosaic Law, was written on stone. Now that doesn't mean the Mosaic Law was bad. Paul said it's holy and just and good but it didn't give life. It wasn't a means of salvation and it didn't give the new life that comes from the Holy Spirit. That's why there had to be a new covenant. “If the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones was glorious so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?” So in these three verses: 6, 7, and 8, there is the contrast of the letter and the Spirit. There is an implied contrast between the new covenant and the old covenant, although the old covenant isn't mentioned here, only the new. And there is a contrast between the glory, and there was a clear glory associated with the Mosaic Law and the greater glory of the new covenant and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. We need to look at both of these images from the Old Testament.
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Turn to Exodus, chapter 34. Exodus is the second book in the Pentateuch. This is after the rebellion of the Israelites when Moses was initially on Mount Sinai and at that point he came down the mountain and he heard the sound of revelry, sound of an orgy going on down there. They had convinced Aaron to melt down a lot of the gold and silver and to make a golden calf for them to worship. They slid right back into idolatry. This is when Moses got mad and broke the tablets so this is a replacement of the tablets. Let's start at verse 10 to pick up the context. God is speaking. “And God said, 'Behold I make a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord. For it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.” So God establishes the principle that He's the One who's going to provide for Israel; He is the One who is sufficient for them. That's a parallel with what's going on in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3. God is the One who ultimately does the work but that doesn't mean that Israel didn't go to battle. They went to battle but God's the One who gave them the victory. So the following verses talk about how God is going to give them victory over the enemies and what some of those restrictions were going to be and the promise that God makes. For example, down in verse 24, He promises, “For I will cast out the nations before you and enlarge your borders; neither will any man covet your land when you go up to appear before the Lord your God three times in the year.”
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By the way, this is a promise by God that He will enlarge their borders. A few years ago there was a book that came out called “The Prayer of Jabez.” It mentioned a rather obscure passage in Chronicles about Jabez who was in the conquest generation. He was praying that God would expand his inheritance. There were people going around saying this is how you pray, you just cite it over and over again like a mantra. What they missed was that all Jabez was doing was asking for more real estate. That's all it was. He was taking this promise of God to expand their borders and applying it in the conquest saying, “Lord, we're obedient, You've blessed us. I'm just asking you to expand the inheritance which is what you promised.” It was simple faith-rest drill and yet people today who should have known better because they were trained well and had a history of writing better, spiritualized that particular promise and made it something other than what it was. He just wanted more land. That's all there was to it.
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After Moses was up on Sinai with the Lord, we're told in verse 28, “So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.” As I've pointed out before, in terms of fasting, you can go three days, maybe four, depending on the circumstances, maybe five without water but you need to drink after that. So this is clearly miraculous sustenance because he went forty days and forty nights without eating or drinking. You can go forty days without eating but after that you pretty much have to start eating soon or you will start having problems. So that part is not necessarily miraculous but the water part is so that shows, by including both, that God miraculously sustained Moses during this period. It wasn't the fasting that was significant; what was significant was that God is revealing to Him His Word. It's so important that there's no time for the mundane chores of life to eat and drink. That's the significance in fasting. Fasting has no power in and of itself. It doesn't impress God that you or I go hungry. The significance of fasting in the Scripture is that something is so important that we're going to set aside time to pray and in order to do that in the ancient world, especially in an agricultural society where it took a lot of time to prepare food...they didn't have microwave food where they could just heat some food up in two minutes where the whole meal process could take less than three or four minutes. In that culture, it took several hours. That would take your time and energy away from the focus of prayer. So this is why fasting was important because it showed what they were emphasizing and that there were more important things to do rather than take care of one's physical desires to eat.
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So Moses is up on Sinai for forty days and forty nights and when he came down, in verse 29 we read, “Now it was so, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai (and the two tablets of the Testimony were in Moses' hand when he came down from the mountain) that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone while he talked with God.” So Moses is in the presence of God and his face shines. We have a way of talking about this. We call it the Shekinah glory. The implication of this is that this is a particular kind of glory. The word “shekinah” is from the Hebrew word shikhon which means the dwelling presence of something. The word for the tabernacle in the Hebrew is mishkan and this isn't a particular type of glory. It's just that when God is present there is the effulgence of His essence, which is light shining forth and it was so brilliant, it's as if it is absorbed and reflected by Moses' skin. As Moses leaves the presence of God, he has the golden glow, not the rosy glow. There's just this light beaming off his face and people could see it. The problem is it wasn't permanent.
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It's like kids that go off to camp. Now there's nothing wrong with kids or adults going off to camp and getting away from all the everyday distractions of life and focusing on the Word of God. Frequently they come back and they realize, maybe for the first time, maybe for the fiftieth time, that they need to straighten out some things in their life and focus on spiritual things. That's great. There's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is thinking that that experience is normative.
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One of the damaging consequences of that kind of thinking occurred back in the sixties and seventies. A lot of baby boomers went off to Christian camp during the summer and as they grew up in high school, college, and adulthood, they went off and had great experiences. Nothing wrong with having a great time with other Christians studying the Word. They came back and they wanted to have that every Sunday. But you see, you can't have that every Sunday. That's not what the normal Christian life is like. That's just an abnormal life. They sang different kinds of songs and they had fun singing and that's just great. I have great fun singing traditional Christian hymns. So they came back and they wanted to have those kinds of camp songs inserted into what was going on on Sunday morning. Songs having a lot of clapping, a lot of physical jumping around or whatever. Which is fun. There's nothing wrong with singing fun songs. There are such great kid songs, some great songs for camp that are just fun. There's nothing at all wrong with that. What's wrong is thinking that the emotion that are generated by that are what should be normative for the Christian life so you want to change up everything that goes on on Sunday morning so it can be that mountain-top camp experience every Sunday. All that does is teach people to rely on their emotions and not on the Word.
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So this was one of the problems here when Moses came down from Mount Sinai. He's got this glow and people are impressed. “Moses has been with God.” As time went by, as we see in this story, the glow faded just as that experience from camp or the retreat or whatever it was fades then people begin to think, “Well, God's not really with me anymore; God's not really with Moses anymore.”
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In verse 29 we read, “So when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. Then Moses called to them and to Aaron and to all the rulers of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them. Afterward all the children of Israel came near, and he gave them as commandments all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. And when Moses had finished speaking, he put a veil on his face.” Now why did he put a veil on his face? Because he didn't want the people to see the glow fade because if they saw the glow fade their enthusiasm, their commitment, everything would fade. We're such fickle creatures. I don't care how straight we are on doctrine, we still have trouble with emotion.
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In verse 34, we're told, “But whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with Him, he would take the veil off until he came out and he would come out and speak to the children of Israel whatever he had been commanded. And whenever the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses' face shone, then Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with Him.” What was going on? Moses did not want the people to be distracted by emotion. Nothing wrong with emotion. I'm not saying this. But it can be a terrible distraction in the Christian life. One of the great tests in life is how we deal with emotion. Do we let emotion push us, motivate us, to making bad decisions, making decisions that aren't wise because we're driven by emotion rather than the truth of God's Word? You can have great emotion when you're driven by the truth of God's Word. It's not one or the other. The issue is how are you going to respond and how are you going to let emotion affect your decision making process.
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So this becomes a major part of the last part of 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3, starting in verse 7, “But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious [see that's that glory that it's talking about] so that the children of Israel would not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious? For if the ministry of condemnation [that's the Law] had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. For even what was made glorious [that's the Law] had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels [that's the Church Age glory]. For if what was passing away was glorious, what remains is much more glorious.” So the whole point through here is that we have something that is more glorious. Some people think, “Wow, if we could just see something like that.” But we have something better that's based on not seeing it, that's based on the testimony of God's Word. And that's really all we need, the testimony of God's Word.
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All of this takes us to understanding something significant here that's mentioned in verse 6, the new covenant. Let me just give you some basic principles on the new covenant. The new covenant is the eighth and final covenant in the Old Testament. It's the fifth Jewish covenant. What was the first Jewish covenant? The Abrahamic covenant. Then you have the Land covenant, the Davidic covenant, and you have the Mosaic covenant and then the new covenant. These were Jewish covenants because they are made between God and the Jewish people. Also you have the Gentile covenants, the Creation covenant, the Adamic covenant, the Noahic covenant. These were all Gentile covenants before God ever called out Abraham and the Jewish people. So this is the fourth permanent covenant for Israel, related to Israel.
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We have to understand something about what a covenant is. A covenant is a legally binding obligation of God to man. God enters into these covenants which are all between God and man. It is a legally binding obligation. It is similar to a contract but a covenant technically goes beyond a simple contract. We don't use covenant too much in our culture so we use the idea of a contract because that's familiar to everybody. But a covenant is really something. It's a contract plus. So whatever is true of a contract is also true of a covenant. Biblical covenants are based upon the character of God. They're based upon God's pledge, His promise, to fulfill certain promises, certain things to those included, the other parties of the covenant. He's going to do certain things for them. He will bless them or He will bring judgment upon them and that's part of His solemn pledge and He is legally bound by this contract.
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Now that gives us great confidence and great hope. That's why the Old Testament often emphasizes His love, His chesed love, because His chesed love is a love that is loyal and faithful. It doesn't change. He's not going to go back on that contract. That becomes a foundation for understanding what real love is. Real love is something based on God's character. Human love can be based on God's character. It can't be based on your character or mine because that's pretty tenuous. But it's based ultimately on God's character. God is faithful. He is not going to go back on His word. So you can count on Him fulfilling His promises. He's not going to change.
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So the third point is that a covenant is a legal contract or covenant. The fourth point is that it's between two parties of equal stature, for example, husband and wife, or it can be between a superior and an inferior, for example, a king and a commoner. Or a king of a great nation and a king of a much lesser nation or between God and humans. So this is the idea. It's this legal binding. Why does God do this? God enters into this so that He, as it were...theologians use the word 'condescend'...I don't like that word much but it gives the idea that God is willing to limit Himself to the framework of the creature in order to demonstrate to the creature His faithfulness. So God willingly limits Himself in these ways to these finite structures, such as a legal covenant. He doesn't have to do it. He does it willingly so that we can come to understand some things about Him that would be pretty difficult to understand otherwise.
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The fifth point focuses on the Greek word syntheke which is like the Mayflower compact. These are all just slightly different ideas, all related to a legally binding agreement between two parties. The Greek word diatheke [diaqhkh] has the sense that the Hebrew word berith does not have as the sense of a unilateral contract. A unilateral contract is when one person enters or binds himself to a contract and it's not dependent on the action of the lesser party. So that a conditional contract is when you say, “If you are obedient, then I will do these things for you. But if you're not obedient, I won't do these things for you.” It's conditional. It's bilateral, because the party of the second part has to act a certain way in order to get the blessing from the party of the first part. So it's a bilateral contract, two people involved in bringing about the final benefits of the contract; whereas a unilateral contract [uni for one, like a unicycle] means that one person guarantees the blessing, the promises of the contract, without regard of the party of the second part. If they're disobedient or obedient; it doesn't matter what their behavior is, the party of the first part is going to fulfill His part of the contract. This word diatheke [diaqhkh] has this same sense in secular Greek use. In Aristophanes play, The Birds, he used the word covenant where two parties had overwhelming superiority over another and could dictate the terms. So it's used in the same way the Bible uses it. You have a superior person making a contract with someone of lesser significance and it is a unilateral covenant.
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The sixth point is that covenants have often been categorized as unconditional and conditional. If you've been around very long you've heard people teach on covenants and you've heard dispensationalists talk about the Abrahamic covenant as an unconditional covenant and you've heard the Mosaic covenant is a conditional covenant. That's really not the best language because even the Abrahamic covenant has conditions. God said, “I'm going to give you the land, but if you're not obedient, you're not going to enjoy the land.” That's a condition. It's yours but if you're not obedient, I'm not going to let you go into the land and enjoy it. That's a condition. So there are conditions even within so-called unconditional covenants so the best term is to refer to them as permanent covenants versus temporary covenants. God permanently promised the land to Israel. The Abrahamic covenant is a never-ending permanent covenant. The new covenant is a never-ending eternal covenant. The Davidic covenant is a never-ending eternal covenant but the Mosaic covenant was a temporary covenant. It was only designed for a short period of time, from the time God gave the Law to Israel until the time that the Messiah would come and fulfill the Law. Then it would be replaced by the new covenant. That's the whole argument of the writer of Hebrews. In it's called the old covenant because it would be superseded by a new covenant. So permanent and temporary are really the best words to describe these two types of covenants.
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The seventh point is that the new covenant is the third permanent covenant with Israel based on the Abrahamic covenant. The Abrahamic covenant promised three things. If you went through the Genesis series you know these, or at one time you could dream about them. Land, seed, and blessing. The land covenant is expanded in the real estate covenant in Deuteronomy, chapter 29. The Davidic covenant is the seed and God's promise of a Messianic king and the new covenant fulfills the third part of the Abrahamic covenant which is a blessing to all the peoples in the world, a spiritual blessing and that comes through the new covenant. So the land covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the new covenant are all based on the Abrahamic covenant and they're all permanent covenants.
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The eighth point is that the new covenant is an unconditional covenant, meaning that the fulfillment of the promise is not dependent upon human actions or human obedience. This is seen in , although in the passage it is stated that their realization of the covenant is going to be related to their obedience. It is not their obedience that causes God to give them the covenant. God will give them the covenant and God will give them a new heart and then they will be obedient to God.
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The ninth point is that whereas most of the other covenants are material and national in nature, the land, the king, the throne...the new covenant is spiritual. It has to do with a change inside of the person. He is given a new heart, a new capacity, and he's given new capabilities. He's going to know the Word intuitively so that there's no need for anyone to teach one another. Now did that happen in Acts? No. See none of these things have happened yet. They're similar because God the Holy Spirit does some similar things in the Church Age to what He will do in the future kingdom but they're not the same. There are lots of similarities between you and your next door neighbor. You have houses that are very, very similar in many ways, you have a mortgage or a lease that's identical 99.9% ways to your neighbor. They're very close but just because your mortgage contract is 99.9% like your neighbor doesn't mean that he's obligated to your terms or you're obligated to his terms or that you can change your terms to his because his are better. Doesn't work that way. So these covenants are distinct. The new covenant is spiritual, not physical. Last, the new covenant is everlasting in nature. It is permanent, just like the Abrahamic covenant, just like the land covenant, the Davidic covenant, they're all permanent.
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As we look at this, we need to look at some of the Scripture. ((CHART)). Now that's a lot of Scripture up there and I'll leave it there a little bit. The key passage is . That's the only passage that actually mentions the term, 'new covenant'. Turn there and we'll just look at those verses. It's four verses in the Old Testament but in the Hebrew it's six or seven. I want to read it to you because it's so important to understand what it says. We pick up certain characteristics. “Behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah [it doesn't mention the church]” There have been dispensationalists in the past who have tried to claim on the basis of new covenant in the New Testament in that there's a new covenant with the church. It never says that. The new covenant is with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It has application to Gentiles. Just has the Abrahamic covenant was with God and Abraham and had application to the Gentiles. Just because it has application to the church doesn't mean there's a covenant with the church. It's very different.
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So God says I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah “not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.” When He says 'in the day' He's not talking about the twenty-four hour period that they came out. He's talking about at that time period when he brought them out of Egypt. Where did he take them? He took them to Mount Sinai. And what was the covenant He gave them at Mount Sinai? It was the Mosaic covenant so he's contrasting the new covenant with the Mosaic covenant. That's where it gets it's identification. New versus the old. It's not going to be like that covenant. That's what's stated in the Old Testament in Jeremiah.
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God continues, “My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days.” There will be a covenant in the future, after those days. When is 'after those days'? This is that time period of what we call the tribulation, the time period of Jacob's wrath, the time period of discipline on Israel. After that, God says He will make this covenant with Israel. God says, “I will put My Law in their minds and write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be My people.” Now this is just basic, basic hermeneutics, that means basic Bible interpretation.
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When God says, “I will put My law...” who is He referring to? That refers to God. We're getting really basic here because we stumble over the a-b-cs. “I will put My law [God's law] in their minds.” Who is the 'their'? To whom does that pronoun refer? It refers to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It refers to the Jews. He's not talking about the church here. He's going to put it in their minds and He's going to write it on their hearts. “And I will be their God and they shall be My people.” Is that happening today? No. Did that happen in A.D. 33 on the Day of Pentecost? No. Is God putting His law in anybody's mind like this or writing it on their hearts like this now? No, he's not doing that to church age believers either. We have to learn it; we have to study it; we forget it and we have to go back and read it again. We have to listen over and over again, thousands of hours of Bible teaching and finally it penetrates our dense little brains and hearts. God doesn't write it there for us. Now in some sort of extended sense, He does, because God the Holy Spirit teaches us but that's not what this is talking about. This is talking about something much different than the normal process we experience.
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That's expanded in the next verse which says, “No more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother, saying Know the Lord.” Is that true today? That nobody has to teach anybody else? You flunk if you say yes. Today you have witnesses, you have pastor teachers, evangelists but in this scenario because the Word is implanted and there's this intuitive knowledge of the truth there's no need to tell your neighbor, “Do you remember what the Law says?” because you know he remembers because it's written on his heart. He can't forget it and you don't need to tell your neighbor 'I told you so. Why don't you pay attention? You didn't go to church the other day.” You don't have to go. You already know it. It's there. God continues, “…for they shall all know me [from those who dropped out of school in the third grade to those with PhDs. They'll all know it.] For I shall forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” Now that's an important phrase at the end of verse 34. It's a phrase that's picked up in other passages such as and 61. These are passages that talk about God's forgiveness of Israel's sins in the Millennial Kingdom. So what this tells us a unique role of the Holy Spirit when the new covenant goes into effect, a unique knowledge of the Word of God, a new unique national forgiveness of Israel when the new covenant goes into effect, and this applies to everybody across all social and economic indicators.
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He goes on to says in verse 35, “Thus says the Lord Who gives the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by night.” Notice it grounds this in creation. If God isn't the creator the way the Bible describes Him as being the creator, then there's no foundation for these covenants. “Who disturbs the sea and its waves roar.” “If those ordinances depart from before Me, says the Lord, then the seed of Israel shall also cease from being a nation before Me forever.” So here he introduces the concept of the nation Israel. So verses 31-34 are all talking about the nation Israel. This is a national promise. So what we see here coming out of this verse is that the new covenant is between God, the party of the first part, the superior One, and the house of Israel and the house of Judah as the second party. It's important to see that it provides for the national regeneration of Israel in the Millennial kingdom. Not just as individuals.
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Now why do I say that? Because, think about this. We went through Revelation. How many years did we study Revelation? How many years have we gone through prophecy? What happens in the mid-point of the tribulation? This is a quiz. Mid-point of the tribulation the anti-Christ goes into the holy of holies. What does he do in the holy of holies? He sets up in there to be worshiped and then he puts his image in the holy of holies. And then what does he do? Then he starts persecuting the Jews. What did Jesus say to do when you see this happen? He said, “When you see this sign, you flee to the mountains. Woe to the woman who is pregnant, who is with child.” This is the sign when the anti-Christ goes into the holy of holies then it's time to leave. Now who is going to listen to Jesus and leave? Is it going to be the cynical, skeptical agnostic Jews or the Jews who have said Jesus is really the Messiah?
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Jewish believers are going to get out of 'dodge in a hurry'. Where are they going to go? They're going to go to the mountains. So if they're listening to Jesus and they're obeying Jesus and they're saved, are they regenerated? Yes. They're new creatures in Christ. I'm not sure if the Baptism by the Holy Spirit will apply. Other aspects of the Church age don't so the Baptism by the Holy Spirit doesn't but they're going to be regenerated. Is this before the new covenant comes into effect? Yeah, two or three years before. So regeneration that happens when the new covenant goes into effect isn't regeneration per se. It's the regeneration of the nation. It's the new national regeneration, a new national distinction, related to these individual believers.
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The best analogy I have is that Old Testament believers like the disciples of John the Baptist. They show up in Ephesus where Paul is. Paul says, “With whose baptism were you baptized?' They say, “John the Baptist.” Are they Old Testament saints? Yes, but they have a limited spiritual life. They haven't experienced the baptism of Jesus and the baptism of the Holy Spirit yet. They haven't heard anything about Jesus. They're Old Testament saints with that limited spiritual life and then when they hear the gospel, they shift from believing in the Old Testament presentation of salvation to a church age completed Christ-oriented presentation of the gospel and at that point they get a whole new spiritual life. That's what's going to happen to those Jewish believers who flee to the mountains during the tribulation. They're regenerated and they have a certain enhancement in their spiritual life but then when Jesus returns and establishes the new covenant, they're going to go from zero to hundred in zero point 2 seconds and they're really going to go into hyper drive in their spiritual life with all these additional enhancements.
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Remember the church age believers haven't been around for 7 years. That's you and me and we're gone with our spiritual life. Baptism of the Spirit, filling of the Spirit, indwelling of the Spirit, that's gone. That's not going to be there during those seven years. So they're going to go from something that's somewhere between the Old Testament spiritual life and Church age spiritual life and what comes up under the new covenant. So that's why it's worded this way. It provides for the regeneration of Israel and the fulfillment of all the other covenants to them. So the new covenant is fulfilled, the Davidic covenant is fulfilled in the physical presence of Jesus as the ruler of the earth and the land covenant is fulfilled when all of Israel is going to be in the land.
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There are ten different provisions which are stated in these passages and we'll hit some of them as we go through them. We'll start next time with Isaiah 61:89. I'm just going to hit a few passages so we understand what the characteristics of the spiritual life in the new covenant are and we'll see that we don't have that today. But there are similarities and the point that is being made here from Paul in is that when the Law ended the Law didn't provide any of this. It didn't provide what we have in the church age and it's not going to provide what's there under the new covenant. The Law is over with and that's the point.

Romans 080b-The Holy Spirit, New Covenant, and the Spiritual Life – Part 2 ;

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 080b-The Holy Spirit, New Covenant, and the Spiritual Life – Part 2 ;
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I want to start tonight with just a couple of comments about the election the other day. Everyone I know was disappointed, at least I hope you were. In my conversations with a number of Christians I have ..., and I understand this although I'm going to be a little firm here. I hear this from people that whenever we get disappointed and I'm just tired of it. It just shows a kind of shoddy, simplistic wrong-headed thinking among Christians that has just gotten us into the mess we're in. They're saying, “Well, it's just God's will.” In a sense that's true but in a sense it's not true. The reason it's not true is because you and I use that as a way to say, “Well, it really isn't bad.” We dump it on God. It's God's fault. He planned it this way. You've just become a five-point Calvinist. You've just denied human responsibility and you've just laid it all on God's plan. And that's dead wrong. The reason evil succeeds is the same now as it was 200 years ago. Good men do nothing. It's volition. It's not God's volition. He allowed it; it's His permissive will. It's not His desired will. His desired will is righteousness, a righteous government, a government of justice, a government of law.
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What happened on Tuesday was not the voting that put a government of law back in place or the potential for it but one that affirmed all of the evil that has been going on for the last four years and beyond. It's not just a Democrat thing but it primarily is, primarily a liberal problem and a moderate problem and a failure to understand absolutes. It doesn't help to ameliorate our disappointment by saying, “Well, it's God's will.” In a sense it is; it's His permissive will but if you don't put an adjective in front of 'will', don't use it because you're muddying the water. This is a classic fallacy in logic. You're using the term and you're slipping from one meaning to the other without realizing it. It is God's permissive will but it's not His desire. What we do, very subtlety, when we say it's God's permissive will, what we're saying, is that God wanted it to happen so we can be okay with it. We can't be okay with it. You shouldn't be okay with it.
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Not one place in the Scripture [you go back and read Isaiah, Jeremiah]. Yes, it was God's permissive will to allow evil kings to reign over Judah and Israel. But it wasn't His desired will and if you read the prophets they castigated the people because of it. They blamed the people; they didn't say, “Well, it's God's will so we'll just be happy with it.” You don't find that attitude in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel and any of the prophets. Not once. So don't do that. We do that when someone dies. “Well, it's God's will.” In a sense it is but Jesus wept outside the grave of Lazarus because the original desired will of God was not for people to go through the pain and the suffering and the horrors of death. He wasn't crying because He looked at the grave of Lazarus. You read the text. He wept because He looked on the heartache and the grief of the people and that was not the desired, intended will of God in the beginning for people to go through and to be spiritually dead and to go through the pain and the heartache of sin. That was His judgment but that was not His desired will, though that is His permissive will because He allows free will.
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I heard one unbeliever say, “Well, what kind of God is this that allows this to happen?” That's the same argument but it's the unbeliever's version. “It's God's fault. It's a lousy God that would let this happen.” We have to understand and I've said it all along: the reason evil happens is free will and as long as we have a God who allows free will, He permits evil to run its course but that doesn't mean we are to somehow rationalize the existence of evil and the horrible things that come with it by minimizing it with this cliché that it's God's will.
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God permitted it. God permitted the Holocaust; he permitted the Black Death and we don't minimize the horrors of those things by just dismissing them as God's will. No, it's not God's desired will. God wants something that is much higher than that but that's the result of fallen human will. So we have to be careful with that. The reason we're in the mess we're in is because of human volition. Part of that is because of the failure in Christianity, not institutional Christianity. I'm not using a vague and ambiguous entity to blame but Christians. Christians have failed. This room ought to be full every time I'm up here in the pulpit. That's a failure on the part of Christians who ought to know the Word of God. You look at what's happening among professed believers in this country under the age of 40. They're not showing up at church. Look out here. There's one or two that are here under the age of 40, maybe three or four. Usually not on Tuesday or Thursday night. We've had a lot more on Sunday morning but they don't show up on Tuesday or Thursday. That's not my fault; that's not this church's fault. That's not the fault of “Oh, you're a teaching church. You teach pretty heavy.”
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Well, across the spectrum in this city we have five different [broadening it out to the suburbs and the sub-suburbs and distant areas outside of Harris county] we have five or six teaching churches. Each one of these pastors have different levels of education, different levels of experience, and different levels at which they teach. Some of them, because of their congregation and the level of growth of the individuals, have chosen to teach at a lower, less challenging level, let's say second or third grade. Others are fifth or sixth grade, others are at ninth grade and I shoot for a little higher level. I've always had people who come in and sit in front of me; it doesn't matter what their background, they learn a tremendous amount and they grow. Your resultant spiritual growth is not dependent upon your human IQ, your training, or your background, or any of those things. It's dependent upon your volition.
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All of these churches, whether the pastors are teaching at a somewhat more elementary level because that's where the church is or at a more advanced level, the young people aren't coming. Go to Baptist churches. They're having the same problem. Go to many other churches; they're having the same problem because Christians don't want to know the Word. They don't want to apply the Word. They don't want to be involved in evangelism. They don't want to be a light to the world. They are self-absorbed, just like their pagan counterparts and as long as that is true of the church, of individual believers, and they're not excited about the Word, they're not excited about explaining the Gospel to their friends and bringing their unsaved friends to church and giving their unsaved friends the Gospel and bringing their saved friends to church so they can really hear what good Bible teaching is, when, this is what we're going to get in our culture because Christians have lost the desire to really impact the culture around them. When they think that all that is necessary to impact the culture around them is to come and study the Word and to keep a good doctrinal notebook and to go home and just apply what they've learned selectively in their own life, if that's all they do, then they're a miserable failure. They're a partial success which means they're a complete failure. Because they're not doing what the Word says to do in terms of that outreach. They're not having any kind of impact or even attempting to have an impact on the culture around them.
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I remember back when I was a small child in the fifties and a teen in the sixties and growing up in a church that was growing by leaps and bounds, it was because the people in the pew were excited about what they were learning. They were bringing people with them. They couldn't wait to get all their friends to come and hear somebody teach the Bible. That's how that grew. I'm not jumping on people just in this congregation, but if the shoe fits, you need to wear it but it's not just a problem here. It's a problem across this country and that's a failure on the part of Christians.
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Christians are more comfortable living like their pagan neighbors than being a distinct counterculture within our culture. The ones who do too often are just legalistic. They're the Christian deconstructionists crowd and the post-millennial and that's as wrong on the other side. So that's the reason we're in the mess we're in. The only solution is to change the worldview and that's the problem, the pagan worldview of this culture. The only thing that's going to change that is not going to be somebody who just has conservative, political-economic values because that's not the real problem. The real problem is like Rush Limbaugh has been saying, “They want a Santa Claus. They want somebody who's going to give them everything. They want handouts from the government. They don't know enough to even look at Europe or the Soviet Union and see how this has been an historical failure because they've been denied a good education because of their volition or someone elses. Until that changes, we're going to see that go down. As long as that's going down, we need to be in the Word even more. It's not getting easier. It's going to get a whole lot tougher. The only thing that's going to get us through those difficult times is going to be the Word of God. And the only place you're going to get is to be in class every time the Bible is being taught because the only thing that enables us to get through some really tough times is the doctrine in our souls.
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That is a sad thing because the few that are here represent the few that are involved as Christians throughout the country. It's a minority that is shrinking rapidly. Twenty years from now if things are going the same way when most of us in this room are in our 70s and 80s, then we're going to have some serious, serious problems facing us because the government's going to be broke. There's not going to be anything there. It's going to be hard to find a church because there's been such a hostility toward Christianity for the last twenty or twenty-five years so we need to be in prayer. We need to do what we're supposed to do as individuals and that is, witnessing, that is being excited about the Word of God in our lives, and reaching out and being a light for the world and that's part of our job.
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Let's look at 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3. It's a crucial chapter. I haven't worked through it in the detail I am now in the past but it fits so perfectly with what Paul teaches in Galatians, chapter 5, and what Paul is teaching in the framework of , , and 8. Just to remind anyone here for the first time or listening for the first time this is part of our study in Romans, especially Romans, chapter 7. We're seeing this focus on what is the Christian's relationship to the Law in the first six verses of . And in Romans7:6, the end of that paragraph, Paul says, “But now we have been delivered from the Law [the Mosaic Law] having died [we died to sin when we trusted in Christ] to what we were held by so that [why have we been delivered from the Law?] so that we could serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.”
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There's a couple of key words you should circle in . The first is that word “serve” which is the Greek word diakaneo which means to minister. Then we circle “Spirit” and “letter”. Those are all key words that are part of what Paul is talking about in where Paul is partially defending his own ministry which is to the Corinthian congregation as part of his ministry service as an apostle. He says in verse 3, “Clearly you are an epistle [the Corinthian church is a letter in the form of changed lives. You may be carnal, you may disobedient, but nevertheless there's a difference between what you were before you were saved and what you are now], ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is of the heart.”
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What do you write with ink? You write a letter so it's just a different way of talking about a letter. It's the same thing, the same concept there that we have in . “Service”, the “newness of the Spirit versus the oldness of the letter.” Paul goes on to say in , “And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient [have the power in] of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves [our training, our background, our skill, anything else] but our sufficiency is from God.” Whatever we face, not just as pastors or apostles or ministers but this applies to any Christian, the sufficiency [provision] comes from God.” He's the One who gives us the resources to face it and handle it, whatever it is.” Verse 5, “Who also made us sufficient, in Greek hikanos, as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit.” Made us sufficient as what? As ministers. Here those three concepts show up again. What I'm showing you is that going over to is not just a rabbit trail but what Paul says here about the newness of the Spirit versus the oldness of the letter helps us to understand what he's talking about in . We have to really work at understanding all of this.
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Last time I started looking at the concept of the new covenant. This is central here. We are ministers of the new covenant. In all the passages we have of the new covenant in Scripture whenever there's a party involved, it's always between God and the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It's never with the church. If you've been around a while and you've been exposed to the teaching of various dispensationalists over time, you would know that back in the 50's in that stage of the development of exegesis and understanding, it was typical of people like Lewis Sperry Chafer, Charles Ryrie, Charles Walford early on to teach there were two new covenants. One was with Israel and one was with the church. This would be a passage they would go to and say we're ministers of the new covenant. Therefore, there must be a new covenant with the church. That's when you make a theological deduction that really leaps about four steps away from the passage because there are other ways to understand our ministry of the new covenant without having a new covenant with the church because it doesn't say there's a new covenant with the church.
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The new covenant is with Israel and doesn't get established until the future but it has benefits that go to Gentiles today. Just as I taught several years ago in Romans, when you have these new covenant passages there's the party of the first part, which is God, and the party of the second part, which is the house of Israel and the house of Judah. And then you have Gentiles over here. Now in the Old Testament God made a covenant with Abraham and in that contract it says that because of this contract Gentiles are going to get blessing. So in the Old Testament, although it doesn't say this, when Jonah went to Assyria, he was a minister of the Abrahamic covenant to the Assyrians. Okay, follow me? He's being a blessing, fulfilling the third part of the Abrahamic covenant which said you will be a blessing to all the nations so he's fulfilling that. He's a minister of the Abrahamic blessing to Gentiles in the Old Testament. Same thing with Elisha and Naman the Syrian. He was a minister to the Gentiles.
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When we get into the New Testament we have something similar, we have the new covenant which is future but it's still between God and the house of Judah but now it's going to bring blessing to the Gentiles in the sense of the church. But there's a different dimension here because of the identification of the church with Christ, who is the party of the first part so our participation in the new covenant comes because we're in Christ. That helps us understand how we as Christians can be ministers of the new covenant, even though there's not a new covenant with the church like there is with Israel and with Judah. It has elements in it that are similar to the new covenant which helps us understand this role of the Spirit. All this plays together in helping understand the role of the Spirit and this is explained in verses 7 and 8.
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We started off looking at the new covenant the last time and this is the eighth and final covenant in the Old Testament. It's the fifth Jewish covenant. So what are the other Jewish covenants? The Abrahamic. The Mosaic. The Land or real estate where God promises the land to Israel. The Davidic covenant []. These others have all been made with Israel. The Land covenant is in . God doesn't establish this covenant until later. The Davidic covenant is already established. The Abrahamic covenant is already established. The Gentile covenants, the Creation covenant, the Adamic covenant, the Noahic covenant, are all established. So the only one that hasn't been implemented yet, established with Israel and Judah, is this last one, the new covenant.
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A covenant is a contract between God and man. It's God's solemn pledge to fulfill certain promises that are outlined in the covenant. It has a legal nature. God is always faithful to His contract, even when man isn't. The term we used before, and still use a lot, is conditional versus unconditional covenants. There's a sense in which that's right and there's a sense in which that's wrong, too, because even in the Abrahamic, there's a condition. Israel is not going to enjoy the land that God's given them unless they're obedient. There's an unconditional nature to the Mosaic covenant. What's the unconditional nature? It's still in effect! . If you repent and turn back to me, I will restore you to the land. That hasn't happened yet and when it does happen, it happens as the final fulfillment, the unconditional promise of the Mosaic Law. So there are elements of conditionality within each of those other covenants. It may be primarily an unconditional covenant or primarily a conditional covenant. A better word is permanent versus temporary. The Mosaic covenant was not designed to be permanent. It was designed to be replaced and it was replaced by the new covenant.
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I also pointed out that a covenant can be between two parties of equal stature or one is superior and one is inferior, and in Greek it has this idea of unilateral enactment from one to another as we looked at last time. This goes along with the terms “permanent” versus “temporary”. So the new covenant is the third permanent covenant based on the Abrahamic covenant. Land, seed, and blessing. The land promised in the Abrahamic covenant is expanded in the real estate covenant, the seed promised is expanded in the Davidic covenant and the blessing to the Gentiles is expanded in the new covenant. It's an unconditional covenant, meaning the promise does not depend upon fulfillment of its promises but there will be a fulfillment. Israel will fulfill it because God gives them a new heart and new mind. He fulfills it for them.
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Then I listed some passages and we started looking at them last week. Here's a list of various Scripture all of which mention something about the new covenant although they don't use that term. The term that is usually used is “an everlasting covenant”. Only in do we have the term, “new covenant”. All these other passages either state results that are clearly stated in other passages as to what God promised in the new covenant or it refers to the fact He will in the future make a permanent or everlasting covenant with Israel. In all these passages, including when it's mentioned in the New Testament, it's always between God as the party of the first part and the house of Judah and the house of Israel as the party of the second part.
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Its importance is that it provides for the regeneration of the nation Israel, not of individuals, because they're already regenerate. Remember in the Tribulation period, only those who are saved heed Jesus' words that when you see these signs you're going to flee to the wilderness. So they're already saved. They're already regenerate. In the new sense of the new covenant that doesn't occur until after Jesus returns and establishes the kingdom. Just like Old Testament believers were regenerate, they got new life but they didn't get the Holy Spirit. In the New Testament regeneration comes with other features. In the future, in the Millennial Kingdom, regeneration will come with different features.
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It's similar to software. I use Logos Bible software. When we bought Logos 3, that was a different dispensation. It didn't have nearly the features that Logos 4 had. Logos 4 was faster, slicker; it had all kinds of different tools that we could use. Logos 4 just got replaced last week with Logos 5. We're in the Millennial Kingdom now; we've got a whole new set of features. Okay? But it's still the same program. I hope that analogy works a little. There's regeneration in every dispensation but it comes with different features. It's sort of like the first regeneration is 1.0; then you get the next dispensation, you have regeneration 2.0. Then you get to the next one it's 3.0. Each one comes with new features [see I'm trying to communicate with the younger generation. The rest of you are going “hmmm??”].
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Last time we looked at the core passage where God promises, future tense, at the time of Jeremiah roughly 600 B.C. Verse 31: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah...” It's yet future. It didn't happen any time in Jeremiah's lifetime. It didn't happen prior to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Then in verse 32 God says, “Not like the covenant I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt...” When was that? That was 1446 B.C. It's not going to be like that covenant. So here's a clear statement. The new covenant replaces that old covenant. Verses 33: “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord...” “Those days”, most of the time in the major prophets and some of the minor prophets like Nahum and Amos and Zechariah, those dealing with the end times, it's a reference to the time of Jacob's trouble, which we refer to as the Tribulation. So it's after those days, it's after the Tribulation, it's after the time of Jacob's trouble that God is going to initiate this new covenant with Israel.
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Then, “I will put my Law in their minds, and write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother...” We covered that the last time, there's not going to be a need for one person to teach another because with regeneration will come an intuitive, exhaustive knowledge of the Scripture. We don't have that today; we don't have anything close to that today. We have something similar. We have the Holy Spirit which enables us to understand the Scripture but we still have to spend a lot of time reading and studying the Scripture to understand it.
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Then I went to Ezekiel 61:8-9. I think this is where I stopped last time. Now I want you to turn with me to . is a wonderful chapter on the future kingdom. I just want to point out a couple of things, go back and pick up the context. The context begins in , “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me. [This is the servant, the suffering servant of speaking here] because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor. He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Jesus read this at the beginning of His ministry when He was asked to read in the synagogue the day this was the reading in the synagogue. But He stopped half way through, right where I stopped. Why? Because up to that point it's His first Advent.
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After that, it's talking about what happens later in the Second Advent, the Day of Vengeance of our God. “To comfort all who mourn, to console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes [everything's been destroyed in the Tribulation and God restores beauty], the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Notice the contrast here. It is only God who provides real comfort. Now we share that comfort. talks about the fact that we suffer so that we can comfort others with the comfort with which we've been comforted. So part of our fellowship with other believers is to comfort. Now that's not just putting our arm around someone, telling them we care. That's important. I'm not minimizing that but the real comfort comes from the content of doctrine, from Scripture. Sending someone a note with a promise in there that relates to what's going on in their life, telling them that, sending them an e-mail just to encourage them with the truth of Scripture. What we see in the Tribulation is that only God can comfort those who mourn; that is, the Jewish and Gentile survivors. They're sad; they're sorrowful, they've lost so many friends and family that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”
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continues, “And they shall rebuild the old ruins. They shall raise up the former desolations. And they shall repair the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations. Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks and the sons of the foreigner shall be your plowmen and your vine dressers [that is, the Gentiles will be under the authority of Israel] but you shall be named the Priests of the Lord, Men shall call you the Servants of our God. You shall eat the wealth of the Gentiles, and in their glory you shall boast. Instead of your shame you shall have double honor and instead of confusion they shall rejoice in their portion, therefore in the land they shall possess double. Everlasting joy shall be theirs.” What's the context here? The context is that this happens in the land when they're restored and when they're placed over Israel. This is important for understanding the timing related to this covenant.
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Verses 8-9: “For I the Lord love justice.” This is the point I was making earlier. God loves justice. He hates injustice. How can it be God's will in a positive sense when an unjust government gets elected? He doesn't love that; He allows it but He doesn't love it. So don't try to minimize it with some sort of supercilious rationalization. “I hate robbery for burnt offering. I will direct their work in truth and will make with them an everlasting covenant.” So this is when the Lord makes an everlasting covenant. “Their descendants will be known among the Gentiles and their offspring among the people. All who see them shall acknowledge them that they are the posterity whom the Lord has blessed.” So this just emphasizes that it is a future covenant and it is an eternal covenant.
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Now we skip over a couple of books. Go from Isaiah past Jeremiah over to Ezekiel. Now Isaiah was about B.C. 730 or so to 720 or 710. Ezekiel and Jeremiah are contemporaries about the time of the destruction of the southern Kingdom of Judah. Go to Ezekiel, chapter 11. Ezekiel has been taken captive in one of the early transports and is taken over to Babylon and he is ministering to the Jews in captivity which also included Daniel. In , he writes [at this point he's still in Israel; he hasn't been transported yet] “Thus says the Lord God: I will gather you from the peoples, assemble you from the countries where you have been scattered...” That scattering is known as the diaspora which began in B.C. 722 when the Northern Kingdom has been taken into captivity, followed in B.C. 586 with Diaspora 2.0 as the Southern Kingdom is taken out. When they return at the time of Zerubbabel in B.C. 538, it's only a partial returning. The Jewish community is scattered all over the Levant, the Roman Empire. The Jewish community is in Parthenon and Babylon still. There were more people outside Judea at the time of Christ than there were there. A partial return was necessary so there was a group there for the Messiah to come to.
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Do you see a parallel with today? There has to be an entity in Israel for the Tribulation to take place. Otherwise there's no one for the anti-Christ to make a peace treaty with at the beginning of the Tribulation period, according to . So God is talking here about gathering them at the end of the Tribulation, “...and I will give you the land of Israel.” That is the fulfillment of the Land covenant.
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Then in verse 18, “And they will go there, and they will take away all its detestable things and all its abominations from there.” That's a removal of idolatry. That hasn't happened yet. Most Jews living in Israel now are not Orthodox; they're not observant; they're just secular but they're not religious at all. So there will be a spiritual cleansing. In verses 19-21, “Then I will give them one heart, and will put a new spirit within them,[the people this is happening to have already been saved and justified; they escaped to Petra, and they came with the Lord into the land but now they're getting this regeneration 5.0 in the Millennial Kingdom] and take the stony heart out of their flesh.” A heart of stone is one that's hard and not responsive. That relates to what we see in the illustration of the Spirit and the letter in . It picks up on that analogy of the hardness of the tablets because there's no change internally on the part of the Jews under the Mosaic Law. “.. and give them a heart of flesh that they may walk in My statues and keep My judgments and do them, and they shall be My people, and I will be their God. But as for those whose hearts walk after the heart of detestable things and their abominations, I will recompense their deeds on their own heads.” That's the judgment on the unbelievers that go through the Tribulation and they're sent to the Lake of Fire. That applies to Jew and Gentile.
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is the next passage on the new covenant. Do you see some things that are similar to the church age? They're similar but not the same. That's why we can't say that the new covenant went into effect on the Day of Pentecost because we're not experiencing this kind of ministry from God the Holy Spirit. This is only something similar in some ways. In verse 24, God says “For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all the countries, and bring you into your own land.” See it's the same time period as the passage we just looked at in . It's talking about the end of the Tribulation period when all of Israel is restored to the land. Then God says in verse 25, “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you [they're already saved individually. This is a national cleansing because there's a restoration to their national ministry and national function among the nations in the world.] Back in verse 23 He says, “And I will sanctify My great name, which has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned in their midst.”
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Contrast to verse 25 where He says, “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness, and from all your idols.” This is talking about the nation as a whole, the distinction between individual and corporate involvement of ministry. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” Verse 27, “I will put My Spirit within you [that's the indwelling of the Spirit but it doesn't come with the same features that the indwelling of the Spirit comes with today. It has these other aspects to it] and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.” He puts His Spirit in us today but He doesn't cause us to walk in His statutes. And we don't. Just look at what happened Tuesday, prime example. We don't walk in His statutes. He doesn't make us... that's the difference between now and the Millennial Kingdom. There's going to be this total internal change that goes beyond anything we've seen before. They will keep His judgments and do them. Verse 28: “Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be My people and I will be your God.” This is the fulfillment of the promise in the Land covenant.
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Then we go to the next chapter. We get a little more expansion on this. Again we have the dry bones passages and then in , “Surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations wherever they have gone, and will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land.” This is the end of the Tribulation period. “And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel [Samaria and the hill country of Judea] and one king shall be king over them all [the Lord Jesus Christ] and they will no longer be two nations nor will they ever be divided into two kingdoms again.” It hasn't happened yet. Not even close. Verse 23, “They shall not defile themselves any more with their idols nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions but I will deliver them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them. Then they shall be My people and I will be their God.”
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This is the faithfulness of God. However much Israel was unfaithful; however much the nation corporately rejected God, God doesn't reject them. He's true to His covenant. Verse 24, “David My servant shall be king over them [this is literal David; in his resurrection body he's going to be the prince who rules over Israel a lordship under the Lord Jesus Christ. “...and they shall all have one shepherd, they shall also walk in My judgments and observe My statutes and do them. Then they shall dwell in the land that I have given to Jacob, My servant, where your fathers dwelt, and they shall dwell there, they, their children, and their children's children, forever, and My servant David shall be their prince forever.” Finally verse 26, “Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them...” So the new covenant is also called an everlasting covenant and now it's called a covenant of peace. He connects the two together in the terminology. “...and it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; I will establish them and multiply them and I will set My sanctuary in their midst forevermore.” That's what's going to be described in chapters 40 and following with the Millennial temple. “My tabernacle also shall be with them and I will be their God and they shall be My people. The nations also will know that I the Lord sanctify Israel when My sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.” That's all new covenant stuff. The point of this is that we see that all of these passages again and again emphasize that this goes into effect when God restores Israel to the land, brings them back from the four corners of the earth and re-establishes the nation under the rulership of David, the Prince, in the Millennial Kingdom. It's not today. We have similarities and foreshadowings today that are based on the new covenant but it's not the new covenant. It gives us just a hint in some ways of what it will be like.
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So we get into this question then, going back to : What does 'letter versus Spirit mean?' What we have here in verse 6 “who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” So there's this contrast between letter and Spirit. Look at verse 7, “But if the ministry of death, written and engraves on stones, was glorious...” In verse 8 the ministry of the Spirit is 'more glorious'. There's this contrast. So we have to decide what's the contrast of letter versus Spirit.
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Remember, the letter written on the stones has its own glory so it's not wrong; it's not wrong; it's just insufficient. This contrast between the letter and the spirit is grossly mistaught. The first interpretation is that 'letter versus Spirit' is the idea of a literal meaning versus a spiritual or allegorical meaning. This has a root going back to the early 6th century with a church father by the name of Origen, who did some good things and a lot of bad things in terms of his teaching, one of which he brought in this whole allegorical system of interpretation and he argued that 'letter' referred to the literal, external Scripture and that 'spirit' referred to a spiritual, internal and hidden sense of Scripture. So you had to get to that hidden sense, which didn't have anything to do with the literal, historical, geographical surface meaning of the text. That opens the door to making the text mean anything you want it to. You'll hear people use it that way many times...that the 'letter kills but the spirit gives life'. This is almost an idiom in the English and means don't emphasize the details of that law. If you emphasize the details of that law, then that's just going to destroy everything.
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Then you have another interpretation of this which tries to state that 'letter' refers to a legalistic interpretation of the law. But Paul is not contrasting different ways of interpreting the Mosaic Law here. He's talking about what's provided, not its interpretation. So this view says that the letter is a legalistic interpretation of the Law and tries to relate the meaning of the letter to the veil that's mentioned down in verse 14, “But their minds were hardened. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ.” They are saying the 'letter' is the veiled mind of the Israelite hearing the Law. This is a very popular interpretation but again, it doesn't fit what's going on here. It's not a contrast between what humans do and what God does. In , Paul says the Law is holy, just, and good so he's not condemning the Law here. What he means is that the Law on stones didn't give people the ability to obey the Law on stones. The letter didn't change the internals of the person. That's what the new covenant does. It's going to give them a heart of flesh. It's going to give them a new mind, a new heart and that's not given by the old Law. It's not that the Law was wrong; it's just that it was insufficient.
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The third interpretation is simply that 'letter' refers to any type of warped interpretation or misuse of the Law. Part of the problem here is that Paul uses this analogy of the 'letter versus the Spirit' in only about three places. One is in and 29; another is in , and then we have this passage here and that's most of it. But in the 'letter of the Law' doesn't refer to a perverted understanding of the Law but to possession of the Law in written form. The Jews of the Old Testament had the letter of the Law. This was a great thing. They had the Law. In , letter refers to the external rite of circumcision which is the application of the Law which Paul contrasts with spiritual circumcision which is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. So possessing the written code is only wrong because it led to a false sense of security in an insufficient Law. In , '”the oldness of the Law and the newness of the Spirit” has this same idea. It focuses on two different ways of serving, one under the Old Testament dispensation and one under the New Testament dispensation of the Church Age. Letter refers to the concrete demands of the Law written in stone, whereas the Spirit refers to the new nature that is given to the believer and the enhancement from God of the Holy Spirit that you get with that.
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Then fourth, this is the correct interpretation, it refers to different modes of the life of the believer. The letter is the Old Testament; it's insufficient, it's not wrong, it's insufficient. The Spirit is the new power given in the Church Age. This is what we see in our passage in “But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died to what were held by..” It condemned us. It didn't provide life. We're delivered from it so that now we should serve in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the Law which was insufficient. This is the same thing Paul is saying in , “For as many as are under the works of the Law are under the curse...” The best that you could get from obeying the Law was a realization of condemnation. The Law just condemned you. It was a condemnation of what Paul calls “the ministry of death”. It made people realize they were spiritually dead and incapable. Verse 11 says, “But that no one is justified by the Law in the sight of God is evident, for 'the just shall live by faith'.” Verses 12-13, “Yet the law is not of faith but 'the man who does them shall live by them'. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law...”
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So in the Church Age that judgment of the Law is what we're redeemed from. Look at verse 14, “That the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus so we can receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” So Christ fulfills the Law so that the Law which only condemns us is ended and we can receive the promise of His Spirit which now gives us the ability to fulfill the Law.
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So briefly, what we see here in is this contrast between the insufficiency of the Law and the sufficiency of the Spirit. This is a problem today. Nobody in the church, whether you're charismatic or not, believes in the sufficiency of the Spirit. People believe in the sufficiency of the Bible plus something. Christians today give it a lot of lip service and no internal obedience and reality. Verse 7 says, “If [and it's true] the ministry of death [the Law] written and engraved on stones, was glorious [see, it's a good thing] so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance..” It had a glory of its own but it's not the glory we have today. The second part of this verse asks, “...how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?”
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The glory of the Law was like the glory of God. It was wonderful. But what we have today from the Spirit is even more wonderful. Then in verse 9 we have the second condition, “For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory.” What we see here, if you look at the bottom note, “ministry of death”, “written on stone”, and “the ministry of condemnation” all refer the Mosaic Law; they're just different ways of talking about it. It made people aware that they were spiritually dead. It was written on stone. It's a ministry of condemnation and it's replaced by a ministry of the Spirit and the ministry of righteousness which is the Church Age. So Paul concludes in verse 10, “For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels [reference to today].
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Compare the Old Testament Law to today; it really had a minimal glory because of the glory that excels it. , “For if what is passing away was glorious [the Law] what remains is much more glorious.” That's what we have today. We have to understand that. This parallels what Paul says in the first four verses of so next time I'll show how all of this dovetails with and 8. The Law was just insufficient; that's what is about. It can't do it. Morality is great but it's not spirituality. Morality is human beings being ethical in their own effort and energy. It doesn't cut ice with God. It doesn't make you more spiritual. The only thing that makes it in the Christian life is for us to learn to walk by means of God the Holy Spirit, walking in fellowship, learning the Word, and living it out in our life. Without that it's just a sham; just going through the motions. You have to focus on these riches that God has given us in the Church Age.

Romans 081b-If the Law was Perfect, The Spirit is Beyond Perfect

Romans 7:1 NASB95
Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
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Romans 081b-If the Law was Perfect, The Spirit is Beyond Perfect
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Open your Bible to Romans chapter 7. We'll continue our study of how the believer is dead to the Law but first a couple of announcements. One is to give you a little update on my dad. Not much has changed. Just little glitches here and there show up. He is still in the VA Hospital and still waiting on alternative places to send him. Because he's under VA care, my options are limited to places, nursing homes and medical foster homes that are contracted with the VA. That will involve places to go look at and will probably involve a lot of time. Fortunately, as I mentioned last week, I have good health. He is comfortable and not in pain and doing well. He continues to surprise them. One day they think he's going to die in 36 hours, because they don't know him, and when he gets a little more rest, he springs back.
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We are, as human beings, incredibly tenacious about hanging to life. That's how God made us. It takes a lot longer for us to go. It's all in God's hands. So I'm very comfortable with that. There's things that I learn as I go through that; that when we minister to people I'm always thinking about when the apostle Paul talks about how we comfort others with the comfort which we've been comforted. So there's an important learning process we all go through which helps us as we encourage, comfort, and minister to one another in the body of Christ.
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One of the things I have noticed before but it's always a little different when you go through it yourself, is that as we deal with people who are strong believers and they are facing loss in their life, they go through it in different ways. It may be loss of parents, loss of spouse, loss of children and that loss impacts their life in different ways so they go through their grief. Strong believers understand that when this person dies, they're absent from the body and face to face with the Lord, especially when you're looking at an older person such as a parent who has lived a good life and is a solid believer. It's hard to watch them suffer because you don't like that but you know that they need to go ahead and be with the Lord but there's a reason why they're there even though you don't understand it. There's a reason why God leaves them there to teach others things.
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It's not the fact, as it is with unbelievers, that someone is dying; it's the fact that all of the collateral issues in life, the legal issues, the hospital hassle, and all of the other stuff that comes along, is distracting. It often seems overwhelming because you just don't know what it is. Even in my own thinking I find that it's not that I'm worried. There are levels of uncertainty. You trust the Lord but it's a matter of all this extra stuff that needs to be done.
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So often I think about our Lord as He went to the Cross. He was under such emotional pressure in the Garden of Gethsemane that he sweated blood. The pressure was there. He felt it. There's nothing wrong with those feelings. Sometimes we get the feeling that if we're really trusting God we're going to just be peaceful and have joy and we're not going to feel the overwhelming reality of the circumstances. We think it's not going to get heavy and maybe even oppressive. I didn't say depressive; I said oppressive because it's serious; there's a lot that's there. Our Lord never sinned even when He felt that pressure and that should comfort us.
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You don't deny the loss; you don't deny all the pressure and everything else that may go with it at different times when it weighs on you. That's not a failure to trust. It's the reality of the circumstances. I hope that encourages some people as we all face these things. It's not a problem to feel the weight of the circumstances; our Lord certainly did. The problem is when we let that move us into areas of carnality. It's how we respond to that that's important. It's not that we have those feelings or those emotions.
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The other thing I wanted to update you on was this little nasty thing that made the front pages last week about this scrap of a fragment of an alleged gnostic gospel. It was allegedly the scrap of a 4th century gnostic gospel. From my readings in the past week a couple of things have come out. There's a lot of doubt whether it is indeed legitimate. This evening when I was trying to find Prime Minister's Netanyahu's speech on TV, I happened to catch an item in the scroll going across the bottom that the Vatican had come out with a paper claiming that this was a fake. So they've looked at it; they think it's a fake. Another aspect of this is that it seems to be a line copied out of part of a gospel of Thomas. The line that's in there that alludes to a wife for Jesus is a really an obscure line but that kind of language is often used as the Church is the Bride of Christ. You find that in some of the orthodox literature at the time just because of that phraseology. The wife of Christ could be translated to mean the Bride of Christ. Anyway, it's written in Coptic and it's bad Coptic. Scholars I've read about have dismissed it as a complete fake or fraud. Now they haven't had the time yet to do the test on the ink and parchment it's written on and things of that nature. In terms of just the superficial evidence, it seems like this is a fake. So I just thought I would update you on that. You don't have to lose any sleep over that in the coming weeks.
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We're getting into some great material in Romans chapter 7. I was talking to Dan Inghram on my way to class tonight. We were just going over some things and I was telling him a little bit about the conference next week about dispensations. I'm on this panel next week to say some things about how dispensational theology impacts how and what I teach from the pulpit. I was just reflecting on this as I was studying today.
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In Romans 7, I wonder how someone can work their way through without at least a rudimentary dispensational framework. What we understand going back to is that Paul lays the groundwork for talking about sanctification with the Baptism by the Spirit. When we reflect back what we've gone through as a congregation in the last three years as we've studied Colossians, Romans, and Acts, we saw the same type of argument in Colossians, chapter 2 starting in about verse 5 or 6 where Paul lays the groundwork for the Baptism by the Holy Spirit and continued to use that kind of language through the core section of Colossians.
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At the same time we're in Acts where we have issues related to covenants; we've dealt with issues related to the New Covenant, the whole message of the Kingdom and repentance and how these things have all come together. As a pastor, as I've been studying this, it comes together and things get clarified in my thinking. It's not that I didn't understand something; it's just that it comes into brighter light and it comes together as Scripture is compared to Scripture and more light is shed on these passages.
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is one of those particular issues, especially in the first part, such as . Just to direct your attention to the end of this opening introductory hinge paragraph, as I pointed out last time. Paul says, “But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died to what we were held by...” So we were held by the Law. The Law's not dead but we are dead to it now. He goes on to say “...for the purpose that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit.” Notice here he mentions the Spirit for the first time in these 3 chapters and it's a contrast with the Law. Now that's very important to understand... that the Law is contrasted with the Holy Spirit. And then he says, “...that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter [of the Law].”
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Now that terminology to refer to the letter of the Law is really developed in where he talks about the “Spirit gives life but the letter kills.” This is a really difficult passage that I've often had questions about but all of these are related. It all is important to understand because these passages address this issue that Christians have had such problems understanding this down through the years. What is the role of the Mosaic Law in the Church Age? What is the purpose of the Mosaic Law in the Church Age?
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Beyond that we even have problems understanding what was the role of the Mosaic Law in the Age of the Law. How many of us have been under the impression at one time or another that the observance of the Mosaic Law was a means to salvation in the Old Testament? Or a means to sanctification in the Old Testament? How well do we understand the concept of personal experiential growth in the Old Testament under the Dispensation of the Law when they didn't have the Spirit? This whole concept of the Baptism by the Spirit being foundational to understanding the distinction between this dispensation and the previous dispensation becomes larger and larger in my thinking.
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With no Baptism by the Spirit in the Old Testament, the sin nature isn't dead. We don't die to the sin nature. The old man isn't crucified. We're not delivered from the tyranny or dominion of the sin nature because there's no Baptism by the Holy Spirit. That was really a new thought to me as I looked at it from that perspective, realizing that without the Holy Spirit, what's the trajectory going to be in your spiritual life? It's not going to be a whole lot of success.
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As we go back rethinking the Old Testament in light of that, outside of a few key individuals in bright lights in the Old Testament, the history of Israel under the Law is a negative trajectory. They never get there. There are times when they are close but they are few and far between. The Law just can't do it. It's a huge negative lesson that morality just isn't enough. Not only is it not enough, not only is it not going to elevate the culture for any length of time, morality, as we see, is probably going to just stimulate the sin nature. It's going to just lead to greater regression and that's how the Law is described in this chapter. It's through the Law that we know sin and the Law sort of aggravates the sin nature.
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I know no one here has ever had this experience but every now and then when I'm driving along on a major thoroughfare and you're approaching an intersection and the light turns yellow, you see people who are far from that light just suddenly put the pedal to the metal in order to beat that yellow light and usually its pretty orange, if not flaming red, when they go through the intersection. It's something about the law that when it says don't do this, it makes us want to do it. I remember when I was a kid at the time they built the Flagship Hotel down at Galveston and they put up signs about not fishing out of the rooms. They didn't want the weights coming back and breaking the windows. They didn't really have a problem with people fishing out the windows until they put up the signs. “Don't fish out the window. Hey, what a great idea. Is anyone looking? Let me try.” When the law says, “Don't do something” it gives us ideas. We want to see if we can get away with it. It aggravates the sin nature.
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That's what Paul is going to say in . So the Law wasn't the means to personal holiness in the sense of experiential righteousness. It's a failure. is kind of a negative between 6 and 8. Six is all about what we have in Christ; eight is what the Holy Spirit provides, and seven is “you really can't do it on your own by just trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps by the Law. It's always going to lead to frustration and failure in the spiritual life. So it's sort of a negative.
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As I've been going through some things today, I've gotten excited. I've gone through and connected some dots with some other passages which always helps us get a little further clarification of what the Scriptures teach. So I want to start where Paul is going to say some negative things about the Law in this chapter. He says some very positive things about the Law in this chapter, too. In verse 12, he says, “Therefore the Law is holy.” I want to start with the emphasis on that passage because it's easy for us, in light of some of the negative things said in the New Testament about the Law, to walk away with the wrong impression and that somehow the Law was just not quite there.
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But if we go back to the Old Testament, the testimony of the Scriptures in the Old Testament, again and again tell us that the Law is perfect. But if the Law is perfect, the Holy Spirit just goes beyond that infinitesimally. It's beyond anything we can imagine. That's what I mean by the title, “If the Law was perfect then the Spirit is beyond perfect.”
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As I pointed out last time, and I've done a little more work on this chart (CHART) to bring the issues out. focuses on the fact that when we're saved, we're dead to sin. In we're dead to the Law. It's not that Law died but that we become dead to it. It breaks that authority.
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That's why he uses the illustration for marriage in verses 2 and 3. All he's saying there is that we recognize that when two people are bound together by the law and there's a death of one that legal binding is broken. That's all he's saying in that illustration. The analogy he draws from that comes out in verse 4 where he says, “Wherefore my brethren, you also have become dead to the Law.” That conclusion tells us that the purpose of the illustration is just to make the point that with our identification with Christ's death there's no longer a tie with the Law.
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We looked at two issues defining Law and then the significance of the illustration and the word Law here is not a general sense of law, a universal principle such as Roman law or Greek law, but Law in Romans is all about the Mosaic Law. It is the focal point. This is talking about the Mosaic Law. Now what was the view of the Old Testament in terms of the Mosaic Law? I think this is so important for us to be reminded about and as I went over these verses in preparation, I realized these are some of the greatest verses and chapters in Scripture. If you don't have them underlined in your Bible, you should underline them.
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I want to go through some of these passages in the Old Testament talking about the value of the Law. It's easy to remember that the key Psalms related to the Word of God are and then . In there's two parts to the Psalm. The first part talks about the nonverbal revelation of God as revealed in the Heavens. “The Heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.” Then in verse , the focus is on the verbal revelation of God. So we have general revelation, non-verbal revelation, and special revelation.
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(CHART) Look at what David says. I've underlined the different terms that David uses to talk about the Law, the Torah, that God has revealed to Moses. He calls it the “Law of the Lord”. In verse 7 he calls it “the testimony of the Law”, in verse 8 “the statutes of the Lord”, the “commandments of the Lord”. Verse 9: “the fear of the Lord”, “the judgments of the Lord” and then there's a conclusion in verse 10. He says regarding the Law that it is “perfect”, “sure”, “righteous”, “right”, “pure”, “clean” and “true and righteous”.
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All of that is true about the Mosaic Law so we shouldn't get a negative idea about the Law. It is spoken of in only the highest terms of value in the Old Testament. “It is more to be desired than gold, yea, much fine gold, sweeter also than the honeycomb.” There is nothing of greater value than the Law. Then we get into . We learn that in the Old Testament Dispensation the Law was the means of cleansing from sin. How is one cleansed from sin? By observing the Law: the ritual cleansing, as well as confession before God. tells us “ how a young man can cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your Word.”
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If you go through there are some 176 verses. This is the longest chapter in the Bible and it is preceded by which is the shortest. is an acrostic which means the first word in each section starts with the next letter of the alphabet. There lots of different words here used for the Law: words, statutes, ordinances, ways, precepts, commandments, righteous judgments. They are all talking about the Law.
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Then the other way in which we are cleansed is not just in taking heed and obeying the Word but in hiding it in our heart and memorizing it. “Your word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against You.” It's preventative care. It's not just the word for cleansing but for staying in fellowship. Then we have other verses that talk about the study of the Law as the highest value, the greatest thing that a person can do. The psalmist says, “I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies, as much as in all riches.”
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How much time we spend pursuing wealth, pursuing money, pursuing security, the things that money can buy and there's nothing wrong with that but here the psalmist is saying he values the Word as much as all that, if not more. He says, “I will meditate on Your precepts and contemplate Your way.” He only gets that from the Word. “I will delight myself in Your statutes.” Now how many times have you read through Deuteronomy and thought, “I'm just delighted to read this”? Attitude check. Verse 17, “Deal bountifully with Your servant that I may live and keep Your Word.” He sees the Law as a path to life. “Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your Law.”
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There is such a sense of excitement here to know the Word. I know many of you can remember back to a time, not that you're bored with it now or you wouldn't be here, but you remember a time when you were so excited. Most of us were that way when we were young. I think that's typical of when we first began our growth as Christians because it's all new and we have a lot of questions we want answered so we're very excited about it. I believe as we get older that our motivation changes and it's at that motivation shift that people fall out. You start off wanting answers to questions like most young people have. Why am I here? How do I know it's true? How can I solve these problems in my life? We seem to have so many problems when we're 20- 30 years old: problems such as “who am I going to marry?”, “why did I marry this person?” to “how am I going to deal with these babies who keep me up all night and then I have to work 14 hours?”
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All these things are coming along and hitting us with the details of life and yet, we want answers. We want to be able to solve problems in life but somewhere after 15-20 years in the Word, we get most of those questions answered and there's some maturity there. The issue isn't coming so much to learn new things to satisfy the questions but that I need to be reminded every day of God's faithfulness, of the importance of His Word, of His provision for me so that I can stay the course. I can't just fall away. I'm not motivated because I'm trying to learn new things, though I will, but I'm motivated because I need to be reminded of the many things I've already learned, that God is faithful.
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It doesn't take more than about 12 hours to forget that God is faithful. Then I forget the promises and try to handle all the issues in life on my own instead of depending upon the Lord. The Psalmist goes on to say that it's the Law that is the means of dealing with the hostile world. In , he says, “Princes also sit and speak against me.” This is David writing, most likely, and he's talking about princes who speak against him. He's talking about rulers, maybe within his own kingdom, conspiracies of all kind against him. He goes on to say, “But Your servant meditates on Your statutes.”
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How do you handle the pressure of people problems, attacks, slanders, all of these things whether its coming from friends, co-workers, people you thought were your friends, family members. How do you handle when you live in a country where the leadership is all going in the wrong direction? Every now and then I hear people on the left or on the right, say, “If so and so gets elected I will move.” I don't know where I would move to because the things that are coming to the U.S. that I don't like are in place everywhere else. We're just trying to be like the rest of the world.
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People in the U.S. have forgotten that what made us great is that we weren't like anybody else. What's going to destroy us is when we become just another copy of the same old basic socialism that everybody else has. We are distinct and what keeps us focused when everything going on around us is chaos is the Word. says, “My soul melts from heaviness.” I spoke about this earlier tonight. We go through times when the pressure is very real and we feel it and there's nothing wrong with feeling it. David says “My soul melts from heaviness. Strengthen me according to Thy Word.”
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In verse 92, David talks about if he hadn't spent a lot of time in the Word, he wouldn't have been able to handle all he's handled. “Unless Your Law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” It's the study of the Word that is the source of good judgment and knowledge. If we want to make wise decisions, then we need to immerse ourselves in the Word. “Teach me good judgment for I believe Your commandments.” “The Law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of coins of gold and silver.” It illuminates our path, our life, “Thy Word is a light unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” This is the Law.
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How can we think negatively about the Mosaic Law? This is the Torah. How can we think negatively when the Old Testament under Divine inspiration extols the Law as such value. Look at some other passages: Deuteronomy 6:1-9. I'm not going to read through all those verses but it talks about the commandments, the statutes, the judgments and that the Lord has commanded Moses to teach the people that they may observe them when they come into the Land. Why? So they can fear the Lord and their days may be long, (verse 2) and that it may be well with them and that they may multiply greatly. If you want to have genuine prosperity, success, and a rich, full life, it comes from knowing the Law and being obedient to the Law.
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So what do you have to do? It has to be with you everywhere you go; when you stand up, sit down, lie down, drive, work, walk, watch TV, when you go out to eat, everywhere. That's what you see in the famous passage in , “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One. You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk in your way and when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, on your eyes, etc.”
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Is the Word of God that real to you? This is just talking about the Law and if the Law was perfect, as I pointed out at the beginning, the Spirit is even better. The Holy Spirit is more perfect, more better. , “The Lord is well pleased. For His righteousness' sake He will exalt the Law and make it honorable.” And then almost the last verse in the Old Testament, , “Remember the Law of Moses which I commanded you in Horeb for all Israel with its statutes and judgments.”
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The value of the Law could not be stressed more in the Old Testament. That is why it is so valued by the Jews when Jesus comes. What's the problem? The problem is that they misunderstood the purpose. It's not that they valued something they shouldn't value; it's that they valued it for the wrong reason. They thought that the Law was the path to righteousness before God. That by observing the Law, they could acquire the same righteousness that only God could give.
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In the New Testament, we find that the people value the Law and respect it. In and 19, Jesus said, “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For surely I say to you that until heaven and earth pass away not one jot or tittle will by no means pass away until all is fulfilled.” That's the high value that Jesus placed on the Law but not the Pharisaical interpretation of the Law. That was what was wrong.
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A very interesting passage takes place in . This is when Paul is returning to Jerusalem. He's going to take a vow and there's nothing wrong with him going to Jerusalem and observing these days because he's not doing it to gain righteousness. I think that is something that has been difficult for people to comprehend in the past but there's nothing wrong with that.
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Look at this first. “On the following day, Paul went in to us to James and all the elders were present.” This is a power meeting between Paul and James, the half-brother of Christ, who is the leader of the church in Jerusalem and all the leaders in the churches in Jerusalem. When he greeted them he “detailed those things which God had done through his ministry and that all that God had done to the Gentiles.” So he gives them an after-action report of his previous missionary journeys. And when they heard it, “they glorified the Lord.” There's no indication that anybody is off-base or focused on the wrong thing.
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They glorified God because of what He has accomplished through Paul and they say to him, “You see brother, how many myriads of Jews there are who have believed.” These Jews have trusted in Christ and believed and they are zealous for the Law. They're not trying to use the Law the wrong way which is what the Pharisees did but they still have a passion for the Law. Only about half of the New Testament is written at this time. The only thing these believers have at this time as the Word of God is the Old Testament and they value it. They're still observing it. They're in that transition zone. The Temple is still there and as far as Jews are concerned, whether they're believers or not, there is still a responsibility to the Mosaic Law to fulfill those ritual commands.
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It would mean how you understood it made a difference. If you were a Christian versus a Jew who had not understood it correctly and were trying to gain righteousness through the ritual. In just a few verses after this as Paul goes out and the crowd reacts to him, they cry out to him. They are misrepresenting his view of the Law. There's no correction from Paul after verse 20 when he says, “Look, there's thousands of Jews who have believed and they still observe the Law.” Paul doesn't say, “They're all screwed up, they're wrong, they're a bunch of Judaizers.” There's no correction there. There's no hint in the text that they have a wrong attitude.
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What happens after this is that Paul goes out and all of a sudden rumors go our through the crowd that Paul was there, then they start crying out and they misrepresent his view of the Law. He's still respectful of the Law. That's why he's there. They say, “Men of Israel help, this is the man who teaches all men everywhere against the people, against the law, and against this place and furthermore he also brought Greeks into the Temple and has defiled this holy place.” This is just all a lie. Lying didn't start in the last twenty years in politics or in religion. It's been around for a very long, long time. All the way back to Cain, there's been lying. They're lying for their own cause and their own agenda. It's not true at all. He's not against the Temple. Has he said anything against the Temple? He's not against the Law at all. You have to understand it right.
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This was the same charge that they brought against Stephen. Remember in ? “They also set up false witnesses to accuse Stephen saying this man seeks to speak blasphemous words against this holy place, the Law.” But Stephen did not speak blasphemous words or anything like that against the Law or against the Temple. In , when Paul was on his second missionary journey and went to Corinth he followed his normal standard operation procedure. He went to the synagogue first, and then after that when he would usually get kicked out, he would gain a hearing from a certain segment of the Jewish population who would respond to the Gospel message and believe Jesus was the Messiah.
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They created such an uproar in Corinth that the Jews in the synagogue tried to bring charges against him in court and they took him before Gallio, the pro-consul of Acacia and brought these charges. Their charge was that this fellow persuades men to worship God contrary to the Law. What we're going to see is that Paul has a high view of the Law. He just doesn't have the Pharisaical view of the Law. He doesn't look at the Law as a means of righteousness.
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Before he believed that Jesus was the Messiah, before he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus, he did believe that the Law was a means to righteousness. That's what he says in Philippians, chapter 3, that he was a seeker of righteousness from the Law. That's what was wrong. It wasn't that the Law wasn't valuable, wasn't important, wasn't perfect. As I said in the title, the law is perfect but the Spirit is better, more perfect, beyond perfect.
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Now part of this was because there was this misunderstanding in terms of the role and the purpose and the function of the Law under Second Party Judaism, as the Pharisaical party developed after the return to the Land in an attempt initially to protect the people from violating the Law as they did before the Fifth Cycle of discipline hit them in 586 B.C. They had good intentions, as my mother used to tell me the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It never gets you to where you're going, it always diverts you.
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The role of the Law was good. It was holy, perfect, and righteous, as Paul says. But it's purpose was first of all, , “For through the Law, comes the knowledge of sin.” The Law's purpose wasn't to give us a path to righteousness but to expose our incredible need for righteousness. That there is none righteous, no not one. Not one person can live up to the standard of the Law. , “The Law came in that the transgression might increase.” The more “thou shalt nots” there are, the more we want to see if we can get away with it when no one's looking. But that doesn't mean the Law isn't good. As Paul says in , “For we know that the Law is good if one uses it lawfully, [according to its purpose].” In , Paul says, “Do you not know brethren...” speaking to the Roman Christians, a large segment of which were converted Jews who had trusted in Jesus Christ as Savior, “for I speak to those who know the Law...” He's speaking here to Jewish background Christians making sure they know the limitations of the Mosaic Law. “...that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives.” shows that when death occurs the Law no longer has dominion.
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But before we get into that, I want to divert our focus a little bit to this whole question of what is the role and relationship of the Law and the Church Age believer. This will take us to about six passages, a couple of which we can hit fairly quickly but we won't get through all six of them this evening. At least we can get started and wrap this next week.
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The first is a passage we will get to this year in Acts, chapter 16. I'm pretty sure we will because there's a lot of redundancy in the Cornelius episode so that won't take months to get through those three chapters. It's amazing how much there is in . All these things happen to Peter and then Peter comes to Cornelius and rehearses for him everything we've already heard so it's repeated a second time. Then when Peter gets back to Jerusalem, he tells the whole story a third time. The Holy Spirit wants us to read it three times to make sure we get the point. As we teach our way through it, we don't need to have quite that level of repetition.
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In , there is another high level meeting that occurs with the leaders of the church in Jerusalem, usually referred to as the Jerusalem Council. Now in the Jerusalem Council, the question is now that Paul has gone out into the Gentile countries and has had such a tremendous response from the Gentiles in terms of their response to the Gospel, the question is: what are we going to do with all these uncircumcised Gentiles? What's their relationship to the Law of Moses to be? Do they have to obey the Law?
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This forms the background for the second passage we're going to in . Paul is going to be plagued by a group of Jews who follow him and antagonize him and stir up the Jewish population against him as he teaches because they're claiming he is against the Law, that he is against their interpretation of the Law that one can be righteous by means of the Law. So the Jerusalem Council there have to answer this question.
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We're told that the apostles and elders come together to consider the matter and they each have their say. Then Peter stands up and talks to them and again, he goes back to the and 11 episode with Cornelius and talks about how God opened the door to the Gentiles through him. In verses 8 and 9 he says, “God, who knows the heart, gave the Holy Spirit to them just as He did to us.” Notice it's a foundation there. It's the Baptism by the Holy Spirit that brings us all into the body of Christ. That's the foundation for Biblical Christian living for New Testament sanctification and spiritual growth, that act of the Holy Spirit. “..making no distinction between us and them.”
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You can hear Paul in the background saying, “..neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, for we are one in Jesus Christ.” That's the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So Peter says, “Why do you want to put the Law on the Gentiles?' That's a great verse, verse 10, when he says, “Therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?” Think about that a minute. Peter is saying that the Law, which is good and perfect and holy, and more to be desired than anything in life, that it was a yoke which we couldn't bear.
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What he's saying is that it put us under a bondage because we couldn't achieve it; we couldn't fully, completely obey the Law and that it ended up destroying us. Now he doesn't say it quite like that but that's the perspective I'm picking up by looking at some of these other passages: that without the Holy Spirit, without the Baptism by the Holy Spirit, without the death of the tyranny of the sin nature the Old Testament believer was really doomed to failure. There's no way that on the basis of the Law or morality, they could ever overcome the sin nature.
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What happens in each dispensation, God in his administration in certain periods of history, gives certain assets to humanity. There's a different set of assets in each dispensation so that when all of history is said and done, we're going to look back and see that every variable was covered and under no variable was man able to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and solve his own spiritual problems apart from God. Apart from God, there's just failure, man can't do it on his own and even under perfect environment, with a perfect political system, and a perfect king, because man is flawed by the sin nature, there will be a massive rebellion against Jesus Christ at the end of the Millennial Kingdom and God will have to destroy the rebels by fire from heaven.
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The problem isn't education; it's not the economy; it's not the Democrats; it's not the Republicans; it's not the Iranians; it's not the Russians; it's not the Czech's. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We're the problem. It's the sin nature in every human being and every volition that's the problem. But God sets up every type: little provision from God to maximum provision from God and under every option, man fails.
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Now there are greater failures and lesser failures. There are people who rise to great heights as spiritual heroes in some periods of history than at other times in history. But what Peter is saying here is that the Law was a yoke on the neck of the Israelites. They couldn't achieve perfection; they weren't able to bear it; they were destined for failure so why would they repeat a failure option. They had something better in this dispensation. That becomes the thrust of what he says.
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Emphasis shifts in verse 11 to grace. So after all the discussion, after Peter talks, after Paul and Barnabas talk, after James talk, they come back and they come to a conclusion in verses 19 and 20. Their conclusion is, “Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood.” In other words, things that would be genuinely offensive to the Jewish sensibilities among them. This is bringing in the law of the weaker brother before it's spelled out by Paul.
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So the Jerusalem Council decree is written out and in verses 24 – 29, it's spelled out and they say in conclusion, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit to lay upon you no greater burden, i.e., the Law, than these necessary things that you refrain from things offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood. If you keep yourself from these things, you do well.” The conclusion of the Jerusalem Council is a conclusion based on grace, and not based on Law.
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So the Law by , is clearly seen not to be related to either salvation or sanctification. Their understanding is that the Law has been replaced by the Holy Spirit and by grace. Not that there wasn't grace in the Old Testament and not that there aren't mandates in the Church Age but that the Law represents a dispensational orientation to Israel and the Mosaic Law as all that there was. It was perfect but it wasn't enough.
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So a new dispensation came in with new aspects. Paul uses a different model in Galatians, chapter 3. This is a crucial chapter and it's going to take more than 3 or 4 minutes to go through this. It's very important to understand because here Paul uses the analogy of a Roman or Jewish household where the child is treated as a child until he reaches a certain age. During the time of childhood, he's treated as a child, talked to as a child, addressed as a child; he's under the control of a pedagogue or a tutor but when he reaches maturity, which in a Jewish household is the age of 13 and he's bar mitzvad and he becomes the son of the commandment.
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At that point he becomes an adult. He's to be addressed by his parents as an adult; certain kinds of discipline are no longer possible. That boy is now a man. And in a bar mitzvah ceremony, he will say, “I am now a man.” His voice usually cracks while he's saying that because he's going through puberty at that time. So that's the analogy. The Law was treating the Jewish race as a child but with Christ coming, it's the end of the Law, and that tutor dispensation is ended and now we're adults, under freedom and responsibility, and grace.
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We'll start with the second point next time in terms of the Law and the Church Age believer in . Galatians is the first epistle that Paul wrote and I think Romans is the crystallization and expansion of everything Paul taught in Galatians. If you want to get a quick, easy orientation to Romans, you go through Galatians. All those basic themes are hit in the right order. We'll come back and start here next Thursday night.

Romans 082b-Walking According to the Spirit Romans 8:1

Romans 8:1 NASB95
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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Romans 082b-Walking According to the Spirit
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We are in Romans, chapter 8, verse 1. This is one of the five greatest chapters in all of the New Testament. This is the chapter that really tells us, really lays out in a logical way, the foundation for the spiritual life. has to be understood in connection with . These are, I think, the two greatest chapters in the Scriptures about the spiritual life and of course they connect with and John, chapter 15, the abiding chapter.
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This chapter lays it out in the most remarkable, logical way as Paul has taken us from dealing with the focus on what happens at the moment of our salvation in terms of our how we are identified with Christ in terms of His death, burial, and resurrection. Interestingly, this time around, some of you may have listened to a series I did 12 or 13 years ago when I was first up at Preston City Bible Church. I went through , , and 8. I think it was 11 or 12 lessons, just to give an overview of the spiritual life in Romans. Now we're going through it in a more in depth fashion.
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One of the things we see here in and one of the things you'll see tonight is that I've sort of refined a few things along the way as I continue to study. This is typical for any pastor. Sometimes congregations idolize their pastors too much. I’ve seen this, especially with younger pastors; they don't have patience with the learning process that pastors go through. The first ten years of most pastors’ ministries should probably not be recorded for posterity because they're learning. You come out of seminary, no matter how much background you have, no matter how much training you have, you're still cognitively trying to put all the pieces together. Even though you may have the basic structure right, the basic theology orientation, things like that together, you're still really wrestling with a mass of detail that just seems like you're trying to nail Jell-O to the wall at times because there's so much there you're trying to control.
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You're still just trying to learn the Scripture. We've lost the kind of training that characterized the Jewish community for thousands of years where everyone was expected to learn and memorize the Scripture by the time you were 13 years old, especially for the men. You would have the Torah memorized. You would have most of the rest of the Old Testament memorized and this was expected. We've lowered our expectations so much that by the time we get to the late 20th and early 21st centuries 50 to 75% of the men who go to a seminary to learn to be a pastor have just really started studying the Bible at any level within two years of their going to seminary.
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Historically we've had a culture that has, by the time men like Jonathan Edwards during the Colonial period (I'm talking about the 1720s through the 1740s.) finished what we would call high school today before he went to Yale, probably had a greater knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew when he started university than most ThM Masters of Theology students have when they graduate from seminary. Think about that. If you don't have that kind of background, it takes a while to start putting things together.
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There are so many different things that come along today that we hear from this pastor, that pastor, that radio personality, this television personality, that are not theologians. They may have great personalities and they don't spend maybe a tenth of the time they should, really studying through the Scripture. What I've discovered sadly in our generation is that the more time a man spends in his study really learning the Word of God so he can teach and lead his sheep, the fewer sheep he's going to have, simply because people today don't value the education, the training of a pastor. I see this among pastors. We've lowered the level of expectation so much that in many circles and many congregations you have churches that almost pride themselves on the fact that their pastoral staff has no formal education.
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Some of you are familiar with a church on the West coast in California that has made a name for itself because it emphasizes the idea of a purpose driven church. That pastor actually got his start in the late 70's with that and it didn't become known nationally for many people until the 90s. There's another church in Chicago by the name of Willowcreek that I first became aware of in the early 80s and it was another one of those huge mega churches that was started and by the late 80s it had a pastoral staff of over 300. Can you imagine? Most churches don't even have 300 people in the church, even if they count all the people that ever showed up at the church. Here was a church that had 300 people on staff.
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There was a man named Pritchard who was getting his PhD in sociology at Northwestern University and decided that a study of this particular church would be a tremendous PhD project. He went to the church staff and got permission to study, write, interview them. He spent a year at the church. One of his observations on the church was about those 300 pastors. There wasn't one who owned a systematic theology. Not one. There wasn't one who had any formal training in Bible. No seminary, no Bible college. They prided themselves on it. At the time that church was the largest church in the United States. Now it's been superseded by what’s his name, down here at the Summit. So that tells you something about the value of education in this country.
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The larger the church, the less formal education. There was even a quote in that dissertation from one of the pastors who said, “Well, we're afraid that if somebody went to seminary that would somehow stifle our creativity and our growth.” My point in all of this is that I've gone through growth in . This was something that I really focused on when I was a student at Dallas Seminary and my very, very first semester we took a course on the spiritual life. I had a professor who had pastored a church in Houston previously and was a good Greek scholar. What's interesting is that he's probably moved much closer to a Chaferean position today than he was then but at that point he was still trying to get over his second PhD at the University of Basel in Switzerland but he was a good thinker and I always enjoyed him. I took as many courses as I could from him because he challenged my thinking.
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You know that's why you should take some professors. It's not because you want to learn what they want to teach you but that they're going to teach you how to think. You may not agree with a thing they say or ever tell you but they're the ones that are going to inspire you to learn how to think and to present your views. They're the ones who cause thoughts to generate in your head. I read a lot of books for that reason. I tell others, “Oh, that was a great commentary. I really enjoyed it.” I don't really remember what I read in the commentary, what the guy said, but it was great because of the thoughts it inspired me to think. I may not have agreed with anything he said. Some of you know what I'm talking about.
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Anyway, Ed was one of my professors. We went through , , and 8. He did not take the view like Lewis Sperry Chafer which is the view I hold today and many of you hold and I consistently teach. It helped me to understand what I believe better than I would. It took me a lot of years to get to that point because of that and one of the products of that whole experience I had was that conference we had two years ago on the spiritual life, the Chafer conference. That was one of the greatest conferences. The product of that from those men who came was the result of that. It's a growth process.
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I say that because as we come to our first verse here, , Paul begins with a conclusion. This conclusion comes out of what he has said in Romans chapter 7. Now let's go back and look at just a little bit. started off with Paul addressing the question of the Law: what is the relation of the believer to the Law? As I pointed out several times in the past few weeks, the role of the Law in the life of the believer in this age has been terribly misunderstood. There are many people who think that the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law are, outside of the sacrifices, just as mandatory today as they ever were.
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My first church was down in LaMarque, Texas. Some of you know where LaMarque is, if you go past LaMarque, you fall into Galveston Bay. I was at a church that had been founded in 1895 as a Union Church. A Union Church was sort of an older term, an antiquated term for Community Church. If you went into a new settlement, a new area, a new community, and you didn't have enough Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians or whatever protestants to have your own denomination then you unify in the church. Now they certainly had some doctrinal differences. Some believed in pedo baptism or infant baptism, some would believe in believer baptism, some in sprinkling, some in immersion so part of the deal was that whoever the pastor was he would make sure that if somebody held a view that was different from his on baptism, he would get another pastor in who would do whatever kind of baptism they wanted, that kind of thing. It wasn't ecumenical in the modern sense because no one is asked to compromise doctrine but they didn't have enough people to have more than one church so they just had a union.
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So this church was called Paul's Union Church and it wasn't called for the Apostle Paul but during the depression the church ran out of money half way through their building program and a man down the street whose name is Paul gave them the money for them to finish the church so they named it after him. I'm glad his name wasn't Herman. Otherwise it would have been Herman's Union Church or Fred's Union Church. One of the first things as a young pastor that I said about two or three months into my pastorate was that the Ten Commandments is not for us. I thought I was going to have a revolt that morning. It took me a long time to settle people down. That was because they just hadn't been taught well even though they were allegedly dispensational. As a dispensational church they would understand that there were different requirements in different ages and when Jesus came, as Paul says in , that was the end of the Law. So the big question that the apostles wrestled with as we've seen in Acts and the question that comes up in Romans and a couple of other times is Romans is what's the role of the Law?
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So that's the question asked here and he ends this in the , “For now we have been delivered from the Law, having died [that is being separated from the authority of the sin nature, the tyranny of the sin nature] to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” As I pointed out there the contrast here is between the dynamic of the new dispensation, the new age that started on the day of Pentecost, where God the Holy Spirit indwells every single believer and fills every believer which is a term related to the growth producing, sanctifying producing ministry of God the Holy Spirit, in the life of a believer who is walking by the Spirit or walking in fellowship.
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All of that summarizes where Paul is headed in . So he introduces this terminology of the Spirit and the letter, the letter related to the Law, that the Law could only do so much. It laid out the path but it didn't give anybody the ability to walk the path. The purpose of the Law wasn't to show people that if you obey the Law you can get to Heaven but that you can't ever obey the Law so on your own you can't ever get to Heaven. It was to point out inability, not to point out ability. Then Paul introduces this next question in verse 7. “What shall we say then? Is the law sin?” So at this point he stops his momentum at verse 6 and he goes down an important and necessary side trail. He comes back to the main line of thought in .
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In , he says, “There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus...” And so in he asks this question and he goes down this rabbit trail of 'is the Law sin” and he says 'no, it reveals sin' and then he goes into the whole discussion that without relying on the Holy Spirit just trying to fulfill the Law, he does what he isn't supposed to do and he doesn't do what he would really like to do which is obey God and the conclusion in verse 24, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Body of death means that in our physical existence we are still mortal and we still have a sin nature and we're still going to sin.
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Then he has a statement in praise in verse 25, “I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then with my mind I myself serve the Law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” That sets things up for . We'll come back to those in a minute. I was just trying to give us an overview here. In , he says, “There is therefore now no condemnation in those who are in Christ Jesus...” If you have a New International Version, New American Standard Bible, New English translation, the English Standard version, anything other than King James or New King James, your verse ends with a period after Christ Jesus.
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But if you have a King James or a New King James it has a significant clause after it defining those who are in Christ Jesus as those “who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” This is one of those most significant, probably the top ten most significant, contextual problems we run into. Usually I don't ever address them or I just make a couple of comments but this is one that is really important for if you take out a couple of translations, New King James versus New American Standard you're missing half a verse.
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Should that verse be there? Having grown up with the King James version and when I went to seminary about that time, mid-70's, was when the New American Standard became very popular I remember sitting down and looking at that and thinking “Wow”. I didn't know Greek and I wondered how come my version has something that version doesn't and what are all the issues. If you look down to , just look there you see where Paul says, “that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” You see the similarity?
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What happened in the 19th century with the discovery of a number of manuscripts that came out of North Africa. ((CHART)) Some of you have heard these stories before, stories related to the discovery of Codex Vaticanus that had been locked away in the Vatican for centuries and then it was gradually discovered and brought out into the open by a couple of different scholars who put pressure on the Vatican and you had Count Von Tischendorf who went down and discovered Codex Sinaiticus in St. Catherine's Monastery in Egypt where he looked at wadded up papyrus there being used as kindling for the fire in room. He noticed as it flared up it had Greek lettering on it. Being an expert in Greek he read it and realized he was looking at a New Testament manuscript that was very old.
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There were four of these manuscripts that were discovered that all date back to about the 4th to 5th century A.D. Well that's pretty close to the writing of the New Testament. So the thinking that permeated scholars at that time is that since these are older than anything else we have, they must be better. Now that's really a fallacy. Because if I have a really good, perfect copy of a second century manuscript but that copy is made in the 8th century or the 9th century and its made because the second century document is fading and hard to read and it needs to be faithfully copied so its preserved and then after its copied that second century manuscript is destroyed, the 8th century manuscript may not be as old as Codex Sinaiticus but it's better.
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The reason these manuscripts in Egypt were preserved is because they were in Egypt where the climate is dry, it's in the desert and so they're preserved. In other places where the climate is humid and damp and there are other problems the manuscripts would rot and be destroyed and they wouldn't be preserved so there were four of these that were discovered. The thinking that began to dominate the study of the Scripture was that if any two of these four agreed, that had to be the Word of God. That was it. Now they would say that was oversimplifying but it's basically the truth and it's certainly true in this particular text.
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It didn't matter how many other manuscripts read differently. If two of these four agreed, that's what the critical text went with. The critical text is a reference to a text that in the bottom margin of the text they put all the different variants down there so the scholars could read it. This is the text that's behind the New American Standard, NIV, and others. It's now gone to the Nestle-Aland text. It's just gone to the 28th edition. It's very, very helpful in many ways but that's the theory behind it.
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But there are differences. The theory behind the King James version and the New King James Version is what's called the textus receptus which is Latin for “received text”. Now the way that came into being was that in the period of the late 1400s, early 1500s, the period which just precedes what is known in Europe as the Renaissance, and the Reformation in Northern Europe, there was a flood of ancient manuscripts, original language manuscripts for all manner of different writings, classical Greek, classical Roman period as well as the New Testament.
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What has happened is that those peace loving Moslems have been once again conquering territory and torturing and murdering and raping and pillaging all the Christians so the monks gathered up all their scrolls and got on their wagons and donkeys and whatever else and headed to Europe to get away from the encroaching barbarian Islamic hordes. All these manuscripts have suddenly been discovered and they're coming into Europe. What happened was in Southern Europe what fueled the Renaissance was they went back to original documents in terms of ancient classical Greek and Roman documents. In the northern areas, in Germany, Switzerland, and France, they didn't go back so far. They went back to the original documents of the Bible and camped out. That gave birth to the Reformation.
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Now there was a Roman Catholic scholar by the name of Erasmus of Rotterdam who was a scholar known as a humanist. Later he became a theological opponent of Martin Luther, who is the one who started the Protestant Reformation. Erasmus found eight ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and he put them together and published the first critical text of the New Testament where it had notes in the margin and had different readings between these different manuscripts. Now all eight of those manuscripts reflected what was known later as the Byzantine text. The Byzantine Empire, the northern empire, around Turkey, Greece and this area which is where scholarship dominated at that time. So that later became known as the Byzantine text.
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None of these documents were any older than the ninth century and they weren't based on the best of manuscripts. There were some real problems. In fact, there were a couple of places where verses were left out so Erasmus just made it up, especially a very famous one in John. Truly. No matter what view you take on textual criticism everybody just about agrees that he just made it up unless you're a King James only person. King James only people say that if it was good enough for the Apostle Paul it's good enough for us. We laugh. They really believe that. Their missionaries will go to places like Poland and Africa and India and tell them they have to learn King James English so that they can read the inspired text of the King James version. That's what they believe.
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Well, over the next couple of decades Erasmus found three or four more ancient manuscripts, added those to the original eight and that became known as the Received Text. It's part of what we now call the Byzantine Family but the Byzantine Family has much better and older manuscripts than what became the TR and they differ. It's also known as the Majority Text. Now if you want to dig into this, last year at the Chafer Conference 9 Ron Minton was here. He's a missionary in Ukraine like Jim Myers is. He's in the Karkov area. He is truly an expert on the history of the Bible and the Bible text and he gave basically a course on textual criticism. He gave a short version for the conference with about three lectures. All of these are on the Dean Bible website.
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That's sort of the background on this. It's where the Textus Receptus came from as many, many more manuscripts in that area of modern Turkey and Greece became discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries. That family of manuscripts became known as either the Byzantine group or the Majority Text. The Majority Text didn't agree with the TR all the time. There's over 1800 differences between the Majority Text and the TR. I tend to be a Majority Text advocate. I think that's superior. You actually have large Greek manuscripts. There are very few that have the entire New Testament but you have large Greek codexes or miniscules that read almost exclusively like the Majority Text. If you look at the Critical Text there's no Greek manuscripts that has the readings. If I picked up my Critical Greek Text there's not a single Greek manuscript that reads like that. And that's part of the difference between these.
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((CHART)) One of the places where this really does make a difference is here in where that last phrase is left out of the Critical Text but it is not only in the TR but in the Majority Text. I put a note down at the bottom that the Critical Text is based on this reading in Codex Sinaiticus which is mid-1400's. That's the Codex that Tischendof found at St. Catherine's of Mt. Sinai and Vaticanus. That's the manuscript that was found in the Vatican. The Majority Text reading which includes the phrase, “who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” is found in Codex Alexandricus, which is also found in that same area of Egypt. It's early 5th century. Only sixty or seventy years separates this manuscript from the top two. But the Codex Sinaiticus is found in four different readings where there are four different scribes who have corrected it. So the uncorrected version leaves it out. The scribe assigned the number two has it in it.
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Are you thoroughly confused at this point? So of all the ancient manuscripts you only have two primary ones who leave it out, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The corrected version of Vaticanus, corrected at that time by another scribe, includes the phrase plus its in the majority of documents and a number of others. Now there's a few other codexes from a little later on in history that leave it out but it's primarily based on the fact that it's not included in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. On the strength of its omission in those two codexes it's omitted from the Critical Text. That's the trump card that they go to.
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Remember what I said? That if any two of those four early Egyptian manuscripts agree on something that's golden for them, that's end of discussion. I've simplified it a lot but that's basically it. This is crucially important because almost everything in , aside from this textual difference, agrees consistently with Galatians, chapter 5 in this conflict between the believer either walking according to the flesh, living his life according to the flesh or sin nature, or living his life according to the Holy Spirit, that's it's one or the other. If you take this phrase out of this verse, it's not that it changes the whole meaning of the context of chapter 8 but it gets fuzzy for a lot of people. It's really clear if it's added in verse one and it's not just because the scribes saw it down in verse 4 and wrote it twice which is what the Critical Text guys will say in terms of explaining it.
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If it ends at “there is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus”, it looks as if Paul who has been talking about justification in Romans and that if you leave out the second half of verse one, that what Paul is talking about here in is that there's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. In other words, if you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you're in Christ and therefore, there's no condemnation. What kind of condemnation would that be? Temporal or eternal? Eternal, that's what it looks like. But that doesn't fly. Now why doesn't it fly?
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When I taught the short series several years ago I took the view that this was positional. I'm correcting myself through additional study. The context of , , and 8 is not talking about how to get justified anymore. It's not talking about how to be righteous anymore. It's talking about what happens when righteous people, those who are justified, are living according to the flesh. That's all of . Paul says, “Wretched man that I am” because he's a believer who's living according to the flesh and he just can't have any victory over the sin nature.
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But it's not just related to the word that's used here for condemnation. That's this word in the Greek katakrima [katakrima]. Katakrima is a noun that's only used three times in the New Testament. And guess where it's used all three times. In Romans. and 18 and . Now in and 18 [we'll go there in just a minute] but if you remember that's where we saw Paul start making his transition from talking about justification and how to be justified to the implications of how does a justified person live in relationship to the sin nature. He goes into the topic then of how the saved person or the justified person now lives. That's the topic of , , and 8.
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In , , and the beginning of 5, Paul has been talking about how to be justified. Starting in 5 and especially in 6, 7, 8 with 5 starting the transition, Paul begins to talk about how does a justified person live. So if condemnation here is talking about eternal condemnation, then Paul has reversed himself and he's gone back to talk about initial justification, rather than how a justified person lives. Now that could fit and there are definitely scholars who take that view and a number of folks who take that view but it's important to understand the difference in this word katakrima and why this particular word is used. In the Loux and Nida's Semantic Dictionary these scholars point out that the word katakrima means to judge someone as definitely guilty and therefore subject to punishment. See condemnation has the idea mostly of declaration of guilt. But the word katakrima goes beyond guilt to punishment, the results of guilt. And that's really important to understand here because when we use the phrase that they're condemned we're thinking that they're guilty and we're thinking eternal but if the word primarily means just the idea of punishment it could relate to a) eternal punishment b) temporal Divine discipline or it can wrap the whole ball of wax up in talking about the present consequences of living according to the sin nature which fits the context here. I'll show you this in a minute; I think it's very important to understand this.
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Bauer, Ardnt, and Gingrich which is the foremost Greek lexicon says that this word katakrima doesn't merely mean condemnation but it focuses on the punishment that follows the pronouncement of legal guilt. Condemnation in English and in focuses on guilt. That word normally translated condemnation is just krima in the Greek. Katakrima takes the preposition kata which we'll see a lot in this passage means 'according to a standard'. Katakrima when its added as a prefix to another word brings in this idea of according to something. Now, I don't want to be guilty of what's called a etymological fallacy here. I'm not saying that the meaning of this word is just determined by the compound of its parts but it helps us understand this. Katakrima would mean what? According to judgment. What's punishment. Punishment means according to the judgment. So that's really what the word katakrima means. It goes beyond the meaning of the word krima which indicates the pronouncement of guilt. It goes beyond it to focus on the punishment or the consequences that come to the one that is guilty.
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A number of years ago we had Ron Merryman who was speaking and he made some really good observations to these words and how they're used in Romans. ((CHART)) And so here's a chart based on what he put up on the screen at that particular time and I just want to show you how a little bit of observation here really helps expose some of the things that are going on in Paul's thinking.
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Ron is a great scholar. Now he's living in Tullahoma, Tennessee as a vital part of Clay Ward's church there. I just want to make a comment here. I'm really proud of Ron for what he did. Ron had been a president of Western Bible College. He'd been pastor of a church in Denver and then as he got older he retired. And I think how we retire as pastors and as folks in the church are really important. Now when you get to the point where you can retire, you ought to think of going into some kind of full time ministry. You're going to have a retirement income already. Go be a missionary. Do something. Don't just quit. Don't just give up and say “I'm going to stay home with grandchildren” and sit out on the rocker. No. Go be a missionary somewhere.
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That's what Ron did. Initially he and his wife retired to the Phoenix area and he was writing and doing other things but then he said, “I really don't have any kind of ministry in a local church here.” So he looked around. He didn't want to go into an urban environment so they had looked at some of the younger pastors coming up and said, “These guys need to be mentored by older, mature pastors.” So he picked Clay Ward in Tullahoma, Tennessee and he and his wife sold their house in Arizona and moved to Tullahoma so he could be an older mentor, a voice of stability, in a young church with a young pastor and that's just fabulous.
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It's passing on, it's mentoring, it's all these great, great things so that's what Ron's doing. He's doing a great job. What I would wish, but you have too many pastors who are happy to stay where they are geographically because that's where there grand kids are. I don't have kids or grandkids so I'm not going to go down a road of saying, “Okay, they're wrong.” But wouldn't it be great if we could get all these guys who are retired who have independent incomes to move to one location and they wouldn't be dependent on a seminary for income because they already have their retirement and they could be the faculty of a seminary? That's really a dream. That's idealism. Because a lot of pastors when they get into their 70's already have health problems; they're near family; they don't want to move across the country someplace but that would be an ideal situation is to have 4 or 5 pastors as they retire from their ministry or whatever they've been doing, then they could just devote the rest of their lives to mentoring young men, training them up to be pastors.
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Anyway this chart is Ron's observation. The way it works across in this chart is it's looking horizontally through sections in Romans, the introduction through 3:20, focusing on sin. The second column is the focus on justification by faith from 3:21 to 5:21. The third column is sanctification from 6:1 to 8:39. And you see that according to the numerical spread here that the top row deals with the two words krino, the verb and krima, the noun and katakrima and you have 10 uses of the word krima and 3 uses of the word katakrima in the first three chapters focusing on guilt and condemnation. That's really strong.
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And then you get into 3:21 to 5:21 and you have no uses of katakrima and I think you have a couple of uses of krima. So the focus on 6:1 through 8:39 isn't on condemnation at all. You see that in the second row, pistis [pistij] the word for faith is mentioned one time in 1:19 through 3:20. So that where Paul is making the point that all are sinners. Faith isn't the issue. But faith is then mentioned some 24 times between the verb and the noun in 3:21 to 5:21. How are you justified? By faith. That's where that word shows up all the time so then when you get into sanctification faith isn't mentioned quite so much. Life or zoe [zwh], zao [zaw]for the verb, zoe for the noun is only mentioned a total of 3 times in the first section, none in the justification by faith section so how many times do we say, “Do you want to have eternal life?” as a synonym for “Do you want to be saved?”
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Paul doesn't even use the word life in his explanation of justification, not once. Interesting. Where does he use it? The results of justification. I just think that's a great chart for showing where the emphasis is, the proportionality there in Romans. That when we get in we're talking about life, not about condemnation anymore in terms of the pronouncement of guilt but there's an important distinction there between krima and katakrima, which is the other noun for condemnation. Now the other things that comes into this and I know sometimes you think I'm probably getting lost in the weeds but these kind of details are really important. If katakrima isn't talking about condemnation like krima is and its talking about the results then that indicates that to be consistent with the use in and 18 that katakrima is emphasizing not eternal punishment but the consequences of sin.
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And what Paul has been doing in is that even though you're regenerate and you become a new creature in Christ you're still living like you're spiritually dead but for the person in verse 1 who's not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, in Christ and not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, that person has no condemnation, no punishment, no Divine discipline in time. Get eternal out of your mind on that word.
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When we read condemnation we think eternal punishment but when I pointed out when we went through and 18 katakrima just focuses on the consequences of the action, not the pronouncement of guilt. It can be eternal but it can also be temporal so the context of this word is focusing on the consequences of sin in the believer's life. Paul, when he says “Oh wretched man that I am” is because he's trying to live the Christian life on his own without the Holy Spirit and he's continually dominated by the tyranny of the sin nature and he's totally frustrated and incapable of living the Christian life.
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Then when he realizes the role of the Spirit, all of a sudden it's like the lights have come on. The Holy Spirit is mentioned one time in where it says “we're saved to walk in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter” and then in is just a side trail. picks up from where ended. That's the mention of the Spirit. The word Spirit is used 21 times in . Guess what the focal point is in . It's the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. A couple of times the word spirit is used there where it's not talking about the Holy Spirit but the rest of the time it is.
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So he's not talking in about justification; he's talking about now how can the justified believer live without temporal condemnation because he's under the control of the sin nature. Or temporal punishment. So a couple of passages just to sum up. In that we're very familiar with because I quote it all the time says “the one who believes in Him is not condemned.” That's krino, not katakrima but it's translated by the same English word. Don't get confused. That's a good translation for but condemned is not a good translation for katakrima which is not a good translation for and . “The one who believes in Him is not condemned but the one who believes not is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” That's focusing on that pronouncement of guilt.
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, though, goes on to say, “And the gift is not like that which comes through the one who sinned.” That's the imputation of sin from Adam in the context, “For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in...” Resulted in what? Punishment. It's the consequences. You can even tell from how its translated resulting in something . Katakrima indicates the results of the guilt, not the guilt itself. So, “resulted in punishment but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification.”
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then says, “Therefore as through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.” Now it may seem like it's splitting hairs but this really is a significant and deep, detailed analysis of this word. I wouldn't have caught this but George nailed this two years ago at that Sanctification Conference in his paper in . He even put a whole appendix in his paper on katakrima. He did a good job pointing out the significance of this and then as I went back and studied that even more I realized even more things. George didn't come up with this. Very few of us have original ideas. We're just putting things together from what other people have come up with in their in depth scholarship.
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What this emphasizes then is that in , not only are we no longer under a judicial penalty from the Supreme Court of Heaven in terms of not being justified, we'd been set free from the judicial penalty related to future punishment and present spiritual death. So we're spiritually alive. We're not under condemnation; there's a freedom which is what Paul talked about in Romans chapter 6:18 “And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” But what happens is that if we live like a slave to the sin nature we go back like we lived when we're spiritually dead. We're not but we live like we're spiritually dead and so we experience the punishment in terms of Divine discipline of living like you're spiritually dead.
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The arena of application in is not to unbelievers, how to get justified, but the arena of application is to those who are already in Christ. It's clear from that. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ [and is further defined] who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” So once again this just sets us up to understand that the spiritual life in the New Testament is not just a matter of morality, doing the right thing, which is the legalistic idea, going back to the Judaisms and those who thought that if they just did the Law they were okay. But there's a new dynamic and that's the Holy Spirit. The issue now isn't are you doing the right thing. It's are you doing the right thing by the right power, i.e., the Holy Spirit. It isn’t enough to do the right thing, to be moral, to be obedient, to witness, to read your Bible but are you doing it in the power of the flesh, the sin nature according to the flesh, or are you doing it according to the Holy Spirit?
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It's the Holy Spirit that's given to us now so that we can walk in the newness of the Spirit and not the oldness of the letter. God's gives us the ability to obey Him which the Law did not give. The Law only said, “This is a requirement.” Now we have the enablement of the Holy Spirit. That's why it's so tragic today that people don't really study the New Testament like this and they don't really get into emphasizing the significance of this great spiritual life. It is totally different in the Church Age. The pattern for understanding the spiritual life in the Church Age is Jesus Christ's life, not the Old Testament believer.
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And yet for much of Church Age Christianity the focus has been, “Let's go back and do it like the Jews did.” They developed a priesthood and sacrificial terminology. How many times have you heard people say, “Oh, I walked to the altar at the church.” and they're referring to the pulpit at the front of a church. Well, nothing ever got sacrificed down there. We didn't shed any blood down there. When I first got out into the broader stream of Christianity I heard, “Well, you need to walk to the altar and lay it all on the altar.” What altar? I haven't seen an altar but that's the terminology we use because in the Church Age they thought the pattern was the Old Testament. It's not. The pattern is Jesus Christ. He's the one we follow and He lived His life in the power of God the Holy Spirit. So Paul sets this up and what I've said today dealing with all these little details is simply to show why this is so important. Take the whole verse, don't chop it up like some translations do, because that sets the framework for understanding this chapter. The issue now is are you walking according to the flesh or according to the Spirit?

Romans 083b-The Key to the Spiritual Life: The Holy Spirit

Romans 8:1 NASB95
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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Romans 083b-The Key to the Spiritual Life: The Holy Spirit
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We are in and since it's been a while since I was here I'm going to do a little bit of review. Now , , and 8 is the best and most detailed or logically developed explanation of the spiritual life within the epistles written by Paul. The first epistle that Paul wrote was the epistle to the Galatians. Galatians contains in sort of a seed or seminal form a lot of the basic teaching that we find here in , , and 8 although by the time Paul wrote Romans he has developed his thinking much more and he's writing a different kind of letter to the Christians in Rome. He's laying out in an extremely logical manner the foundation for Christianity.
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First he deals with the problem of sin in the first couple of chapters. And then the problem that if man is unrighteousness then how does man get righteousness. Man gets righteousness by having it given to him by God, justification by faith alone is the doctrine. Righteousness is imputed or reckoned or given to the person who believes the promise of God, specifically in this age, the promise that Jesus Christ is the Savior, the Messiah, the One who died on the cross for our sins. So as we walk our way through Romans we see there's a tight, logical progression. Sin, then justification, , then .
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begins to work out the benefits of our justification because we have been justified by faith, Paul begins in . We have, as a present possession, peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. As we get into and following, Paul is setting up the transition from talking about how to be justified to the topic of , , and 8 which is how does the justified person live.
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So the issue in , , and 8 isn't how to move from spiritual death to spiritual life. The issue isn't how to become justified. The issue is how does a justified person live. So when we get into passages in , and 8 that talk about death we have to remember that isn't talking about the spiritual death of the unsaved person. That would mean the solution is justification, regeneration, but the true issue is the death-like experience of the believer who continues to swim in the stream of carnality. As long as we are living according to the flesh, which is the term Paul will use, then we experience the same consequences of sin that the unbeliever experiences who is spiritually dead.
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The believer does not become spiritually dead once he is made alive in Christ but he does experience a death-like existence because he's not benefiting from the life-giving blessings and benefits that God has already given to us as believers. As we have studied in , , and 8 connected to what we've been studying in Colossians Paul approaches the Christian life the same way by going first and foremost to what happens in the legal realm before the throne of God at the instant the person believes in Jesus. There is a transformation that occurs at that point in time, a transformation that not only involves a declaration of justification and not only involves regeneration but also involves not only that doctrine that is misunderstood today also, called the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
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We studied that that should be more accurately interpreted or translated as the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. It's an identification that occurs at the instant that we trust in Christ, at that instant when you say 'I believe that Jesus died for me, will save me, that Jesus is the One who paid my penalty”. As soon as we trust in Him, at that instant, God the Holy Spirit, is used by Jesus to transform us and to identify us with His death, burial, and resurrection. It is through that identification with His death, burial, resurrection that we enter into Christ.
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This is a doctrine or theology often referred to as positional truth because it refers to the truth of our new position in Christ. Paul goes back to this in and 3. Everything he says about the Christian life is based upon our understanding of this radical thing that happens. We don't experience it. The only way you can learn about the baptism by the Holy Spirit is by reading about it in the Scripture and coming to understand it in these passages. It's not something that knocks you off your feet when you trust in Christ. It's not some inner feelings. You don't get butterflies in your stomach or the rosy glow. You don't have any kind of external manifestation. There's no experience that goes with it.
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You might have the flu as a friend of mine who had mono. The only thing he could get his mind around when he was down flat on his back was a book called The Late, Great Planet Earth. He was reading through that and finally decided after years of being witnessed to by his uncle, a guy named Bill Munderlin, that some of you knew. Finally at the age of 32 he trusted in Christ and he said he just rolled over and went back to sleep. But at that instant he was baptized by the Holy Spirit and placed into Christ.
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That's what Paul says in Romans 6. I'm just going to read this again for review. He says in 6:3, “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus [entered into his death, burial, and resurrection] were baptized into his death?” When we have water baptism it depicts this abstract doctrine. That's one of the things that is a real tragedy in the history of Christianity. People haven't really understood baptism. Baptism is just like the Lord's Table; it is a visual symbol to help us grasp an abstract reality. And so in the ritual of water baptism, someone is taken and they are plunged into the water and that is a picture of our identification of Christ in His death.
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At Christ's death what did he do? He paid the penalty for sin so sin is dealt with at that point so our identification with Christ in his death has to do with the application of that payment of the sin penalty to us. Being under the water is analogous to Jesus being in the grave for three days and then when we come out of the water that is a picture of Christ's resurrection to new life and that we now have a new life because of our identification with Him in His death, burial, and resurrection. So Paul says, “Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus [that's everyone who believes that Jesus died on the cross for their sins] were baptized or identified into His death. Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”
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It's in that verse that Paul says that it's in that verse that we learn how to walk in newness of life. It's not a methodology. You're not going to get it because you come to church and you hear five points on how to be a victorious Christian or ten points on how to live the Christian life, how to walk the Christian walk. Paul says that the way you're going to live as a Christian is that you have to get it inside your head the fact that you're not the person you were before you were saved. You're a new creature in Christ. You have a new identity in Christ. There are new realities about you and you have to learn these from the Word. You're not going to get them from experience. It's not going to be based on how you feel about your relationship with God. It's not going to be based on how you feel about sin. It's not going to be based on any kind of experience. It's going to be based on the fact that you understand in your head that something has changed. And then because you understand that new reality you're going to live differently. Now there are people who just have a hard time doing that.
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Let me use the illustration of immigration. Back in the 19th century, if somebody immigrated to the United States, and they came from Eastern Europe or Southern Europe or they came from Western Europe or even if they came from Africa or Asia, when they came to the United States they wanted to be an American. They left behind most of their cultural identity. For a while they may live with others who came from their background because that was someone similar but as they came to understand America and English they came here to be an American. Many families that came here never had their children learn the language of their homeland. It was never taught to them because those parents understood that they had a new identity. They weren't Germans any more. They weren't Swedes. They weren't French. They weren't Russians anymore. They were now Americans. They weren't Greeks; they weren't Italians. They were Americans. And so they had a new identity and they had to learn to live in light of that new identity as defined by this new culture.
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In the Christian life, it's that same way. We get a new identity and we have to quit using the language we used in the old country when we were spiritually dead and we were carnal. We need to quit thinking according to the cultural norms and standards. In the old country they were under the tyranny of a king or a dictator or an absolute ruler, just as before we were saved, we were under the tyranny of the sin nature. They have to learn to think in terms of everything they are now in this new country. Then they have to live in light of that.
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But what we have today is we have people who come over from many countries but especially from Moslem countries, from Saudi Arabia or Somalia or other Arab countries. They come here and they go into apartment complexes or other areas, like a ghetto, where they're separated from America. You get people who come up from Mexico and they live in a community where everyone speaks Spanish. There may be one, two or three generations that never learn English. They don't learn to function as an American. They don't want to take on the new culture of being an American and leaving behind the culture of what they were.
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That's like most Christians. They want to continue all of the ways they had before they were saved. They just want to make sure they're going to go to Heaven. But what Paul says is that you have a new identity and once you capture that new identity you're going to have freedom and learn to enjoy freedom. Just like historically people would come to America because they wanted to be free, not to do whatever they wanted to do but they wanted to be free from the intrusions of large government, big government getting into everything in their life.
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I'm going to give a commercial now so if you don't want a commercial from the pulpit take a vacation mentally. Some of you know that last June I wanted to take some kind of gift with me for the people speaking to us in Israel, something from Texas. We waited until the last minute because there was so much going on and we finally decided it would be great to give them a little tin of various kinds of nuts with an outline of the state of Texas. It was too late to order them from a place in Austin where we'd get things like this before so I looked around in Houston. I found a place called the Houston Pecan Company and it's just a little warehouse kind of place over in the Gulfton ghetto area in Bellaire. We went in and I immediately recognized that the lady who seemed to be running everything was Jewish. I told her what I wanted it for, that we were going to go to Israel. That immediately established a connection.
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Myers was with me and he was looking at something on the wall. It was an article from the Houston Post back in the late 80's or early 90's. It was the story of a man who had been a Holocaust survivor because of Oscar Schindler. That was the father of the lady helping me. He was the little guy who kept coming in and out in his walker. We had a great visit with him. Well, today I went back over to visit with them and to get some nuts for gifts for Christmas. There was another guy there who is an Israeli artist. I met him and got to visit with him. He was at this Israel event I spoke at about a week ago. He said, “I knew you looked familiar but I just didn't recognize you in a sweatshirt and blue jeans.” When I pulled out he had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said in large letters, “The bigger the government...” Then I had to get very close because the rest was in very small letters and said, “...the smaller the citizen.” I thought that was a great way to put it. We've got a lot of very conservative Jews in America who, as one Jewish writer puts it, “Israelis are Republicans and American Jews are liberals.” So that sort of shows the difference between the two.
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Anyway, when you have big government like people had in the old country before they came to America, it was the tyranny they left. The bigger the government, the less freedom we have. The smaller the government, the more freedom and the larger the citizen is. So when people came to America they had freedom and that fits the analogy that I'm using because when we're free from the sin nature, when we trust in Christ , that's the freedom Paul is talking about in . It's what Paul is referring to in Galatians, chapter 5, verse 1, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.”
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Freedom isn't the ability to do whatever you want to. Freedom is the freedom from the tyranny of the sin nature so we can do what God wants us to do. We're always under some sort of authority. It's either going to be our placing ourselves under the authority of the sin nature and Satan or placing ourselves under the authority of God but there's no neutral ground where we're just under our own authority. We deceive ourselves in arrogance into thinking well we're just going to live our lives my way. No, when you say I'm living life my way what you're really saying is I'm doing it Satan's way. People just ignore that particular aspect to it.
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Romans6 lays this down and says the purpose for that identification of Christ in the baptism by the Holy Spirit is for the purpose that we walk in newness of life. Now let me connect the next dot for this. I want you to turn over to which addresses the second issue here which is that not only are we delivered from the tyranny of the sin nature but, as we've seen, we're delivered from the tyranny of the Law. Paul says, “But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died [see, there's this same use of this concept of death, that identification with Christ in His death means we're dead to the sin nature, dead to the Law] to what we were held by so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the Letter.”
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So in we're to walk in the newness of life, now we're to serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the Letter. So the newness of the Spirit is the life we're supposed to have. But as I pointed out last time in where Paul is addressing the Law's relationship to sin and death he points out that the Law reveals this sinfulness of the sin nature. The more God says, “Thou shalt not” the more we want to. The more the Law says, “Thou shalt do this” then we're not so concerned about that. We want to do what we're not supposed to do. So the Law brings this out from inside the person.
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The Law reveals the sin nature and the sin nature is the cause of spiritual death and it is the cause of a sort of experiential carnal death, I would add for the believer. And so Paul raises and answers these questions in , “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary...” The Law brings sin out and exposes sin in your life and Paul, as a Pharisee thought that he was able to do everything in the Law and he would impress everybody and God but what actually was happening was that he ultimately discovered that on all the externals he could deceive himself into thinking that he was accomplishing it but when he got to the last commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” he couldn't deal with the fact that he couldn't overcome mental attitude sins.
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His answer is that the Law is holy and reveals sin in verses 7-12 and then in verses 13-25 he points out that the Law tells us what to do but doesn't impart the ability to perform. We know what the requirement is but there's the frustration of not being able to meet the requirement. So we do what we don't wish to do and we do not do what we want to do, which is, as a believer, to obey Him. And then we have the solution which is the Holy Spirit and at the end of chapter 7 he utters this statement, “O wretched man that I am.” Why is he so frustrated? Because he can't figure out how to meet the requirements of the Law, how to live a holy life, that is how to live a life that is set apart to the service of God and all he ends up with is fulfilling the lust of the flesh which brings just failure and temporal or carnal death or operational death into his life. He has a death-like experience. He's not experiencing the joy, the happiness, the fulfillment, the happiness, the meaning that should be his in Christ.
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Then you see the shift in his thinking from the negativity, derision, and defeatism of verse 24 to gratitude. Gratitude and becoming praise oriented is the first step in any level of spiritual growth. Thanking God is the starting point of any kind of grace orientation. Recognizing that God did everything and that we simply have to respond to it. So in verse 25, Paul says, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the Law of God but with the flesh the law of sin.” Here he's talking about serving the Law which is fulfilling the mandates of the Law but it's because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
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Then I spent some time on . This is a very well-known textual problem which means there are some manuscripts which include the last phrase and there's some ancient manuscripts which don't so the question is whether this is really a part of the Word of God or not. If you have a King James or New King James version then that is included in your translation. If you have a NASV, NASV95, NEV, NIV, ESV or any of the others its not there and it involves two different ways of handling textual problems. I believe the Majority Text which is similar to the text of the KJ or NKJ is the more accurate, more critical version. We went over this in detail last time.
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The Critical Text which is what is behind a lot of the modern versions is only based on two primary ancient manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus from the 4th century. The Majority Text, that is the majority of translations that we have plus Alexandrius which is also an early North African text from the early 5th century and is very similar to Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and the corrected version of Sinaiticus include it. I think it should be included on the basis of just the external evidence here but also because of the context.
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People will say, “Well the scribe just copied it in the wrong place. It's located down in verse 4.” There's no reason that God the Holy Spirit wouldn't repeat Himself. He does that several times in the Scripture just to get our attention. But here it's defining what 's going on in . “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...” If the verse stops there as it does for many people who want to limit this to talking about no condemnation because we're justified, we're in Christ Jesus. But all throughout this section, those who Paul is talking about are not under condemnation. We'll look at that word in a minute. The word is further defined as those who “do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
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((CHART)) So the relative clause as I point out in the bottom paragraph of this slide, defines further those Paul is talking about in the phrase “those who are in Christ.” They are the ones who do not have the condemnation and the ones who are also walking according to the Holy Spirit. It hinges on the meaning of the Greek word for condemnation. I pointed out it is only used 3 times in the New Testament. It's the word katakrima and all three uses are in Romans. Two of them are in Romans, chapter 5 and that tells us that it's in the post-justification section of Romans. It's not in the section where he's talking about the sinners back in and 2. It's not in the section where he's talking about justification and being justified from condemnation. It's in the section where he's talking about how justified people live. And justified people are able to live for the Lord only when they walk by the Spirit and they're free from condemnation which relates to punishment. That's how the word should be translated as punishment and it's not punishment in terms of eternal punishment but temporal punishment or consequences for sin in a person's life. Greek dictionaries talks about its meaning to judge someone as definitely guilty and thus, subject to punishment. So the idea is guilt and punishment. The Arndt and Gingrich dictionary says its not merely condemnation but the punishment following a pronouncement of legal guilt. So the focal point of this word is on punishment so it's really functioning on the Divine discipline that comes in the life of a believer who continues to walk according to the flesh. The emphasis is not on eternal punishment but on the consequences of sin in the life of a believer and so the issue here is on the believer's spiritual growth.
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In terms of summary, I said that what Paul has been saying is that we're no longer under the judicial penalty from the Supreme Court of Heaven which is back in the early part of Romans, that as a believer in Christ we've been set free from the judicial penalty related to future punishment and from present spiritual death but if we're not walking by the Spirit we still act like we're dead spiritually so there are consequences to that which is present time punishment.
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The arena of application here is related to those who are already in Christ, that means they're already justified. It's not to those who are unsaved but to those who are saved. The key word in this passage that we run into is the word flesh. It's going to come up so this is just a little review of the sin nature and the diagram I'm using here because this term flesh comes up and is juxtaposed to Spirit many times in Romans, chapter 8. It's introduced here in the first verse, “..those who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Paul recognizes something here, something that a lot of modern Christians don't want to admit. That is, that it's either one or the other.
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How many times in life have you heard someone say, “You know, I don't like so and so because for them everything is either black or white, it's either yes or no and there just so many shades in between.” Well, that's why they don't like God. God sees in terms of His way or the highway. It's God's way or man's way. It's either walking by the Spirit or walking by the flesh. You can't have your right leg walking by the Spirit and your left leg walking by the flesh. Notice I put the right leg walking by the Spirit and the left one by the flesh. I just didn't want you miss that was intentional.
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The sin nature is called the flesh. The term 'the flesh' in Scripture refers to the physical flesh, the physical bodies of animals or the flesh of man. But then it is taken metaphorically to refer to the moral condemnation of man with the sin nature itself, that which is tied to man's temporal situation and his temporal failure. And so the term, 'the flesh' isn't just talking about just something physical but is used to refer to that which energizes and animates the fallen condition of man which is the sin nature. I think it's interesting how the Bible uses this as a phrase. Very few people really try to probe into the metaphor here and why Paul uses this metaphor. I think it's because the very DNA structure of our physical bodies carries the corruption of the sin nature and it gets transmitted from one generation to another.
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((CHART)) So we have this sin nature represented by this black diamond and at the very center of the sin nature is something that drives it. Everything comes back to this. If you can get a grip on the dynamics on the sin nature then you have a great tool to use in understanding what is going on in the world, why it happens, why people do the things they do. It will help you from being overly disappointed in people who fail. It will keep you from being overly disappointed in yourself when you fail. It will help you to understand there are basically two ways of looking at life. There's the way of looking at life from the standpoint that man is inherently corrupt because of Adam's sin and those who look at mankind as being basically good, just flawed. He doesn't have basic faults, he just has a few problems. He's not dead; he's just a little bit sick at times so that's the difference.
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Thomas Sowell in his book The Conflict of Visions has an excellent historical analysis of this, showing how this impacts how people looked at society and how people look at government and how people look at the role of people and the role of those in government. He shows historically that the people who tend to think that man is perfectible and that society is perfectible are those that think that man is basically good. Those who think that man is not perfectible but that man is inherently corrupt and therefore our government needs to have checks and balances on itself because it's comprised of human beings, checks and balances on the citizenry, that they understand that man is basically evil. We use different terminology for these two groups. The group that thinks man is basically good are the people called liberals. People who think that man is basically evil are called conservatives and that's been the historical designation and historical truth. Sowell does an excellent job of developing that. Only someone who is a believer in Jesus Christ who understands the Word of God and the nature of sin can understand that.
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Many of the Founding Fathers understood this concept whether they were actually born again or whether they were of a sort of Unitarian theology as some were among the founding fathers or whether they were a more dedicated orthodox believer. They were products of a culture that had a strong Christian theistic orientation and they understood that man was basically evil. Therefore you can't give very much power to any human being because if he's evil, he's going to take advantage of that power and enlarge his own power. So they created a government in the Constitution with checks and balances to try to keep government small and they created a government where it was designed so that there would be opposing forces so it would keep the government from doing very much. Because in their view of government, a government that did very much and was efficient in accomplishing its ends would eventually take freedom away from the people. Because they understood that man was basically a sinner, they understood that sin had to be controlled by law and by society and by punishment.
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We live in a world today where the idea of sin has been forgotten and disposed of. Sin is antiquated. I read a book by Robert Schuller about forty years ago. Robert Schuller was the one who had the drive-through church originally out in Southern California and then he had the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County. One time you [George Meisenger] and I went out there just to see the sights at the Crystal Cathedral. Schuller came out with a book which he sent around a free copy to pastors all over the country and it was called Self Esteem: The New Reformation. It was a fitting book for its age because in its introduction he said that back in the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, early 1500s, there was a belief that man was basically a sinner. Now that was all right for that time. They interpreted the gospel as Christ dying for sins. That was all right for that time but now we're more advanced and we understand from psychological research that man's basic problem is that of self esteem. Man doesn't think very highly of himself and we need a gospel that Jesus died so you can have a good self esteem and sin is just an antiquated concept. It just doesn't work anymore. So that was his gospel.
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The Bible teaches that we're all sinners and until the moment you're saved (this is what Paul goes into in ) everything you do, whether its something good or something bad, everything comes from the sin nature. It either comes from an area of weakness or an area of strength. The area of weakness produces sin. The area of strength produces what we call human good. But it's all motivated by this core thing that I've always called the lust pattern. Today psychology is trying to redefine this. We don't like sin any more so it's not that people are sinners, they just have disorders. It's also known as syndromes. People like those words because it softens it. You've got a syndrome. It's not your fault. It's not because you're making bad choices because you're choosing to follow the dictates of your sin nature. You just have a syndrome. It's not really your fault. You're okay and I'm okay. Wayne Dyer came out with that psychological framework back in the seventies. The Bible says, “You're not okay and I'm not okay” and God is going to judge us by eternity in hell unless we do what He says. So we have these syndromes or addictions. We have chemical addictions, sex addictions, and food addictions and addictions to laziness and Facebook and Twitter and the Internet and your cell phone. We have addictions to everything.
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We used to call them bad habits. The trouble with bad habits is that it's your fault because it's your volition. You choose to do this. If it's an addiction, it's not my fault. It's something within me. I'm just a victim. And so it produces a victim mentality. But the Bible doesn't say you're victims of anything except your own volition. The only solution is to submit to God but we like to think we have addictions or emotional illnesses. You just have an emotional problem so now everybody is addicted to pills to take care of their emotional problems. The Bible says you've misidentified the problem so you've misidentified the solution. The problem isn't a syndrome or disorder; it's not an addiction. The problem is you're a sinner, you're corrupt. And the only solution is first and foremost to recognize that Jesus died for your sins and you've become free from the tyranny of the sin nature and then to learn the Word of God and learn Bible doctrine and apply it and implement it in your life day to day and all these things will be taken care of and eventually they will be flushed out of your life but only because you've replaced the garbage in your soul with the truth of the Word of God. As long as you're majoring in the garbage in your soul all that's going to come out is garbage. Garbage in – garbage out.
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The lust patterns produce both relative good and relative sin. I always love the line when Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says, “How then you, being evil give good gifts to your children?' It's a great line. Jesus is talking to his disciples. Now I try to get away with it here but in most churches if a pastor walked in to his Board of Deacons and said, “You guys are all evil but you're giving good gifts to your children”, he might have a problem. But Jesus told his disciples that their basic problem is sin. We're all evil.
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One of the things that makes a person a hero isn't because they have sterling character and it isn't because they're always making the right decisions. If we look at at all those great men of faith that are highlighted there, there are a couple of things we ought to remember. Number one, none of them were free from the tyranny of the sin nature because that didn't happen until the Day of Pentecost. They're not like us. They're still slaves to the sin nature even though they were believers. Number two, they all failed miserably most of the time. Not unlike us. But what made them heroes of the faith was that at critical times they rose above their sin nature, they rose above their carnality and they chose to follow God and to trust God at a critical time. That's what makes a person a hero.
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As a conservative I can look at the Founding Fathers and say they all had feet of clay because we all do; we're all sinners. And what I want to focus on is what made them great. What were the elements that caused them to rise above the flaws of their sin natures and the corruption of their humanity because that's what made them great. We're all subject to the same failures and flaws that they had. The liberal thinks that because they're a hero they were always good. But let me show you about this affair and that affair and this problem and that problem. See, liberals want to tear them down because these people had a lot of failure.
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The issue in life isn't failure. We're all failures most of the time when it comes to God's standards. What makes heroes is those who rise above their failures, rise above their sin nature, and trust God at critical times throughout their life. That's what makes heroes, heroes. Not that they do what comes naturally but on occasion, they did what did not come naturally. That was what was unique. So even as sinners we do relative good but we're still flawed sinners. We produce what we call human good. There are many wonderful moral people out there, who give to many good causes, who help people who are wonderful, kind, and generous and give of their money and give of their time and give of their talents but it's all done from the sin nature. It has no eternal value.
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((CHART))But then on the other side, at the bottom of the triangle we have our personal sins, our areas of weakness when we commit sin, overt sins such as outbursts of anger, or murder or thievery or we have sins of the tongue: gossip, slander, all the gossip when you pass on undocumented e-mails which tell something negative about someone else and you don't know whether it's true or not but you would like to believe that it's true about that person because they're just such a horrible politician. That's gossip, that's slander, that's not Biblical. So we have a new area of sin called computer slander and computer gossip.
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The lust patterns can manifest themselves in a couple of different directions that are sort of opposite to one another. These are trends and I've called it desire trend because it's lust expressed through a desire in one direction or another. Lust drives it either toward aestheticism which is the idea that somehow if I just live according to a rigorous moral code I'm going to impress the God or gods or fate or the universe and things will go well with me. And so there's a trend toward aestheticism which is the idea that if I just give up things that's going to impress God. If I dedicate my life to my religious system that's going to impress God. Legalism is the idea that what I do is the basis for blessing from God and that leads to a moral degeneracy like the Pharisees. That's what they thought. They were very moral but they rejected God's offer of righteousness for their own righteousness. So they were moral degenerates.
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And then on the other side we have the opposite. Those who are licentious, lascivious. They follow all their lust patterns. You know Jesus preferred to hang out with this crowd because the other crowd doesn't think they need his help. So he hung out with the publicans and the prostitutes and the sinners and got judged by the Pharisees, those on the other side for that. But people who are licentious and lascivious, they know that they need grace. There's no pretension there. They know they're desperately in need of grace. But if you live in the sin nature that leads to an immoral degeneracy Immoral degeneracy is no better, no worse than moral degeneracy. They're both degenerate. That's the problem.
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Now as we look at what Paul is saying here in , he's talked about the eternal realities, that at the instant we trust Christ as Savior we are identified with Christ, we're placed in Christ by the baptism by the Holy Spirit. That's our new identification. So we're in Christ. We are His. But in terms of our day-to-day temporal reality, moment-by-moment in time we can either be operating on the Word of God, being filled by the Holy Spirit, and walking in the light or we can walk in the darkness according to the sin nature. When we do that, we're walking in darkness and we're experiencing the same results as the unbeliever.
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We have a life of death and corruption, of unhappiness and misery because we're operating on arrogance and the only way to recover is through . So as I pointed out last time as we get into that first verse in “There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus..” [in Christ Jesus; there's no condemnation, no punishment] “...for those who are not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” And then he's going to explain this in the next verse why we can say there's no condemnation, no punishment.
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He says, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” So you have a contrast here between two laws: the law of the Spirit of life and the law of sin and death. Now in that first phrase it talks about the law of the Spirit of life. It shows the source of that law. We're still under a law. It's not the Mosaic Law but it's absolute realities. It's absolute standards and it comes from the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. He's the Spirit who produces life. That second genitive there, “of life” should be understood as a genitive of product. It's the law from the Spirit Who produces life in us. That life comes from the Spirit and it is in Christ Jesus. It has set us free from the law of sin and of death. So, again, we have these contrasts. It's either one or the other.
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Now when we look at what Paul is going to say in Romans 8, I want you to observe about 4 things here. ((CHART)). First of all that the word translated Spirit with an upper case as pneuma is used thirteen times in through 8. Now the word is used a couple of other times meaning other things but in terms of meaning the Holy Spirit it's only thirteen of those times and twelve of those are in Romans, chapter 8. There was one in that we were set free form the Law that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and everything from to 25 was a digression. he comes back to what he means to serve in the newness of the Spirit. Isn't that interesting? The Holy Spirit is not mentioned at all in and only once in but it's twelve times in .
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The second thing we should observe is that spirit is contrasted with sin once in , “where the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the Law of sin and death.” See the contrast between the law of the Spirit and the law of sin and of death. The rest of the time it's contrasted with flesh. , , and . My point is that sin and flesh are synonymous. Paul prefers to use most of the time the word 'flesh' to describe the sin nature because it permeates our entire life, our entire body, our entire person so he contrasts either one or the other. It's that black and white thing again. You're either walking by the Spirit or by the flesh. You can't do a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. There are no mixed motives. It's either one or the other.
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Spirit in this passage is connected to life and contrasted to death. This is one of the major concerns of Scripture, going all the way back to Moses in the Torah. He says, “I set before you this day, life or death.” Are you going to follow the Torah and experience the benefits of life or are you going to disobey God and experience death? There are consequences to our decisions. If you make the right decisions based on God's revelation, they you'll experience the fullness of blessing from God and if you don't then you're going to experience the ongoing punishment and condemnation in life from God. So in this whole chapter we see a stark, rigid contrast between flesh and Spirit, between life and death. It's one or the other.
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We see this in various passages such as in where Paul says, “Therefore brethren, we are debtors or under obligation...” Now that's an interesting word because there are lots of Christians who think that if we're obligated to do anything after we're saved then we're legalists. Grace says I can do whatever I want to do but the Bible says, no, we're under obligation. There are responsibilities that come with our privileges in the Royal Family of God. We're a new creature in Christ and there's a purpose for our life. We are not to waste it. We are to live our life for the Lord. “...we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.” You're not obligated to your sin nature at all. But for 8, 10, 30 years you lived like the sin nature was the boss so it's real hard to say no. That's because you've got a really bad habit and so do I. Not doing what the sin nature says every time can;t be done without grace and God the Holy Spirit.
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So “..we're under obligation, not to the flesh [sin nature] to live according to the flesh [sin nature]. For if you are living according to the flesh you must die...” Now, wait a minute. We're not going to lose our salvation. That's not what it's talking about. It's not saying you're going to have spiritual death. Remember there are 7 different kinds of death in the Bible. There's physical death, spiritual death [everyone is born spiritually dead, ], sexual death [Abraham was spiritually dead and he was past the age when he could father children.]. There's positional death which occurs when we're identified with Christ in His death. That's our positional death. There is carnal death when we are living according to the sin nature. There's temporal death when we're experiencing the consequences of that in our life. Then there's the second death which occurs for those who rejected Christ and they go to eternity in the Lake of Fire.
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So when he says you must die he's not talking about physical death, he's not talking about future eternal punishment, he's talking about experiencing the death-like consequences of living according to the sin nature. But in contrast, “..if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body..” Notice he's switched from talking about the flesh to the body. Paul constantly using terms relating the sin nature to our physical bodies because it's through our physical bodies that the sin nature expresses itself in what we say and what we do, where we go, and those kinds of things. So we have to remember that this passage is addressed to the brethren; it's not addressed to unbelievers. He's warning believers so that we can have life rather than a death-like existence.
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Second, believers have been given eternal life but they can still experience carnal death so then in and 21, Paul laid this down. That either we live our lives as slaves, we're all slaves, but we're either slaves to sin resulting in death. But he's talking to believers; he's not talking about dying spiritually. We're talking about experiencing the death-like results of living on the basis of sin so we're either live as slaves to the sin nature, which is self-destructive, or we live as obedient slaves to God and that results in righteousness in life. Righteousness and life are seen as two sides of the same coin. In he says, “What fruit [benefit] were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed for the end [outcome] of those things is death?” So that's what he's talking about.
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gives us a dynamic on how the sin nature operates. He says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”. See we think of temptation only when we've yielded to it. I'm not tempted unless I yield to it. No, that's not the Biblical view. If you go on a diet and you wake up in the morning and you have a satisfying breakfast and thirty or forty minutes later someone offers you a donut, you say, “No, I’m satisfied, I’m not very hungry.” But if you get up in the morning and you're running late and you don't get to have your breakfast and someone offers you a donut and you bite their hand off getting it. You were tempted by someone else both times. Just because you didn't yield to it or feel attracted to it doesn't mean you weren't tempted. That's the external or objective sense of temptation.
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Anybody who has ever been hunting knows a wild animal is going to be tempted by the bait in the trap. He'll come up and sniff around and walk around and look at it, back away and look at it. Then finally they decide they're not going to go for it. See, they've been tempted by the bait in your trap but they didn't yield to the temptation. We often think of temptation only in the sense of yielding to it but the Bible talks about it in both senses. So each person is tempted externally. Here he talks about moving from that external temptation which is the word used in but it becomes subjective and enticed by your own lusts. This is when all of a sudden you decide you're going to yield to that external test and now you want it and you're going to go for it and grab it.
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“When the lusts [external desire] has conceived it gives birth to sin...” What happens then? When sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. This is for believers. This is what happens in our life. We can have a life characterized by the blessing of God or we can have a life characterized by sin and corruption. This is the contrast. It's our decision. Are we going to pursue life or death? So in conclusion, let me just give these two definitions. Life is to be understood as capacity to life and experiencing the joy, peace, contentment, and happiness in any and all circumstances based on the fact that God the Holy Spirit is filling us with His Word. There's a fullness in His Word and we're walking by the Spirit and advancing to spiritual maturity. But death, in contrast, is the loss of blessing in time due to the failure of executing the plan of God for our life. It is based on attempts to live life on the basis of our own desires, our own terms, really rejecting Scripture as the authority for life. The reality is in we've been set free from sin but we've become slaves of righteousness. We're always slaves of either sin or righteousness. We’ve been set free from sin and enslaved to God and the result of this is eternal life. Not life everlasting which refers to the qualitative aspect of life as much as the eternal ongoing aspect of life. This is the freedom we have in Christ. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” This brings us to and we'll start there next time.

is where we are going to spend most of our time

Romans 8:1 NASB95
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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is where we are going to spend most of our time.  Before we get there I want to remind you of the context.  We don’t want to lose sight of where we are and what we are doing.  We are studying the book of Hebrews.  In the course of our study of Hebrews we are doing some application that comes out of the verses that we are currently studying.
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‎NKJ For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.
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‎“He” is a believer who ought to be older, but he is acting young.  The word here for babe is the Greek word nepios which indicates somebody who should be acting more mature but is acting like a baby.  You might have used this term for a sibling who was perhaps a teenager and is acting like a 4 year old.  That’s the idea.  It is not a positive term in the sense that he is a brephos or a spiritual infant but it is a term of insult.
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‎NKJ But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
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‎This is a poor translation.  I have said it should be translated “those who by consistent practice or consistent use of their senses.”  This is the Greek word gumnazo meaning to be disciplined.  It has the idea those who by consistent discipline in the application of the Word of God and consistent discipline in study and application and utilization of the Word of God are trained so that they can discern good and evil. Discern has to do with the ability to distinguish or evaluate.  It is the development of spiritual critical thinking skills so that as we can think (and be exposed to whatever) about it in terms of doctrine.  That is a level of application that goes beyond what most people think of as application.
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‎I get pretty frustrated sometimes when people say, “I wish it was more applicational.”
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‎In other words give me or give me 5 points on how to be happy in marriage or give me 10 points on how to manage my money.  They want stuff that is really “practical” as if being ale to discern good and evil and truth and error isn’t fundamentally more important.  You end up seeing the  same people who sat in a church in a pew where the Word of God has been taught for 10 years and then they make stupid decisions because they never really understood what discernment was all about which is an outgrowth of application.  We are using that as a way into a subject we have been looking at for awhile on divine guidance and the leading of the Spirit.  There is a lot said by different Christians about what these things are.   What could be more fundamental than making decisions and how to discern what pleases God in the decision making process?  One of the things that people talk about is the leading of the Spirit.
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‎I put a quote up last week and the week before on divine guidance and the leading of the Spirit from Dr. Ryrie’s book “Basic Theology” and used that as a way to critique what he is saying.  Is this really what the Bible means?  Let’s look at the context.  Don’t just buy into something because somebody has a good name or reputation or because you have been told that they are a great teacher and theologian or just because they tack on a bunch of Bible verses. Look those verses up and see if they say what they are purported to say.  That is one reason why I have always made it a point to put these verses up on the overhead for you.  I don’t want to give you ten points on something and then give you the references.  I want you to look at the references.
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‎How many times have you heard that in your life and you have gone home and looked at the verses and said,     “Wait a minute.  I am not sure how this verse connects to this point.”
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‎So that is why I do that – so you can see what the connections are in the Scripture and train you better in the Scripture.  We are looking at the topic of the leading of the Spirit.  We looked at several introductory things last time, but we need to be reminded of what they are.  The fundamental question that we are asking is – is the leading of the Spirit that is talked about in and the same thing as divine guidance? 
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‎I hear this all the time.
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‎“The Spirit led me to do this.”
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‎Or, “God led me to this job.”
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‎Is that what this is talking about or is it talking about something completely different?  To understand this we have to understand the context.
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sets up the main issue in the book of Romans.
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‎I just love doing broad sweeps like this because so often we end up doing microscopic dendrology.  Do you know what dendrology is?  I learned that when I went to Stephen F. Austin State University.  It has the largest forestry department in the world.  The first thing every freshman in forestry had to take was dendrology.  I thanked God I never wanted to go into forestry. It is the study of trees.  So often what we do is microscopic dendrology.  We take all of our time analyzing the cell structure of the leaves on each tree and we never look at the forest.  We can’t see the forest through the trees.  You know the old adage.  So many people don’t understand the basic structure of the Bible because all of their lives they looked at microscopic studies of Scripture.  You have to do both.  There is a balance.  You have to do the detail exegesis but then you have to put it together in an overall structure of context.
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‎So the issue in Romans is an explanation of God’s righteousness (His character) and how the righteousness of God is satisfied for salvation and how man can be righteous and what the results of that righteousness are.
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‎NKJ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, "The just shall live by faith."
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‎So the gospel – believe on the Lord Jesus Christ – reveals what?  Righteousness.  That is the core issue in the gospel.
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‎….from saving faith to spiritual life faith – two kinds of faith. 
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‎The just are those who are justified by faith.
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‎Literals translation:  The just by faith shall live.
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‎Most versions translate that “the just shall live by faith”, but the by faith goes with the justification not with the living.  This isn’t a verse that is talking post salvation so much as those who are justified by faith which is the first 5 chapters of Romans.
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, , and 8 talk about that life.  We will see that in just a minute.
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‎So the foundations in 1-3 Jew and Gentile all violate God’s righteousness.  That’s the message.
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‎NKJ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
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‎That is what Paul is saying in the first 3 chapters.  Chapter one gives an opening introduction and concludes with all gentiles fall short.  In chapter 2 all Jews fall short.  Chapter 3 therefore everybody falls short of God’s standard. Jew and Gentile all violate God’s righteousness.  If you don’t measure up to God’s righteousness, how do you get it?  God freely gives His righteousness through faith alone.  That is chapter 4 and 5.  Justification is connected in 5:1 to reconciliation.  Because we are justified we have peace with God.  That is .  The first five chapters of Romans talk about the fact that we are lost and how we get saved.  It is in that the text starts talking how the justified believer shall live.  So chapters 6, 7 and 8 are the foundational chapters for understanding for what God says about the spiritual life.
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‎The first point is laid out in chapter 6.  The justified believer should consider himself a slave of righteousness.  But how does he do that?  Chapter 7.  Chapter 7 is an attempt to do it by pulling yourself up by your own spiritual boot straps. It is operation personal morality.  That is Paul as a believer.
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‎He says, “Man, I just struggle with the sin nature.  I do the things I don’t want to do and I do the things I don’t want to do.”
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‎I think every believer if they are serious about living the Christian life at some point or in the years of spiritual infancy feel like they have multiple personalities inside of them.  There is one side that runs all the way to sin direction.   The other side runs opposite.   They can’t figure out how to keep things together.  They do what they don’t want to do and don’t do what they know they should do and want to do.  That is Paul’s predicament as a believer in chapter 7.  Through chapter 6 and chapter 7 there is one word that is left out and doesn’t show up until chapter 8.  That is the Holy Spirit because that is the key.  So Paul builds this logical case.   Chapter 6 says the justified believer should consider himself a slave of righteousness.  How does he do that?  He tries to do that by keeping the law in chapter 7.  But all it does is the more he tries to keep the law the more he realizes he is a sinner.  He is totally frustrated.  Then he comes to chapter 8 and explains that only the Holy Spirit can produce righteousness and life. That is the first 8 chapters of Romans.   See how simple that is?  Once you understand that and then you read the individual verses within that structure then it really opens things up to you and makes a lot more sense.  We got about that far last time.
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‎The introduction of chapter 8 is crucial.
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‎NKJ There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.
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‎Those who are in Christ Jesus include every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.  “In Christ Jesus” in Pauline terminology standing for positional truth.  Our position is Christ is different from our day-to-day experience.   We are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection at the instant we put our faith alone in Christ alone.  As a result of that there is no condemnation.
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‎The word condemnation is an interesting word in how it is used in the context for Romans.  It is the Greek word katakrima which is the intensified form of the word krima.   Krima is normally translated judgment.  Katakrima is an intensified form has to do with condemnation.  This word is used a couple of times as we will see in a minute in and 5:18.   It’s a reference to what has taken place to a believer before he is justified.  So it is a flash back.
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‎NKJ And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification.
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‎It is a flash back to what he covered in .
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‎Whose transgression?   Adam’s transgression.
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‎The word judgment is the short word krima.  Condemnation is the long word katakrima.
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‎So there is this contrast between judgment and the free gift.
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‎NKJ For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.)
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‎NKJ Therefore, as through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.
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‎So that is talking about what they are before they are saved.  After they are saved you have .
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‎NKJ There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.
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‎So we were in a state of no condemnation.  Now we are in a state of no condemnation.  It doesn’t matter what you do, you are in a state of no condemnation because you are justified.   That is your position in Christ.
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‎Here is a chart that I stole from Ron Merriman.  Those of you who were here during the pastor’s conference, Ron Merriman who has been president of Western Bible College up in Denver back in the 60’s and has been a pastor for many years taught on the value and importance of knowing Greek and using Greek in the study of the Word.  A lot of pastors somehow forget that.  He used a number of different illustrations on different words from the book of Romans.   I thought this was really helpful because it is a good visual display of where the emphases are in the book of Romans.  For example in the first column we have the words krino and katakrima.  They are variations of the same word.  Krino is the verb to judge, to condemn and katakrima is the noun from that verb, judgment.  What is interesting is that in these three sections of Romans in 1:19-3:20 the verb (krino) to judge is used 10 times.  The noun krima is used three times for a total of 13 times that the concept of judgment and condemnation is used in those first three chapters of Romans.
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‎But then when you go to 3:21-5:21 krino isn’t mentioned at all.  And in that section katakrima is used twice.  That is the , .  That is a throwback and summary of what he said in 1:19-3:20.  Krima is used one time in .   So those are 3 references to judgment in 3:31-5:21.
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‎Then when you get to the section on the spiritual life on sanctification in 6:1-8:39 there is only one mention.   That is katakrima in .
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‎That is one of the things you use in Bible study methods.   It is called the law of proportionality.  If God says something ten times in one chapter and he doesn’t mention in the next chapter, what is being emphasized?  So it is a matter of proportion.  You have 13 uses of the concept of judgment in the first three chapters and then it almost completely drops away after that.
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‎Then you come to the next verb in the chart.  The middle horizontal line is pisteuo which is the verb to believe and pistis which is the noun for faith or trust.  Pisteuo the verb is not used at all in the first three chapters. The noun is used one time.  But when you get to the second section which is talking about how you are saved (justification by faith) notice the shift. Pisteuo is used 7 times and pistis are used 17 times for a total of 24 uses of the word faith in the section that is talking about how to become justified.
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‎I remember years ago before I went to seminary I would see stuff like this and almost bounce off the walls I would get so excited.   This is so interesting to see how the Bible is so well laid out and so organized structurally for emphasis.  You just can’t see this stuff so much in your English text.  Then on pisteuo and pistis when you get into the sanctification section (the spiritual life section) where you are dealing with something different, the verb is only used one time and the noun is used two times.  So you have one use in the section on sin and condemnation and 24 uses in the section that deals how you get justified and only three uses in the area of salvation.  Where do you think the emphasis is?  It is in the area of justification.
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‎Then you come to the third key verb in Romans.   The verb is zao meaning to live and the noun is zoe meaning life.  Zoe is the word that John loves to use and others love to use.   Paul uses it some.  It refers to eternal life, the quality of life.  Not bios which is physical, biological life.   It is eternal life is the word zoe.  The verb zao is used two times in the first three chapters. Zoe is used one time for a total of three times.   Life isn’t mentioned at all in the middle section. Isn’t that interesting?  Life isn’t mentioned at all in that middle section which is between 3:21 and 5:21.
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‎Just as a little side note – hold your thought we are going to a little footnote.  At the pastor’s conference (I really haven’t said much about this.) Dr. Niemela presented a paper where he was arguing for eternal life being at least implicit in understanding the gospel.  I do not agree with him.  There has developed a division in the Grace Evangelical Society which has done some tremendous work and is headed up by Bob Wilkin and Zane Hodges.   Zane was my Greek professor at Dallas.  I have known Bob for years since I was up in Dallas in a doctoral program 20 years ago.  We have a great relationship but these guys have gone somewhere that I can’t go and a lot of men can’t go right now.  That is that in the gospel you have to have this implicit understanding of eternal life or you are not saved.  In other words you have to have an understanding of assurance of salvation (at least implicitly) or you really haven’t understood the gospel.  I don’t think that is true.  I think that if you believe that Christ died for your sins you are saved.  I even think that if you invite Jesus into your heart you are saved.   Because if what is going on inside your heart is that you are believing in Jesus alone for salvation and somebody comes along and says that you need to pray and say, “God, I want to invite Jesus into my heart”, God is the one who looks on the heart and He knows that what you are doing internally is that you are trusting in Christ alone. You have been told some real sloppy verbiage to use.  You have been told you have to pray a prayer to do that.  If you notice when I give my invitation and prayer on Sundays I always say that the minute you trust in Christ God in His omniscience knows what you are trusting in. You don’t have to pray a prayer.  If you pray a prayer, then you have already trusted in Christ.  You are already saved.  Once you put your faith alone in Christ alone, the instant you are trusting Christ, you are saved.  You don’t have to tell God you did it.  He is omniscient.  He already knows.  He knew when it was going to happen a billion years ago. You don’t have to have this concept of eternal life.
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‎But this has created a division.  It has created a new organization of pastors.  In fact I didn’t understand all of this stuff until recently.  I didn’t realize this was going on because I just don’t keep up with them.
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‎Two or three years ago there was a group that met at the Pre-Trib Rapture Study group that meets every year in December.  They organized a new group called the Free Grace Alliance.   Dr. Rodmacher (you have heard me speak of him) is the Chancellor of Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary is a part of that group.  I am part of that group.   This has become an issue now – is an implicit belief in eternal life a necessary part of the gospel? I don’t think it is. I think this really demonstrates that right here.   When you get to 3:21-5:21 talking about justification by faith, the word life, the word zoe, isn’t even mentioned.  It is not mentioned until you get into sanctification.  I remember I learned this from Ralph Hodges years ago that the concept of zoe is such a pregnant term.  It is loaded with meaning.  We often think of it as life that doesn’t end. But that only has to do with the quantity of life.   But the word has a depth to it.  It is quality of life.
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‎Jesus said…
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‎NKJ "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
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‎He came not to steal and destroy but to give life (zoe) and give it abundantly. The abundant life is talking about that rich quality of life that you get as you grow as a believer.  It’s really not necessarily inherent in understanding the gospel. What we see here when we look at the use of the words for life in Romans is that the verb and the noun are each used 12 times in the section on the spiritual life from 6:1 – 8:39 for a total of 24 times.  Words for judgment and condemnation words are used 13 times in the first three chapters.  This is where Paul is getting us lost.  Words for faith are used 24 times in the section on how you get that righteousness of God.  Then words for life are used 24 times in the section on sanctification.  See how that breaks out. You can see what Paul is talking about in each one of those sections.  That is what we are talking about in .  When we get to our study of and we are talking about being led by the Spirit, from this word study what would you guess the leading of the Spirit is going to be related to?  Just take a little guess.  Life, experiencing that fullness that abundant life that Christ has for us as opposed to the concept of divine guidance - God giving you impressions or liver quiver or whatever you want to call it to decide whether to buy this house or that house, to invest in Ford or Chevy or General Motors or Microsoft or Intel or Apple.  Those aren’t the decisions that the leading of the Spirit relate to.  Just structurally you lay these things out and that really gives you a map of what Paul is saying.
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‎So we get into chapter 8 and I have some basic summaries.  First of all, based on the believer is no longer under a judicial penalty from the Supreme Court of Heaven.  That is what it means.
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‎NKJ There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.
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‎No matter what you do, even if you reject Christ or deny the gospel or even if you get into the worst sins you can possibly imagine, there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ.  The believer is no longer under a judicial penalty from the Supreme Court of Heaven because he now possesses justification – the righteousness that comes from God. We should understand this.  It is not like God giving us His righteousness in the sense that He pulls something out of Himself and gives it to us.  It is righteousness that is equivalent to God’s righteousness.  It is perfect righteousness.  It is a standard that God is giving to us.   It is a judicial standing of perfection.  He is declaring us to be not guilty of anything.  It is a judicial standing of perfect righteousness that is being imputed to us.
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‎The arena of application adheres to those in Christ that is anybody who has trusted Christ as Savior.   This occurs at the instant at salvation.  This is what baptism of the Holy Spirit means.  It doesn’t mean speaking in tongues.  It doesn’t mean some sort of experience.  It doesn’t mean that you are going to swoon or pass out or be slain in the Spirit.  There are only two people in the Bible slain in the spirit – Ananias and Sapphira.  You don’t have any experience of this.  You only learn about it after you are saved through a study of the Word.
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‎So verse 1 () reviews the point of 6:1-5 which emphasizes a couple of things -  first of all the potential of walking in new life.  Because you are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection because you are crucified with him – that is what that means.
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‎NKJ Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
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‎That is not water baptism.  That is not going out and being immersed in water.  This is talking about the baptism of the Holy Spirit which is identification.  That is the ultimate significance of baptism.  Baptism literally means to dip, plunge, or immerse.  But the word for baptism was used to signify identification of something with something - frequently in an initiation into a new position.  If you do a word substitution of identification you get the sense of what he is saying.
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‎Therefore we have been buried with Him in identification into death.
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‎We have been identified with His death so that His death is our death.  His death becomes the death of our sin nature.  That is what he is going to say.
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‎So the baptism into death is towards something.  Toward what?  Newness of life.  There is that word, the noun zoe, newness of life.  The purpose for that identification with Christ is so that we can have in our experience (not position) but in terms of our experience a new quality of life.  So there is the potential because that only becomes real if we take in the Word of God and walk by the Spirit of God.
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‎Second, we have emancipation from the tyranny of the sin nature, but not the presence of the sin nature.  Before you are saved all you can do is sin.  That is all you can do.  You can’t do anything else because that is all you have.  You can do morality, but it comes out of the sin nature.
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‎NKJ For he who has died has been freed from sin.
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‎That is identification with Christ’s death.
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‎The word sin indicates the sin nature.  We are freed from it.  It’s not gone.  If it was gone there wouldn’t have to be any commandments or prohibitions in the New Testament. It would just say that once you are saved you aren’t going to sin anymore.  Some people think that, but they have such a weak view of sin.  If you only think that there are three things that you can do to commit sin and you don’t do those three things, then you never sin.  But then if you get proud about it, you have a problem.   It is always the mental attitude sins that sneak up on you.  That is what Paul realized in .  goes on to explain this.  So after we go back and pick up in verse 1 a summary or the chapters 5 and 6, we go on in verse 2.
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‎NKJ For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.
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‎That is a reminder of what I just read in .  We are free.  The word law here, the law of the spiritual of life and death, should be understood as the principle or the application.
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‎So because of the Holy Spirit because He is the Spirit of life,  we are free from the sin nature which only produces death.  So who is he talking about here?  He is talking to the Romans.
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‎Is that what he said?  I just wanted to see if you were alert.  Make sure that you aren’t sleeping here.  What does that mean?
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‎That means when he is speaking to his audience he says, “You have been set free.”  
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‎In other words he is viewing them as regenerate justified believers - not unregenerate.  You can’t read that in here.  He views his audience as regenerate, born again, justified believers.  They have been set free from the law of sin and death positionally.
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‎Now as we look at this we have to understand three key words – freedom, law and sin, and the word death.  Law means principle.  We have seen that already.  The law of the Spirit of life is in contrast to the law of death.  They must be understood in opposition to one another.  Since he is going to go on and apply the possibility of being dead to his readers, he has got to be talking about a different category of death.  We have gone over this.  There are 7 different kinds of death in the Bible – physical death, spiritual death, sexual death, carnal death, operational death, the second death and positional death.  Positional death is , but this is operational death.  He is setting you free from operational death.  This isn’t just setting you free from spiritual death because it is the law of the spirit of life.  It’s talking about what?  The potential of the abundant life as a result of being identified with Christ.  expand this.  So we have to go down and look at the core context.
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‎NKJ Therefore, brethren, we are debtors -- not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.
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‎NKJ For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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‎So there is this contrast between living according to the flesh and living by the Spirit.  These are the two polar opposites.  Either you are living according to the flesh or you are living by the Spirit.  If you are living by the flesh, then you must die – operational death.  If you are living by the Spirit then you are putting to death the deeds of the body.  Since this is addressed to brethren back in verse 12 and because they have been set free from the law of sin and death, they are truly believers.  He says that there is an obligation that goes with that.  That obligation is to live by the Holy Spirit.  That’s our responsibility as believers.  If we fail in that then we will have nothing but wood, hay and straw and that will all burn up at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
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‎So the law of the Spirit of life is contrasted with the law of sin and death.  This goes back to what he says in .  Open your Bibles because I don’t want to take these verses in their proper order.  I want to hit the high points to draw out some principles.  is talking about the fact that we are positionally free from the dominion of the sin nature and what that means.
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‎NKJ Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?
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‎Now this would apply to a believer or an unbeliever, but he is speaking to them as believers because he has already said they were set free from sin.  Now if you present yourselves or yield – that is where that concept comes from.  
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‎You hear the old theologians like Chafer and Walvoord say, “The yieldedness part of being filled with the Spirit or staying filled with the Spirit.”
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‎What yieldedness means is to present yourself to God.  That is how it is translated in more modern translations.  It is to stay in fellowship.  It is a synonym to abiding in Christ.  It is a synonym for staying submitted to the authority of God and not going into rebellion and getting out of fellowship and sinning. He says that you have this choice.  You can either present yourself to the sin nature and be a slave to the sin nature which results in operational death or you can present yourself to God and that results in righteousness.  What kind of righteousness?  Is this talking about positional righteousness?  Justification?  No, you are already justified.  You have imputed righteousness. This is talking about experiential righteousness that builds capacity for spiritual maturity.   It is the production in the believer’s life of experiential righteousness or experiential sanctification.
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‎NKJ What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.
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‎Before you were saved you were involved in all kinds of religious activity or pagan immorality or whatever it was. You thought you were getting something out of that one way or the other.  Now you are ashamed of it.  The outcome of those things is death.  That is talking about the production value. That is not why they were spiritually dead.  You are born spiritually dead because of Adam’s original sin.  That is what your condemnation is for.  You sin because you are a sinner.  You are not a sinner because you sin.  I know that is tough to handle.  You sin because you are a sinner.  You are born condemned.  When you come out of the womb you already have a sin nature and Adam’s original sin is imputed to you.  As you grow, you sin because you are constitutionally a sinner.  You are not born neutral.  You are not born perfect and then chose to sin.  What Paul is talking about here is the outcome of those decisions that you did before you were saved is operational death.  It is an experiential death.  It is not talking about that original spiritual death condition.
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‎NKJ For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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‎He is talking to believers.  So often this verse is translated and applied as a salvation verse.  It‘s not.  Salvation and justification was covered where?  In through the end of chapter 5.  What happens in chapter 6? We are talking about the post salvation life.  The payment for sin in your post salvation life is operational death.  This isn’t talking about spiritual death.  It is operational death.
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‎Wait a minute.  This sounds like it ought to be a salvation verse.  But you see he is talking about life.  Remember the chart?  You don’t have any mention of life until you get to chapter 6 - after you are justified.  There has to be that distinction between what is required for justification and what is required for sanctification.  They are distinct doctrines.
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‎Do you know who doesn’t separate them?  Roman Catholicism.  In Protestant theology, Luther discovered that justification is a one shot legal act that happens at the instant of salvation. In Roman Catholicism you get at little bit of grace each time you participate in the sacraments.  If you build up enough then you get saved.  Nobody knows how much is enough so nobody knows if they are really saved.  So justification is a process. Justification in Roman Catholic theology is progressive.  So is sanctification.  They have made justification and sanctification equal.  If you aren’t sanctified then you are justified.  Lordship salvation does the same thing.  If you commit that sin or that sin or that sin or you denied Christ after you were saved then you didn’t have the right kind of faith.  It is a Protestant form of the same error that Rome had.  That is why John McArthur in his book “The Gospel According to Jesus” when it came out in the first edition  he translates (and if you don’t read the footnotes -  that is why in books like that you have to read the footnotes and you have to know the technical issues.) .  He says that the word pistis which is the word for faith should be translated faithfulness.
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‎For by grace you have been saved through faithfulness.
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‎Is that right?  That’s a process.  He needs to go back to Rome because that is what Lordship salvation essentially is.  It is the same error that the Roman Catholic Church has.  Justification is distinct from sanctification.  You are justified by faith alone in Christ alone.  You become a new creature in Christ.  But sanctification is separate.  You are saved but you still live in sin then the wages is operational death.  You don’t experience that full abundant life that Christ has for you which is just as free (because it is all grace) as the never ending part of it - the life that you get when you trust Christ as Savior.
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, , and 23 all emphasize the reality of operational death for the believer.  Now we go back to .
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‎NKJ For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
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‎This is the same principle.  He is just reiterating it.  If your mind is set on the flesh (that is the sin nature control), it is operational death.  It is not loss of salvation, not that you weren’t saved.  It is operational death, dead works.  As we get into the next chapter of Hebrews he is going to say things about not going back to dead works. It is the same concept, operational death.
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‎You have two options. You can walk by the Spirit or you can walk by the sin nature.  If you walk by the sin nature, it produces operational death.  If you walk by the Spirit you have your mind set on the Spirit, you have life and peace.
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‎We did and jumped ahead to these other verses to demonstrate the principle of operations death.  Now we are back to verse 3.
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‎NKJ For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh,
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‎The law was never designed to do two things.  It was never designed to give you justification.  The Mosaic Law was never designed to give you spiritual life.  The Mosaic Law was the law code for the nation and it had to do with ritual operation that was part of the ritual observance of the tabernacle.
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‎You see the law could not save.  But God did.
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‎It means that it appeared in human flesh – physical humanity.
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‎There is the second time that word is used in this section, katakrima.
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‎NKJ that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
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‎What was the requirement of the law?  Righteousness.  So it is fulfilled in us because of imputation of righteousness.  He is going back in the first 4 verses of to review those concepts he has covered already.
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‎Now when you read that you have to watch the punctuation.  There weren’t any commas in the original.  That relative clause that begins with the relative pronoun who, that defines the meaning of that first person plural pronoun “us”.  Who are the “us”?  It is those who don’t walk according to the flesh but walk according to the Spirit.  The “us” isn’t all believers.  The “us” is those who walk according to the Spirit.  So what we see throughout this section is two polar opposites that you have in .  You have the law of the Spirit of life versus the law of sin and death.
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‎NKJ For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
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‎In verse 5 you have those who live according to the Spirit and the things of the Spirit.  Here you have those who walk according to the flesh versus those who walk according to the Spirit.  So you have these two opposites.   The way you ought to read that is not the first option, “in us.”  That would read “that requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.”  But it is us defined as us who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.
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uses the same contrast.
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‎NKJ For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light
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‎That is position.  That is who you are.  You are light in the Lord.  You walk as children of light.  That implies that you can walk as a child of darkness even though you are a child in the light.  There are two different kinds of Christians. 
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‎There are a lot of people who say, “That is wrong.  That is elitism. That’s terrible.”
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‎In fact - some of you may run across this - there is a Bible translation that has been out for a few years now called the New Electronic Translation – the NET Bible.
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‎When that came out I had several people say, “You have got to get this.  This is really great.  If you open it up and look on the pages, the bottom third to two-thirds of every page is all these translator’s notes and technical information on Greek grammar and everything else.  It is just fabulous.”
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‎I knew who published it so I wrote the publisher and asked who translated it.  They told me it was the entire Greek Department at Dallas Seminary.   I knew who these guys are and what their theology was on the spiritual life.  So I started looking at critical passages and went to .  It talks about abiding in Christ.  The footnote says that this does not refer to the elitist view that some people have that some Christians abide and some don’t.  All Christians abide in Christ.  Then I started looking at a lot of other verses.
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‎I said, “This is terrible.”
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‎You are going to get a lot of people who don’t know the technical stuff and they will get this and look at those notes.  It will have a terrible affect.  It is consistent with the theology that is being taught by the New Testament Department at Dallas Seminary now at least as it regards to the spiritual life.  That is because to a man they are into lordship salvation.
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makes the same kind of comment.
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‎NKJ If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
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‎The “we” are believers.  Believers can lie? Sure!  If we claim to be walking with God but we walk in darkness, we are lying and not practicing truth.  We are not putting into application of doctrine in the soul.
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‎NKJ For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
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‎That’s the carnal believer.  That’s the contrast between carnality and spirituality.
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‎NKJ For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
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‎That is operational death.
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‎What does spiritually minded mean here?  Think in terms of the phrases we have seen already. Walking according to the Spirit or living according to the Spirit and now we have another phrase – being spiritually minded.   All those are talking about the same thing.  They are synonyms.  If you live according to the flesh, you walk according to the flesh.  You are fleshly minded.  All of those things mean the same thing.  On the other side of the spectrum, you have walking by the Spirit, living by the Spirit and being spiritually minded.
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‎NKJ Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.
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‎Let’s stop a minute.  What is a carnal mind?  The carnal mind is the mind that is dominated by the sin nature.  That applies to two groups of people, doesn’t it?  Unbelievers are always carnally minded.  They can’t be anything else.  It also applies to believers.  The technical word is that this is a gnomic principle.  That means it is a universal principle.  The carnal mind whether it is a believer or unbeliever is at enmity against God.  When you as a believer operate according to the flesh you are hostile to God.  When you are out of fellowship you can’t be subject to the law of God, There is impossibility there. It is a split side of that same statement made in .
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‎NKJ I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.
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‎If you are operating on the flesh, it is impossible to please God.
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‎NKJ So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
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‎Wait a minute.  We have just had a shift in terminology.  If you are not careful, you will get lost. Walking according to the Spirit and walking by the Spirit is one thing.  But when we get here to , we make this shift.  Then what happens is it is talking about the unbeliever.  The unbeliever is in the flesh.  That is talking about an unbeliever.  If you walk according the flesh (according to the standard of the sin nature) it never talks about the believer being in the flesh anymore.  We are not.  We are in the Spirit.  Here what Paul is doing is applying this to the unbeliever.  The carnal minded believer is acting just like an unbeliever and is as unproductive as an unbeliever. 
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‎NKJ But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.
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‎What he is arguing here is – look the unbeliever is carnally minded.  He can’t please God and you as a believer if you become carnally minded you can’t please God.  But, who are you?  You are not in the flesh, but you are in the Spirit.  See how in the flesh and in the Spirit are used differently?  You as a believer are not in the flesh but you can walk according to the flesh.   You can live by the flesh but you can’t be in the flesh.  In the flesh is the unbeliever.   So here he is talking positionally.  You are in the Spirit and not in the flesh if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.  As a believer the instant you trust Christ as Savior, the Holy Spirit dwells in you.   This is a key verse on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, He is not Him.  It is the Spirit of Christ that gives you - the ability to walk by the Spirit.  But if you are not saved, you can’t do it.  If you are saved you may not do it.
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‎NKJ And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
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‎If Christ is in you, you have imputed righteousness.   Therefore the Spirit can be life for you.   
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‎Set on the flesh equals death.  According to the flesh and set on flesh are synonymous phrases.  In contrast to that you have the phrases in the early part of the chapter, according to the Spirit and set on the Spirit.  That equals life and peace. Set on the flesh is hostile to God.  Then there is a shift from the phrase “according to” to the phrase “in the”. In the flesh refers to unbelievers.  They can’t please God.
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‎So , see that difference?  So is not talking about the contrast between the carnal believer and the spiritual believer.  It’s talking about the unbeliever.  The argument is saying that the carnal believer is living like an unbeliever.  He is producing the same kind of dead works.
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‎So then we come to .
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‎NKJ But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
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‎He does because that is positional reality.
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‎So the spiritual life comes as a result of the ministry of the Holy Spirit who is dwelling in us.   When He is filling us operationally, that is what we call the filling of the Spirit.  That happens when we are walking by the Spirit.  That’s after salvation and after justification.
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‎NKJ Therefore, brethren, we are debtors -- not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh
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‎In the flesh is the unbeliever. 
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‎So we have this obligation not to live according to the sin nature.
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‎NKJ For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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‎Notice the phrase again. It is not “in” but “according to.”
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‎You will live the abundant life.
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‎That is the context of verse 14.
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‎NKJ For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
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‎This is mature sons, huios.    So led by the Spirit in verse 14 must be understood to fit within the whole flow of these phrases – the mind set on the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, living by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit.  They are all taking about the very same thing.  That is what we will see in .  It is covered by the phrase, walking by the Spirit.
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‎In this context being led by the Spirit is another way of describing life according to the Spirit in which the Christian is putting to death the deeds of the body.
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‎So the leading of the Spirit here is guidance into the revealed or moral will of God.  Remember our categories?  The moral will of God is God’s revealed will - what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.  So the leading of the Spirit here has to do with the leading in relation to putting to death the deeds of the flesh, applying the moral will of God to our lives or the revealed will of God to our lives.  The leading here is not guidance into making decisions.  It is guidance into making decisions related to applying doctrine to our lives, doing that which is pleasing to God.
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‎The issue is that obedience to that will would be impossible apart from the Spirit of God.  When we do it and apply the doctrine and we grow, that produces a mature son of God – a huios  not a teknon which is an immature child.  It only comes by being led by the Spirit of God.   He leads us through His Word.  So once again it is that two-fold operation of the Word of God with the Spirit of God produces maturity in the child of God.
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‎We will come back next time and look at and the context there.  We will see that it is talking about the same thing.  Galatians is the first epistle that Paul wrote.  Romans is a more mature explanation of everything that is in Galatians.   Galatians talks about justification in chapter 2 and ends up with the spiritual life in chapter 5.  The same thing is in Romans.
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‎Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.
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Romans 084b-The Flesh versus the Spirit

Romans 8:3 NASB95
For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh,
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Romans 084b-The Flesh versus the Spirit
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We are in and we'll review here a little in verses 1 and 2 and then move on through, I hope, verse 11, understanding that this is the spiritual life. I think that this is really important to review. If you just pick up your Bible and you just start reading Romans, chapter 8, you might come to some rather unusual conclusions about what Paul is talking about because you just jump into the middle of his letter.
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It's like coming home in the evening and it's about 7:15 or 7:30 and you turn on a murder mystery, police show, CSI, NCIS and you're halfway through the show and you have no idea what they're doing. You turn it on and you have to guess and figure out what they're trying to solve, the whole circumstances of the murder or whatever the issue is. You just start guessing at it and you know as well as I do that for probably the next 15 or 20 minutes you're wrong. You don't know the context of those first thirty minutes. You're just guessing. Often that is how people approach the Bible when they're interpreting the Scripture. They don't understand the importance of context.
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As we've studied before, the three laws of Bible study, like the three laws of real estate are location, location, location, but in Bible study we call it context, context, context. When you take the text out of the context, you're left with a con job. And that is often what happens in many, many sermons and Bible teaching, you're just left with somebody using a text as a pretext to get across whatever they're wanting to teach.
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, , and 8, as I've said probably to ad nauseam, is not how to get justified but how the justified person lives. Therefore, when we approach and some of the things that are said here we have to understand that Paul is not talking about how to become a believer, how to become a Christian, how to be saved, how to be justified. He's talking about the Christian life. He's in that point where we've already understood what it means to become saved, to be justified, to become a Christian and that's by faith alone in Christ alone. It's trusting in Jesus as the One who died on the Cross for our sins. But what we have here is understanding how we are now to live.
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When we get into discussions and readings about, for example, a verse like verse 9, which talks about “you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit”, what exactly what does that mean? When it talks in verse 6 and verse 7 about to be carnally minded is death, what does it mean? Is that an unbeliever? Sometimes when we read these words 'carnal versus Spirit' we think of in terms of unbeliever versus believer. But what this is talking about is believers who are not walking by the Spirit, their life is not being energized and empowered by God the Holy Spirit, then the only other alternative is the sin nature.
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The term 'flesh' is a word Paul frequently uses to refer the sin nature. The word 'flesh' or the Greek word sarx [sarc] has several different meanings as does the word 'spirit'. So the word 'flesh' can refer to the physical, material substance of our corporeal body or the 'flesh' can refer to, for example, the flesh of the meat we're eating. That word is used that way sometimes. Or it can refer to that which energizes the body which is the sin nature. It's interesting that Paul uses the terms 'flesh' and 'body' or 'body of sin' as synonyms for sin and the sin nature. That suggests very strongly that the location of the corruption of Adam's original sin is not in the soul but in the body. It's passed on through the DNA structure. Now how that happens I don't know. I think we make a mistake if we try to identify a Biblical principle like that too closely with where modern science is in terms of its explanation of DNA and biology and cell structure and things like that simply because in the next decade or two that may change. But the truth of God's word doesn't change. So how it fits we don't know; we don't have to know. All we see is this connection between the sin nature and the corporeal body.
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It is through our physical flesh that the sin nature works itself out and manifests itself and that the only solution to overcoming the dictates of the sin nature is through the Holy Spirit. Now while we're here in Romans 8, I want you to just hold your place here and I want to turn to . The reason I'm going to is because it gives us one of the two or three passages in Paul's writings where we see this contrast between walking by the Spirit and living according to the flesh or the sin nature.
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Now for those of you who were here Tuesday night we're going to have a test. When did Paul write Galatians? Very good. First missionary journey. Very good. So that means this is the earliest stage in the first writings of the Apostle Paul. And when does he write Romans? Romans is at the end of his third missionary journey. Remember the first missionary journey resulted in Galatians. The second missionary journey he writes 1 and 2 Thessalonians, the third missionary journey he writes 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans. The fourth trip which is not a missionary journey but a trip to Rome and he writes the four prison epistles. So Galatians is written somewhere around probably 52 or maybe a little earlier and he's addressing a problem that has come up in Galatians. I think this is so important for us to understand the spiritual life.
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To me Galatians is even more clear than Romans but that's because of the structure of the epistle. The problem in Galatia was that the Galatian believers had been deceived by a group of Jews, maybe even Jewish believers, but completely distorted in their theology who were loyal to the Mosaic Law, who were following along behind Paul and Barnabas. They were coming up and saying, “You know this thing about trusting in Jesus is just fine but it's not really enough. You need to add the Mosaic Law into the mix.” So they added the Mosaic Law into the mix to get saved. So it was faith in Christ plus the Law to be justified.
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That's the topic in the first two chapters in Galatians and then the other thing they taught was that if you're going to really experience the spiritual life then you have to also follow the Law. So in Paul changes from talking about the gospel of justification by faith alone. We have the very well-known verse in , “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith and not by the works of the law, for by the works of the law, no flesh shall be justified.” Now that's when he's reaching his conclusion, sort of the high point of his argument in those first 2 chapters telling us that the topic is justification.
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When we get into chapter three he immediately just blasts them and says, “You foolish Galatians. Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified? The only thing I want to learn from you is did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by the hearing of faith?” Now notice that's the key question for the rest of the book. “Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law?”
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When do we receive the Spirit? At the instant of salvation. At that instant there are a number of things God does to us that we don't experience but they are spiritual realities that are part of the transformation to being a new creature in Christ. One of those is that God the Holy Spirit indwells us. We'll look at that a little later on in detail. So we receive the Spirit in that instant of salvation. Paul is saying, “Now did that happen by obeying the Law or did that happen by just simply believing in the gospel?” Well the answer is hearing the faith.
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So he goes on to state the question in a different way in verse 3: “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit...” The starting point of the Christian life is not by works of righteousness which we have done but according to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. So we begin by the Holy Spirit and Paul says, “...are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
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There are three key words that he uses there: spirit, perfect, and flesh. 'Spirit' referring to the Holy Spirit, 'perfect' is the Greek verb teleioo [teleiow] meaning to be brought to completion or maturity. This is not the idea of perfection in the sense of flawlessness but the idea of being brought to completion of what you're intended to be. Now Paul doesn't answer this question right away. In modern classrooms Paul would get an “F” in pedagogy. Since it's by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I guess that means the Holy Spirit flunks the class because he doesn't give you all the nice little illustrations.
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In fact, he goes a long way around the barn to answer the question. He takes us back to Abraham in . In he says, “Just as Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” Then he goes on from there talking about Abraham, talking about Moses and the Law and then he goes into the purpose of the Law in the last part of chapter 3. At the end of chapter 3 he talks about the baptism by the Holy Spirit which we've seen is foundational for Paul's understanding of the spiritual life.
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In chapter 4 he talks about what happens when we get adopted into the Royal Family of God and then in chapter 5 he gets to the fact that we have freedom in Christ and all of that takes us to where he says “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty, only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh...” What's that? That's the sin nature. Don't use your freedom for the sin nature to express itself”... but instead [strong contrast] through love serve one another.”
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That's the primary command here governing the last portion of the epistle. Through love we're to serve one another. Then he's going to explain why that's so important. In he says, “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Now that's really interesting because he's nailing down the fact that ultimately maturity for the Christian is demonstrated and exhibited in love for one another. In contrast he says, “But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another.” Christians are probably the only army in the world that loves to shoot its wounded.
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In verse 16 he's going to explain how in the world we can love one another. We all know we're not very lovable a lot of the time and there are a lot of Christians we know who aren't very lovable and we really don't want to be around them but we're still commanded to love them. It's not just loving them from afar. It's loving them up close. How can you do that? You can't do it in the power of the flesh. You can only do it through the Holy Spirit.
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Paul says in verse 16, “I say then, Walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” Because we've gone through this passage many times in the past you should have three words circled in verse 16. 'Spirit', 'fulfill', and 'flesh'. The same words that were used just a couple of pages back in . Same words. What does that tell us? Now he answers the question. He asks the question, raises the issue, in . He lays all this groundwork in chapters three, four, and five so that now we ought to be able to understand the answer.
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His command is, “Walk by means of the Spirit.” It's the 'in' plus the instrumental use of Spirit as the means for facilitating the spiritual life and “You shall not fulfill or bring to completion the lusts of the flesh.” Now in the Greek grammar of this verse there is a strong double negative stated plus a subjunctive mood in the verb. What that means is that you can say 'no'; you can say 'really no' and you can say, 'absolutely not, impossible.' In English if you double up negatives they cancel out each other but not in Greek. So the strongest way to say or negate something is to use both negatives, ou [o)u] and me [mh], in Greek with a subjunctive voice mood and it has the idea that it's impossible to do something. You will not be able to do something. It can't be said any stronger.
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What Paul is saying is “walk in the Spirit” and as long as you're walking by means of the Spirit it will be impossible to bring to completion the lust of the flesh. Now a lot of people say, “Well, how could that be? If I'm in fellowship, how could I sin?” Because you stop walking by the Spirit before you sin. If you break that one second down into its components, just like when Peter is out there walking on the water, as long as he's looking at Jesus, he's okay. But the second he quit walking by Jesus, he took his eye off Jesus, what happens? The consequence is that he falls, which is comparable to sin.
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As long as we're consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit through the Word, as soon as we take our eyes off Him, boom, we go down into the sin nature. So the command is, “Walk by means of the Spirit and it will be impossible to fulfill the lusts of the flesh for [now he's going to explain it] the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh.” So he sets this thing up in Scripture. It's the Spirit or the flesh.
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There's this war going on between your sin nature and this new nature you have that's being energized, nourished, and strengthened by the Holy Spirit so the flesh is fighting against the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh. They're contrary, completely opposed to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. Doesn't that phrase sound familiar? It's right out of where Paul is talking about his life before he understood the role of the Spirit and he says, “I don't do the things I want to do and I'm doing the things I really don't want to do.”
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So there's that concept. When we're walking by the sin nature we don't do the things that we wish, that we desire to do as a new creature in Christ. Then he says that if you're led by the Spirit “you are not under the Law.” What he means by that is that under the Law there was no provision for being able to obey the Law. So “leading by the Spirit”...the word here for leading means lays out a path. If you've ever been out in the woods and there's no path and you're sort of laying out a path, you may go along, or if you're just out in your backyard and you're putting some flagstone down for a place to step as you walk through your garden, you lay down a path. It goes in front of you, step by step. You put a stepping stone here, a stepping stone there and there.
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The Holy Spirit lays out an objective path for us with stepping stones. The name for that objective path is the Word of God. That's where we see the path charted in the Word of God. That's why we have to know the Word of God. In Paul says, “But if you are led by the Spirit [and we are] you're not under the Law.” One of the ways you can tell who's running your life is by the product of your life so there's a contrast set up here. First there are the works of the flesh in : “Now the works of the flesh are evident: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery [which is really the use of mind-altering substances], hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like...”
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In contrast to that we have the fruit of the Spirit in verse 22 and the first thing mentioned is love and you ought to circle “love” in verse 22 and take it and draw a line up to verse 14 and circle “love your neighbor” and then draw another line and circle the word “love” in verse 13 so the next time you read this you'll see how it all connects together. Verse 22 now gets back to the topic in hand which is to learn how to love your neighbor as yourself.
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It's done from the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is a result of walking by the Spirit. It produces love and I think that the rest of these manifestations are different facets of love: “joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such there is no law.” Verse 24 says, “And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” What does that remind you of now that we've gone through a lot? That's the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. When we're saved, at that instant, we are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection and so the old man is crucified, that power is broken, but the sin nature is still there.
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The old man, everything we were before we were saved is gone, so now Paul says, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” We live by the Spirit, regeneration. If we're going to be alive, have new life from the Spirit, what should we do? We should walk by means of the Spirit. There is a different word for walk which we had before. The word we had before was peripateo [peripatew] which just means to go step by step. The word here has the idea of following in ranks or following in a path that's laid out. So we walk down that path laid down by the Spirit.
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It's similar to , “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him [that's studying the Word] and He directs your paths.” How? Through the Word. So why did I go here? Because we see first of all that as a believer you're either living your life on the basis of the sin nature or you're living your life by the Spirit. It's one or the other. It's not a little bit of both. You don't have one foot that's kind of being spiritual and at the same time, have one foot that kind of being carnal. There are a lot of people that teach that but you can't make that work with Galatians, chapter 5. That's just human viewpoint theology. So it's one or the other.
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That's very clear from so when we get into we realize that whatever Paul is saying in , he's not contradicting what he said in . So he has to be talking about the same kind of thing but from a slightly different perspective so when he's talking here about carnally minded, that is being empowered by the sin nature or the flesh, versus being spiritually minded, he's talking about walking by the flesh or walking by the Spirit. He's talking about a believer. He's not talking about an unbeliever.
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There are a lot of people, especially people who come out of a Reformed or Calvinistic background or from more of an extreme Armenian background, like Wesley and Methodism, a lot of Holiness and charismatic theology, Lordship salvation, they interpret as related to an unbeliever. But that's because they don't understand the real dynamics of the spiritual life or the role of the Holy Spirit.
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As we said last time is really talking about the fact there's no condemnation now to those who are in Christ Jesus. It's not just positional where many of us have taught this in the past because we haven't appropriately understood the significance of that relative clause. That relative clause is left out of most modern translations. It's in the King James and the New King James but it further defines those in Christ Jesus as those who are not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
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What Paul tells us in that he's not just talking about believers who are positionally in Christ. That's what happens when you drop that last part off. He's not just talking about our position of 'no condemnation.' He's talking about no condemnation to those who are in Christ and are walking by means of the Spirit. He's not talking about those in Christ who are walking according to the flesh. See, they're under condemnation. Not eternal condemnation, as I pointed out but Divine discipline.
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Because the word condemnation, as I've been emphasizing the last two or three weeks is not katakrima [katakrima] used here, but the idea of just punishment, the consequences of sin. So this isn't talking about the fact that because we're saved there's no condemnation. Yes, that's true but that's not what he's saying here. He's not talking about salvation here or getting justified. That was back in chapters three and four. What he's talking about here is those in Christ Jesus who do not walk according to the flesh. He's talking about no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus who are walking according to the Spirit.
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You have to get both phrases in there, not just one phrase in there. Don't just stop at “in Christ”. He's talking about a group that are “in Christ” who are also walking according to the Holy Spirit. That's the focal point here. Because those who are walking according to the Holy Spirit are the ones who are growing, who are being forgiven by using as an opportunity to get back in fellowship, to abide in Christ, and to keep pursuing spiritual growth. He's talking about how to be a victorious, winning believer and he's not focusing on those who are going through condemnation because they're living according to the sin nature as believers and living like unbelievers.
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The Lonighter Dictionary focuses on the idea of judging someone as guilty and subject to punishment. Don't read into it eternal punishment in hell. It's talking about someone guilty of disobedience to God and undergoing punishment. That can be eternal or temporal but if you're coming in in the middle of the TV show at 7:30 you're going to think he's talking about just being positionally in Christ and you ripped it out of the context of and 7. So as I pointed out the emphasis is not on eternal punishment but on the consequences of sin in this life.
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((CHART)) We looked at the sin nature last time. The lust pattern drives everything. This is the lust of the flesh. It can produce either relative good that says, “I’m better than you are. Sometimes you're better than I am.” When we compare ourselves to the ultimate point of God's righteousness I'm not okay and neither are you. So we do produce relative good but because it comes out of a corrupt nature, it has no eternal or spiritual consequences. And then we have personal sins which are those things we normally think of as sins, whether they're mental attitude sins, such as arrogance, mental attitude lusts for any number of things, sins of the tongue such as gossip or slander, or overt sins. Then this lead us to various desire trends, either toward asceticism which is the idea that by giving things up and by doing anything it really gets God to bless me.
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According to , God has already blessed us with “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” He just hasn't distributed them all yet. He's already blessed us so we don't do anything to get blessing. It's sort of like if you have a baby and that baby starts to grow up. You're just a proud daddy and you have a wonderful son, you've been blessed materially so you give the keys to a brand new Lamborghini to your son at six. It's his. You've put his name on the title deed for that car. But you're not going to give him the keys until he's old enough to demonstrate some responsibility and capacity for ownership so he doesn't kill himself or anybody else by driving that vehicle. That's how God distributes our blessings. They're already ours. That package has been given to us at the instant of salvation but only as we grow and develop maturity and capacity does he distribute those blessings so we don't self-destruct.
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So we either move toward asceticism which says, “I'm really impressing God. I'm going to do all these things and He's going to bless me.” Or we go in the opposite direction and we're licentious, lascivious, antinomian. We just say, “Jesus died for my sins. I just confess it and move on. Or I’m going to confess it, using the word “rebound” for confession. I'm just going to pre-bound before I sin and God's grace will cover it.” We've all done that. Don't sit there with some smug look on your face like you don't know anybody ever did that. I won't name any names.
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In salvation we are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection by the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. That is being “in Christ”. That is what is going to be talked about when Paul gets down into verses 9, 10, and 11. He's going to be talking about that positional truth. But then we also have another realm of our temporal realities. Usually I talk about this as being filled by means of the Spirit but it's also described in these verses as being “in the Spirit” as opposed to “in the flesh”. So when we sin we're out there in the darkness of the sin nature in the flesh and we have to confess our sin to get back in the Spirit and walking in the light as He is in the light. When we sin, we go out.
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((CHART)) Now that I've laid that framework, let's talk about this a little bit. Paul makes his first statement in verse one that there's no punishment to those in Christ who are walking according to the Spirit. That whole phrase has to be there. In verse 2, he says, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” And as I pointed out the last couple of weeks it reminds us what Paul said in Romans 6. I focused on this last time.
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It's the first time Paul starts using the Greek word for spirit, pneuma [pneuma], in this passage. He uses the word thirteen times, once in and now twelve times in . It's always contrasted with sin and the flesh. They didn't have this dynamic in the Old Testament. Old Testament believers didn't have this option. How do we know that? Because they didn't have the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. They couldn't be identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. So there's no deliverance from the tyranny of the sin nature in the Old Testament.
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They were born with three stripes against them. They get saved but they still have that slavery to the sin nature to deal with. So all through this section we have this contrast between flesh and spirit and life and death. It's all about life. How do we really experience that full life Jesus has for us? is where we see the whole principle of that deliverance from the mastery or the tyranny of the slave master of the sin nature. says “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin to death or of obedience to righteousness?”
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He's talking to believers and he says that you as a Christian have a choice, maybe a thousand choices, maybe ten thousand choices every day to either let sin master you or to let the Holy Spirit be the master. It's your choice. Before you were saved you didn't have that choice. It was all from the sin nature. But now you have a choice. So if you're messing up in your spiritual life you only have one person to blame. It's not God. So you make that choice every day,
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You let sin be the master or not. says, “And having been set free from sin you became slaves of righteousness.” See you've been set free from the tyranny of the sin nature but we still have that corruption. We can still walk according to the sin nature. Positionally we're slaves of righteousness but we have to live that way. That's the left circle. Positionally we're a slave of righteousness. We are sons of light but moment by moment we have to choose whether we're going to walk like a son of light or not.
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If you grew up in a family where your father or mother was proud of your family and your family heritage and your family name, if you did certain things they would say, “Now, no one in this family does that.” Did that mean you weren't a member of the family? No, it's a way of stating what the standard of behavior is for that family. If you act a certain way, you're not acting like a member of the family. But you're still a member of the family. So positionally we're slaves of righteousness but sometimes we act like we're slaves of sin.
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, “What fruit did you have then in the things of which are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.” These people are already justified. They have eternal life. He's talking about temporal death as a result of living according to the sin nature. So in , “For what the Law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh...” This is a great example of the word asthenes [a)sqenhj]which sometimes means physically weak or sick but in the epistles it almost always means spiritually unable or spiritually weak or being a spiritual wienie.
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That's how it's used in when it says, “Is there anyone sick among you, let him call for the elders and have them pray for him and anoint him with oil.” It doesn't have anything to do with being physically sick. It's this same word. It means to be a spiritual wimp. And you're wimping out and you're a wienie and you're just a failure by the numbers and so you need more mature believers to come alongside and encourage you and pray for you and move forward. It doesn't have anything to do with being sick. Otherwise, we'd translate this “What the Law could not do, sick as it was through the flesh.” That doesn't even make sense.
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The flesh can't obey the Law. “... what the Law could not do, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh.” Now if I give you a test which is why I spent all that time back in because I was establishing something. Why did we go there? To show that when Paul is making these contrasts between flesh and the Spirit, he's talking about believers and he's talking about the choices you make.
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Now, what's the context? You've been here all the way through since before seven o'clock watching the whole TV show, you've got the context. The context is talking about a believer and the spiritual life. It's not talking about how to be justified. So you look at this verse and you scratch your head and say, “Now that looks like it's talking about what Jesus did on the Cross.” But you'd be wrong. Why? Because it doesn't fit the context. It doesn't fit the context at all. This isn't talking about what Jesus did on the Cross. It's talking about what he did in laying out the pattern for the spiritual life for the Church Age believer.
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Jesus' life was really like a hinge in history. He's fulfilling the Law in the Old Testament. And the Law in the Old Testament was external with no internal enablement. But in order to demonstrate righteousness, Jesus under the Mosaic Law in the Age of Israel has to fulfill the Mosaic Law. On the other hand he does it because He's filled by the Spirit. He's enabled by the Holy Spirit, just like you and I are and He's setting the precedent for the future dispensation of the Church Age by how He lived. And He's showing by how He lived that there's no punishment for sin.
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He demonstrates that condemnation for sin in the flesh. He's the One who is condemning sin in the flesh. Because in His flesh He doesn't sin. “...So God sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh...” Now that's the same word that's used in Philippians, chapter 2 to talk about how Jesus is in the likeness of humanity, that when He came, entered into the world, the whole deal with kenosis, adding to His deity, humanity, He's in the likeness of sinful flesh but he's not sinful flesh. He just looks like it. He looks like you and me. He looks like a normal human being except He doesn't have a sin nature in the cell structure of His body. He hasn't inherited Adam's original sin and He doesn't have a sin nature. He's not corrupt. But he's a full human being but He's in the likeness of sinful flesh. He's truly human and as an offering sin he condemned sinful flesh by the way He lived.
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Why? Why did He do this? Verse 4, “That the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us..” What's the requirement of the Law? We covered this just a few minutes ago. Did y'all go take a nap? Go watch a commercial. Remember we saw that in when he first introduced the concept of loving your neighbor as yourself He said, “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Okay, keep that in mind.
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In , “that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us...” What's that? Love. Love is the ultimate. So it assumes and summarizes all the other virtues of spiritual growth and maturity in the fruit of the Spirit under that one thing. So he says, “That the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, [comma] who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Now see, this is another example in this chapter where commas are very important but in Greek there weren’t any commas. They didn't put in any commas or periods. In fact, they didn't even put spaces between the words. They do it like one long run-on sentence and you had to figure out by grammar and your knowledge of the language. You think, “Boy that would be hard to read.” Now it's not.
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It's like Hebrew reading backward. After you get used to it it becomes part of your thinking. I remember after about the fourth or fifth day my first year Hebrew class which I took in summer school. I think that was a mistake because there were so many little, bitty rules you have to memorize the first few days that it's just too intense at the beginning. But I remember coming home, driving home the fourth day and I came to a stop sign. Hebrew reads from right to left and I kept looking at the word “pots” on that stop sign. And that's when I knew I was beginning to get a handle on Hebrews a little bit. Your mind can take these things up and adjust as it goes along.
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We put commas in in order to clarify things and sometimes, it's a little ambiguous in the original language and you're not sure which it is and that's where theology comes in to help. You can either translate “us, who do not walk” but if you don't put a comma after us then all of us do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit and that's not true. There's some people who think that, that all of us who are true believers walk according the Spirit and not according to the flesh. And if you're not and you're walking according to the flesh, then maybe you weren't saved. But we have to put that comma in there because there are some of us who don't walk according to the Spirit very much, if at all. Then there are others who walk according to the Spirit a lot more.
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What Paul is saying is that the requirement of the Law... Which is what? Love your neighbor as yourself. The requirement of the Law is fulfilled in us who walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh. But it's not fulfilled in us who don't. See that's the same thing he said in . He started off, as I pointed out, that we're to love one another, to love our neighbor as our self. That through love we're to serve one another and then he goes on to this whole discourse of walking by the Spirit or walking by the flesh.
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If you walk by the Spirit, what happens? The Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit in your life and you'll have this genuine love develop in your life as the result of the Spirit. So the requirement of the Law to love, to serve one another is fulfilled in you by walking by the Spirit. But it’s not fulfilled in those who are walking according to the flesh because according to and following its just divisiveness, outbursts of wrath, and contentiousness, and hatred, and selfish ambition, heresies, envy, murders. So those who walk according to the sin nature have all of those sins manifested in their life.
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and 4 says that the Law couldn't so it. But the Law said, “love your neighbor as yourself” but no one could do it because the authority of their sin nature wasn't broken. So under the Law they couldn't do it but God sent His Son to fulfill it. He came to fulfill the Law. And He fulfilled it in His humanity through the power of the Holy Spirit. He didn't fulfill it through the power of His deity. Remember there's a firewall between His humanity and His deity. The only time He is authorized to access His omnipotence or His omnipresence or His omniscience is to demonstrate that He is God. He's never allowed to violate that firewall between His humanity and His deity to solve His problems in his humanity. Because He's setting a precedence to show that you and I, in our humanity, by walking by the Spirit can grow spiritually, obey God, and have victory over sin.
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In the Law couldn't do it but God did by sending His Son in mortal flesh as a human being but not in sin and He condemned sin in the flesh. The idea there is that He punishes sin. Sin is the object of the verb. So it's not that He's bearing the condemnation of sin. That's how we tend to read it. He is condemning sin by His ability to live without sinning in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
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Then we get another explanation in verse 5, “For those who are according to the flesh...” Now this is where you have people who come with that preconceived mindset of Reform theology, Covenant theology, Lordship theology, or even Armenian theology. At this point they start talking about believer versus unbeliever. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh.” See, believers can be according to the flesh, too, because they focus on the sin nature. They're ignoring the provisions of walking by God the Holy Spirit.
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A Christian, a born again believer, can be even worse than an unbeliever. In a lot of cases, the unbeliever is trying to get to heaven. He's trying to be moral. But the believer thinks he's grace oriented. He thinks God will forgive him; Jesus paid for it so what the heck? And they can be a lot worse. You've never really been betrayed and beat up on until you've been betrayed and beat up on by a believer. Again, “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.”
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See, you're either walking according to the flesh or according to the Spirit. If you're living according to the flesh then over time what's going to happen is your priorities and your values are going to be determined by the sin nature and you're living for temporal glory. But those who are living or walking according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. Then verse six says, “For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”
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There's a contrast here between the person focused on the flesh and the person walking by the Spirit. The verb phreneo [fronew] governs both those who live according to the flesh or those who live according to the Spirit. The verb phroneo means to think, to judge, to give your thinking to something, to set your mind on something, to be focused in a certain way of thinking. It means to give serious consideration to something, to ponder it, to let your mind dwell on it, to concentrate, to fix your attention upon something. So to be carnally minded is a person who is constantly focused on things that appeal to the sin nature or the flesh and to live that way.
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So to be carnally minded is death. Not eternal death in the Lake of Fire but you're going to have a death-like existence in this life. You'll never experience the benefits or the blessings of God in this life. It'll be a death-like existence. To be spiritually minded is life and peace. Not eternal life like life without end but as Jesus said, “I did not come like a thief to steal and destroy but I came to give life and to give it abundantly.” Right here and now we have this abundant, rich life because our mind is set on the Spirit. But if you're a believer and your mind is set on the flesh, then the result will be catastrophe, Divine discipline, judgment for sin, condemnation, all of those things and a miserable life as you're constantly being disciplined by God.
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Verse 9, “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you...” He's reminded us of that positional truth that we're not in the flesh anymore. We are in the Spirit. We understand that at the moment of salvation the Holy Spirit dwells in every believer. Then he goes on to say, “Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.”
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Again there's that connection back to justification. So verses 9 and 10 are talking about our positional realities. Then he's going to draw a conclusion to that in verse 11, “But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you [and He does] He who raised Christ form the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.” Now we already have eternal life so it can't be talking about eternal life here. It's talking about the experience of the richness of our new life in Christ as a new creature in Christ on the basis of what we're given through the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit. That's our potential.
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We're going to come back next week after we've all filled our bottom circles to abundance on Christmas Day and we'll learn all of what it means to live according to the Holy Spirit and the leading of the Spirit in the next five verses, verses 12-17.

Romans 085b-Indwelling and Filling of the Spirit Romans 8:9–11

Romans 8:9 NASB95
However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.
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Romans 085b-Indwelling and Filling of the Spirit
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We're in Romans, chapter 8, and we've been going down through looking at this contrast between those who are living according to the Spirit and those who are living according to the flesh. The flesh is just another term the Apostle Paul uses for describing the sin nature. The sin nature is just as powerful, just as evil, just as wicked, just as deceptive in the believer as in the unbeliever. That's one of those factors that some Christians just have a very, very tough time dealing with.
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Within the history of Christianity there have been two ways of dealing with it. Number one, if you're still committing some sins that culture in that time period has deemed the most wicked, evil, terrible sins, then you've lost your salvation. You're just committed some act that too great for the grace of God. That God somehow forgot to take care of at the cross or something like that. That usually goes by one of two names: Pelagius and Augustine.
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Historically Pelagius was an English monk who was Augustine's opponent. If you read Augustine, you think he's just about as messed up as Pelagius was but Pelagius believed that everyone was born with just as pure a soul as Adam was created with. They chose to sin and they chose to be saved. It was purely a works salvation and then you could choose to commit sins that would cause you to lose your salvation. Augustine's answer was an almost fatalistic view of salvation that later took another form as Calvinism. There are a lot of similarities.
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The Calvinists/Armenian debate that occurred at the end of the 16th century, early 17th century, rehashed a lot of the same ideas and we continue to fight those same battles today. The Calvinists started an Augustinian camp that goes to the opposite extreme. It's not that you lose your salvation; they just say you weren't truly saved to begin with. Both sides failed to understand the principle of the total depravity of man, even though that's a major watchword for Calvinists and Augustinians. They think that it's not that regeneration gives birth to a new entity in your soul, in the inner part of your being as we believe, but what regeneration does it sort of takes away some of the power, some of the ability, of the sin nature. That's how they define regeneration. It's not that you gain new capabilities, and a new life, and a new relationship with God but you lose the capacity to be as bad as you were before you were saved. That's really how they define regeneration.
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I remember about twelve or thirteen years ago reading an excellent scholarly article, not that I agreed with it but it was well researched and well argued, by a former classmate of mine in the doctoral program at Dallas Seminary who was dealing with that whole kerfuffle about Lewis Sperry Chafer who at that time had still not started Dallas Seminary. He was a budding theologian and he wrote “He Who is Spiritual” and it was reviewed by a man who was considered the greatest living theologian, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, who was the head of the theology department at Princeton. Warfield just took young Chafer to task for that book because it was contrary to what was taught in the Reformed or Presbyterian theological camp. Chafer was an ordained Presbyterian.
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So Warfield just went after it but in this article by this classmate of mine, going through it what really struck me was that in his conclusion he said that a lot of what Chafer said was really good but [there's always a 'but' that comes after that], but he just had a low view of regeneration. He didn't understand how regeneration limited the sin nature. That was one of those sentences you read that makes a light go off and you suddenly realize why a lot of people think the way they think. It's because they mis-define certain terms or they've got some bad theology in there.
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So all of that is crucial for really understanding what's going on here, why different Christians believe different things about the Christian life and it comes down to usually theological deductions that are imposed on the text, rather than looking at what the Scripture says and studying it. Some of this takes a lot of time. It's not as simple to study. You can't just look at what it says necessarily, what it says on the surface, because a surface reading of chapter 8, out of context, may look as if Paul is contrasting the regenerate with the unregenerate when he uses phrases like “walking according to the flesh” or “those who are in the flesh” versus those in the Spirit. It sounds at a certain superficial level if you don't study out those phrases as they are used by the Apostle Paul, especially in his formative epistle, Galatians, which is what we looked at last time showing that conflict between the Spirit and the flesh.
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((CHART)) I developed this chart years ago to show that there are two types of believers who are laid out in Romans, chapter 8. There are always two different kinds of people being talked about, those who are being successful and those who are failures. There are two lifestyles that are being described in , “that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” The successful believer is the one who lives and walks according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh or the sin nature.
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Then there's a contrast of two different ways of thinking in verse 5, “For those who live according to the flesh...” Living and walking are parallel concepts. It's a synonymous parallelism between verses 4 and 5. Verse 4 uses the concept of flesh versus Spirit. Walking is just a metaphor for how people conduct their lives. The successful believer operates on God's way of thinking, which is derived from the Word. The Word gives us the principles and the promises and as we meditate on it, it changes our frame of reference for thinking. It doesn't just happen. God wants us engaged in constantly reading and studying because that's the only way we really process what is there. It's not like God giving us a systematic theology book where everything is outlined and organized and laid out in ten points, where once you read it and memorize it, you're good to go and you can go home and not read it anymore. But you have to constantly go back to the Bible.
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Each time we go back and reread and study, as we've studied in other parts of the Bible and bring that information with us back to a fresh reading of , then all of a sudden we begin to see things in these chapters that we haven't seen before. So that is how it develops our thinking. We have two ways of thinking, either according to doctrine or Divine viewpoint as expressed in Scripture or human viewpoint, paganism. In verse 6 there are two results laid out, “For to be carnally minded is death...” When you're living and walking according to the flesh, the result is death. Not eternal death but a death-like existence in the life of the believer because he continues to live as if he is spiritually dead so he produces a death-like life.
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Now we're going to see a lot of this in our approaching study of Proverbs on Sunday morning because you see a lot of contrasts in Proverbs, between the wise and the fool. The path of the wise leads to life and the path of the fool leads to death. Again, in that context it's not talking about eternal death. It's the consequences of living according to wrong understanding of reality. So as verse 6 continues, “but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” Failure leads to a life of emptiness and death. For a while it may not seem empty. I think a lot of us may have had situations or evangelism opportunities where we talk to someone who's not a believer and you say, “You know you can't really be happy without Jesus or without doctrine.” And they're as happy as they can be. For example, if they think that they can be happy with a lot of good food, a lot of good wine, and if they have that, they're just as happy as can be. Until something happens in life that shows that a lot of good food and a lot of good wine just really can't get them through the difficult times of life. And that's when the props are knocked out from under them. But for many years as we've studied in Romans, they have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness, lived on the basis of a fantasy and they think they're happy. It's a pseudo-happiness, a temporal happiness but it has no real depth to it.
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Paul talks about two attitudes toward God in verse 7, “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God.” This is when the believer is living in accordance to the sin nature; he's in rebellion against God. He's hostile to God because the carnal mind cannot subject itself to the Law of God. It's in hostility to the Holy Spirit. So the contrast here in verse 8, “So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” When a believer learns the Word and he's walking by the Spirit, his life pleases God.
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There's a contrast we'll see in the upcoming verses, two different kinds of sons in verses 14 and 16. Those who are sons indeed in verse 14, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” Verse 16, “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” So we are sons indeed, verse 14, but those who never grow stay children. They never mature.
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Then we'll see two kinds of heirs, those who are both heirs of God and those who are heirs of Christ. The failures are only heirs of God. They're not heirs of Christ. So that chart contrasts the two kinds of believers. What kind of believer do you want to be? Do you want to be a believer who is successful in this life and that's defined by God's standards for success? Or are you going to be a failure? You may be a success in the world's eyes but a failure in God's eyes. That's the only success or failure that really matters. So the issue is learning how to live, to walk according to the Holy Spirit.
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Now we come to verse 9. Last time I just passed through verses 9, 10, and 11 real quickly. Now I want to come back and just camp out on a couple of key doctrines in verses 9, 10, and 11. One of the things that I pointed out again and again is that grounds the Christian life on this event called the baptism by the Holy Spirit. We've gone over that so many times. It's not in the Old Testament. No believer, no saved person, in all of the centuries prior to the day of Pentecost in A.D. 33 ever experienced the baptism by the Holy Spirit as identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection because it hadn't happened historically so it never occurred.
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Once that occurred, other things came along with that baptism with the Holy Spirit. That baptism, that identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, dealt with sin in a way that had never been dealt with before so that the individual believer could be sanctified positionally in a way that had never occurred before in history. Completely set apart to God.
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This is related to another ministry of God the Holy Spirit, His indwelling ministry. That is related to His work in positional sanctification of making us a temple. That's a concept that I don't think we have explored enough in the history of Christianity. What it means that each of us as a believer is a temple. The Greek word there is naos [naoj] which is the same word used to described the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, in the tabernacle or the temple in the Old Testament which is the specific area where God dwells. No one could come in there except for the high priest to go into the holy of holiest and only other priests could go in occasionally to the outer part which was the holy place.
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It's important to follow the grammar today. We live in a day when a lot of people don't want to pay a lot of attention to grammar and it's very important because there's some confusion over this. Most of you have been fairly well taught but it might surprise you that even among some of the people, the pastors that we know and love don't always get this right because there's confusion here. I have spent some time having some discussions with them on this. I don't know how successful I've been but it's a little bit dicey at times. We all get influenced by other people we read and study. The verse reads, “However you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed, the Spirit of God dwells in you.” So what we have here in verse 9 is a conclusion built on a conditional sentence. The conditional sentence is “if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.”
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In Greek there are different ways you can express what's called a hypothetical or a condition. If you go to the store tonight, you're going to get wet. Well, that is a statement that the first part is assumed to be true. If you go to the store tonight, you're going to get wet. Why? Because it's raining outside. You have statements similar to that in Scripture where the first part is assumed to be true. For example, where Satan is tempting the Lord Jesus in the wilderness he said, “If you are the Son of God...” He uses this first class condition and he is accepting the truth that states “and you are the Son of God.”
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Then you have another way of expressing a condition that says, “If, and we're going to assume it's not true.” And you might say something like, “If President Obama was a committed Christian, then he would not be hostile to many foundational principles in the Constitution.” You're making an initial statement, “If it were true” but you're really saying it's not true. There are many kinds of those conditions stated in the Scripture.
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A third kind that we normally think of when we state some kind of condition is, “If and we really don't know if something is true or not or is going to happen or not.” This is like , “If we confess our sins...” Maybe you will; maybe you won't. It could go either way. So there are those three different ways to express conditions in the Greek. In the English we only express it by the word 'if' and that doesn't necessarily convey the nuance or the meaning that's there in the Greek.
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The meaning here in this 'if clause' in verse 9, “If indeed [and it's true] the Spirit of God dwells in you.” Paul is assuming the indwelling of the Spirit of God in his audience. Now as you look at this in the English, asking a rhetorical question, you have 'you'. Is the 'you' singular or plural? In English it's difficult to tell because the translators didn't come from south of the Mason-Dixon line and they don't distinguish between you [singular] and y'all [plural]. Or even all y'all which is the plural of y'all. So this is significant. Is he talking about you as an individual or y'all as a group?
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Where I'm going with this and I want to clarify this tonight is that there are those who teach that when you get into the indwelling passages of the Holy Spirit in and specifically some in 6:19, they say that what Paul is doing is talking about the corporate whole of the Church. It is the place that the Spirit of God has made a temple. I'm going to show you tonight that that's not true. I remember one time sitting down and having a good discussion about this with Jim Myers in Kiev, one of the first years I went over there. We were talking about and why that shouldn't be taken to be a corporate thing although a lot of people take it that way. He said, “If you didn't have 1 Corinthians, how would you prove the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?” The answer , “...and the Spirit of God dwells in you.” And this is a foundation you can't really debate at all.
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God the Holy Spirit indwells inside each of us as believers. What's important, though, is we have to look at this plural pronoun. I'm belaboring this because I think if we understand the plural pronoun here we'll understand why the plural pronoun in 1 Corinthians doesn't mean the corporate entity of the local body of Christ. And it gets into some interesting grammar. If we are to translate this correctly we would translate it, “However y'all are not in the flesh” and the “are” there in the English is the present active indicative and the second person plural. Notice. A plural verb, y'all are. You have a repetitive second person pronoun. You don't have to put the second person plural pronoun into the Greek grammar. It's embedded within the verb itself but when you add the pronoun you're just emphasizing it even more. So it's emphasizing the plural pronoun aspect. Y'all definitely are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. So both of these are plural. Paul is talking to a group.
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Many times when I'm speaking to a group and I say y'all need to read your Bibles. I'm not saying you need to read your Bibles as a group and you understand that. When I say y'all need to read your Bibles I mean you as a group of individuals, every individual within that group, needs to read their Bible. What's funny is that people have come to this and they read the y'all as if its talking about a corporate entity and the corporate entity is where the Spirit of God dwells, not in each individual. I went back and looked at one point at every verb leading up to and I looked at all the injunctions or commands that were there and it's obvious that Paul gives all these commands as plural, all through 1 Corinthians. He addresses the congregation through plural pronouns and plural verbs. But he's speaking about individual application. The plural indicates he's talking to a group of people but a group of individuals, each of which has to fulfill the command.
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So when Paul says, “The Spirit of God dwells in y'all,” he's not talking about when the church comes together as a body it becomes the temple of God. That's very important to understand. Another little thing I want you to understand here because this is one of those fun little things in grammar that I like to talk about every now and then and tweak a few people in the congregation. That's also fun. We have some people here who we love to get down and dirty with on minor points of English grammar. It's a lot of fun. “However y'all are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in y'all but if anyone...” Wait a minute. What's that word? “Anyone?” We've shifted our pronoun from a plural pronoun to a singular pronoun because even in ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew, as well as ancient English going back to the 1300's, there are examples where plural pronouns are used to refer to individuals. Every now and then people get a little bit uptight over that. I have a tendency to do this. I don't know where I picked it up. But this is a classic problem of whether when we refer to either a singular noun or a singular pronoun is it proper to refer back to it with a plural pronoun, especially the third person plural pronoun, 'they'.?
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I will read from a couple of acceptable sources here. First of all this is from the word usage on Wikipedia in their dictionary. It says, “Now the usage of the third person pronoun 'they' to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested to as early as the 1300s in English. [It's all through the Greek and Hebrew in the New Testament, by the way. So it's good enough for the Holy Spirit it better be good enough for you.] Many admired writers have used 'they', 'them', themselves', and their' to refer to a singular noun such as one or a person or an individual and each. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, “A person can't help their birth.” [That grammar is just sacrilegious to some people.]
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And more recent writers, such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction in sentences, such as 'to do a person in means to kill them'. [See, you have 'a person', singular noun but 'them refers back to it as an indefinite plural.] Another example is 'When you love someone you do not love them all the time.' [someone is a singular noun, them is a third person plural. This is not part of just English. It's part of every language, I think, in order to avoid certain difficult constructions.] This writing is wide spread and can be found in such mainstream publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and The Washington Post. The usage is so common in speech that it generally passes unnoticed in speech. However, despite the convenience of the third person plural forms as substitutes for general 'he' and the structurally awkward forms like 'his or her' many people avoid using 'they' to refer to a singular antecedent [that's the preceding pronoun], out of respect for the traditional grammatical rule concerning pronoun agreement.
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Most of the usage panelists reject the use of 'they' with a singular antecedent. 82% find the sentence, “The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work” as unacceptable.” However, that kind of phraseology is used in the Bible constantly. According to Oxford Dictionaries and their guidance on this topic, “It's often important to use language which implicitly or explicitly includes both men and women making no distinction between the gender. This can be tricky when it comes to pronouns. In English a person's gender is explicit in the third person singular pronoun such as 'he', 'she', 'his', 'hers'. There are no personal pronouns that can refer to someone as opposed to something without identifying whether that person is male or female. So what should you do in sentences such as these? If your child is thinking about a gap year, then _____ can get good advice from this website. So should that be 'he', 'she' or 'he/she' in the blank? Another example: A researcher has to be completely objective in ______ findings. Should it be 'his', 'her', or 'his/her' [which is where we're going to with this silly gender-neutral language]?
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The Oxford dictionary goes on to say, “In the past people tended to use pronouns like 'he', 'his', 'himself' in situations like this but now they need to be gender-neutral.” So they come down to saying, “You can make the relative pronoun plural rewording the sentence as necessary by saying, 'If your children are thinking about a gap year, then they can get good advice from this website. Or if your child is thinking about a gap year, they can get good advice from this website.” They conclude by saying “You can use the plural pronouns, 'they', 'them', 'their', etc. despite the fact that they are referring back to a singular noun.” So that is the conclusion of the Oxford Dictionary style sheet. I think that ends the discussion.
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We have this same kind of problem here. We have this discussion of 'y'all', a plural pronoun and then its shifting to 'anyone', a singular pronoun in “does not have the Spirit of Christ he [another singular pronoun] does not belong to Him.” The 'you' is plural; the 'he' is instantiating that in showing that it has individual application. And so this is important to see these kinds of distinctions because if you're not careful, and you're splitting a grammatical hair too fine, you can end up in heresy by thinking that because its plural, it's talking about a group that becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit, rather than opposed to each individual within the group.
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So let's look at what the Bible teaches about the indwelling and the Holy Spirit. First of all at the instant of salvation every believer is both filled and indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. You don't feel it. I didn't feel it. We don't experience anything. Our blood pressure doesn't go up. Our heartbeat doesn't increase or decrease. We don't have palpitations, flushing of the skin, a rush of joy. Some people might. But it's not normative. It's not something everybody experiences. It would be related to other factors leading up to the point of conversion. But this is one of many, many things that happen at the point of salvation that are not part of an experience. We receive the imputation of Christ's righteousness. We don't feel anything. We don't suddenly feel that your soul is seared with moral purity as you receive the righteousness of Christ. There's no feeling there. It's just stated in Scripture. The only way to know about it is to study the Word of God so we know about it. The reason a lot of people don't know about it is that they don't study the Bible. They're afraid to. Usually because the pastor is doing things that aren't Biblical and they don't want anyone reading the Bible. So at the instant of salvation, every believer is both filled and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. These are not the same thing but they are related.
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The second point is that the indwelling is a permanent non-experiential reality that establishes the foundation for absolute or positional sanctification. That simply means that at the point of salvation we are all set apart positionally. We're given a new identity, a new position, a new legal standing in relation to God. That's positional and sanctification has to do with being set apart for the service of God. As an unbeliever we are in the kingdom of Satan. We have nothing ruling our nature except the sin nature and so we're not usable by God at all. There has to be a righteous transformation that changes our identity and puts us in a new place so that we can potentially serve God. That is called positional truth or positional sanctification. We see this embodied in this two verses. and 20 Paul says, “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, [see its possible for Christians to not know this which is what he has already stated in ]?” One thing that is instructive is that I went back and did a word search on soma –[swma]which is the Greek word for body. If you look at soma as it is used by Paul in this first epistle to the Corinthians it's never used of the collective body except when it talks about the body of Christ. It's always defined in the context. When its talking about the body related to the individual it always has this individual nuance to it unless it is clear from the context and the concept of the body of Christ hasn't been introduced in this epistle yet. “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you..”
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So the Holy Spirit is in you and this connects these two ideas which is so important. “whom you have from God and you are not your own?” So, see, this is what Paul talks about in where he says we shift from being a slave to sin to a slave to God. We're not our own. We're never our own person. We're never free to do our own thing. We either do Satan's thing or God's thing but we're never doing our own thing. The explanation why we're not our own is, “For you were bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.” This isn't just an abstract doctrine. It has a significance that every day because we're a new person, we have a new identity, a new positional reality, we are to glorify God in our body and in our spirit, both physically and mentally, we are to glorify God. All of that, the body, as well as the Spirit, is God's.
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One of the reasons Paul puts that in is because in Greek culture there had been this influence from Platonism from the last four hundred years that the body was really insignificant and it was tied to the earth. It was just basically morally corrupt and could not be of any value and the real value was in the spiritual realm. Here Paul makes it very clear that Platonism is just a bunch of bunk because the body and the soul have been bought at a price. So body and soul together can serve God. This comes from this permanent non-experiential indwelling.
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Third point about the indwelling and the filling of the Spirit is that the indwelling of the Spirit never before occurred in human history and its unique to the Church Age. You don't have it in the future, in the Tribulation. You'll have it in a different, expanded form, a much more robust form, in the Messianic Kingdom, the Millennium following the second coming of Christ when the New Covenant goes into effect with Israel. But what we have now is similar to, but not the same as what will happen when the New Covenant comes into effect in Israel and Judah. So the indwelling of the Holy Spirit never occurred before in human history.
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When you think about the Old Testament, fewer than a hundred people had any relationship with God the Holy Spirit. Some who were filled were people like Aholiab and Bezaleel who were the craftsmen who were responsible for all of the metal work, all the woodwork, all the furniture design, and the construction for the tabernacle. Later then all those doing all that work for the Temple. You have the prophets, you have some of the kings, but the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is primarily related to enhancing their leadership ability over the people of God. It is not related to their spiritual life at all. You just have to get that notion completely out of your head. It had nothing to do with David's spiritual life. It had nothing to do with Solomon's spiritual life. It had nothing to do with Moses' spiritual life. It had to do with enhancing their leadership role within the theocracy of Israel. Period.
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And it doesn't have anything to do with how spiritual or spiritually mature that Old Testament believer was. So we're going to look at some of these examples so you'll understand this. I want you to look at some of these in context. Let's go back to . This is repeated later on when it comes into practice as there's a lot of original instruction and then later a subsequent fulfillment in Exodus so there's a lot of repetition. God tells them to go build something and later on it describes them building it, so you get it twice. In Exodus, chapter 31, this is a description related to the construction of the tabernacle and the artisans. “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah.” The reason that genealogy bores you and shouldn't is because it locates this as a real person. If you read legendary, mythological stuff it doesn't lock down the person in terms of their genealogy as a real time individual who lived at a specific time and place in history. So “Bezaleel is the son of Uri, the son of Huri, of the tribe of Judah. And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom...” Notice God says I filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom.
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Now when we look at that and the way its written in the Hebrew it looks like he's got something similar to the filling of the Spirit that we have in the New Testament because of the similarity of the word 'fill'. But these are already gifted artisans who are being filled with the Spirit of wisdom. Now here the Spirit is described in terms of what it produces in terms of wisdom. This is a word we're going to spend a lot of time on in our study in Proverbs. Its the Hebrew word chokmah which has as its core meaning the idea of skill, producing something of value, producing something that's beautiful, producing something that's wondrous.
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In some contexts when its talking about wisdom in relation to life, it means living well, living in a way that brings glory to God and creates a beautiful, magnificent life, based on the grace of God and the wisdom of God and the revelation of God. Here its a spirit of skill at what they're producing. They are skillful seamstresses, they are skilled when they're making furniture, their metalwork and their woodwork. All of that. So when you look at , He's giving them a Spirit of wisdom, the Holy Spirit is behind it. It's not a filling by means of the Spirit like you have in but it is the giving of the Spirit which fills them with skill in their area of production. So verse 3 should be understood, “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, that is giving them wisdom, knowledge and all manner of workmanship.” It's not a spiritual thing, it is a skill thing in terms of what they're going to produce in the production of the tabernacle.
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In verse 4 the purpose is “to design artistic works, to work in gold, in silver, in bronze, in cutting jewels for setting, in carving wood, and to work in all manner of workmanship.” I don't see anything here like the filling by the Holy Spirit. I don't see character transformation. It's not about spiritual growth there. It's about being able to produce in wood, silver, gold, bronze, something of beauty, something of glory. That was the role of the Holy Spirit there. It's not related to spiritual life.
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Now let's turn over to another example, a couple of books over in the Pentateuch, to . Now this is another one of those situations where we see a lot of rebelliousness on the part of the Exodus generation with their complaining, griping, and grumbling. Of course, none of us ever do that. Verse 1, “Now when the people complained it displeased the Lord...” That's one of those commands that's repeated in the New Testament when the Lord says to do all things without grumbling or murmuring in as a reminder to all of us of that. “Now when the people complained it displeased the Lord, for the Lord heard it and His anger was aroused so that the fire of the Lord burned among them, and consumed some in the outskirts of the camp.” Divine discipline bringing death on more of the Exodus generation. God says that none of them were going to get into the land alive so there were these various judgments that occurred that took additional level of life. “Then the people cried out unto Moses and when Moses prayed to the Lord, the fire was quenched. So he called the name of the place Taberah...” There's this ongoing complaining there.
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Then as you go through the chapter this is where Moses begins to delegate authority to the seventy elders. In verse 16, “So the Lord said to Moses: 'Gather to me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tabernacle of meeting, that they may stand there with you.” So we're going to bring in this new leadership group that you're going to delegate responsibilities to and then God says in verse 17, “Then I will come down and talk with you there. I will talk of the Spirit that is upon you...” This is the Holy Spirit. Notice it's not in you, but upon you. It's the Hebrew preposition au which always means upon. It's from an external point of view. Not the preposition bu which means inside of but au which means upon or above. “... and will put the same upon them and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it yourself alone.”
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When this occurs they prophesied. Now what exactly does that mean? Did they foretell the future? Did they preach a sermon? There's one passage in Chronicles that uses the term 'prophesy' in relation to singing praise to God. I think that's probably what is meant here. Miriam prophesied before the Lord and then she sang a hymn back in so I think there is a meaning of prophecy that is singing praise to God. I think that's what happens here.
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So all of them that are there praised God but they didn't all come out of the camp. There are two that haven't come out yet. They're back in the camp and they're known as Eldad and Medad. So in verse 25, “Then the Lord came down in the cloud, and spoke to him, and took of the Spirit that was upon him and placed the same upon the seventy elders, and it happened when the Spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied, although they never did so again.”
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Another example of things that happen in the Scripture that are one-time events that are not to be seen as on-going events. This is like the gift of tongues and miracles and healing in the 1st century. They were just defined and set up to be temporary gifts as the foundation of the Church. In verse 26, “But two men had remained in the camp; the name of one was Eldad and the name of the other Medad. And the Spirit rested upon [not in] them. Now they were among those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp...” God is identifying who the leaders are by this manifestation as a result of the Spirit coming upon them.
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Then we had Balaam. Balaam, who is doing everything he can to earn his ill-gotten gains from Balak and he's even hired to curse Israel. He can't do it but the Spirit of God comes upon him. So it's not related to his spiritual condition. Balaam, I believe, was a believer but he's disobedient the whole time. So the Spirit of God comes upon and uses even carnal, pagan believers to accomplish His purposes.
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And no book shows that better than Judges. We have that kind of thing happening again and again to the judges. The Spirit of the Lord came upon Othniel in the fight against Cushan, which defied the King of Mesopotamia. The Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon in . The Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. He's the one who made a rash vow and ended up sacrificing his daughter for an offering to God. and 14:6 talk about the Spirit of the Lord coming upon Samson. Samson was a brutal, violent, womanizing, rebel against God 98% of the time in his life and yet God still used him because that's how things functioned in the Old Testament economy.
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We see another example of this with Saul. , “And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you [speaking of King Saul] and you'll prophesy with them and be turned into another man.” That indicates that he's regenerate, by the way. Then in , “When they came to the hill there was a group of prophets to meet him and the Spirit of God came upon him.” Notice it's always upon, upon, upon; it's not in. You didn't have indwelling like there is now. And then the Spirit of the Lord leaves him in , “But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him.” He comes under Divine discipline. The Spirit of the Lord left him. It was temporary. It was only for key leaders to enhance their leadership ability in relationship to the theocratic kingdom or theocracy of Israel and it was a temporary bestowing of the gift.
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This is why after David sinned with Bathsheba he prays to God in his confession for God to cleanse him of his sin and “create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your Holy Spirit from me.” See, this is not a prayer for us today. He doesn't want God to turn His back on him like God did with Saul and give the blessing to another dynasty or another house and take the Holy Spirit away from David like he had taken the Holy Spirit away from Saul. I'm amazed how many people decide they want to teach something different on that, even today.
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So the Old Testament did not have a permanent giving or bestowal or gifting of the Holy Spirit. There's no indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in these examples was not for their spiritual growth or their spiritual life. Now our Lord prophesied that there would be a unique coming of the Holy Spirit future to His ministry. In he says, “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees Him nor knows Him but you know Him for He dwells with you and will be in you.” So this is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit prophesied by the Lord.
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At this point the indwelling is for the purpose of making the body a temple, an inner sanctum for the indwelling of Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament temple the naos is constructed and once it's constructed the presence of God takes up its abiding presence inside the naos. So this is the analogy. The believer, therefore, is set apart bodily in this life from unbelievers. There are no sacred buildings, only the human body.
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In and all through that chapter, starting in 6:12 Paul is talking about things that believers should participate in and should not participate in and in verse 15 he says, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” The term bodies here is talking about the individual body. “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not!” He's talking about the physical, human body, not used metaphorically to refer to a corporate entity. Verse 18, “Flee sexual immorality; Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.” Again, he's talking about the individual physical body. Verse 19, “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body and your spirit, which are God's.”
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Then we go to . This comes immediately after Paul's description of the judgment seat of Christ and the destruction of the wood, hay, and straw and rewards for the precious stones. He says, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” He's talking to the whole group so he uses y'all but he's referring to the individual. “Do y'all not know that you [each individual within the group] are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him for the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.” So this indicates this temple sanctifying ministry of the Holy Spirit.
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Point number 6 is that the Indwelling of the Spirit is a permanent relationship not affected by carnality or spirituality. Whether you're obedient or disobedient, you are permanently set apart to God. But the filling of the Holy Spirit is something that is temporary. When we sin, it breaks that fellowship and that ongoing harmony. The filling of the Holy Spirit stops. The pause button is hit and is recovered only when we confess our sin.
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The seventh point: the indwelling is based on the grace provision of God. God, out of His character has given this wonderful provision for us. It's not based on our volition but the filling of the Spirit is. If we choose to sin, we break that filling ministry of the Holy Spirit and we have to confess in order to recover it.
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The eighth point: indwelling is related to the body and the temple sanctifying aspect of the Holy Spirit's ministry. It's our entire person because the body is the dwelling place of our soul and spirit whereas the filling of the Holy Spirit is the role of the Holy Spirit in teaching and filling the believer's thinking and soul with the Word of God. Now when we stop walking by the Spirit, that gets put on hold.
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Ninth point: filling is lost or put on hold when the believer sins but the indwelling continues because its for a different purpose. It's related to our permanent position in Christ. And then what we're going to see next time is that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is different from the indwelling of Christ. That doctrine is doubted. I can't believe how many Biblical scholars say that the term 'the indwelling of Christ' is just another way of talking about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit when that's clearly not true in Scripture. So we'll tackle that next time because it's all part of our study to understand . We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. That's the foundation for the spiritual life.

Romans 086b-Adoption and Heirship

Romans 8:13 NASB95
for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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Romans 086b-Adoption and Heirship
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We are in Romans chapter 8 and tonight we're going to begin in about verse 12. We've worked our way through the previous verses talking specifically last time about the whole doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit versus the filling of the Holy Spirit. Remember that every single believer at the instant of salvation is indwelt by God the Holy Spirit, non-experiential event. That means we don't feel it. It's not something that gives us a feeling of warmth or a glow. It's not represented by any kind of activity. It's simply something that happens along with numerous other, non-experiential things such as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, justification, adoption, all of these things that the Bible talks about that become ours and our reality at the instant of salvation. The only way we can learn about them is when we come to study the Word of God and then we realize how much God has given to us and how much He has provided to us.
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When we think about it, that's the way many things in life are. We're given many things in life with our birth. We're given a certain amount of natural talents and abilities, due to what is passed on to us through genetics, our inheritance through our parents and we only activate those things as we make decisions in life and decide to use them and we discipline ourselves and make many, many choices. Ultimately it comes down to our volition and making right decisions to pursue excellence and exploit whatever it is we've been given. When we study the Word we come to understand what it is we've been given spiritually and our need to exploit that.
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What becomes the foundation for our spiritual life is what Paul talked about at the beginning of Romans, which is our position in Christ. This is the result of this event that never before occurred in history prior to A.D. 33. That is the baptism by the Holy Spirit, that identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection that set us completely apart unto God and part of His family. It also involves, as a result of that, something we're going to look at tonight and that is adoption into God's family. And because it is adoption into God's family, it is adoption into God's royal family. With that comes something called inheritance.
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Now inheritance is one of those extremely significant doctrines in Scripture that is not always understood by many people. In fact, the average reader of Scripture thinks that inheritance in Scripture is something that is common to every believer, that all believers are equally heirs of God and of Christ, and that heirship or inheritance of the kingdom of God is equivalent to getting eternal life and going into heaven. And yet what we discover is that when we look into these passages, which we'll see some of tonight and next time, inheritance is based on behavior. Inheritance is based on choices. Inheritance is based on works.
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But salvation is a free gift, according to and 9. So if inheritance is based on works and salvation is based on a free gift, then salvation is not the same as inheritance. They are two different things. Now there are some aspects of our inheritance that are true for every believer and a part of salvation but there are other aspects of our inheritance that are based on choices and on volition and our decision to grow and mature in our Christian life.
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Now just for a little review, let's go back to verse 6, which is an explanation of a general principle. This is something that is true for a believer and an unbeliever, anyone whose mind is set on the sin nature, whose life is energized by the sin nature. The result of that is going to be death. Verse 6 says, “To be the carnally minded is death... [The Greek word there is for the sin nature]” Now that is a general principle. The unbeliever has no option but to be carnally minded. He can't be spiritually minded because he's not regenerate. He's spiritually dead.
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The believer can make a choice. If the believer is walking by the Holy Spirit, then he's not being energized by the flesh. That's what we looked at last time. But once we determine to stop walking by the Spirit then the result is that we go into that default mode of walking by the flesh. I was talking with Jim Myers today because I made the decision, due to a lot of things that happened this last fall, not to go over to Kiev this year. If I were going to Kiev this year I would not be here right now. I would be on my way over and I would be starting to teach there this coming Sunday. So Jim is teaching the course on rewards and inheritance in my place so we were going through the notes. He's added some things to what I had originally done. We always play off of each other that way. And so we were just going through a lot of the different passages in the seven letters to the seven churches, just to work our way through those because they're all about rewards and judgments.
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As we were talking about that and talking about that whole concept of walking by the Spirit, I used the analogy of Peter walking on the water. As Peter sees the Lord Jesus Christ walking on the water coming to the boat, Peter wanted to get out there and show that he could do that as well. He was always extremely motivated to trust the Lord. He was just energetic that way. That's something we miss out on; he was highly motivated. People who are highly motivated not only make great decisions and see great successes but they also trip and fall on their face a lot. So often we look at the failures and we forget the great success.
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As Peter starts to walk on the water, his focus is on the Lord. As long as he is focused on the Lord, he is walking by faith on the basis of the power of the Lord Jesus Christ to enable him to walk on the water. But before he sank, he took his eyes off the Lord. Now taking his eyes off the Lord wasn't in and of itself a sin but it put him in a position where he quit trusting and he put his eyes on something else. And that's what happens when we quit walking by the Holy Spirit.
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Jim made this great observation, saying, “We always focus on the fact that he took his eyes off the Lord but Peter walked on the water!” We forget that great success. He trusted the Lord and walked on the water. We always tend to go to the negative and say, “Yeah, but he took his eyes off the Lord.” But he trusted the Lord and he did walk on the water and that's just incredible. So anyway Jim and I had a great conversation about that this morning.
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This illustrates what every believer can do. We can do the spiritual equivalent of walking on water, something supernatural, something miraculous in our everyday life when we walk by the Holy Spirit but we have to keep our eyes on the Lord. We have to keep focused on the Word and we have to understand those dynamics of the spiritual life at having that focused, faith-rest mental attitude. And if we don't have it then we're just going to look at the waves of testing and slip beneath the waters of carnality and that ends up in death, not eternal condemnation but in a temporal death that is non-productive in the Christian life.
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So Paul says, “For to be carnally minded is death but to be spiritually minded...” Here he's talking about being focused on God the Holy Spirit. “...to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” That's the result of being spiritually minded. We have that abundant life that the Lord promised us. And then he explains that. Notice the 'because' in verse 7. All through this chapter it’s important to notice those initial words because it tells us it's either an explanation...that would be 'for', or 'because' or it gives a result or conclusion with 'so', 'then', or 'therefore' or in some cases, like verse 9, it builds a contrast. So Paul then gives the reasoning behind this in verse 7, “For the carnal mind is enmity with God...” The carnal mind, the mindset energized by the sin nature is always hostile to God. It's not just a little bit hostile to God, it's not partially hostile to God, it is completely hostile to God no matter how it dresses itself up in all kinds of legalistic works and in going to church.
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Someone can go to church, be involved in prayer meetings or prayer groups and they can in many cases share their testimony and they can do all kinds of things, all though the energy of the flesh and it has no eternal value whatsoever. They can be completely energized by approbation lust, by power lust, by various different kinds of lust patterns that manifest themselves. They can be energized by jealousy, envy, a desire to show themselves better than others but none of that has any value eternally. But on the outside to you and I they appear the same. The person on the right side of the room with their head bowed and their eyes closed and the person on the left side of the room with head bowed and eyes closed looked the same. But which one is in fellowship and which one's not, you can't tell. The person on the left that's witnessing to somebody; the person on the right that's witnessing to somebody; one person is doing it in the power of the Holy Spirit and the other is doing it in the power of the flesh. You and I cannot discern the difference. One person is giving, another person is giving, we can't discern the difference. Only God can. And that which is done in the power of the flesh is hostile to God because it's man depending on the arm of the flesh for success.
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As Paul says, “For the carnal mind is enmity against God for it [the carnal mind] is not subject to the Law of God.” It's doing it under its own terms. Verse 8 says, “So then those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” If the carnal mind is hostility toward God, Paul concludes that those in the flesh cannot please God. And we live in a world where it is a rare instance where pastors or teachers understand this distinction of doing it in the power of the Spirit or in the power of the flesh. It's muddied up. Much of theology is influenced by Calvinism and Reform theology.
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When I was in seminary and many other times I have had professors and instructors who just failed to understand this. In fact, they failed to understand how you could recover from sin and they didn't teach the significance of and confession which is covered in many other ways all through the Scripture. But here we have a clear description of the believer who is operating in the sin nature, which is hostile to God who can't submit to the law of God. That's not the Mosaic Law; that's the mandates in the New Testament. They're not able to submit to the law of God because they cannot please God when they're out of fellowship.
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Now how in the world can you recover from that? You can't. And how in the world can you think someone can be a little bit carnal and a little bit spiritual because they have mixed motives. Let's look at that concept a minute. Mixed motives are like having something with a little bit of leaven in it. It's good but it has a little bit of leaven. Paul says in Scriptures that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” It doesn't take but a little bit of wrong motivation, wrong attitude, being out of fellowship and no matter what you're doing that's good, it's done from a wrong motivation and done from a wrong way. A right thing done in a wrong way is wrong. It never will be right.
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It doesn't matter what the results are and so you have today a lot of people running around with a lot of God talk and a lot of Jesus talk and yet they have nothing going on that is Biblical, spiritual, or is really of the Holy Spirit. It's extremely sad because what these churches and pastors and groups have done is completely deceive people in thinking that their emotions and all the feelings that are generated going to those kinds of churches means they're somehow closer to God and they're as far away as they could possibly be. They may be saved but they're not getting anywhere in their Christian life. They don't know how to go forward. They're stuck and they're baby Christians, they're still in diapers, and we all know what babies do to diapers. That's all they're doing through their life and they don't know how to clean anything up by confession.
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So verse 7 says, “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God [this is an extremely strong word], for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.” In verse 9, you have a big contrast, “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.” So the starting point in verse 9 is being a believer and being indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
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Then he says in verse 10, “And if Christ is in you...” Here he's talking about a shift here towards the abiding relationship or fellowship with Christ because that's the purpose for the indwelling of the Spirit. “...the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.”
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Then we come to a conclusion in verse 12, “Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh.” So we are in a position of indebtedness because everything has been paid for us and we accept that as a free gift but we are in debt to the grace of God. This states the principle: we are debtors not to the flesh [which means to live according to the flesh]. Then we have an explanation which starts with that word “for” and then begins a series of first class assumptions so it's an assumption of the truth of the first part which leads to the result of the second part. “For if you live according to the flesh [assuming you're living according to the flesh], you will die....” Not eternal death.
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Remember there are seven different kinds of death in the Scripture. There's physical death, there's spiritual death which is true of every person who is born, we're born physically alive but spiritually dead. There is carnal death, there is positional death when we're identified with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, there is eternal death [eternal condemnation], there's sexual death. These are some of the different deaths in Scripture. There is operational death for the believer who lives according to the sin nature. He will die; he will not be able to produce anything that has eternal value.
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That's the focus here: if you live according to the flesh you will die, you will live a death-like existence. You have eternal existence and justification but you will have this temporal death-like existence. So you have the first part of this statement, the protasis, which is basically a grammatical term for the first part of a conditional clause, “if you are living according to the flesh”. If you are living your life on the basis of the sin nature you must die. You will die. It's an imperatival result there indicating the consequences of that death. “...but [in contrast] if by the Spirit [first class condition] you are putting to death the deeds [practice] of the body, you will live.”
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Both of these statements 'you must die' is an infinitive and indicates the natural consequence of living according to the flesh and 'you will live' is a future passive that shows the result of living by means of God the Holy Spirit. And the phrase there for the Spirit is just your normal dative use for the Spirit there indicating He's the means whereby we do what? We put to death the deeds of the body. Here's another way in which death is used here. A central idea in death is often separation. For example, when Adam and Eve sinned, they were separated from God. When Adam and Eve believed, that restoration of relationship occurred and was restored. So we have a separation that should occur here from the deeds of the body. This is another way Paul uses to talk about the deeds of the flesh, or the sin nature.
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So believers are to be putting to death, that is, separating themselves from the works of the sin nature. And that only comes about by what? By making decisions such as, “I'm not going to react that way. I'm not going to respond that way. I'm not going to give in to those feelings of anger or resentment or I'm not going to follow through with that lust pattern, I'm not going to let that control my life right now. Right now, if you're a baby believer it may last a nanosecond. Right now if you have a little time in grade, it might last two or three minutes, maybe five or ten minutes. As we mature spiritually then it lasts longer. But what we're supposed to be doing is putting to death the deeds of the flesh, not saying, “Well, it's really hard. I'll just confess my sin later.” That's not how it's done. We should be putting to death the deeds of the flesh, removing that from our life. That's the focus of the metaphor, “separating that from our life.” We are to put to death the deeds of the flesh.
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And then there's an additional reality here that we have to understand in terms of this distinction with children that comes in the next verse. The next verse says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” Now let's stop a minute and think about this. Now we have a further issue. There are believers who are not led by the Spirit and what this means is they're not following the Spirit. They're not walking by the Spirit. The Spirit may be objectively leading but they're saying, “I'm going this way. I'm going that way. I'm not following your leadership.”
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This isn't talking about the reality that God the Holy Spirit leads every believer. But God the Holy Spirit doesn't make every believer follow. Remember, last week I talked about that there are two different passages or two different words that are used in for walking. At the beginning there's the command that we're to walk by means of the Spirit and we won't carry out the deeds of the flesh. That word for walk is peripateo [peripatew]. It's a word that simply focuses on the mechanics of walking and putting one foot in front of the other. You walk along one step at a time, taking one decision at a time, not looking down the path to the chasm that's coming up or the rough patch that's coming up but just focusing on one step at a time right now.
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At the end of that segment we have stoichio in verse 26 which talks about following in the steps of the Spirit. There's an order to it so it's emphasizing another aspect of walking, following in the steps of the Spirit. See, there are a lot of Christians who don't want to follow in the steps of the Spirit. They want to follow their own path, not the path laid out by the Spirit, which is the Word of God. They want to chart their own course. They want to use all the God-words, all the Jesus-terms, wear the little bracelets that say 'What would Jesus do?”, and all the little witness wear and all this other stuff but it's superficial. It doesn't go any deeper than their clothing because they don't understand any of the mechanics and the stocheo believer is the one who is following in the footsteps of the Holy Spirit.
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The Spirit is always leading but Christians are not always following in those footsteps. Now the ones who follow are actively being led by the Spirit. They are doing what the Spirit says to do and they are following those steps, those verses, those protocols laid down in the Word for us to go forward. The ones who do this over a period of time reach maturity and they're called 'sons of God'. It's a technical word in the Greek, huios. It's not a baby, it's not an infant, it's not a child but it's a mature son. And so what Paul begins here in verse 14 is to lay out a chart of two different courses of action in the lives of believers. You can have a destiny as a believer that is mediocre or a failure or a destiny as a believer who is a success and identified in the seven letters to the seven churches in Revelation as an overcomer believer.
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The problem is we take a verse like this as equivalent to the phrase 'sons of God' or actually 'children of God' in but it's a different term. is talking about teknon [teknon] which is a term for children, not sons. These are mature sons. We have to realize that at the instant of salvation, every believer is regenerated and adopted into the royal family of God. We're regenerated and become a new creature in Christ but we're just a little whiny baby in diapers and we don't know anything. What Peter tells us in is that we are to desire or hunger for the Word like a newborn baby. If any of y'all have been around newborn babies when they get hungry, they just start screaming for food. They want food. They want somebody to feed them. They want that right away. I'm seeing some heads nod out there. Yeah, they want to be fed. A lot of new believers are that way but if you don't feed them, then their appetite starts to go away after a while and their systems start to shut down and they quit demanding food. This is where 98% of American Christians are today. They've been starved for so long that they don't even know that they're hungry.
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Years ago I went on a long outward bound type of experience with Honeyrock Camp which is Wheaton's Camp up in the north woods. At the end of two weeks of canoeing and backpacking, we did this three day solo. We weren't to have food for a number of reasons. That was part of the goal, to go three day without food and to fast. One of the most significant reasons was because there were a lot of bears in those woods. If you had any food with you, the bears would come in at night and roust your little camp. We were all spread out about a hundred or two hundred yards apart from each other so there wasn't any way to get any help. Nobody had any 1911s in their backpack to protect themselves from any marauding bears, no 357 magnums or anything like that so you knew you had to make sure you didn't have any food.
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After about the first day or so your appetite began to naturally suppress. We were drinking a lot of water, we were right on the shore of Lake Superior which keeps a mean temperature of 33 degrees year round so that's too cold for bacteria to develop so it's perfectly good to drink all the time, at least it still was at that time. This was about 1980, I believe. So we had all the water we could drink and I couldn't believe it. By noon of the second day I had no desire for food. By the end of the third day the appetite's completely gone. You don't care about food. You're not interested in food.
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The next day we all were gathered up, talked about our experiences, got loaded up on a couple of trucks and vans and were taken back toward the base camp about thirty miles away. Then we were dropped off about 13 miles, half a marathon, from the base camp. After three and half days of no food, preceded by two weeks of backpacking and canoeing with very little food, then we had to run the last thirteen mile back to the base camp. When we got there, there was a sumptuous, sumptuous meal for us. You really didn't want to eat that much. But once you started eating that appetite kicked into high gear.
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Now I think spiritual hunger is something like that. If you don't feed newborn baby believers, then they're not hungry after a while. Their appetite gets suppressed. That's what happens in all these churches. You don't hear whiny babies crying to their pastors that they need more doctrine, they need more teaching, they need to learn something because they've been starved so much, they've been put on a spiritual fast, so they don't want to hear anything, they don't want to learn anything, they don't want to eat any spiritual food. But those who haven't gone too far when they start hearing the truth, a lot of times, all of a sudden they wake up, and they become spiritually energized and they want to eat. That's the idea Peter has in when he states “As newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the Word that you may grow thereby.” We grow by the Word, not by singing, not by fellowship, but by the Word. We grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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So we're regenerated but then we have to grow. We start off as babies. Brephos [brefoj] is the Greek word for infant, teknon can be a child from infancy all the way up to they are an adult mature son. Then we have the word huios [u(ioj] which describes an adult son. That's the word we have here. Those who follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit, these are the ones who become sons of God, adult sons, mature Christians. You only get there by walking by the Spirit and following the leadership of the Spirit. Now several passages in the Scripture are important references to this. One that I mentioned earlier is . talks about the fact that we're saved as children. “But as many as received Him...” a synonym for believing at the end of the verse. The previous verse says “He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him”, meaning the Jews. “...but as many as received him [accepted Him as Messiah], to them He gave the right to become children, teknon, of God even...” This is an assensive use of the conjunction kai [kai] which means that is, “to those who believe in His name.” So how do you become a child of God? You believe in His name. At that instant you become a child of God.
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You're not a child of God because you are a creature of God's. That is the teaching of liberalism. In my first church I had some people who liked to watch Robert Schuller on Sunday morning and they also liked to watch the broadcast of First Methodist Church in Houston. I was down near Galveston. There were a lot of great people in the church, too. It was a mixed bag, a great learning experience. You want to have a church like that when you're young and when you're just getting started because you need to learn and go through those hard knocks. To get that kind of congregation at the end of the run is tough. You don't want to do all that head knocking that needs to come along. You're too tired after forty years of dealing with sheep.
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There were many people in that church who believed everybody was a child of God. That's the so-called the Christian belief of many Americans who believe we're all children of God but what this teaches is that the only way to become a child of God is to believe in His name, which in the context of the gospel of John is to believe Jesus is who He claimed to be, the Eternal Son of God and the Promised Messiah. So we're saved to become sons, not to stay as babies.
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The fifth thing we learn here is that several passages indicate sonship is a result of character, not simply faith. In case you got lost on some of those points, the first point was that at the instance of salvation every believer is regenerated and adopted into the royal family of God. Second, at that instance of salvation, everybody is a baby. Everybody is a little crybaby, a little whiny baby. Then the third point is that huios is an adult son. There has to be growth. It doesn't happen automatically. It only happens as a result of decision, after decision, after decision to partake of spiritual food. Fourth point, shows that we're saved for this ultimate purpose. Then fifth, several passages indicate that sonship is a result of character, spiritual maturity, not simply the result of believing the gospel.
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That's really important because some people want to make sonship equivalent to the gospel. But what is the gospel? The gospel is that salvation is a free gift. , “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast.” You don't work to earn a gift; it is something freely given but these passages that talk about sonship talk about something being earned. Something that's the result of character change. Something that's the result of growth. For example, says, “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.” This should be a sign over everybody's doorway in times of political persecution.
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Wait a minute. I thought over in that John said it's by faith. That's to become a child of God. This is becoming a huios of God, a son of God. In order to be a huios, to grow to maturity we have to be obedient. We have to enact in our lives the mandates of Scripture. So Jesus says that in order that you may be sons of your father in heaven “for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” That's grace orientation. This is talking about common grace. So how do you become a son of God? You have to grow to spiritual maturity. You have to have unconditional love toward those who love you as well as those who are enemies. Another verse is , “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.” This isn't talking about world peace. This is talking about peace between fallen human beings who are born in a state of enmity with God and God who is reconciling the world to Himself through Christ. Reconciliation is a term that always related to peace. The way we are peacemakers is through exercising our ambassadorship, representing God and announcing the gospel that there is peace between you and God. You need to believe in Jesus Christ and this peace becomes a reality in your life. So the peacemakers are those who are witnessing to and evangelizing those who have never trusted in Jesus Christ as Savior. So the peacemakers are blessed because they're growing to maturity. They shall be called sons of God.
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Then when we go to the end of the New Testament, to the end of the book of Revelation, we have one of those passages that people always get confused about. I encourage you if you've never gone through the Revelation series, take some time and at least go look at the passage in and 8 because this is so very important to understand. Revelations 21:7 talks about inheriting and Revelations 21:8 talks about losing an inheritance. So the context here is talking about inheritance, not justification or getting eternal life. In 21:7 we're told, “He who overcomes shall inherit all things...” So that means if you want to inherit everything from God you have to do something. Wait a minute. I thought salvation was not by works. Right. That's why overcoming can't be equivalent to gaining eternal life. Gaining eternal life is a free gift. So inheritance is the result of overcoming.
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The one who overcomes grows to spiritual maturity and Jesus promises, “I will be his God and He shall be my son.” But then we have the contrast of the person who spends his life just living in his sin nature as much as he did before he was saved in verse 8, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone and is the second death.” Now the key word there is that word 'part'. We've studied this before. There are many people who take that to mean they have their destiny there, they shall have their role in the lake of fire. That's not what the word means. It's a Greek word meros [meroj] which is used to designate that part of a will that specifies the inheritance to an heir. So it should be translated, “they shall have their portion of the inheritance”. It's not talking about them. It's talking about their portion of the inheritance. So the picture here is that here is an inheritance that was set aside for this individual but because they failed to mature and qualify for the inheritance, rather than receiving the inheritance that would be distributed at their majority or when they become mature, they're disqualified from receiving it.
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They're still in the family of God. They still enter heaven but the inheritance is thrown into the Lake of Fire and destroyed for eternity. They're never going to qualify for it. It's not talking about losing salvation. It's talking about losing inheritance. This is seen throughout many, many passages. I did a lot of in depth study of that whole concept when we went through the book of Revelation. So the overcomer is the one who grows to spiritual maturity; the non-overcomer is the one who lives according to the sin nature. So the one who overcomes will be a son. It's works again in the sense of pursuing spiritual growth and spiritual maturity.
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Now back to Romans. When we look at , “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” These are the mature ones. Now in verse 15 we have another explanation “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear..” What he means by “spirit of bondage” is that he means bondage to slavery to sin which we were set free from at the instant of salvation through the baptism by the Holy Spirit. “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we call out 'Abba, Father.'” Now abba is the Hebrew or Aramaic term that's equivalent to daddy. It's a term of endearment between a son and a father. You go around Israel and you always hear the kids calling to their father, “Abba. Abba. Come look at this.” Abba and daddy are equivalent. It is a very intimate term between a father and a child. So we are adopted into the family of God and He becomes our Father.
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This introduces us to the doctrine of adoption. It's a fundamental doctrine. I want to look at it two ways. First of all we have to understand something about the historical background and that may be as far as we get this evening and then we'll look at its doctrinal significance. We're adopted into the family of God. This means that now for all legal purposes we are part of God's family. We see this under the sealing of the Holy Spirit. He basically puts his brand on us. This is a good Texas doctrine so we're identified forever and ever as His. We can't lose that. It is a permanent adoption. When Paul talks about adoption, he covers it both in here as well as in Galatians, chapters three and four. He builds on the Romans and Greek ideas. He sort of borrows from both. When you use metaphors you're not using everything in the comparison. A metaphor or simile always compares one thing to another. A simile is a stated comparison such as, “White as snow.” There are a lot of different characteristics of snow. White is the one characteristic that's the focal point of this comparison and it's a stated comparison using the word “as” or “like”. White as snow and then you have the literal sign of its reality.
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When you look at adoption it's a metaphor, not everything related to either Greek or Roman adoption would apply, just certain features of Greek or Roman adoption would apply. In Greek adoption, the practice of adoption emphasized the family relationship. A man during his life or by a will after his death [isn't that interesting?] could adopt any male citizen into the privileges of his family. So a male could adopt someone at the time of his death. You'd never even know them actually. They may already be dead but according to the terms of the will you're adopted into his family which gives you all of the privileges that pertain to that particular family.
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So that is a point of comparison with the family of God because Jesus Christ dies on the Cross and because of His death on the cross we can be adopted into the family of God and given all the privileges related to family membership. So the adopted son, in the Greek model, would accept all the legal obligations and the religious duties of a real son. So he becomes the son in reality by choice and he has all these legal obligations that are set upon him. So when Paul emphasizes the family aspects of our adoption, he has the Greek model in mind. The Greek model focuses on those family realities and that's especially true in Romans.
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Paul, in , emphasizes the reality of our adoption as part of what happens with the baptism by the Holy Spirit at that same instant in time, and all the different things that happen. One of those is that we're adopted into the family of God. So the emphasis here in is on the impact that should have on the way in which we should live. Now we have a new obligation because we have been adopted into the family of God.
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The Roman custom was much more severe and demanding. Roman law emphasized a severe authority of the father over the son. The father in the Roman system could just at the snap of a finger put everyone into slavery for the rest of their lives. He is the complete tyrant over the family. He is a tyrant over the son so that the son is no better than a slave until adulthood. Now that fits more the model of what Paul is illustrating when he's talking about adoption over in Galatians. The reason the Romans gave such authority to the father is that they were trying to protect the inheritance and protect the purity of the aristocracy.
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If a natural son is a loser, a failure, if he's incompetent, if he just can't carry the banner for the family, then the father can disinherit him and he can bring in an adopted heir. Can you think of an illustration of this? Ben Hur. Judah Ben Hur, that's where the name comes from, he's a Jewish aristocrat who is framed for an attack on Roman soldiers by accidentally knocking some tiles off the roof and they fall down and hit soldiers and as a result he's put into prison. He's sold as a slave and he goes into the galleys and is a galley slave. Then he's involved in this huge battle at sea and he saves the life of a Roman tribune who then adopts him as his son. When he shows up back in Jerusalem he goes by the Roman family name, he has the family seal, he represents everything in the family even though he's not a blood relation. He is an adult when he's adopted. That film shows a great illustration of the history of Roman adoption.
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In the Roman system, there's a ceremonial purchase of the one who is going to be adopted which is referred to as 'redemption'. He's purchased through this ceremony. So if the new son was a slave, like in the case of Ben Hur, then an actual purchase price is paid for his freedom. He's redeemed from slavery and then as a free man he's then adopted into the family. Roman adoption emphasizes inheritance or the possession of certain things, not a blood relationship, and it can relate to a blood relationship, as well as an unrelated heir.
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Now in the Roman system, in the first fourteen years, a son is put under a pedagogue or tutor. This is what Paul talks about in Galatians. He's put under a tutor and he's basically treated as a slave, inferior to the slave who is the tutor. The role of the pedagogue is to discipline and to train the child of the aristocrat. So in those early years there are no rights for the son for the first fourteen years until he is old enough at the age of fourteen to receive the toga of youth which indicates his new position. Then this indicates even for a blood son there is a sort of adoption ceremony where he is recognized and made part of the family. When the father announces that the son is now accepted into the family.
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That's all the time we have but you can see where we're going. Now what Paul does is he's going to draw from the historical analogies that are familiar to his readers to show that there are privileges that we have as believers because we've been adopted into the family of God and we now have to live up to that family name. We carry that banner forward and so there's an obligation put upon us, as believers, to live in a way that brings honor and glory to God and this is because we are now adult sons. We'll come back next time and look at that and then connect it to the doctrine of inheritance.

Romans 087b-Adoption and Heirship - Part 2

Romans 8:13 NASB95
for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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Romans 087b-Adoption and Heirship - Part 2
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Open your Bibles tonight to where we're going to look into some interesting things in this passage. But before we get into the section that we're focusing on, , which focuses both on the doctrines of adoption and heirship that are crucial to understand, I just thought I would lighten the mood a little bit and point out some historically humorous mistranslations of Scripture.
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is a verse that should be translated, “Likewise, you husbands, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.” Now in Matthews Bible which was an early translation made of the Greek New Testament in 1537, this verse was mistranslated in the notes that were included in the Matthew Bible in 1537 so it became known as the wife beaters Bible. That footnote read, “And if she be not obedient and helpful unto him, endeavor to beat the fear of God into her head that thereby she may be compelled to learn her duty and do it.” That's one reason this is not a very well-known translation today.
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Another example is from , “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.” Once again this fits our topic tonight, dealing with the sons of God, a term for mature believers, not just a term for those who are children of God by faith alone in Christ alone. This is a verse for all of the homemakers listening. It was translated in the Geneva Bible in 1562 as “Blessed are the place makers for they shall be called the sons of God.” So for those who set the table, this is their verse in the Bible.
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, because of the mistranslation there was called the Printers Bible. It should be translated, “Princes persecute me without a cause, But my heart stands in awe of Your word.” The Geneva Bible translated that “Printers persecute me without a cause, but my heart stands in awe of your word.” So that was another mistranslation. One of the most famous Bibles with a printers error was called the Adulterers Bible. says, “You shall not commit adultery.” The printer dropped out the word “not” and in the King James version published in 1631, it read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The printers were fined 300 pounds for their error. Most of the copies were gathered up and destroyed, only eleven are known to exist today.
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Another verse we should probably get to this evening is , “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites...” But in the Unrighteous Bible, a King James translation printed in 1653, they dropped the word “not” again. That's one of those troublesome little words and it reads, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God..” So these are kind of fun little tidbits of history.
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In , this mistranslation of this passage led to one King James Version, translated in 1716 being called the sinners Bible when Jesus is interviewing the woman caught in adultery. “He said to the woman, “Does anyone condemn you? No one, Lord, she answered. So he said to her, Go your way and sin no more.” But the sinners Bible translated is as, “Go and sin on more.” See you have to make sure you get those letters in the right order or it can just cause all kinds of problems.
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Then there's the fool's Bible which was a King James Version printed in 1763 which reads, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” Once again, they dropped out that troublesome little word “no” and it said, “The fool has said in his heart, there is a God.” The printers were fined 3000 pounds and all the copies destroyed. So that shows the importance of getting it right. One of the things I'm going to point out tonight is that error can creep in, not just by switching the letters in a word, like “no” to “on” or dropping out a word like “not” but it can lead to a problem just by inserting a comma in the wrong place.
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So let's turn to . This whole section here is talking about the contrast between those who are living according to the flesh, which is talking about believers. As I pointed out in the past, believers who are living according to the flesh, walking according to the sin nature, are the same category as Paul warns the Galatians about in and following. He states there's a war between the flesh and the Spirit, and if you're not walking according to the Spirit, you're walking according to the flesh. So believers do live and walk according to the flesh, as I pointed out in the last class, and the warning here is that there will be death. Not eternal condemnation death but a death that is the result of a death-like existence because we're not living on the basis of God's Word and the grace of God's Word.
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By the time we get to verse 14, it reads, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” I pointed out last time that the term here is important. It's not children of God, teknon [teknon]. It is the sons of God, huios [u(ioj], which is a term for an adult son, not just a child. So those who are led, actually follow the Spirit, and walk according to the Spirit grow to spiritual maturity. Then in explanation, verse 15 comes along and Paul says, “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, Abba, Father.”
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Bondage or slavery was the whole focus of because at the instant of salvation we are identified with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. Therefore we become a new creature in Christ and we're no longer slaves to the sin nature but we are slaves to righteousness positionally, in terms of our new family, our new identity. So he says “You did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear [which is what characterized you as an unbeliever] but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, Abba, Father.” This indicates close intimacy, becoming a family member of the family of God.
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So the contrast is between those who are sons of God, huios, growing to maturity versus those who are mere children of God who have been redeemed and adopted into the family of God. So that brought us to the doctrine of adoption which I covered partially last time looking at the cultural and historical background. I pointed out that in Greek adoption the focus was on family relationship and emphasized the one who was adopted coming into the family and accepting all the legal obligations and religious duties of a genuine son in the family. So Paul used these aspects of Greek adoption when he's emphasizing the fellowship and family responsibilities of the believer.
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In contrast the Roman concept of adoption was much more rigorous and demanding on the one who was adopted. This was partially based on their strong emphasis on the authority of the father. The Roman law was called the patria potestas or the power of the father. In the Roman system a son is no better than a slave until he reaches maturity or adulthood at about the age of 14. Until then he's treated like a slave, has no rights, no privileges. The father can even turn him out to slavery, turn anyone in the family out to slavery, if he so desires. He had complete control.
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I pointed out several other facets of that last time. What I want to do tonight is go on looking at the spiritual significance of adoption in the Scripture. Based on the Roman concept of adoption the child is placed under the complete authority of the tutor or the Greek pedagogue who had all the authority. The child had none. This is the analogy Paul uses in Galatians and he develops this emphasizing that he's drawing a focus on believers under the Law as being similar to a child that is under a pedagogue. He just has no freedom whatsoever; he's completely under the authority of that pedagogue. So this is developed by Paul in Galatians3:26 and following.
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There, he talks about “you are all sons of God through faith” and ties that to the baptism by the Holy Spirit which occurs to all and then later on, he develops the whole analogy in relation to the pedagogue. Essentially what he is doing is showing that in the history of the human race, Israel under the pedagogue is limited and they don't have freedom and the pedagogue dictates every aspect of their existence. The pedagogue is the Mosaic Law. At adulthood, which comes at the time of Christ, when Christ pays the penalty for sin, the role of the pedagogue is over and the child now becomes an adult son with all the rights and privileges which God gives them.
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The church age believer is compared to that mature son who has reached maturity and now has freedom and now has the position and responsibilities given to an adult son. This is related to the fact that the believer is identified and placed in Christ who is the adult Son, the huios of God. Because of our position and identification with Christ we have these privileges positionally. There is now freedom for the believer. That gives us that background of understanding adoption so we are adopted into God's family.
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As part of adoption and being a member of the family, this leads to another important aspect of our spiritual life which is inheritance. If you are a child, then you are usually considered to be in a position where you can inherit property from your parents. In our understanding of inheritance someone has to die and then whatever they owned is passed on to the next generation. That is not the main idea in the Jewish Old Testament concept of inheritance. I've gone through lengthy studies of that and basically the core meaning of the word inheritance is possession. Someone can have an allotment of land in the promised land and it is their inheritance. They own it but no one died and left it to them. That is their possession.
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The main idea we have in the word inheritance is really this idea of ownership and possession. That same idea does come across into the New Testament. I want to review this doctrine of inheritance or heirship. This is really important because a lot of confusion comes up when people read certain passages in the New Testament because they have a preconceived idea of what inheritance consists of they misread and misinterpret the passage.
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((CHART)) Three questions we need to address are listed here on the screen. First, is the concept of inheritance a synonym for receiving eternal life? For example, in and 20 we have a list of the works of the flesh. They are adultery, fornication, lewdness, idolatry, envy, murder, drunkenness, revelries, and the like and when Paul finishes he says that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
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Now many people read “inheriting the kingdom of God” as receiving eternal life. Under that interpretation, if one commits these sins or commits them on a frequent basis then they can't have eternal life. That is a problem because that makes salvation appear to be based on works or overcoming sin in our life. When people read these lists they usually focus on adultery, fornication, murder but they overlook the outbursts of anger, hatred, jealousy, the mental attitude sins of envy and these sins are manifest by every believer. It's easy to see someone's overt sins sometimes but it's not so easy to see the arrogance and the hatred and the resentment and the bitterness that may be going on inside of their soul. This seems to indicate that if inheriting the kingdom means getting eternal life then we have to earn it by getting rid of sin in our life. That is a conflict with many passages that talk about salvation being a free gift.
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Second question we have to address in relation to that is: Is an inheritance earned? Is it given? Or aspects of both true? In other words, are some aspects freely given and other aspects of the inheritance earned?
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Third, we need to determine the exact meaning of this concept of inheritance. Now where that comes to play in our immediate passage in has to do with and 17. says, “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” That's teknon. “And if children then heirs..[so we are heirs]“ Then if you have a passage like most, such as my New King James which has a dash which sets off the next part of this as sort of a parenthetical explanation of heirs and it's punctuated as “—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,...” Notice the comma is placed after Christ. According to that punctuation, heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ are viewed as being identical or synonymous terms. In other words if you are a believer you are an heir of God and you are also a joint heir with Christ. They would be identical based on that punctuation.
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Remember there were no commas, periods, semi-colons or colons or anything like that in the original Greek. All the letters just ran together with no spacing between them. The problem we have with this punctuation is that if we are all equally heirs or God and fellow heirs or joint heirs with Christ, then that would make those categories of inheritance dependent upon the last conditional clause there, the “if” clause. We would be heirs of God and heirs of Christ, not if we believe in Christ but “...if indeed we suffer with Him that we may also be glorified together.”
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See that last “if” clause explains that if you want to be an heir of God and fellow heir with Christ then you have to suffer with him. What does that mean? That caused a lot of problems down through the centuries in Christianity because of the misunderstanding and mispunctuation of that verse. Most of your Bibles punctuate it the way the New American Standard does so this bases heirship on suffering. If you don't suffer, you won't be an heir. The problem here is that one reading of , if you don't get rid of these sins in your life, you can't inherit eternal life and if you don't suffer with Christ, then you won't be a joint-heir with Christ. The problem with that is that and 9 says that we're saved by grace and not by works. It seems like those two passages are talking about a works-based salvation. Punctuation is very important.
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I love this example I've used for years. ((CHART)) Here we have a sentence, “A woman without her man is nothing.” I want you to think about that for a minute. Where would you put the comma? If you are a woman, you will probably put the commas like this. A woman, without her, man is nothing. However if you're a man, you will probably punctuate it like this. A woman, without her man, is nothing. This states that the woman, alone, just can't quite make it. So where you put those commas radically changes the meaning of the sentence.
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We can look at , and put a comma after also and after Christ. That punctuation combines the terms, “heirs of God” and “fellow-heirs with Christ” as the same thing. However. If we move a comma so that we place it after God, ...” If children, heirs also of God..” Then “joint-heirs with Christ if we indeed suffer with Him.” So that being an heir of God is related to being a child of God and that is part of the grace package received at the instant of salvation. But to be considered a join-heir with Christ in which there is additional reward on the basis of suffering. That would be a second category.
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This really becomes the issue. Remember this, that salvation is a free gift but rewards are earned. There's a big difference between something being given and something being earned. When something is given there are no strings attached and there's no condition or basis that's the foundation for receiving the gift but a reward is based on what we attained, what we worked for, what we achieve. So that is the foundation for this. What I'm saying very simply is this. Salvation is a free gift but rewards are earned. Every believer get salvation as a free gift by simply trusting in Christ and we all have certain things in common. We're justified, we're redeemed, we have new life in Christ, we're baptized by the Holy Spirit. Every believer has those things in common.
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But there are some believers who pursue spiritual growth and spiritual maturity who realize in their experience both in time and in eternity, a certain number of blessings. God promises in Scripture a certain number of rewards because of that believer's responsibility and the way he has pursued and lived his spiritual life. Whereas, the one who hasn't, is not going to receive his blessings and rewards because he has not grown to maturity or developed the capacity to handle them. Let's look at what the Bible teaches about inheritance. Just in terms of New Testament concept, the basic word is kleronomia [klhronomia] which is related to the law of heirship or the law of inheritance and its basic meaning of the noun as listed in the lexicons as inheritance, possession, or property.
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When we read that word inheritance in the New Testament, don't simply think about someone dying and leaving something to you in a will. It is a property, something an individual owns, or something that is their possession. The verb has the basic idea to possess, to receive something as one's possession, or to obtain it. So the very verbal concept there, to obtain something has a works connotation. All I want to do here is lay out that the basic meaning is going to emphasize possession, and receiving something as possession.
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The second thing I want to point out is a verse in which states that Jesus Christ is the heir of all things. That doesn't mean the Father died and He inherited it. I think this helps illustrate that principle, that the concept of heirship is ownership. Jesus Christ is the heir or possessor or owner of all things. Now what qualified Jesus to become the owner of all things? Did He do something to earn it and qualify for it or was it something that was freely given to Him? It wasn't freely given to Him like in salvation where we simply believe in the gospel and we're given salvation. Jesus Christ qualified by going to the Cross, dying on the Cross, and by being obedient to the Father. He is elevated to this position over all creation, where He is the heir of all creation. So Christ is the heir of all things because of what He did, because He fulfilled the plan of God for his life.
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Now a third thing we note is that heirship is based on adoption, that is our sonship, our relationship to God. Therefore, in one sense, we have passages that make it very clear that inheritance is related to positional truth. It's related to our position in Christ. Very simply, at the moment we trust in Christ as Savior the Holy Spirit identifies with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection and we are placed “in Christ.” That's our new position. We were “in Adam”; now we're “in Christ.” So we call that positional truth, our new position. So we are “in Christ”, that is related to our phase one salvation, our justification, where we enter into that new life with Christ.
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We need to understand that some passages emphasize inheritance in relation to what is given to us when we first trust in Christ as Savior. Passages like and 4:1, “And if you are Christ's, [and you are, 1st class condition], then you are Abraham's seed...” What Paul meant in context there is that Abraham believed God and it was accredited to him as righteousness. [Gal. 15:6]. Now in Galatians, chapter 3, Paul develops this whole analogy related to Abraham. Those who are truly Abraham's seed are those who follow him by faith in God's promise. “..And if you are Christ's then you are also Abraham's seed” because as he pointed out earlier in the passage, this word 'seed' is related to Christ [ which states, “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made and He, God, does not say And to seeds as of many but as of one and to your seed who is Christ.”
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So Christ is the seed, then we are also Abraham's seed and. “heirs according to the promise.” So Paul goes on in , Now I say that the heir as long as he is a child does not differ at all from a slave though he is master of all.” See this is where he develops the idea of the pedagogue. He goes on in the next verse, “But is under guardians and steward...” Then in 4:3, “Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world.” So he's talking about the fact that, using the time line of history, before the Cross, Jews were under the Law and they did not have the privileges and rights of an adult son at that point. Even though they are a child, their rights don't differ from that of a slave. Then he develops that. The only point I'm making here is that heirship is based on adoption. The Roman concept, you get adopted, you're in the family, but if you're under the age of majority, 14, then you're just treated like a slave.
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Fourth observation, still in that heirship in one category is based on the grace promise of the Abrahamic covenant. It's a promise not based on earning it. It says if we have faith in the promise of God in the Old Testament then, just like Abraham, righteousness is credited to the individual. Now to be an heir of the Father, Who is eternal, the heir must also have eternal life. That's the fifth point. Heirship demands eternal life because the son must have the same life as the father. We will continue to live in the family of God in Heaven. So in , “Not by works of righteousness which we have done but according to His mercy He saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.” So we're saved not on the basis of deeds we have done.
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It's not on the basis of giving up certain sins or not committing them as much. It's not on the basis of suffering with Christ. Salvation is a free gift. It's not on the basis of things we've done in righteousness but according to His mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. The next verse goes on the say, “Whom [the Holy Spirit] He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ Our Savior.” This happens at the instant of salvation. Verse 7 says, “That having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” Now, notice, justification is the foundation for making us heirs in relation to the hope of eternal life. This is a phase one aspect of the inheritance, eternal life, life without end in heaven.
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Sixth point is that heirship also means to share the destiny of Christ. Christ's destiny has been set from eternity past to rule and reign and we are to rule and reign with Him. Christ has an eternal destiny and we will share it with Him as we share His election. Also we have obtained an inheritance having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will. Now sharing the destiny of Christ, according to , is based upon suffering with Christ, not just being positionally “in Christ”. 1 Peter1:3 connects , “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope...” Okay, so birth at salvation, when we first trust in Christ, we're born again to this living hope.
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The seventh point here is that inheritance is both a present reality and a future possession. , “In whom also we have obtained an inheritance..” But this is reserved in heaven for us. and 5, “to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God, through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” So the point in all of this, what I'm simply saying is, that there are two aspects to that inheritance. One is related to what we are given at the instant we believe in Jesus Christ as Savior. At that instant, part of that package is that we are adopted into the royal family of God and we become heirs of God. Heirs of God in relation to eternal life, heirs of God in relation to hope.
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But there's a second aspect to inheritance that requires spiritual growth and as we grow, then these blessings which we already have received become distributed to us. It's as if you as a father, give a gift of something valuable, a car, land, a home, to an infant child, he doesn't have actual ownership rights or possession to it yet because he hasn't developed the maturity to handle it. Once he grows to maturity, then that is given to him from a trustee or someone of that nature and he can enjoy it. It's his potentially but it's not his actually until he grows to maturity and develops the capacity to handle it.
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This whole concept of inheritance is directly related to the ministry of God the Holy Spirit. So our whole spiritual life in this church age is dependent upon these ministries of the Holy Spirit: the baptism by the Holy Spirit, walking by the Spirit, the filling of the Spirit, the indwelling of the Spirit, and now we see the sealing of the Spirit. says, “In Whom you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after you believed you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise.” The Holy Spirit is given to us as a down payment for a future realization of that inheritance. That's verse 14, “Which is the earnest [pledge] of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of His glory.” So the Holy Spirit is given as a down payment indicating something greater that will come in the future. So heirship also includes something related to eternal security. This inheritance that is undefiled and imperishable and will not fade away and is reserved for us in Heaven.
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What protects us is the power of God, not our obedience. God protects us, not our obedience and this is done through faith unto salvation to be revealed in the last time. When we're children of God, He has sent forth His Spirit into our hearts crying Abba, Father, indicating a sign of that adoption, that intimacy with the Father. is a pledge of our inheritance. Those are the first nine points.
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We've gone through that before. For some of you that's new. For some of you that's review. It's very simple. Let me boil it down. Inheritance has two aspects. Number one, an aspect that's true for every believer as a child of God and a member of the family of God, adopted into the family of God at the instant of salvation. But for the children who press on to become huios, the sons of God, there are additional blessings and rewards that are qualified for through obedience, through faithful living, walking by God the Holy Spirit.
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The problem we have today is that people don't make this distinction in terms of theology. They mush it all together and end up with a works kind of salvation or a kind of salvation that is only known on the basis of one's works. So if you don't have the right kinds of works, well you weren't really saved. Under point ten, this confuses the two images of salvation being a free gift but a free gift is free. It's something that is free.
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It's given with no strings attached, not on the basis of any condition, whereas a reward is earned. This inheritance is clearly spoken of as something that is earned through behavior. I'll give you some passages to show those distinctions. For example, in as well as , we have these lists of people who commit certain sins: covetous, idolatry, immoral, adultery, whatever they are. In , the one who commits these things “does not have any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”
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Wait a minute, if salvation is a free gift then why don't I have an inheritance in the kingdom of God? Well if we equate inheritance in the kingdom of God with getting eternal life then we have a problem. But if inheritance has to do with additional rewards and blessings and roles and responsibilities in the kingdom, then that's predicated on doing well now. Another illustration I've used is someone who goes into the military and goes through boot camp. This life is like boot camp and there are those who are going to do very well in boot camp and those who may not do so well in boot camp. When they come out of boot camp, they're all still in the army, but those who have performed well may have and will have opportunities to go to additional training schools and have greater advancement and promotion opportunities because they performed well and developed their skills during the period of basic training.
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This life is analogous in that example to basic training. We're all going through basic training. Some of us are excelling. Others of us aren't doing so well. Those who excel develop capacity for leadership. They learn wisdom and skill at living, which is what we're studying in Proverbs, so that when we go to the judgment seat of Christ, they're going to have a capacity, a maturity, a level of spiritual responsibility and leadership for which they are rewarded and they will be given positions of responsibilities in the kingdom, in the future Millennial kingdom, that relates to their level of maturity. But those who have frittered away their time on the earth or in Biblical language, “have not redeemed the time” have just wasted the time and they haven't matured spiritually. They've lived the life of the fool. They've been conformed to the world. They haven't been too concerned about what God is doing in their life today in preparation for eternity, then, at the judgment seat of Christ, most of what they have produced in this life is going to be burned up like wood, hay, and straw. There's not going to be much left that qualifies them for any kind of responsibility or leadership in the coming kingdom. This is because they didn't develop the capacity for leadership and responsibility for dealing with this life and all the problems of the cosmic system, dealing with Satan, and dealing with personal sin.
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So those who practice these sins because they fail to walk by the Holy Spirit [] will not inherit the kingdom of God. Will they be there? Yes, they will. Will they have positions of responsibility and leadership? No, they won't. They will be present but they won't have various privileges. states, “Knowing that of the Lord you shall receive the reward of the inheritance for you serve the Lord Christ.”
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A reward is something that is given for a job well done. Another way of looking at this is like a sports contract where a player is guaranteed a certain amount of income but then he has various incentive clauses for performing well. He may be guaranteed an income of three hundred or four hundred or five hundred thousand dollars no matter what happens but if he plays well, and that would be spelled out as to what that meant, if he makes it to certain post-season games and the team does well, then he will get additional bonuses that could number in the millions and millions of dollars.
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That's analogous to the believer. Every believer gets the same contract. We're all going to get eternal life. We're all going to be paid a base salary which means we're going to spend eternity in heaven. But there's an incentive clause in the Scripture. That means if you do well, if you pursue maturity, if you live out on the basis of the Word of God and you grow and study, then because there are qualities that are produced in your life through walking by the Holy Spirit which is analogous to gold, silver and precious stones that survive the judgment seat of Christ, then there will be additional blessings and privileges and responsibilities.
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The Bible doesn't talk about the future kingdom in a Marxist-Leninist framework. We're not all going to have the same thing. We're not all going to be given the same thing. There are going to be distinctions based on ability and performance. That's why some will be in certain positions of influence and leadership and others will not. So we see, in terms of a conclusion, there are two categories of inheritance. The first is inheriting the kingdom. This is mentioned in and in . The second is inheriting salvation. We all inherit salvation. We're all heirs of God. But not all will inherit the kingdom. Not all will be a joint-heir with Christ.
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says, “and if children, then heirs—heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.” So if we want to be a joint heir with Christ we have to suffer with Him. Now what does that mean? Does that mean we are going to go out and be martyrs? No, that's not what that means. What it means is that if you and I, while living in the devil's world, are pursuing spiritual maturity, we are going to suffer. You don't have to go look for it. It will find you. It will find you frequently because you will be running and living in contradiction to the zeitgeist, the heartbeat, the desires of the people around you.
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As a result of living in the devil's world, you're going to encounter a lot of suffering. You're going to encounter a lot of adversity. I'm going to come back and cover that when we get into the next section of Romans because this is really where Paul segues into that next section because he recognizes this. In verse 17 he introduces the concept of suffering, “if indeed we suffer with him.” Then in verse 18 he says, “For I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” And so we're going to get into that doctrine of suffering and adversity when we get into the next verse.
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Now, point 12, Christ inherits the kingdom as described in which talks about Him being elevated, being given the kingdoms of the world at the time when there's that great revolt at the end times. Christ inherits the kingdom due to His loyalty to God the Father. So He becomes the heir of all things because He advanced to spiritual maturity and fulfilled God's plan for His life. The same is true for us as joint-heirs with Christ. We pursue the plan of God in our life, grow to spiritual maturity, and there will be rewards for us. says, “But to the Son he says, Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness.” That what qualified Him to be the heir of all things. “Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness more than your companions.” He's elevated because of His perfect obedience.
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Now another thing I should note is that there's a difference between living with Christ and reigning with Christ just as there's a difference between being an heir of God and a joint-heir of Christ. lays this out. “It is a trustworthy saying: For if we died with Him...” When did we die with Christ? The instant of faith alone in Christ alone we received the baptism by the Holy Spirit which is identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. “For if we died with Him, we shall live with Him.” That is true for every single believer. If you died with Christ, it's because you trusted in Him as your Savior and you're identified with His death, burial and resurrection. The result will be that we will live with Him.
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“If we endure....” Ah, now that's works. Enduring, persevering, that's works. “If we endure, we also...” Notice that. Not just living with Him but also, there's something more. “If we endure, we shall also reign with Him.” So enduring is related to suffering and means additional rewards. “But if we deny Him....” That means if you live your life and you're more concerned about your personal pleasures and personal issues in life than you are studying the Word and growing to maturity.
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“If we deny Him, He will deny us.” Not denial of eternal salvation. That's covered in the next verse, but denial of rewards at the judgment seat of Christ. If you deny Him, if you live your life apart from Christ as a believer, then you will be denied privilege, position, responsibility, leadership in the coming kingdom. then says, “If we are faithless...” The “we” means believers. Faithless doesn't mean we were unbelievers. It means as believers we just didn't trust Christ; we just didn't trust God; we just didn't grow to maturity. Even though we're faithless, He remains faithful. That means we will still be saved because we are preserved by His faithfulness.
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“If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.” We are in Christ, we are His. He can't deny us. Even though we're faithless, He's not going to kick us out. We can't lose salvation. But the kingdom of God has been promised to those who love God but not all believers love God. Love for God is expressed through obedience to God and those who are obedient to Him and grow to spiritual maturity will receive an inheritance in the kingdom.
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Just to wrap up there's a great illustration of Esau in the Old Testament. Esau was still Isaac's son. Remember, Abraham couldn't have any children and God promised him that he would have a son and through his son there would be many nations. Then Sarah, his wife, gave birth to Isaac. Isaac married Rebecca and Rebecca had twins, Esau and Jacob and Esau sold his inheritance, traded it out. He came home from a hunting trip, tired, worn out, hungry and Jacob had fixed a nice meal of lentil soup. Esau said, “If I die, my inheritance isn't going to do me any good.” He treated his inheritance cavalierly and with disrespect and he traded it off to Jacob for a mess of pottage, just for a bowl of soup. That's the issue.
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That passage isn't talking about Esau and his eternal destiny. It's talking about the fact that he willingly gave up the potential of his inheritance for just a bowl of soup. He traded out eternal rewards for immediate personal gratification. That's what we do all the time. We constantly choose to sin in some area, rather than walking by the Spirit. What we're doing is trading out eternal rewards, gold, silver, and precious stones, for immediate gratification. So Esau is the example of that. The writer of Hebrews says, “See that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you know that even afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing...” He had a change of heart. He repented. He changed his mind. He said, “You know, that was really valuable. I made a mistake.” But there are some things we can't go back and recapture. “When he desired to inherit the blessing he was rejected [not for salvation] for he found no place for repentance even though he sought it with tears.”
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He truly changed his mind but you can't go back and remake decisions you failed with in the past. You may get other opportunities to make other decisions but you can't go back and do it over again. When I was a public school teacher, I used to say to my students, “No do overs. One shot. That's it. Okay?” Esau did get a blessing. : 27-39, “Esau said to his father, “Do you have only one blessing, my father. Bless me, even me also, my father. Then Isaac his father said, “Away from the fertility of the earth shall be your dwelling and away from the dew of heaven from above and by your sword you shall live and your brother you shall serve but it shall come about that when you become restless that you shall break his yoke from your neck.” So Esau still received a little bit of a blessing but he doesn't get the main inheritance which went to the Abrahamic seed and the line of the Abrahamic covenant. Esau lost his inheritance blessing but not his position as Isaac's son. So we may lose inheritance blessing but we don't lose our position in the family of God. That wraps that up. I want to come back next time and deal with some of those tough passages before we move on to looking at a little more details of some of the inheritance issues.

Romans 088b-Inheriting the Kingdom

Romans 8:13 NASB95
for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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Romans 088b-Inheriting the Kingdom
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We are in Romans, chapter 8. I just want to remind you of a little thing I did last week. I pointed out some of the rather odd errors of translations that have cropped up in some different Bibles over the years. One was the Unrighteous bible which I mentioned last time from . We're going to look at this passage in depth so this is why I want to remind you. It was called the Unrighteous bible.
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It should be translated, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” This was a King James Version published by Cambridge Press in 1653. They left out the word “not” so it read, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?” Now that wouldn't actually be a surprise because we tend to expect that the unrighteous, because they're unbelievers, won't inherit the kingdom. Now why would that be something Paul would point out to people? This is to the Corinthians and this is a difficult passage. People think that inheriting the kingdom means to be saved. Don't you think people would understand that the unrighteous aren't going to get to heaven? So if Paul meant the unrighteous aren't going to be in heaven, why would he need to say that?
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That's because, what he's actually saying here, isn't something so obvious. The unrighteous is not a synonym for unbeliever. It can refer to believers who are walking according to the sin nature. Now as we were looking at our study in , we came to this verse in and 17. “The Spirit Himself bears witness [testifies] with our spirit that we are children of God and if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ...” I pointed out that there's an interpretation that's made in the translation of that verse that impacts how most translations punctuate the verse. Most translations punctuate it without putting a comma after “God” so that “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” make it appear to be synonymous terms. In actuality, they're not, as I pointed out last time, because if it were then it makes all children heirs and heirship is qualified by suffering with Christ. That would mean that inheritance would be a work. Inheritance would be based on something you do, suffering for Christ. It wouldn't be based on faith; it wouldn't be a gift.
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This was the tenth point I made last time. I went through a whole series of about thirteen or fourteen points on inheritance. The tenth point was understanding the problem that some passages speak of inheritance as a gift. We do receive some inheritance as part of the salvation package the instant we're saved. But there are other passages which speak of inheritance as a reward. A gift is something that is freely given. A reward is for something that is done; a reward is earned. Someone does something well and they receive a reward or a prize.
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If it turns out that they have cheated in the contest, then they run the risk of losing the award, which is the case of Lance Armstrong, which is a sad case. Interesting, I was listening to someone on the radio the other day who was talking this. I had always wondered who should have gotten the prizes in all those Tour de France contests that he raced in. He won. Why didn't we hear of the second place or third place? Apparently, I may be wrong, I'm just repeating what I heard on the radio, but most of the ones who got second or third place were also doping. So everybody was doping so nobody wins.
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So a gift is free but a prize or an award for an inheritance is something that is earned. It's something that is worked for. That's important to pay attention in the passage we're going to look at tonight. So we see these passages like . It says, “For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” That's an important passage because it adds the concept of Christ or God to the kingdom concept which specifically focuses on the Millennial kingdom. But that would mean that to inherit the kingdom of God the inheritance is based on something you do.
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Just three chapters earlier in and 9, Paul said, “For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.” So in he says salvation is a gift and it’s free and it's not works. Then we get over to and inheritance in the kingdom is based on behavior, it's based on character, it's based on something other than grace. So we have a conflict here if inheriting the kingdom is a synonym for entering the kingdom or in other words, entering heaven.
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is another of those passages that gives us a grocery list of sins, “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident...” The flesh is a term for our sin nature. It's the Greek word sarx [sarc]. Now there are adverbs and adjectives built on that such as sarkikos [sarkikoj], which means fleshly, also translated carnal or carnality. “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident.” Then we have this list. It involves fornication, uncleanness, lewdness. The first four are all related to some sort of sexual sins. Then we have sins related to God: idolatry, sorcery or pharmakeia [farmakeia] which had to do with using various hallucinogenic drugs to create an encounter through some sort of mystical experience with a false god, so that relates to idolatry in a way.
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Then we have interpersonal sins, which I want you to pay attention to these; we're going to hit them again in a few minutes. They are hatred, contentions, always bickering and fussing with each other in the context of a congregation. Jealousies. We don't have this in this congregation that I'm aware of but there are some congregations that are so loaded with cliques or groups or individuals that really seek to have some sort of power base in a congregation. I don't know why anybody thinks that having a position of power in a church is something worth having but some people do. That's the idea of contentiousness and jealousies, jockeying for position or power, approbation in a local church.
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Outbursts of wrath. This isn't just someone who gets irritated or losing his temper on occasion. This is a characteristic where a person is just always reacting in incredible anger, no self-control whatsoever in terms of anger. Selfish ambitions. Dissensions or always stirring up trouble. Heresies, always running after some new doctrine. Envy, which is the counterpart of jealousy. Murder, revelries and the like. Paul says, “...just as I told you beforehand that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” It doesn't say in the Greek, “those who do such things”, that would be the Greek word poieo [poiew], but those who practice prasso [prassw].
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So this refers to a lifestyle of someone who has become a believer. This wouldn't make sense if these people aren't really believers because you expect someone who lives this lifestyle not to go to heaven because they're a sinner. So why would Paul make an issue out of this? It's no big surprise if he's talking about those who practice such things, if he's saying those are unbelievers because we know unbelievers aren't going to go into heaven. So it only makes sense if these activities or sins are being committed by believers. He's not talking about entering into heaven. He's talking about something else, something beyond just entry into heaven.
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says if we are obedient and grow to maturity, that's the context, then we will “receive the reward of the inheritance.” It's not a gift. Reward is something that's earned through obedience, through serving the Lord Christ in context, in that last phase. So what I concluded was that we see two categories of inheritance in the Scripture: inheriting the kingdom and inheriting salvation. Inheriting salvation is something that's true for every believer and inheriting the kingdom is true for believers who pursue spiritual growth and spiritual maturity and learn to serve the Lord in their life.
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This is what is talking about, putting the comma after “heirs of God,” shows we have two categories of heirship. Heirs of God is equivalent to inheriting salvation and being a “joint-heir or fellow heir with Christ” is related to suffering. Now that doesn't mean martyrdom type of suffering, it means when you're living the spiritual life, when you're making a choice in your life between a) following your sin nature and following the world and b) being obedient to Scripture and walking by the Spirit, we will always encounter suffering. We will always face adversity, unjust suffering because we're going against the grain. We're swimming upstream against the culture. And the more the culture around us, and here in the United States our culture is becoming progressively anti-Christian because the foundation of Christian values, of course, is found in the Old Testament and those emphasize personal responsibility, and volition, emphasize marriage between a man and a woman, emphasize family where you have a father and a mother and children. Those are all being attacked again and again in subtle and overt ways in our culture. So whenever we're trying to counter that and live our life according to the Scripture, we're going to face opposition in the angelic conflict, opposition from the cosmic system.
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And that's adversity. It may be small adversity. It may be heavy adversity but it's suffering with Him because we're obedient to Christ and the consequences aren't pleasant. Now the twelfth point I said was that just as Christ inherits the kingdom because of His obedience to the Father; he is resurrected from the dead and because of His loyalty to the Father, He is elevated to kingship in His humanity. Not His deity because His deity is eternal. This is talking about in His humanity when He's resurrected from the dead and ascended to heaven, He is given, on the basis of having lived His life righteously in obedience to God, He's elevated and He's given the scepter of the kingdom as the son of David.
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So that's the and 9 passage, “But of the Son He says, “your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and the righteous scepter is the scepter of His Kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness. Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness above your companions.” The scepter of righteousness if given because of behavior, because He lived His life in obedience to God.
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That took us to the 13th point, making the distinction between living and reigning with Christ as seen in . Reigning is based on endurance. “If we endure, we shall reign with Him.” Reigning is based on doing something. Doing something is a work. When we're saved, it's by grace, not works. So reigning is distinct from the salvation package.
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Then the 14th point is that inheriting the kingdom is promised to those who love God. Not all believers love God. Loving God is indicated by obedience to God which means spiritual growth. Those who are disobedient don't love God. I don't care how you feel about God. And the Bible doesn't care about how you feel about God and the Bible because over and over again it says that if you love God, you obey Him. If you disobey Him, that means you don't love God. So it doesn't matter how we feel or how much we say, “Oh, how I love Jesus.” If we're not obedient, we're lying.
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The 15th point is about Esau. Esau thought that his inheritance wasn't worth much so he was so hungry that he traded a bowl of red lentils for his inheritance. The warning there to believers is, This inheritance issue is so important that you must not squander it in this life by putting your focus or priorities on something that's insignificant and temporal. Esau was saved, I believe, but he lost his inheritance which was related to the Abrahamic blessing. Now all of that is sort of a lead-in to bring us back to where we were when we finished a week ago because I wanted to look at these “inherit the kingdom” passages and I think the best way to do that is by going to .
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There are several other passages. We've already looked at one: and following. There is the one in Ephesians that I've talked about. There's one at the end of Revelation that we'll also bring in in and 8. “He who overcomes shall inherit all things and I will be His God and He shall be my son but the cowardly...” So the contrast is between the one who is an overcomer and the one who is cowardly, the one who will inherit all things, and the one who won’t inherit all things. It's not a contrast between believer and unbeliever because that was already made at the Great White Throne Judgment at the end of chapter 20 so this is a reward passage. It talks about the cowardly unbelieving abominable murderer, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire.
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Most people who read that say that means people who are cowardly, unbelieving murderers, sexually immoral, if they do all those things then they end up in the lake of fire. That is not what that is saying at all. It's a misunderstanding of that word 'part'. So let's start with . “Or do you not know...” See when Paul says that he is assuming that they should know this because he's taught them in the past. He says, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” So right away we see that one of the key words we have to study here and understand is that word 'unrighteous'.
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A lot of people look at this passage because of something that's said in the first two verses and they think that unrighteous equals unbeliever. So let's read it that way, “Do you not know that the unbeliever will not inherit the kingdom of God?” Sure, that's kind of obvious, isn't it? We all know that. Unbelievers aren't going to inherit the kingdom. They're not going to be in heaven. So why would Paul bring this up? That's a blinding flash of the obvious. So that's just one way we see this is reduced to absurdity, a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument there. Paul goes on to say. “Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminates [homosexuals], nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers [extortioners], will inherit the kingdom of God.”
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Verse 11 says, “Such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” Now the way verse 11 is usually read by people is that the congregation, made up mostly of believers, had all previously been fornicators, idolaters, covetous, etc., but now they're all believers. They're washed, sanctified, and justified. But that's not how this should be read because that misses the point. Let's go back and first of all let's address this issue of unrighteous. The way we ought to translate that word 'unrighteous' is based on the first two verses, the context. Remember, if you take the text out of context, you're left with a con job. That's what happens in a lot of theology. You get conned. So we have to keep it in the context.
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There's a broad context and a narrow context. Context is like the real estate law of location, location, location. You really have to pay attention to it. But there's a lot of different context here. We have the context of chapter 6. We have a narrower context of chapter 6, verses 7-11. In chapter 6, verse 7, you have the word 'wrong' which is a form of the same word for unrighteous. It shows up again in verse 8. “Know you, yourselves, do wrong...” You commit adikia [a)dikia], unrighteousness. So it's the same word. That's the more immediate context and you have a different meaning there. You have a broader context, which is the first five chapters of First Corinthians. You have to take all that into account so it's not quite as simple as some people think it is.
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Paul starts off with the bickering, fussing, and divisiveness going on within the congregation in Corinth. It's gotten so bad that when someone does something to somebody else, or just does something living their life, like in our culture, somebody else sees it and they just take offense. They don't like the fact that someone else did that so they take offense and they're just going to sue the person. So they were taking litigiousness to a whole new level. They were taking each other to court and suing one another.
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This is an important passage because I've heard a lot of Christians talk about the fact we should never sue anyone. That's not what this passage is saying. This passage is talking about believers who know each other who are taking advantage of each other and then suing each other and going to unbelievers for resolution. It's not talking about when someone has legitimately been wronged for any number of reasons by a corporation, or a company, or something of that nature. Those are other kinds of lawsuits. This is not a blanket prohibition of lawsuits. It doesn't say that.
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It's talking about believers who know each other, who are taking advantage of each other, rather than going to leaders in the church to resolve personal conflicts. So he says “Dare any one of you, when he has a case against his neighbor, dare to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the saints?” So when we look at that first verse it's obvious that unrighteous is used in context in contrast with the saints. So the saints are clearly believers in the congregation.
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So that would indicate that the judges possibly are unrighteous. But there's going to be another meaning to that term. So we have to be careful with it. It looks, though, that that indicates they're unbelievers. Then verse 2 says, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?” See immediately Paul puts this context of answering the question of whether you should sue a person.
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I don't know if any of y'all have ever asked that question or been in a position where you've been wronged and someone has been negligent and you've suffered financial loss and you have to contemplate whether you should bring a lawsuit. How does Paul answer that question? Now he doesn't do what most people do and deal with the immediate consequences. He goes to eschatology. How many Christians in this world think, “Well, I don't care what happens in the future. I'm not an amil, premil...I'm a pan mil meaning it'll all pan out in the end.” They're just intellectually lazy. They don't want to figure out the future, thinking the future will take care of itself.
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Paul says, “Wait a minute. We have to understand important things about the future.” In verse 2 he asks, “Don't you know that the saints will judge the world?” See, the saints, which is hagios [a(gioj], the sanctified ones. It's not talking about some special class. It's always used for Christians who are positionally set apart to Christ. In the future, believers are going to be in a position to judge the world. They're going to have that oversight. Part of what's happening now and the reason you need to develop wisdom, you need to develop discernment from the Word, is because this is preparing us so that in the future we can fulfill that responsibility because when you die, God is not going to blast you with a bunch of knowledge of doctrine between the time you die and the time you end up at the judgment seat of Christ and you get your responsibility distributed for the future kingdom.
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What you have in your soul when you die is the capacity you're going to have at the judgment seat of Christ. So the Lord's going to look at us and say, “Well, you've got about ten percent capacity here so you're going to be a clerk in the lowest justice of the peace court.” He's going to look at someone else you didn't really think too much of here on earth and they're going to have always been at Bible class listening to Bible studies, always applying, very quiet, and the Lord's going to say, “You have 95 percent capacity; you're going to be a Supreme Court judge.” That's how it's going to work. So there's going to be these distinctions based upon the capacity and the maturity we develop now.
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Paul is saying, “Why are you going to unbelievers for this when believers are going to be judging the world in the future?” That's a much greater responsibility than what these temporal magistrates have. Then he says “If the world is judged by you, are you not worthy to judge the smallest matters?” In other words, why are you doing this when this is your future destiny? So let's look at this word unrighteous. The Greek word is adikos [a)dikoj]. In the plural it's adikoi and it's an adjective that's used as a noun. It stands in the place of a noun. So we talk about red states and blue states. That's an adjectival description of a state. The state is Texas, which is a red state, Connecticut, which is a blue state. That kind of thing. Those are just adjectival descriptions and we use the adjective in place of the proper noun. This is the same kind of thing here. Unrighteous is an adjective as in unrighteous people or unrighteous men but it just uses the adjective to stand for the class.
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((CHART)). Now in the box on the right side I've listed definitions from three of the most respected Greek lexicons that are available. The top one is Thayer. Any dictionary lists meanings in order of their priority of use. So just because the first meaning is one thing doesn't mean it always means that. It means that more than it's used to mean the second category. The second category of meaning is used more than the third category. So you look up things in the dictionary that have 19 meanings, well, the 15th, 16th, 17th meanings are very rare usages. They're used that way now and then but not all the time.
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I want you to notice the agreement here in these three lexicons. They all list unjust as the first meaning, not unrighteous. Now if we look at the word adikos, the a is a prefix, like in English. It's the negative. The core part of the word is dikos from dike [dikh] meaning righteous. So “a” means un so it means unrighteous or unjust. So the primary usage is of that which is unjust.
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We look at this and there does seem to be a contrast in those first two verses in chapter 6. Then it goes on if you read the context in your Bible, “Do you not know that we shall judge angels? How much more matters of this life?” So by verse 6 we see that brother goes to law against brother and that before unbelievers. Now that's a different word there; it's the word apistos [a)pistoj]. pistos is the word for believer or belief and its used for the faithful one, or the believer. apistos means an unbeliever. apistoi is not what's used in the first two verses. Up there, it's adikos, the unrighteous.
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Paul seems to expand the issue in verse 6, “…brother goes to law with brother and that before unbelievers.” It seems like those unbelievers could be the judges. He doesn't really say the judges are unbelievers. That's an implication and it may be right. But it could be that everyone who is sitting there and watching the judicial procedures are a lot of unbelievers. So “before unbelievers” doesn't necessarily mean “before unbelieving judges”. It could mean unbelievers who are watching the whole procedure and the judges that are here are just unjust judges, easily corrupt.
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There are some problems with understanding this. The word 'unrighteous' can refer to unrighteous unbelievers and it can refer to unrighteous believers, Christians. So just because the word adikos is used doesn't mean we are justified in jumping to the conclusion that these judges are unbelievers. Now that's a broader immediate context but there's little bit narrower context and that's down in verses 7, 8, and 9 where we have 'wrong' which has to do also with a form of this word adikos, the adjective. “Now you yourselves do wrong things and cheat and you do these things to your brethren. So doing adikos, activities classified as adikos is an activity of these Corinthians who are clearly believers. They're clearly believers, but they do adikos, which is wrong or unjust actions and they cheat their brethren. Immediately after saying you're doing these unjust things to your brethren, he says, “Do you not know that the unjust [the wrongdoers] will not inherit the kingdom of God?” So verse 8 is a much more focused verse and it’s the immediate context for verse 9. Not verse one.
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Take a look at verses 9 and 10, you have this whole grocery list of sins: fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, sodomites, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, extortioners. Unfortunately a lot of Christendom has taken this verse and others similar to it, that people who do these things all the time are not going to go into heaven. But it seems to me that would pretty much negate most prison ministries. Most of the prisoners in there have had a lifestyle of these things and some of them were believers. I know, unfortunately, a couple of pastors and a couple of seminary students who ended up committing various felonious crimes and ending up in prison for a length of time. So they were believers but they got out of fellowship, started walking according to the sin nature and ended up in criminality.
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Let's consider the question: does unrighteous indicate they're unbelievers? Well, Paul addresses Corinthians in light of their committing all these acts. Just turn back with me a couple of pages to the first chapter. In the first chapter Paul starts off in verse 3 saying, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. He uses “our”, a plural pronoun. He's addressing the congregation as a whole and he's talking to everybody in the congregation as a group and he's assuming they're all believers and that God is the Father of all of them as believers. From the very beginning he's addressing them and assuming that everyone there in the church at Corinth is a believer. He says in verse 4, “I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything you were enriched in Him, in all speech and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you so that you are not lacking in any gift...” He's assuming they're all believers.
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So, not only are they all believers, and not only does he give them compliments in these first nine verses but starting in verse 10, he starts hammering them for all of their extreme sinfulness. It's not that they just committed these sins a little bit here and a little bit there. This was arguably the worst, most sinful, most self-absorbed, most narcissistic, divisive congregation in the ancient world. Look at verse 10. He tells them, “Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you...” They're said to be contentious in verse 11. If you turn over to the next page, they're filled with intellectual arrogance. In 1:29, they were said to be boastful. This runs all through this section with arrogance, intellectual arrogance which is the whole problem in the second chapter.
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They're exalting human wisdom as opposed to the wisdom of the word of God. Look at chapter 3:1-3. He says, “I brethren, I couldn't speak to you as to spiritual men [pneumatikos /pneumatikoj which is from the root pneuma /pneuma meaning spirit] but as to carnal.” There's that word built on sarx which means of the flesh which I talked about in . They're fleshly, their lifestyle is produced by the sin nature, the flesh. He has to talk to them as those who live according to the sin nature, in essence. Then, in verse 3 he says, “For you are still fleshly...” Are they believers? Sure, he said you all are believers, all those things related to them back in the first chapter. They were enriched in everything by God, in all knowledge, the testimony of Christ was confirmed in them, they were denied no gift. All of that. They're clearly believers but they are disobedient; they are egregiously disobedient.
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And he says in verse 3, “for you are still fleshly. For since there is jealousy and strife among you...” They're characterized by envy. Envy was listed in as one of the works of the flesh. They're characterized by strife. Strife was also listed in as one of the works of the flesh. There are divisions among them. Now that's a textual problem but it's probably there based on the Majority Text and that, too, is listed in as a work of the flesh. So here are these Christians, clearly Christians, and they're characterized by the works of the flesh. They're clearly living like unbelievers and that's why Paul says at the end of verse 3 that they're behaving like mere men.
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Then he goes from that in the context of to talking about the fact that they've been trying to align themselves up with different leaders. In verse 12, “Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,” and “I of Cephas”. Now in 3:6 Paul tells them that everybody had a different role in an agricultural analogy. Then he goes to a building analogy and talks about the fact that every one of us builds in our life with various things. We have gold, silver, precious stones and we have wood, hay and straw. He says we all build but once our work is complete it will be manifest at the Day of Judgment. That's verse 13, Each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire.” That's the picture here. What's revealed by fire is the gold, silver, precious stones.
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The wood, hay, and straw is burned off and so he says in verse 14, “If anyone's work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward.” How do you get a reward? You work for a reward. Is salvation a reward? No, salvation is not earned. So you work for a reward. What we do in our Christian life as we grow? We develop capacity for righteous living, we develop a capacity for wise living, and as a result of that, God, the Holy Spirit, produces in us the character of Christ and that's the gold, silver, and precious stones that is left. It's the Divine good that's produced in our life by the Holy Spirit rather than human good which is produced by our own morality and our own sin nature. So we're rewarded for what is produced in our life by the Holy Spirit.
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If anyone's work is burned, he will suffer loss. So he's going to lose something. But he doesn't lose salvation because the next clause in verse 15 says, “he will suffer loss but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.” So he may lose everything but he still is saved and enters the kingdom but he doesn't have a reward which is the inheritance of the kingdom. Then he says, and this is really important, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” Now I talked about this a few lessons back in terms of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Some people take the “you” here as corporate and that the corporate body of believers is the temple of God. But all the way up to this first those plural pronouns have been used to refer to the corporate body of the church to address things that are true for every individual. So it's not talking about the congregation as the temple of God but all of you, as believers, each individual, is a temple of God for the Holy Spirit.
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And then there's a warning in verse 17 of divine discipline. “If any man destroys [defiles] the temple of God...” That means corruption. The word there is phtheiro [fqeirw]and it means corruption. It's the same word that's translated destroy in the next phrase. “If anyone defiles or corrupts the temple of God [that's basically carnality] God will phtheiro him. If you phtheiro God, God's going to phtheiro you. That basically means if you look it up in the lexicon, it means to do physical harm and every single example of that word being used in the New Testament refers to judgment in time, not judgment in eternity, but judgment in time. So if someone disobeys God then God brings discipline in their life, that's phtheiro. It's judgment here and now, not judgment in the future, so it refers to a temporal judgment.
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If you look down later on in the chapter, they're boastful again. Verse 21, “Therefore let no one boast in men. For all things belong to you.” Skipping down to 4:6, it says they're puffed up. In verse 7, they're boasting and they're full of themselves. Then we get over into , it says, “It's actually been reported that among you there is sexual immorality among you.” That's listed in . They're arrogant, they're sexually immoral. Then if you go over to chapter 7 it talks again about sexual immorality. You get into chapter 11 and they're coming to the Lord's table and getting drunk. In chapter 10 they're warned not to give into idolatry in 10:14, “Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.” Idolatry is one of the sins listed in .
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The point I'm making and the reason you need to understand this is because you're going to run into people again and again and again who are going to say, “Look, says that if you do these things, you're not going to go to heaven.” But that's not what Paul is saying at all. He's already said the Corinthians are believers and the Corinthians are doing all of these things. This is characterizing their lives. It doesn't mean God approves it. He doesn't but they are disobedient children who get cut off from the inheritance. The inheritance goes to the obedient children who grow to maturity but the inheritance we're talking about isn't eternal life and it isn't eternal judgment.
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So Paul is saying here, “Don't you know the unrighteous [the wrongdoers in context] will not inherit the kingdom of God?” He's not talking about unbelievers because it's obvious that unbelievers don't go to heaven. He's talking about believers who continue to live in carnality. Then he lists the type of sins that characterizes them. He says in , “Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” It's a very clear statement. Every one of them is justified. Wait a minute. That's not how most people look at it.
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((CHART)) So I drew these three charts to help explain this. The first chart in the upper left depicts this as referring to the believers who were there. It's a small group. In contrast “you' then refers to the rest of the church. They weren't really believers. They were just professing believers. This is how some interpret this. This is not correct. It contradicts the second part of the verse which says “all of you were sanctified, justified, cleansed.” So that doesn't work.
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The second way this is sometimes interpreted is that the some is just a rhetorical word that is used and all the people are viewed as positionally saved. That's really kind of an odd view and it doesn't make a lot of sense either. The best view is what we see in the right. The “some” is part of a larger group. Some of you. So if I were to pick the people who were on this front two rows here, they would be “some of you.” You being the whole group, “some” referring to the five over here who are sitting on the first two rows. That's what I'm depicting here. The “some” is a subset of the larger group. The whole group is made up of believers. But some of them used to be characterized by this behavior. They're not any more but the rest of them are still characterized by that behavior. Does that make sense?
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Most of this congregation are full of divisiveness and immorality. They're called carnal. Paul has to talk to them like spiritual babies because they're still living like unbelievers although they're believers. So ninety percent of them are spiritual failure. But some of them, ten percent, have seen a change and transformation in their life because they're walking by the Holy Spirit and they're obeying the Word of God. So when Paul says “such were some of you,” the some have broken out of the carnal behavior pattern and are growing to maturity. But all of them were saved. So the ones who've broken out are the ones who are moving toward inheritance and the ones who haven't are still trying to go to court and being divisive and causing all kinds of problems.
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In , Paul says, “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord, rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance for you serve the Lord Christ.” So the reward is something given for service. Inheritance is something that is given for service. This connects the idea of reward and inheritance together. A reward is for serving. If you don't serve, no reward. You still get into heaven, but no rewards.
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Okay, now I think that makes that point clear. I want to go back and look at one thing I mentioned earlier from the Revelation passage that some will have their part in the lake of fire. I want you to turn with me. We've gone over it before. I've covered it numerous times but I just want to remind you in John, chapter 13. Similar circumstance in that there is a group before the Lord Jesus Christ of His disciples. All of them are viewed as saved but there's one there who's not. That's Judas Iscariot. If you look down to John chapter 13. Look at verse 5. This is a picture of Christ pouring water into a basin to wash their feet and he starts washing the feet with the disciples and toweling them dry. “So he came to Simon Peter. He said to Him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter.” Jesus is saying you'll understand this later because it has a symbolic value. “
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“Peter said to Him, “Never shall you wash my feet! Jesus answered him, If I do not wash you, you shall have no part with Me.” Now that's the same word 'part' used over in . It's a Greek word meros [meroj] which is used in a legal context in a will to indicate a share of the inheritance that would go to somebody. You get this part; that person gets that part, this other person gets this other part. That's the idea but the way we use the word part in English it indicates also a role, such as, “I'm going to try out for this part in the play.” So people read this as saying that well Peter won't get a part in the kingdom, or in other words, he won't be there, he won't go to heaven.
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That's not what Jesus is saying. Jesus is saying that if you don't let me wash your feet which is a picture of ongoing cleansing through confession and if you don't cleanse your sins through confession, there can't be any spiritual growth; you'll just be spiritually stunted. If you don't confess your sins and have regular cleaning of sin, then you won't have an inheritance in the kingdom. You won't have a share in the inheritance. Peter understood that. He understood that and said, “Lord, don't just wash my feet. Give me a complete bath.” Put me in the shower.
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Then Jesus replied in verse 10, “He, who is bathed, [this word indicates a complete total bath from the word louo [louw] versus the word nipto [niptw] which means to partially cleanse his feet] and you all are clean, but not all of you.” And then John tells us that what Jesus meant by that is that one of them in verse 11, “For He knew the one who was betraying Him.”
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So having understood that, that 'part' means a share of the inheritance, when we go to that passage in where we read this statement related to the future judgment, the future role of believers in the eternal state, “He who overcomes [the one who has earned the victor's wreath] will inherit these things. I will be His God and He will be My son. But for the cowardly unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their meros, their part, their share, their inheritance will be in the lake that burns with fire.”
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Its not that they go to the lake of fire but that these rewards that would have been given them, their share of the inheritance is thrown into the lake of fire where it's destroyed. Not them. It's their inheritance that's destroyed. They go in to heaven, yet as through fire, just like at the judgment seat of Christ. So those who fail to be victors lose something. They lose their rewards and they're destroyed in the lake of fire but those who are victors, those who are overcomers, they will have rewards at the judgment seat of Christ and their maturity determines their role, their responsibility, in the eternal kingdom.
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When we take that back to , just to wrap this up, the heirs of God are all believers but the joint-heirs with Christ are those who persevere and endure through suffering so they will be glorified together with Christ in the kingdom. Now is going to introduce the topic of suffering and we'll come back and get into that next time.

Romans 089b-Suffering: The Whys and Wherefores

Romans 8:17 NASB95
and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.
Romans 089b-Suffering: The Whys and Wherefores
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The topic, the doctrine we're going to look at this evening and probably next week as well comes out of the next couple of verses. Actually, the last verse we've already looked at in , as well as in , introduce the concept of suffering. For some people, suffering has to do with something that is extreme. But the word for suffering in both Greek and Hebrew, merely means that something has happened to a person. Over the course of the development of the language, these words for suffering in both Greek and Hebrew came to be associated with something that was not positive.
That can operate on a scale of intensity. We have things that happen every day that are not what we wish to happen, not extreme, but not what we would like to happen. They provide difficulties and challenges for us and that is suffering in one form. I often think that some of the more extreme things we think of as suffering are just so large and overwhelming that they're easier to handle than the constant little nitpickings of the adversities of the world because we just get tired of the battle. As my friend Jim Myers often says, “We have to learn to love the battle.” It's often wearisome. We live in the devil's world. That's one reason we encounter suffering and adversity and suffering is simply dealing with the fact that we're living with fallen creatures in the midst of fallen world.
It's not necessarily an overt or extreme persecution or oppression or the hostility of going through a hurricane or a tornado or going through a major economic collapse. Suffering can involve a lot of minor areas, as well. It's just the difficulties of life. Some of us have been around long enough to know that sometimes our walk with the Lord on a day-to-day basis gets wiped out more by the little tiny things than the major things. So when we hear the word suffering, don't think in terms of something that is horrible and extreme and large. It includes a whole spectrum of things.
A lot of times the way in which we respond to something and the way in which we perceive a negative event is dependent upon the mental attitude that we're in at the time. If you're tired, if you're weary, if you've been going through a series of negative events, then you can hit the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. It's not very large but it just seems to absolutely wipe you out. On another day, when you're fresh and you're well fed and you're energetic, it may not be such a big deal or may not faze you too much and you're able to focus on the Lord. And the Lord designs these as tests for us for a number of reasons.
This is what I want to get into as we begin this study so I want to look at suffering in terms of what the Bible teaches about the reasons for sufferings: the whys and wherefores for suffering. says, “And if children...” We all are children if we're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. This passage teaches us that at that instant of salvation we're adopted into God's royal family and we become heirs of God. Then if we pursue spiritual growth, we become joint heirs of Christ, conditioned on suffering with Him.
Now that is not a suffering that is related to what He endured on the cross. The Lord Jesus Christ faced a lot of different suffering, opposition, antagonism, and frustration. Can you imagine being the absolute perfect Son of God? In the Old Testament as God is present in the tabernacle or temple, sin or anything unclean could not even come into His presence. And yet now we have the incarnate second person of the Trinity living and growing up in the midst of a fallen family, in the midst of a fallen culture or world, and with uncleanness and sin in His face, day in and day out. That would present a measure of adversity and as He entered into His ministry, constantly facing the opposition from the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, the religious leaders, as well as others who had their own agenda. That, too, was another form of suffering.
There are a lot of different ways in which we can suffer when we stand for the truth of God's word and take our stand with the Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 18 goes on to say, “...we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.” Now that's not talking about heaven. That's talking about, as I pointed out, the distribution of rewards when we are at the judgment seat of Christ because we have taken on the challenge to be a disciple. The term disciple is not a word that is a synonym for a believer. There were many disciples who did not believe. Judas Iscariot was one example of a disciple who did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah. A disciple is simply a term for someone who is a student, someone who is dedicated to following the teachings of their master or their instructor or their rabbi.
And so a disciple is really a term for a believer who has taken on the challenge to pursue spiritual growth to some level. So as Paul introduces this topic of suffering in verse 17, he then goes on to explain it and put it into perspective in verse 18 by saying, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Whether the sufferings are great or small; whether this adversity is on the magnitude of a scale of 10 or 15 or 20 or whether this just barely makes a blip on the screen. Whatever the suffering is, they're not worthy, no matter how extreme it is, once we compare it with the glory which will be revealed in us. When we understand the purpose, when we can focus on the why to the degree that we can comprehend it, understanding that God is using it for a purpose, even though we can never comprehend that purpose, it all makes sense.
We'll spend some time in Job tonight. That was God's message to Job, that no matter how horrible things were God told Job He wasn't going to answer his questions because even if He answered them Job couldn't understand it so the issue is you have to trust Me. So Paul says here that the perspective is that the suffering of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. So I want to start by looking at some categories of suffering that we learn from the Scripture. We're going to look at about five or six categories this evening in terms of understanding the kinds of suffering that God allows in our lives.
The first category is preventative suffering. God allows suffering in our life to prevent us from giving in to carnality, going further in our arrogance, giving in to our sin nature. Under this category there are several ways in which preventative suffering occurs in our lives. The first is that suffering is preventative in that it warns and instructs us. God sent suffering to Job. Job, as you know, lost his children, his possessions, his wealth, and he did not curse God. Then there was a second round of losses where he lost his health and again he did not curse God but due to the influence of his friends, the questioning we all have in times of adversity were exposed. God did not send suffering to Job because Job had done something wrong. Again and again at the beginning of Job, God says to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job who a righteous and blameless man?” This is stated several times.
Job had done nothing wrong so why did God allow this suffering in his life? And one thing you need to remember as we go through this is that God is the original multitasker. So we may encounter suffering that has several different facets to it and several different reasons for it. It's not just one or the other. God is doing several things at the same time. So the first is that suffering is used to warn us and instruct us.
Now this could fit under another way suffering is often evaluated and analyzed, that there's deserved suffering and undeserved suffering. Deserved suffering is when we can attach to the suffering to some specific decision or course of action in our life. The reason we're going through this adversity is because we have made certain bad decisions in our life and we're just reaping the consequences either in terms of the direct consequences or because God is exacerbating those consequences as divine discipline.
Then there's undeserved suffering, sometimes called unjust suffering, suffering that is not attached at all to anything in our life. We may be doing everything right like Job was and yet we go through some form of adversity or suffering. One reason is that God often uses that suffering to expose areas of independence and autonomy in our lives that we're not facing or dealing with so that in the process of spiritual growth we have to understand the depths of our own depravity. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all things and wicked, who can know it? So we've camouflaged our own sin nature so much that sometimes God has to bring adversity or suffering into our life to expose that arrogance that is still present in our life so we can deal with it. So it's designed to warn and instruct. In , in one of Elihu's speeches to Job, he says, “Then He opens the ears of men and seals their instruction. So God uses suffering to get people's attentions, to get us to learn something about Him.
The second form of preventative suffering is to get us to turn from sin. What is sin? I didn't say sins. I said sin. There's a difference. Sins in the plural usually talks about specific, individual acts of disobedience, different kinds of sin. Whether we're talking about overt sins, such as murder or illegality or physical actions of violence or dissension or whether we're talking about sins of the tongue, slander, gossip, or maligning people or whether you're talking about mental attitude sins, these are what we mean when we say sins. The purpose for suffering is to expose the actions of the sin nature so we turn from it. We say, “I'm not going to do that.” speaks to this, “In order to turn man from his deed.” So that's a reason for preventative suffering so we don't continue on the wrong road as we're talking about in our Proverb study on Sunday morning.
The third reason for preventative suffering is to prevent that pride and sin associated with arrogance from developing in our lives as it continues to grow and expand. says, “That he may turn man aside form his conduct, and keep man from concealing pride.” This means to remove pride from the life. A fourth reason is to protect us from death, the end result of sin. We've studied in Romans and other passages that the end result of sin is death, not eternal condemnation in the lake of fire but living a death-like existence apart from the power of God so that we're not living and experiencing the blessing and the happiness and the joy and the peace that God has for us. says that another reason for suffering is “To bring back his soul from the pit...” This is a metaphor here used for death or death-like existence. “… that he may be enlightened with the light of life.” So preventative suffering is to get our attention before we've gone down the path of sin to prevent us from taking the wrong course. So that's the first reason for suffering.
A second category of suffering is corrective or disciplinary suffering, punitive suffering. This is what we often think of that God is punishing us for taking certain courses of action or doing certain things. The word that is used most frequently in the Old Testament for this is the Hebrew word yakach. It's used in and 12, a verse we're all very familiar with. It's a verse we'll be studying soon on Sunday morning and that's a word that's used in and it means to correct someone by punishment. It refers to a penal disciplinary action. So this is for the believer who doesn't pay attention to the preventative suffering and keeps going forward in terms of his own willfulness in disobedience to God. It's used in these passages in a passive form, especially in to show that it is God who is the ultimate source of the chastening.
In other passages like in and 12, the genitive construct there views that which informs us of the source of the chastening. and 12 says “My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe His reproof.” Don't react with anger to God and don't blame God because you're going through suffering or adversity. God in His sovereignty oversees everything; He's not directly causing it but He allows through His permissive will certain things to come in to our life. He sovereignty oversees these things because He allows them to come into our life for these various purposes. We're always reminded and the promise you should memorize is , “No testing has overtaken you but what is common to man, and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tested beyond what you are able but will with the testing make a way to escape that you may be able to endure it.”
uses this same word again where David prays, “O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger, Nor chasten me in your wrath [hot displeasure].” Remember the word 'anger' doesn't mean God is throwing a temper tantrum or He's becoming emotionally upset. It is a metaphor to understand the intensity and the negative aspect of God's judgment for disobedience. The word 'rebuke' and 'chasten' are parallel to one another and it emphasizes that corrective nature that comes with suffering.
So God used suffering in Job's case, not to discipline him for wrong behavior, but it was part of preventative type of suffering. It exposed certain ideas that were wrong in Job's thinking. He had developed a false idea of his own righteousness which comes out in some of the passages and some false ideas about the value of his service to God. This is what Elihu is contending in these passages. He contends that Job had said, according to some translations in , “I am righteous before God”, but other scholars believe this should be translated that Job said “I am more righteous than God.” This would indicate a certain self-righteousness and arrogance that he had and he's defending his innocence with such vigor that he has overstated his own righteousness. This is part of the purpose for suffering. It exposes these aspects of arrogance within our own sin nature which we have camouflaged and covered up.
Elihu quotes Job as saying “What advantage will it be to you, what profit will I have more than if I had sinned?” In other words Job was contending with his friend, saying what value would this be if he had sinned. In , he goes on to say, “It profits a man nothing when he is pleased with God.” Job is expressing his dissatisfaction with God so what the suffering does it begins to expose areas in our soul where human viewpoint begins to leak out and reveal and expose areas of arrogance in our soul. Elihu points this out to Job to get him to wake up.
Now a third category of suffering is a pedagogical or educational suffering. It's designed to teach something. It's designed to give us instruction, so we learn something from it. We're not just going through suffering. When we go through difficult times we should say, “Now what does the Lord want me to learn here? How am I supposed to respond to these circumstances and to this situation?” There are many different ways in which this is accomplished. We'll look at the passage a little later on but in , the Apostle Paul talks about the fact that God had given him a thorn in the flesh and then it is further defined as a messenger from Satan. That word 'messenger' is the Greek word angelos [a)ggeloj] which means messenger and it's the word for angel. So it's an angel from Satan.
That thorn in the flesh wasn't a health problem; it didn't have to do with his weak eyesight; it didn't have to do with any of those other things but there was a demon assigned to Paul. Later on it talks about how he's overcome all this opposition and persecution and it's clear that is how this thorn in the flesh manifested itself. It's apparently in the context of spiritual warfare. There was demonic activity stirring up opposition to the Apostle Paul. Here was probably the most brilliant man on the face of the earth. He had one of the greatest rabbinical educations known to mankind during his lifetime. Plus he has all the revelatory knowledge that God had given him and yet he's rejected time and time and time again. He is opposed by people who don't want to understand anything he's saying and he is constantly going through rejection and hostility and persecution so God has allowed this to keep him humble.
So that's one reason we have pedagogical suffering is to teach us something about humility. In doing that it teaches us to develop patience in two categories. The word 'patience' in English is often used to translate two different Greek words. One is hupomeno [u(pomenw] which means to stay under something, to endure a testing situation of negative circumstances. The other word is makrothumia [makroqumia], makro meaning long and thumia which is anger. It means not losing your temper, not losing your patience, so the two go together. To endure something involves a patient endurance and long suffering. The Lord is teaching these things. In doing that it teaches us humility to recognize the authority of God to oversee all of the events in our life. Our life is not about what we want. It's not about you. It's not about me. It's not about your agenda. It's not about my agenda. It's about God's agenda. When we forget that, God has to instruct us and teach us and correct us. He will do that through His Word. He'll do that through preventative suffering. If we don't get the message, it will be through punitive suffering but all of that is part of educational suffering.
In Job we read passages such as , “Behold, God is exalted in His power...” When we come to understand the omnipotence of God to sustain us in the midst of suffering, then God is exalted. When we say, “Oh, God can't really help me,” what we're saying is “Scripture lies. God's not omnipotent. I'm in a situation God never thought about before. God's omnipotence isn't able to take care of me. I've got to do it on my own.” That's essentially what we're saying so “God is exalted by His power.” We have to let His power be manifest and then the verse continues, “Who teaches like Him?” He teaches through suffering and adversity.
In , we have the cry to God, “Teach me what I do not see; if I have done iniquity, I will do no more.” We're calling upon God to expose what the real issues are in the midst of testing so we can be successful in the test and not have to go through it again. Another passage in the Psalms that also talks about this pedagogical aspect is in . Let's look at and just sort of think our way through this Psalm so we can understand what the message is and how we can apply some of these principles and promises in our own lives. This is a psalm of David and it's in the context of forgiveness for sin. In that sense it is also what is called a lament psalm. That's the technical, scholarly term they use for these but it's a psalm that's a cry to God in the midst of suffering. David is crying out to God that he's going through all this adversity and suffering in life and calling upon God to sustain him. David begins by saying, “To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.” So the psalm begins focusing on God.
Sometimes in a lament psalm the focus isn't on God but it just goes right to the problem. That happens with us a lot of times when we are in the midst of suffering. We're so focused on who we are; we're so self-absorbed and we're so focused on our own problem that that's where we start with prayer. And some people think that's just wrong. They think they have to just wait until they get in fellowship and get everything straightened out but that's not what David does. You don't need to feel the need to do that. We can confess our sins but we have to start with, “Lord, I'm really upset here.” There's honesty there. “I'm upset; I don't understand what's going on. This is happening and my life is cratering around me. What's going on?” That's the cry to God but we don't stop with that. We don't stop and have a pity party. We continue to press through to focus on who God is and what His plan is and it's that focus that then changes the perspective.
Now in this psalm David begins with a statement of trust in God. See, not all situations or all responses are the same. Not all people are the same. One day we're going to respond one way; another day we're going to respond another way. In this situation David begins by focusing on the Lord, “To You, O Lord, I life up my soul. O my God, I trust in you. Let me not be ashamed.” Now the underlying statement here is “Lord, I'm trusting You but this looks pretty bad and I'm afraid you're not going to pull me out of it and, if you don't, I'm going to be embarrassed in front of everybody.” So, see, he's starting out with trust and confidence in God but he wants to lay the issue out. “Let me not be ashamed. Do not let my enemies exult [triumph] over me.”
The other thing that is going on here and that is embedded in this is a rationale to God that “Lord, if you don't pull my fat out of the fire, we're all going to be embarrassed about Your plan.” He's pointing out the rationale that if God lets these horrible things continue, then it will give aid and comfort to the enemy so that's part of his rationale of why God should intervene in his life. “...Don't let me be ashamed. Don't let my enemies triumph over me, Indeed, none of those who wait for You will be ashamed.”
Now this phrase 'waiting on the Lord' is a synonym for trust because in trusting in the Lord we have to relax and not impose our timetable on God's plan. “Those who wait upon the Lord shall mount up with wings as eagles.” That's the same idea in Isaiah. We need to wait on the Lord. That waiting may take days, months, years but that's part of the test is to wait on the Lord. There's the contrast in verse 3, “Those who deal treacherously without cause will be ashamed.” In other words, he's talking about the evil doers, the bad guys. “Make me know your ways, O Lord, Teach me your paths.”
So ultimately there's this statement that's reflective of humility that “Lord, I'm in the midst of this adversity, this opposition but I know this is a teachable moment. It's a time for me to learn and apply some doctrine so help me understand the lesson and to put it into practice.” Then he focuses on where the solution is in verse 5, “Lead me in Your truth and teach me for You are the God of my salvation. For You I wait all the day.” So he has affirmed his trust in God in verse 2 and he has affirmed the fact he is waiting on the Lord. That's implied in the first part of verse 3. It is restated at the end of verse 5, “On You I wait all the day.” Then he verse 6 he calls to the Lord, “Remember, O Lord, your compassion [tender mercies] and your loving kindnesses.”
Now, what's he doing here? He's focusing back on the character of God. He's doing it not only to remind himself of God's attributes but he's reminding God of His attributes, mercy and loving kindness. These are terms that are often linked together in Scripture. Rakham has to do with mercy. It's an idiom that comes out of the bowels that God is a God of tender mercies and compassion and loving kindness is faithful loyal love. Verse l6 goes on, “For they have been from of old.” Lord, this is who You are. Again, he's building and embedding a rationale in his prayer for why God should answer his prayer positively.
Then there is the confession in verse 7, “Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions.” Sins, khatawth, refers to the violation of God's standards and transgressions asah which means to transgress or violate a commandment. “According to Your mercy remember me. For your goodness sake, O Lord.” So he appeals to the character of God. Then we come to verse 8 and focusing again on the righteousness and goodness of God, He says, “Good and upright is the Lord. Therefore he instructs sinners in the way.” So God is instructing us. We're all sinners as Paul says in the New Testament, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Therefore he teaches sinners in the way. “He leads the humble in justice.” But what does He do with the arrogant? In other passages God takes a stand against the arrogant; He opposes the arrogant but for the one who is humble, He guides in justice.
Now, the passages that talk about David being a man after God's own heart indicates his basic orientation in his thinking was to be obedient to God. But many times he failed. That's true for many of us. Our ultimate desire is to obey God but there are other people who go to church but it's just a show and its superficial but their heart's desire isn't to truly obey God. Just because your heart's desire is to truly be obedient to God and to learn and to grow, it doesn't mean it's any easier and doesn't mean it's not going to be difficult and doesn't mean there's not going to be difficult challenges. But that's the basic orientation, the life's course that David chose. We all know David fell off the wagon many, many times. Sometimes he really crashed and burned. That can be true for any believer but God still said David was a 'man after His own heart'. So we can be focused on God. You can have a believer who is tremendously focused on God, mature, growing, and his life orientation is on Bible doctrine but that doesn't mean he's not going to crash and burn a few times. We all will and we all do. So God teaches sinners in the way, the humble he guides in justice.
Part of the guidance is through suffering. God's allowance of suffering is compatible with His righteousness. He guides in justice. This is the same word for righteousness in the Hebrew, tsehdak. It says the humble He guides in justice and the humble He teaches His way. So He guides through teaching and that instruction comes through suffering. Verse 10, “All the paths of the Lord are loving kindness [mercy] and truth.” This is like , “All things work together for good.” Too many people hear “All things are good”. That's not what it says, It says, “God is working all things together for good.” In God's sovereignty He has an end game and in His omnipotence and omniscience He's able to weave together all the evil, disobedience, horrible things so that when we get to the end of the plan of God in time, God is going to work all these things together for absolute good. “So all the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth, to those who keep His covenant and His testimonies.”
Then he comes to the end of this period about confession in verse 11, “For Your name's sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity for it is great.” Now we don't know which particular sin this was. There's no historical annotation here to indicate a particular time of carnality but it's obviously a significant sin. Verse 12 we read, “Who is the man who fears the Lord?” What does Solomon say, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So David is asking who is the man who fears the Lord, that is truly oriented to the grace of God, the authority of God, the sovereignty of God. “He will instruct him in the way he should choose. His soul will abide in prosperity, and his descendants shall inherit the earth.” That is, the descendants of the one who fears the Lord.
Verse 14, “The secret of the Lord is for those who fear Him.” Now this passage is focusing on that God is constantly involved in teaching us about Himself, teaching us how to depend on Him, and teaching us how to grow. echoes the same idea stating that, “Blessed [happy] is the man whom You chasten, O Lord, and whom You teach out of Your law.” So God's instruction ultimately comes out of His Word. The only way that you and I can have a framework for understanding suffering in the very limited, finite way that we do, is when we have a framework that comes from God's word and understand what He has revealed to us.
We see something about this in . Up to chapter 37 we see this interchange between Job and his three friends and then we see a fourth individual, Elihu, who seems to be saying something different form the three friends who are saying, “Job, get a grip. You screwed up. God is punishing you because you're guilty.” But all along God had said that Job was blameless and upright in all his ways. Now Elihu comes along and he addresses it from a different perspective and there's a lot of debate whether Elihu is just as wrong as the other three friends or whether Elihu is more correct in pointing out the justice of God. These are some issues I haven't really had the time to get into, they're complicated but that beside the point, something I'll have to deal with when I get around to Job. But in chapter 37, we see that Elihu is still focusing on challenging Job's sort of resentment toward God and causing him to think a little bit more about suffering.
In the first verse of chapter 37, he talks about a metaphor of a storm that's coming. He says, “At this also my heart trembles and leaps from its place. Listen closely to the thunder of His voice and the rumbling that goes out from His mouth.” So he's describing the approach of God and the approach of suffering in terms of a storm. This extends down through verse 5. Then in verse 6, he talks about God's control over even the harshness of the winter weather or storm. This is covered in 6 through 13 and then starting in verse 14, Elihu begins to ask Job a series of rhetorical questions. Starting in chapter 38, God is going to start asking Job rhetorical questions. He doesn't expect an answer. The questions are asked in order to give Job a chance to think about how he would or could even answer those questions.
So starting in verses 14 through 18 we have these various questions that Elihu is asking, “Listen to this, O Job, stand and consider the wonders of God. Do you know how God establishes them [dispatches them] and makes the lightning of His cloud to shine? Do you know about the layer of the thick clouds [how the clouds are balanced], the wonders of One perfect in knowledge.” See, Elihu is beginning to point out to Job that his knowledge is pretty finite. This is a perfect set-up for when God begins to answer Job starting in verse 38. So Elihu asks those rhetorical questions and then in verse 19 he focuses on what Job's attitude should be in terms of responding to the instruction of the Lord. “Teach us what we shall say to Him. We cannot arrange our case because of darkness.” In other words he's looking at God being in this impenetrable darkness we can't really understand what God understands because our knowledge is so finite and limited but God's is so comprehensive that we can't understand.
Verse 20 says, “Shall it be told Him that I would speak? Or should a man say that he would be swallowed up?” God is so overwhelming. Verse 21, “Now men do not see the light which is bright in the skies.” You look at the sun, you're going to go blind. “But the wind has passed and cleared them. Out of the north comes golden splendor, Around God is awesome majesty.” I think this is a point where the whole trajectory of Job has been building to this point in Elihu's speech and then God comes on the scene. So Elihu is setting the stage for God to come on and address Job. Verse 23, “The Almighty—we cannot find Him. He is exalted in power and He will not do violence to justice and abundant righteousness. Therefore men fear Him; He does not regard [shows no partiality] any who are wise of heart.”
That, really ends the first part of the whole book of Job and then in 38:1 the Lord comes and appears to Job and begins to ask him a series of questions through the next several chapters. So we have this focus in 37: 19-24 on the transcendence of God's justice and His omnipotence. God instructs us. We learn from Him. We have to submit to His authority. We see this in passages like , , and 71. “Teach me good discernment and knowledge for I believe in Your commandments. Before I was afflicted I went astray but now I keep Your word.” He's been instructed in the midst of affliction. Verse 71, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn your statutes.” So one purpose of suffering is that we learn God's statutes. As part of this suffering, God is helping us to understand more of who He is. It's not revelational in the sense of God giving verbal information to us but the suffering enables us to comprehend as we apply and implement God's word. It gives us that ability to gain greater insight into an understanding of the reality of the text.
Moses refers to this in terms of the adversity that the Israelites went through in the wilderness. , he says, “He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor that your fathers know...” In other words, God let you get really hungry “that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.” , “This is my comfort in my affliction that Your Word has revived me.” , “Before I was afflicted I went astray but now I keep Your Word.” is another one. “It is good for me that I have been afflicted that I may learn Your statutes.” Again and again this is reiterated. , “My voice cries out to God and He will hear me. In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord. In the night my hand was stretched out without weariness [without ceasing] and my soul refused to be comforted.” Some of you have had nights like that; some of you have had many nights like that when you just couldn't sleep because you were going through such adversity that once you closed your eyes and tried to go to sleep at night, all you could think about was whatever the troubles were. David had the same kind of experience, so what does he do? He turns to the Lord where he would receive comfort but he was not receiving comfort because he wasn't responding to it.
, “when I remember God, then I am disturbed; when I sigh, then my spirit grows faint.” Until David focused on doctrine there's no real solution. Another way in which this educational aspect of suffering comes through is seen at the time of Lazarus' death. Lazarus died in the early part of John, chapter 11. You all remember the story. Jesus and the disciples are up in the northern part of Galilee where they are ministering around the Sea of Galilee. Some messengers come from Mary and Martha, saying, “Lord, your friend Lazarus is sick unto death. Come and heal him.” I always think it's interesting because earlier in John there's a centurion who has a son who is sick and he sends a messenger that says you don't have to come, just heal my centurion from where you are. But here Mary and Martha don't say that. The Lord is up in Galilee and he can heal Lazarus from there. They say, “Lord, come and heal him.” And the Lord who could immediately heal him from there or could leave and get there before Lazarus died says, “No, I'm not going to go.”
He continues about His business for another four or five days and then He decides to head south to take care of the situation with Lazarus. By the time the Lord arrived, Lazarus was already dead and in the grave for four days. The family and friends are all around. Martha comes out and she's quite distrait. This is the context of these verses. Jesus is talking to His disciples as they're on their way down to Bethany and he said, “Lazarus is dead and I'm glad for your sakes that I was not there that you may believe.” Believe what? They were already believers in Jesus as the Messiah. They're already born again, regenerate, but they have to learn to trust God. Their belief in terms of the faith-rest drill had to be developed so this is going to be an opportunity where Jesus can raise Lazarus from the dead and it is going to give more empirical evidence of His Messiahship and His power to raise people from the dead.
Whatever problem you're facing God has the ability to solve that problem. So He says again that He was glad He wasn't there so that they might believe but “nevertheless, let's go to him.” is a core issue of Paul's teaching in relation to affliction and suffering and in relation to financial suffering, dealing with giving and he's talking about the Macedonians and how they gave out of their poverty to help the believers in Jerusalem that he was collecting along the way to take money to help those who were suffering in a famine down in Israel. He says, “Now, brethren, we wish to make known to you the grace of God which has been given in the churches of Macedonia, that in a great ordeal of affliction their abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality [generosity].” See, out of their poverty they gave because of their understanding of the grace of God, so their suffering was used to teach others about the grace of God. Verse 9 says, “For know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.” Jesus Christ, as the eternal second person of the Trinity had all things and then He entered into human history as a child living in a lower middle class, working class family, and he grew up without a whole lot so that He could go to the cross and through His death on the cross, He might be made rich.
Fourth category of suffering is to glorify God. , when Jesus was dealing with the blind man, people are saying, “Well, who sinned? This man or his parents?” This man was born blind. Jesus said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned but that the works of God should be revealed in Him.” This was so God could be glorified through the healing that was about to take place. takes place right after Jesus hears about Lazarus being sick unto death. “But when Jesus heard this, He said, “This sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it.” So adversity and suffering may have nothing to do with you except the opportunity to bring glory to God.
This is the backdrop of what Paul says about his thorn in the flesh. In he says, “Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelation, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me—to keep me from exalting myself.” Paul's knowledge is so great he's saying a thorn in the flesh was given to him to make sure he didn't cave in to arrogance. He goes on to say in verse 8, “Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me.” Now there's nothing wrong with Paul praying to God to remove the suffering. He didn't know what the answer was until he asked. There's nothing wrong with asking just because God's answer is no. So it's legitimate to pray and request anything but recognize God may say no, that there's a reason for this suffering. The reason for Paul's suffering was so he could learn that God's grace was sufficient for him, that God's power, His omnipotence, was sufficient. His strength was made perfect in weakness. So Paul concludes, “Therefore I boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” In other words, I recognize that by my limited power going through this, God is glorified as I depend upon Him. God says to David in says, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue [deliver] you, and you will honor [glorify] Me.” That's a great promise we can all claim: “Call upon Me and I will deliver you and you shall glorify Me.”
Then the fifth reason I have for why suffering occurs is to remove distractions in our lives so that we learn to focus on what's really important and what has eternal value. It teaches us to organize our life and get rid of the stuff that's irrelevant for why God has us here, that is a distraction from our ambassadorship and to put our focus on the fact that we're not here for our personal pleasure and enjoyment. We're here to represent the heavenly court and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. In and 10 Paul says, “Indeed we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead...” He's talking about the fact he's been under persecution and had been sentenced to death and so that life was on the verge of execution but it was that way so they would trust in God, not in themselves. In verse 10, “Who delivered us from so great a peril of death and will deliver us in Whom we set our hope [trust] that He will still deliver us.”
Suffering also teaches us to organize our life so we spend more time in prayer. , “In the day of my trouble, I sought the Lord; in the night my hand was stretched out without weariness [ceasing]. My soul refused to be comforted.” That often is our experience. We go through adversity and it is so overwhelming that we claim promises and we pray but we're so unsettled that that continues all through the night. Some people say, “Well, you're just not really claiming the promises if you didn't go right to sleep.” That's the silliest thing in the world because that comes from someone who has a silly, superficial attitude about suffering. Think about the fact that the night before Jesus goes to the cross, when He's in the Garden of Gethsemane, He is as if he's sweating blood. He is under so much emotional turmoil. Do you think He could have gone to sleep? Peter and John went to sleep. They're supposed to be guarding Him but Jesus couldn't go to sleep. He is under extreme emotional distress. That's the language that's used in the Greek. He is overwhelmed but He's turning to God and He's praying. Now if they hadn't come out to arrest Him, He would have been up all night sweating blood and praying.
Just because you're praying and claiming promises doesn't mean instantly your mental attitude gets straightened out. It doesn't mean instantly that which is bothering you and overwhelming you goes away. It might but there are times when we go through things and we just feel so overwhelmed that it takes time to let the Word of God have its impact in our life and to settle things out. That's what David is talking about here. He's doing all the right things; he's seeking the Lord, his hand is stretched out without ceasing but his soul refused to be comforted. It just didn't happen because the soul is so overwhelmed by the circumstances.
James gives us a couple of prescriptions in . He says, “Is anyone among you suffering, let him pray.” That's the solution and if you have recovered and if you're cheerful, “Let him sing songs.” Now I'm not going to embarrass anybody here but I should ask, “How many songs could you sing if you were cheerful? Could you sing through a whole hymn? By memory? Shame on you. Better get to work because the Bible says that if you're happy, sing hymns. You have to learn them. Gee, what a concept. Not just memorizing Scripture but learning hymns. You can't exactly apply that Scripture if you don't know any.”
Okay, suffering removes distractions, and 13. The Petrine epistles are great epistles for understanding suffering. He says, “In this you greatly rejoice, even though now, for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed [grieved] by various trials..” So on the one hand you can have great joy but on the other hand, you're going through hell on earth. In verse 13, he says, “Therefore prepare your minds for action [gird up the loins of your mind].” Straighten out your thinking. It's thinking, thinking, thinking. God doesn't care how you feel. I don't care how you feel. The issue is are you “girding up your thinking”? If you start thinking right, your emotions will come in line. It may not happen overnight. It may take time but the issue isn't how you feel. We all recognize we have all kind of screwed up emotions. The issue is are we thinking according to the Word of God? “Therefore prepare your minds for action, keep sober...” That means to have objective thinking. The only way you can have it from the Word of God. “...Keep your hope [rest your hope] completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Now that closes out those five categories of suffering. Next time I want to come back and address it from a more personal, subjective perspective of ten reasons why we all suffer. Why do I suffer? We say, “God, why am I suffering?” I'm going to give you ten reasons why we suffer. Only one of them has to do with your own bad decisions.

Romans 090b-Ten Reasons Why We Suffer Romans 8:18

Romans 8:18 NASB95
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
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Romans 090b-Ten Reasons Why We Suffer
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We are in Romans, chapter 8. Last time was actually two weeks ago since last Thursday night I was in D.C. for my dad’s service. Some of you may not know that we also had a service for my aunt. My uncle had been buried there a little over two years ago. My aunt died a little over a year ago and so we were also interring her cremation urn with my uncle so it made for a somewhat busy, busy time.
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talks about suffering. Now this is a crucial idea because Paul connects suffering here to being a future heir of Christ, a joint heir with Christ. We have to re-punctuate the verse a little bit, “If children, then heirs of God,” which is true of all children of God. Now there’s a difference here. I’ve stressed it before but I want to remind you that there are two phrases here. These are critical phrases for proper interpretation of this text. “Sons of God” which is the Greek word huios [u(ioj] and “children of God” which is teknon [teknon]. This refers to every believer but huios refers only to those who advance to spiritual maturity. It’s important to understand that difference because as we see in this verse, those who become joint heirs with Christ are those who suffer with Him.
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As I pointed out, suffering is not something extreme. Some people think suffering is something on a great order of pain and adversity but it’s just basically having to face and deal with issues in the cosmic system, the devil’s world, in a corrupt fallen universe and every day as we bump heads with the corruption that is reality around us, we suffer. Whenever we have to make right decisions for the truth and any time there’s any negative blowback, that’s part of suffering. Rather than taking the path of least resistance we took the path of righteousness and truth and we have experienced a negative reaction from it and that is necessary for us to grow and mature spiritually. So we have to put these sufferings into perspective and they’re necessary for that future time.
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We are shifting our focus here when it talks about heir-ship and inheritance and what happens when the Messianic Kingdom is established and Christ comes back. The church age believers will rule and reign with Him as co-heirs during the Millennial Kingdom. So the focus now is not just on the present time but on living in the present in light of that future reality and that ultimate destiny. That ultimate destiny is referred to as glory. Verse 18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us.”
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Now that glory is different from the other glory, the mention of being glorified with Him, in verse 17. Being glorified with Him means we are recognized and elevated as joint heirs with Christ at the judgment seat of Christ when we receive our rewards. The glory that’s revealed in us is related to that eternal state so there has to be a distinction and an understanding of the ways glory is used in this particular passage.
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Critical to our preparation is testing. We have to be tested. This is true in every endeavor in life. If you’re going to succeed at anything, you have to go through testing to make sure you have qualified by learning what you needed to have learned to reach a certain point. Unfortunately, there are people in the field of educational philosophy today who don’t understand the purpose of testing. Because that’s become muddled in education today we have a problem because we think that we can fix the failures that are occurring in the home and the failures that are occurring because of societal breakdowns of discipline which all impact the classroom. We think we can fix the educational failures by just assessing or mandating certain tests. The result of that is just the opposite. That seems to be the intuitive response but the reality is that when you start imposing tests as your criteria, then what happens is that the teachers have to teach to the test because their evaluation and their assessment is based upon how well their students do on the tests. So they’re no longer teaching to learn but teaching to pass tests. That doesn’t work in the real world. Tests don’t function in that way. So testing happens to be a way in which you face the realities of life and have to utilize and apply the knowledge you’ve acquired in the classroom.
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For the Christian that means applying it to our thinking so that rather than being run over by adversity we stand firm, trusting the Lord. It doesn’t mean the adversity isn’t painful. It doesn’t mean the adversity isn’t emotionally traumatic. I’ve pointed out many times that the Lord Jesus Christ went through emotional trauma in the Garden of Gethsemane. The words that are used there, the fact that He physically sweated blood shows how intense the emotional and physical pressure was as He anticipated what would take place the next day before He went to the Cross. It’s a very real emotional pressure. I find that too many Christians have a shallow view of emotion. Either on the one hand you try to suppress it and act like it’s not really there or on the other hand, you just let it reign supreme and let it run your life. That’s not true. The Lord Jesus Christ did not let that emotion run His life or make His decisions or neither did He act like it really wasn’t there and life was fun, great, and wonderful and everything was just perfect. He recognized and dealt with the realities of that emotion but He didn’t let it dictate what He was going to do. He was not going to be mastered by the emotion generated by the circumstances.
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I went through some categories of suffering last time. I’m just going to hit them very quickly this time. The first category is preventative suffering. It warns and instructs according to Job33:16. It teaches us to turn from sin according to . It is designed to prevent arrogance and sin associated with sin in . It is to protect us from death, which is not eternal death but temporal death or a death-like existence from living a non-productive spiritual life in .
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The second category is corrective or disciplinary suffering, also known as punitive suffering where the Lord punishes the believer for disobedience. This is found in and . The third category we looked at was suffering designed to teach us in , , , and . Also , , and 71. We’ll run into this again in , as well as , , and 71. and then where Jesus was teaching and instructing the disciples with reference to strengthening their faith. , , and 9.
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The fourth category is suffering to glorify God. This is seen in with the man born blind, not because he sinned or his parents sinned but so that God would be glorified when he was healed. And in , just think of all the suffering and misery that went on when Lazarus died. Lazarus’s physical pain, Lazarus’s emotional and mental anguish, the anguish and sorrow of Mary and Martha and his friends and family as they surrounded the tomb and they were still there in grief four days after Lazarus died. Because of that anguish the Lord Jesus wept. He looked upon their anguish and their sorrow and He wept. That is one of the most striking things in my thinking. We don’t have a really good handle on the theology of emotion. Here Jesus, in His perfect humanity that never sinned, gets quite emotional. He weeps but the reason He weeps is because of the grief that He sees, the sorrow, the anguish on the part of people who have experienced death and the loss of a loved one which God did not design. That was not God’s original intent for man to go through that. That is not what God intended. I remember the first few times I taught that people said, “What do you mean, God didn’t intend that?” No, He didn’t. That was the punishment for sin and this shows the compassion Christ had in His humanity for the suffering of people who were going through something that was not their fault. It was because they were living in a fallen corrupt world. Paul’s suffering with the thorn in the flesh is another example of suffering to glorify God. It was a demon messenger, literally an angelos [a)ggeloj], an angel of Satan, which means it’s a demon, sent to antagonize and buffet Paul. That’s to control his arrogance. He was to learn that God’s grace was sufficient for him and this would glorify God. Also in , God says, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you and you will honor Me.”
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The fifth category was suffering to remove distractions and focus on the important issues of life. We have so much going on in our lives. You think about all the decisions, all the things that stimulate us today from the time we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed and you compare that to what someone up to the end of 19th century experienced and it’s profound. They had an extremely simple, undistracted way of life and they could spend time reading and thinking. If they lived on a farm, which most people did, they had time to think and reflect as they were going about various chores. But now we have all these distractions and we love our entertainment. We are entertainment addicts. True confessions. My name is Robby and I’m an addict to entertainment. We all are because it’s stimulative; it’s part of our culture, but it’s a distraction from studying the Word and focusing on our mission and ministry to the Lord.
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I’m reading the new third volume of William Manchester’s massive work on Winston Churchill. It just recently came out. I read most of the first one and bits and pieces of the second one. I’ve been looking forward to this but I didn’t know if this was going to come out because Manchester died in 2003 or 2004. He had a series of strokes in the mid to late 90’s and had not been able to write after that. He could think, his mind was good, but he couldn’t transfer his mental ideas to paper. He could verbally express himself but he couldn’t write anymore. He commissioned another writer to finish the task when he died and that has now come out.
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It’s just remarkable. Churchill was a brilliant man and he anticipated the arrival of television but the reality disappointed him greatly and he never watched it because it would be such a disappointment and a waste of time and destroy productivity. I actually had a deacon like that in Connecticut. I guess Dave is probably 94 or 95 now. He’s a great war hero. He was with the marines that came in and replaced my dad. My dad was in the first wave at Iwo Jima. He was medevac’d at the end of the second day and on the third day Dave came in with a replacement division, probably one of the few marines that was not wounded and remained on Iwo Jima for the next 28 days. Dave came back to Preston City, where he was a native. I think he’s still a deacon at Preston City Bible church. We used to kind of laugh because he was deaf and when anything controversial came up, we’d just talk in our normal voices and he’s just nod his head and go right along with everything. But Dave never had a television. He raised his kids without a television. He never allowed one in the house and he never had air conditioning either. And that’s a problem because it gets up to 90 there in the summer. So talk about suffering. Suffering is to remove distractions and the things you can accomplish just by removing some of these things from our life.
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That brings us to the next part of this study on suffering which is ten reasons why we suffer, understanding why we suffer. One of the key passages for our first category is our passage in . The first reason is because of Adamic responsibility. Adam made a bad decision and we all suffer its consequences. That’s a form of how we’re associated with people who make bad decisions so we suffer. Well this is the ultimate association. We’re all associated with Adam. Because Adam sinned and disobeyed God immediately the human race was plunged into spiritual death, separation from God.
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In a sense it’s like having a fan plugged into a wall outlet. As long as it’s plugged into the outlet it’s receiving energy and moving. Once it’s removed from the outlet, it still has the semblance of life but if you watch it, it slows down and slows down until eventually it dies. The spiritual death of is like pulling the plug on the human race. But Adam didn’t die physically for a number of years. That was a consequence of spiritual death, that condemnation, that punishment God imposed on the human race because it disobeyed Him by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As we studied in the past that didn’t just affect Adam and Eve and their relationship to God. It affected the animal kingdom. The serpent was cursed more than all the other animals. That means there is a difference in degree. That means there’s a judgment on the serpent that’s worse than the rest of the animal kingdom.
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It clearly states that the rest of the animal kingdom came under a judgment. There was corruption that impacted them. There was a corruption that impacted Eve in terms of her bodily functions in relation to procreation and in relationship to giving birth. There was now pain and sorrow that was increased. The soil was now going to produce thistles and thorns and Adam would have to scratch out, in terms of farming, scratch out his living through the sweat of the brow so the curse impacted creation, all of the elements. It had a physical impact.
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We know in physics, there are the two laws of thermodynamics. The first law states that matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed. Now there was a time when that wasn’t true. In during the creation week, energy and matter are created and being organized. It was not until the completion of the creation week that that first law of thermodynamics would go into effect when there would be no more creation of matter and energy. But the second law of thermodynamics that all energy is moving to a state of entropy, a state where it’s not usable. It just goes from being usable to not being usable. We don’t lose energy or matter because of the first law. That second law doesn’t go into effect until Adam sins.
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The moment Adam sinned, one of the consequences was that everything in the creation started moving into a direction of disorder and chaos and it’s still running down. Eventually it will run down. This is one of those sophisticated little arguments against the evolutionary model. If you start with a finite amount of matter or energy, how long does it take for it to run down? Well, it will run down before eternity. If we started billions of years ago with a finite amount, it would have run down by now. It would have dissipated by now because they believe in the eternality of matter. So it would have run down by now. If it’s finite to begin with, it can’t run for an infinite length of time. That bypasses their presuppositions.
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So Adamic responsibility brings corruption into everything in the planet. Everything is affected that way so after Adam sins nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. We go out and we want to work in the garden and we have weeds that come up. It’s not what it’s supposed to be. We have to weed over and over again. We go out and we try to do anything or build anything and sooner or later it rusts or it grows and we have to cut it or it disintegrates in the humidity and it rots. It all runs down. Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. When we experience frustration with the way creation is we’re reminded that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. There’s something inside that says that it shouldn’t be this way. And it shouldn’t. It wasn’t originally designed that way.
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This is part of that inner testimony of God’s existence that God has built into every one of us. Sort of that God-shaped vacuum that Ecclesiastes talks about. confirms this in relation to creation. Paul says in verse 18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Consider is the Greek verb logizomai [logizomai]which has to do with the word logic, and has to do thinking, considering, reflecting upon something and is often used to present a logical conclusion from stated premises. It should be best translated, “I have come to the conclusion as a result of the doctrine that Paul has learned that the sufferings of this present time..” That includes all degrees of suffering, adversity, difficulty.
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Present time is an interesting phrase in Greek. There are two different ways to express the concept of ‘now’ in Greek. One word is arti [a)rti]. The other word is nuni [nuni], which indicates a broader sense. Arti indicates something happening right now in the immediate present today or tomorrow. We might say, “We are now looking to purchase some land for the church.” That’s not a true statement but you might say something like that. That just covers a general, broad period of time. Whereas I might contrast that by saying, “Right now we don’t have any plans.” There’s a general sense in which you want to do something now in a broad time period but right now in the immediate there’s no plans to do it. That would express the difference between those two words. Paul uses it that way in . He says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly [enigmatically] …” That is the word now meaning right now. The mirror is the Word of God and it’s not complete. The perfect hasn’t come; the canon hadn’t been completed yet and so right now our understanding is affected by the fact we don’t have a complete revelation.
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Then he says, “But now these three things shall abide…” Now here is a broader term of what abides beyond the writing of the canon, the apostolic period, what now abides are generally faith, hope, and love. So that shows the distinction between the two words. In ‘now’ is the word for a general period of time. There are several times when this phrase is used in Romans and it always refers to this present age or dispensation. So he’s saying that the suffering in this present time is in contrast to the future time when the Messiah comes. He’s drawing out this distinction of living under the present era and the future period of the Millennial Kingdom. “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed in us.” Now that glory refers to our future glorification when we’re in our glorified bodies, ruling and reigning with Christ. says, “For the anxious [earnest] expectation…” There is something within us and I see this and I hear this with folks and the older they get they say, “I’m just so tired of living in this corrupt world I just can’t wait to go be with the Lord and be face to face with the Lord.” Not that they’re wanting to end things soon, it’s just that they feel the tension of living in this fallen world and they anticipate, look forward to, that future time when there will be no more time, no more fear, no more sorrow, no more tears, the old things are passed away. So there’s this longing, this anticipation of something so much better. “For the anxious longing of the creation..” This is a personification of material creation to compare it with human beings. So the creation, itself, is being depicted as though it has these feelings, these hopes which are analogous to ours.
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The longing of the creation “waits eagerly for the revealing [the disclosure, the revelation, the unveiling] of the sons of God.” Now this takes us back to verse 14, “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God..” These are the ones who are growing to maturity. So there will be a disclosure or revelation of this group of believers known as the sons of God, these are the ones who will rule and reign with Christ in the Millennial Kingdom with Christ. These sons of God will be unveiled at the beginning of the Millennial Kingdom as those who will be joint heirs with Christ, ruling and reigning with Him.
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So there’s this longing on the part of the creation for this time period because at that time period the curse is partially rolled back. Not completely rolled back because we’re still living in a fallen world. But it will be partially rolled back. For example, one of the consequences of the curse is the antagonism in the animal kingdom, the development of carnivores. After Adam sinned you wouldn’t want to go put your hand in a cobra’s den and the lion would not be lying down with the wolf but when we get into the Millennial Kingdom that aspect of the curse will be partially rolled back. The curse is not completely obliterated. It’s still going to be a fallen world and bear the scars of all history but there will be a certain amount of change. People will live lengthy lives, possibly the entire length of the Millennial Kingdom so it will be more like the period between the fall and the flood than the period of time since the flood. It’s rolling back the curse to a large degree so there’s this expectation of that time.
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And then we’re given a little further explanation in verse 20, “For the creation was subjected to futility [vanity], not willingly but because of Him [God’s plan] who subjected it in hope…” Now when you think of hope, don’t think of hope in the present but hope is always something that is fulfilled in the future in Biblical teaching. It’s fulfilled eschatologically when Jesus comes back. Hope is a confident expectation of something in the distance so we’re talking about expectations here, the expectation of the creation is rolling back the curse. God subjected this creation to this curse in hope so there’s this anticipation of something that will be resolved. Why? Verse 21, “That the creation, itself, will be set free from its slavery to corruption…” So what this is saying is that the creation, itself, is under a bondage. We, as believers, are born into bondage to the sin nature and we’re living in a state of corruption. So, it will be delivered “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Now notice the shift here. Children of God relates to all believers. Previously we talked about the sons of God which are those who pursued maturity in their spiritual life. Here, in this time period during the Millennial Kingdom is for all believers and it is a time when we, as believers, experience real liberty in the Millennial Kingdom.
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So the first point is that the reason we suffer is because of Adam’s original sin and we’re living in a corrupt world and we’re living with corrupted people and corrupted institutions and nothing is going to be what it ought to be. So rather than living with depression and discouragement we need to recognize that we live in a fallen world and God expects us to move out, trust Him, have joy because of the hope we have of this future restoration. One other side note on , verse 18, talking about this expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revelation, which the Old King James calls the manifestation, of the sons of God. Now there is a heresy today, just to let you know that I know about this and it’s around. It’s the idea from some really poor translations from the Old Testament, trying to make the fact that there’s going to be this super army of believers in the church age. It’s tied to post-millennialism and dominion theology and that this group of spiritual elites are going to take over the world. This has been a foundation in a lot of Christian activism which is motivated by a desire to bring in the kingdom. This is just as utopic as Marxism and socialism and it is not Biblical because it’s based on this rejection of the literal kingdom. It’s based on the idea that the church militant is going to bring in the kingdom. That connects to something we said on Tuesday night. It’s actually what Diesel was asking a question about on . I didn’t catch what he was driving at but he wanted me to connect that. This is a very popular belief. Two years ago there was this day of prayer, maybe you remember they had in August. Rick Perry came and spoke. It was a really big deal. Nearly everyone involved with that day of prayer came out of the dominion, reconstructionist, ‘manifest sons of God name it and claim it’, that crowd. Of course politicians like Rick Perry don’t know anything about these things so they end up becoming duped by some of these kinds of programs that come out, thinking they’re just doing something that is a good thing like a day of Prayer. They don’t realize that these theological undercurrents run behind things. That was what Diesel tried to open me up to say something about that and I didn’t catch.
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Okay, second point is that we suffer personally because we make bad decisions. We make bad decisions in what we do and we make bad decisions in how we respond to adversity. It’s not just bad decisions on things we do, choosing overt sin, and consequently reaping the negative consequences for those bad decisions but we make bad decisions in how we choose to respond to adversity. We have horrible things happen; we see horrible things and it generates horrible emotions in us. Then, we start acting on those horrible emotions and giving reign to them and the next thing we know we’re reaping the consequences of that and we’re in a downward spiral into a dark hole of depression because we’re not claiming the promises of God. We haven’t learned how to claim the promises of God and we haven’t learned the mental discipline to shut those things out and to focus on our mission as believers and let God deal with the horrible things going on in creation. says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows that shall he also reap.” This isn’t talking about divine discipline. This isn’t talking about additional punishment that God may bring into the life of a believer because of ongoing carnality or sin in the life. This is just talking about the natural consequences of making bad decisions. The trouble is that in the spiritual realm the consequences don’t often happen immediately so we get sucked into a sinful lifestyle, a sinful way of thinking, and ten years down the road we start reaping the consequences. We’re a little slow on making the connection between the consequences and the bad behavior.
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The third reason we suffer is divine discipline, in a punitive sense. There’s divine discipline in a positive sense where God is teaching us to discipline our lives and to organize and control things in our life so we can be productive for Him. This is talking about discipline in a punitive sense where God intensifies the negative consequences of our own bad decisions, to get our attention, to get us to get back on track. This is seen in . There’s a quote from Proverbs, chapter 3. “And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, ‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines.” Now that’s something that needs to come across to parents that a sign of love is discipline. The right way. Not out of anger, not out of resentment, not because the kids have intruded upon your private time or somehow it’s taking away from your personal agenda, but discipline them because they need to learn right from wrong. There needs to be an objective pattern of rewards and punishment for children in order to train them. Train is the root word in discipline, it has the idea of training someone in the right path. These verses in Hebrews are focusing on the negative aspects of discipline, “..do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor faint when you are reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” If you’re not being disciplined by the Lord, then maybe you’re a bastard. You’re not legitimate, if you think you’re a believer. This is saying that every believer is going to be disciplined by the Lord because He loves them. That’s not a sign of the assurance of your salvation, by the way, so don’t take it that way. So there’s divine discipline. One reason we suffer is because we continue to stay in rebellion to God.
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Fourth reason, this is one that applies in a lot of ways. Think of the concentric circles of the people you’re associated with. If you’re married, you have a spouse. You will be positively and negatively impacted by the decisions of your spouse. So pick your spouse wisely. Then there are your children. You can’t do anything about your parents; they may wish they could do something about you. You can’t do anything about them; you didn’t pick them. They are yours for the duration. But you have children and those children may bring great joy in your life or they may bring great misery in your life. In most cases they bring some of both. They’re your children and then eventually there are your grandchildren.
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Then you have people you are associated with in business. They may be business partners. They may be people you work for, let’s say you work for a large company. You work for a company, let’s say an oil company. I won’t name any oil companies, this is just a generic illustration, and somebody gets involved in some very bad decisions. We can think of numerous examples recently. Somebody in management makes bad decisions. Sometimes they make bad decisions because of their own arrogance and own selfishness. Then the next thing you know the company is in very bad shape and people are losing their jobs because of bad management. It’s just one way we are associated with people who make those decisions and we suffer because people make bad decisions. So we’re associated with someone who may be suffering from the fact they are reaping what they are sowing and we may be involved in an organization where someone is under divine discipline so consequently, the company is undergoing problems because of those associations.
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It could be your spouse. It may have nothing to do with you. I find a lot of people who the first thing they say is, “I must have done something wrong.” As I go through all these explanations I think that it’s pretty easy to decide, “Am I in fellowship? Am I really trying to walk with the Lord? Or am I living in rank carnality?” If the answer is “yes, I’m living in rank carnality,” then we need to confess our sins and we need to get our bodies back into Bible class and we need to start walking with the Lord. That’s the solution. But if we’re already there and bad things are happening then it could be for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with that. But our sin natures are so self-absorbed that the first thing we say is, “What did I do wrong? I’m a failure. I’m a loser.” Immediately what have we done? We’ve become a failure and a loser because of our self-absorption. So we need to get our eyes off self, always, and get our eyes on the Lord.
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If we’re going through suffering, what’s the solution? Make sure you’re in fellowship. Put your eyes on the Lord. Start claiming promises. It doesn’t really matter why you’re going through the suffering, whether it’s your fault, your wife’s fault, your husband’s fault, your kid’s fault, your employer’s fault, the government’s fault, George Soros’ fault, Obama’s fault…it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we take what is a really bad situation and turn it into something positive for the Lord by claiming promises and being obedient to the Lord and then what was meant for bad will turn into good. That’s how we end up with and 29 later on.
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Then the next reason is just living in the cosmic system. Now this is different from the first one. The first one is focused on the fact we live in a corrupt world. Nothing is going to work the way we want it to work. This reason is focusing on the fact that our world is dominated by people who think like the devil and it doesn’t matter whether they’re a believer or not. The people who run the systems in this world by and large think like the devil, not like Jesus. They just don’t. I don’t care how great a believer some president was or some congressman was, I will tell you they were not focused on the Word and they probably are living on a lot of cosmic system ideas. Now if you go back in history there may be some examples that are different but in our lifetime, there are very few examples of political and national leaders who had a clear focus on the Word of God as their marching orders, from a solid position. They just weren’t trained that way so we live in the cosmic system. Because we live in the cosmic system, it’s always going to be difficult and there always will be suffering. There will be suffering at your job site. Whatever you do, you’re dealing with unbelievers, fallen creatures who operate on a cosmic system scale of values. You’re living under a government that is more and more being dominated by cosmic system values. So it’s always going to be difficult so rather than caving in to depression and discouragement, we need to get our focus back on the Lord, claiming promises and executing God’s mission for our life as rigorously as we can.
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Now another reason is a positive aspect that come out of suffering. The first positive aspect is that it’s a wake-up call evangelistically. In we see the suffering, the potential suffering, coming upon the Philippian jailer. He’s in charge of the security of the prisoners. Under Roman law, if the prisoners escape under your watch, then you die. Now the Philippian jailer was probably the smallest person in the jail…because he slept on his watch. It’s a wake-up call. What does he do? He immediately comes to Paul and Silas and asked what he must do to be saved. Because as soon as the prison opened enough he knew his head was on the chopping block so he wants to know how he can be saved and he’s open. So, suffering can wake people up for the need for the gospel, the need to secure their eternal destiny.
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Seventh reason is that suffering motivates us to learn doctrine. When people go through tough times, then all of a sudden they recognize they can’t handle it and they need to get into Bible class. I know that many, many people, myself included, can point to times in their life when it was all they could do to drag themselves to church every single night because they knew that no matter what else was taught, they were going to come out of class being reminded that God is faithful, God has a plan for your life. If you’re still alive, God still has a plan for your life, it’s not too late, and there’s hope and there’s a future. But you have to get with it spiritually and you hear that day in, day out, and you’re able to make it another day. You’re able to crawl through another twenty-four hour period until things begin to reverse course. says, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn your statutes.” So we go through suffering and it motivates us to learn the Word and make it the priority that it should be. As Solomon says in Proverbs, we’re to buy truth and sell it not.
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The eighth point, we’re to be a witness to our neighbors. As we go through adversity, people watch. Now you may not think anybody is watching you but you’d be surprised how many unbelievers out there and how many believers know all about you. They know that you’re a Christian. They know exactly what goes on in your life. They watch you in the morning, like on Sunday morning when you get up and get in your car as they’re looking out through their bloodshot eyes trying to recover from the night before and they see you drive out your driveway. They see this over a period of time, and figure out that you go to church. “You’re a Christian, you’re one of them.” That’s part of your testimony. People watch us and they observe us and how we handle adversity is part of our testimony, part of our witness. In Paul says, “Yet for this reason I found mercy so that in me the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.” Not already believers but for those who would believe. And so our life is a testimony to other human beings.
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But it doesn’t stop there. We are also a witness in the angelic conflict. says, “So that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church …” That is through us. The wisdom of God is made clear through us. As we apply the Word, then God’s wisdom is demonstrated. We become, as it were, exhibit A in a trial and the people, the witnesses that are watching, are not other human beings but as the verse says, “to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.” These are the angelic forces. They’re learning things about God and about God’s grace and about His faithfulness and love through watching us that they could learn no other way. They watch us and they’re just amazed. They can’t believe we can screw up as much as we do and God still cares for us. And we turn back and we trust God and we see His faithfulness. They see His faithfulness and that is a testimony to them.
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Then the last reason that we suffer has to do with how we grow and learn in that suffering. You may be going through some suffering right now. You may go through something that is so horrible that you can’t even imagine why God is taking you through it. I want to tell you something. In five years, in ten years, as you have moved out of this and grown and matured spiritually, there are going to be people God brings into your life who are going through what you’re going through and you’re going to be able to encourage them and strengthen them. They’re going to look at you as an example that there is indeed life after all this misery and you’ll be able to share with them how God took you through that and that’s an important part. , “Who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
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One of things I see in a lot of churches as a pastor in watching the church scene over the years is that in a lot of big churches you have a lot of big programs. Now some programs are good and some aren’t and there are pastors who like to dump on programs all the time. But the problem I see in churches is when doing the right thing is motivated by an external, top-down structure. A deacon board meets and says, “We really need to do this.” And whatever it is, we’re going to go out and let’s find somebody to head this up and we’re going to put five people in charge and we’re going to make this happen and see that they meet once a month and that this is taken care of and that is taken care of. It flows from the top down, from mature believers who are setting up structures for others in the church. A lot of times I’ve seen this really doesn’t work. I’ve seen churches who try to do this with evangelism. Every year they have their evangelism training programs. They go through teaching on evangelism. They have role play on evangelism. They go out to the malls, the highways and the byways, and do evangelism. But when it’s all over with the people aren’t witnessing any more than they were before. Because internally they haven’t matured as believers to where they are self-motivated, and ready to share the gospel with people who are going to hell. This happens in a lot of ways. What I’ve seen is the way it should happen is that as you come to Bible class and as you learn the Word and as you mature, someday the Holy Spirit gets you to finally turn the light bulb on inside your dark little brain and you go, “I should be witnessing to that person.” And see, now all of a sudden it’s coming out of your soul from your spiritual growth.
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I’ll tell you one example around here that I’ve been really pleased to see. That is, that over the last nine years now, since the existence of this church, we have seen a number of men die in this church. In fact, it’s almost scary. We’ve seen a number of men die in this church and we’ve seen a number of widows. What I’ve been pleased to see is how these widows have encouraged one another. It’s not because the board has gone to one or two of them and said, “You know, you’ve been a widow a pretty long time now and you’re fairly mature spiritually so why don’t you get with a couple of others and you guys organize something?” It’s motivated by their own spiritual growth and their own desire to minister to one another. That’s the way it should be. There are people who come out of structured churches who say, “No, no, it needs church structure.” No, it doesn’t. If people are growing spiritually they’re going to meet the needs of one another and they’re going to encourage one another, pray for one another, all those one another passages. And that shows a healthy church.
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Now if a church is young in terms of spiritual maturity, those things don’t happen right away. But for people who are in the Word over time, those things happen. It’s so great to see it. It shows that the church is maturing. You have mature believers and they’re really responding to the teaching of the Word. That, to me, is a much greater sign of the health of the church than anything else when you see those kinds of things happening in the congregation because it shows that people are really growing and maturing in their spiritual life.
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Okay, next time we’re going to come back and wrap up this one particular section. I don’t know how far we’ll get because we have to deal with this whole issue of the future orientation of verse 22 down to verse 27 because that focuses us. This is why we suffer. It focuses us on the ultimate goal and we need to get a better handle on that ultimate goal. This is what the ‘good’ is in . It doesn’t say “all things work together for good”. It says “all things are working together for the good.” God is working them together for something in the future and it’s that future orientation that we need to keep in focus. That’s what enables us to deal with all the manure we walk through day in and day out.

Romans 091b-The Doctrine of Groaning and Intercession Romans 8:18–26

Romans 8:18 NASB95
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Romans 091b-The Doctrine of Groaning and Intercession
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We’re in . We are in a fabulous section dealing with future things. Sometimes you work your way through a passage in your reading and you’re studying, and sometimes in English you can actually pick out the key word because there’s really very little way to translate it in the way it is being translated. Often times in English, though, you find translators follow a rather artificial English style rule, which is don’t use the same word very often within the same paragraph. The rule says to try to have stylistic variations in vocabulary but sometimes the Holy Spirit didn’t quite read the English rulebook and so He uses the same word three or four times in two or three sentences. He’s making a point.
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We’re going to start in verse 18. We’ve studied some part of 18-21 last time but this time we’re going to make it down to about verse 27 just before we get to a well-known promise in . The key word that we see in this section is a word that shows up first in verse 22. “For we know that the whole creation groans.” In verse 23, “Not only that but also we ourselves having the first fruits of the Spirit, even as ourselves groan within ourselves…” So we’ve got the creation groaning and we’re groaning and then further down when it talks about prayer in verse 26, “In the same way the Spirit helps [assists] us in our weaknesses for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” These are unutterable groans so there’s no audible sound. So three times we’ve got groaning going on.
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Now you always thought as a Christian you’re supposed to have happiness and joy of the Lord in your heart and always be happy and joyful about everything. As the song says, “I have the joy, joy, joy down in my heart.” But here we have one of the central chapters on the spiritual life in the whole Bible that almost every knowledgeable Christian recognizes as one of the greatest chapters in Scripture. It focuses on our phase 2, Christian life experience as what? Groaning. Any of us who have been around for very long should recognize how true that is. On the one hand, we have a great joy and happiness because we know what our eternal destiny is. We have stability in our soul in the midst of crises, but there are difficulties, there are challenges. Health challenges, emotional challenges, physical, monetary challenges; there’s challenges that we face dealing with people. We have all kinds of systems testing in terms of our employment and employers. We have people testing in terms of the same kind of things.
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It goes on and on and on because as we studied in the last two lessons, in dealing with the reasons and categories for suffering, we live in the fallen world so the world is corrupt and all of the systems are corrupt. There’s no ideal form of government until Jesus returns. When Jesus returns, because He is the God-man and He is absolute perfection and He will be the head of the Kingdom, there will be a perfect government and perfect politics. But even in a world with a perfect government, with a perfect governor, who will be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and a perfect system of laws, there will be an untold number of people who at the end of a thousand years will reject all that, will claim that it is all wrong, that Jesus Christ is just out of destroy all the poor people and to take advantage of all the old people, to take away all of their Medicare and all of their Medicaid and everything else. The same thing we hear today is going to be leveled against the perfect rule of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is because of the corruption of the sin nature on all those who are born during the one thousand year period of the Millennial Kingdom.
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So this is a time of corruption, even though there’s a partial reversal of the curse when it’s rolled back some during the Millennial but the curse does not end until we get to the destruction of the present heavens and earth and God creates a new heavens and a new earth. There is not going to be a perfect world until we get to that time. Until then, if you’re a human being and you’re fallen and you’re living with a corrupt body and you’re living with corrupt sinners and you’re living with corrupt systems and working in corrupt systems, you’re going to groan. And that groaning is creation itself groaning because it’s under corruption and we’re going to groan and it’s not wrong to admit it.
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There are a lot of Christians who think it’s wrong for them to complain. Yes, complaining is wrong but you can complain to God. “Oh, no, no, no. I don’t want to tell God how hard it is.” Don’t you think he knows? He’s omniscient. If you’re not telling Him, you’re not being honest with yourself. That’s one problem Christians have. You can’t face and handle the problems you’re facing if you’re not willing to admit what those problems are. And you’re not willing to admit the fact that your faith wavers at times. Read the Psalms. Read all of those lament psalms when David is groaning and it’s the same word as used here. The word that’s used for groaning here means to mourn or to lament something. Read through the Psalms and read all of these passages where David is groaning about his circumstances, the people that are opposed to him, and the enemies that he has, the situations he’s going through and he’s always going back to the Lord. But before he gets focused on the Lord and gets his mental attitude straight and moves forward, he’s always honest with God about the negatives of his situation. He doesn’t try to gloss over it.
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We can’t get anywhere if we’re not dealing with reality as it is and think, “Oh, I shouldn’t feel this way because I’m a Christian. I shouldn’t have these thoughts because I’m a Christian. I shouldn’t hate my job because I’m a Christian. I shouldn’t have trouble and have anxiety over going to work with the people I’m going to work with because I’m a Christian. Yeah, you’re a Christian and you’re a fallen sinner and you have to go through that; we all have to go through that and until we face it and be honest with ourselves and with God we’re not really going to be able to maximize the solutions that God has for us. So I’m calling this The Doctrine of Groaning and Intercession. .
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Let’s just do a little review. We touched on this last time, “If, and we are children…” Every believer is a child of God teknon [teknon], “heirs also, heirs of God.” That describes every believer at the moment of salvation, we are regenerate, born again, born into the family of God. We are adopted into the family of God so that we are going to be trained as children of God. We’re heirs of God. But the next category is distinct. It’s “fellow heirs, joint heirs with Christ, if we suffer with Him, in order that we may also be glorified with Him.”
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Now the next verse, the one I talked about considerably in the last couple of weeks, verse 18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Now I went back and took a look at this verse a little more because I’ve just had trouble understanding this concept of how this glory is revealed in us. It’s not the preposition ‘in’ which can also be instrumental. It’s eis which can have a nuance of within but this preposition in the Greek usually indicates movement and many times it’s the preposition that’s used if you’re going somewhere. You say, “I’m going to go to Dallas” and you would use the preposition eis [e)ij] to indicate direction and movement toward a goal. That’s how this is used.
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It’s a preposition that suggests some kind of movement and direction so what is being moved here toward us is glory. Now isn’t that an interesting concept? The context we’re talking about here is suffering. Every believer is going to engage in some sort of suffering. It may be mild. It may be maximized. It depends on the circumstances but if you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and at any level trying to apply doctrine in the world you’re going to face opposition and hostility at one level. That’s what this suffering is. It’s not necessarily overt persecution. It’s just facing adversity and difficulty in life related to your obedience to the Word of God. “For I consider that the suffering [whatever adversity or difficulty or challenges I face today in terms of applying the Word], they’re really not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed toward us.”
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What Paul is saying is that if you or I are growing to spiritual maturity and we are applying the Word then God is doing something in our life in terms of bringing glory to Himself. That’s accomplished by conforming us to the image of His Son. He mentions this in verse 29, so look at that verse. We’ll get into this more next time as we examine all those words that Calvinists believe mean we actually have a fatalistic God but that’s because they distorted the terms. The verse says, “For those He foreknew, He also predestined...” Predestined simply means to set a goal ahead of time. To set a destination beforehand. If I get up in the morning and decide I need to take a trip to Austin, I am going to predestine Austin. I am setting Austin as my destination ahead of time so the prefix “pre” means before or ahead of time so I set that destiny.
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Jesus Christ’s character is our destiny. He is conforming us to that goal. That’s the direction God is moving us. How do be conformed to His character? One of the ways God uses is suffering. We studied in Hebrews, chapter 2, where even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered. It’s not that He was disobedient but He had to go through that process. As He suffered, He grew and matured spiritually in His humanity. And so, what Paul is articulating here in verse 18 is that the sufferings are not that important. Get your eyes off of yourself, quit being self-absorbed with the people who don’t like you, with the difficulty of the job, with the fact that you’re getting older and it’s more difficult to read the fine print you need to read when you’re trying to go through things or whatever else it is. We all go through these changes. Life gets difficult. Work in this fallen world gets difficult. We sometimes have overt spiritual opposition from people who know we’re Christians and they’re just out to get us.
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But that difficulty that we go through is nothing compared to what God is producing in us. That’s essentially what he, Paul, is saying here. Because something is happening when we’re walking by the Spirit, God is directing His power, and His character toward us. Often the word ‘glory’ is used as a synonym for the entire essence of God. So the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the essence of God that will be revealed in us. Now does that passage seem to make a little more sense? God is creating His character in us. Look at , “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There, the ‘glory of God’ is used as a summary term for the essence of God. We’re fallen short of the essence of God. It’s used the same way here. The glory that is going to be revealed in us is really the essence of God that is being revealed in us, His character. We’re being transformed into that character from grace to grace, as Paul says, so it is a matter of spiritual growth. That is revealed in us. It’s moving to us, in a sense, and being produced in us, as we learn to handle the suffering and as we go forward.
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Now Paul is going to add an additional explanation. See this verse, verse 18, started off with a ‘for’. Everything that comes between this verse, verse 18, and verse 27 is helping us to understand suffering with Him. So we’re learning to suffer with Him so that we may be what? Glorified with Him. The way in which we’re glorified with Him is manifesting His glory in us, His character in us. I bet no one here has ever read it that way before and I think that brings it out in a much clearer fashion. As I was going through this today, working on this preposition, that suddenly struck me that that’s what going on here, this kind of directional thing with that preposition eis [e)ij].
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We’re going to go to the next step in this explanation in verses 20. “For the creation was subjected to the futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope.” Now this is another verse I talked about last time to understand what happened when the fall occurred, what happened when Adam sinned. As a result of his sin, the whole creation came under condemnation. So it is subjected and this phrase “in hope” is a phrase that should be understood in terms of a reference point. It’s a dative of reference. The word is elpis [ἐλπίς] there and it’s in the dative case. Dative case is used to indicate the indirect object. It’s used to indicate means or instrument or location but one of the things that it indicates is reference with regards to something. So God subjected it with reference to hope.
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Now this opens up an interesting line of thinking. We have to stop and we have to say, “What is the focal point of hope all through the Scripture?” As I say all the time, it’s not just a wistful optimism. Like we wake up today and the weather is beautiful and gorgeous and the weather is probably going to be beautiful and gorgeous tomorrow and we hope it will be on Saturday because we want to go fishing or hunting or some outdoor activity but it could rain. We could have another day like Monday again just to get everything washed out but we’re not sure. We know that the weather “guessters” say one thing but it can often change in 24 hours. That’s how we use hope. But that’s not how God uses hope. We’re certain, we’re sure, we’re confident. We know something is going to happen in the future. God subjected, He brought this judgment, this curse, upon the physical, material universe because He’s focused on where He’s going to take everything in terms of the future destiny.
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“Hope” brings in the future. “Subjected it” is the past. He subjected it because He understood in His omniscience that in order to bring about the solution to sin and all the corruption that entered into the universe because of evil He had to bring everything under judgment. This eventually would be necessary to bring everything to its ultimate resolution and the destruction of evil. That’s one of the difficult things about solving the problem of evil is that we don’t have a mind that can comprehend all the bits of data that God can comprehend. He recognized that the pervasiveness of evil and the pervasive destruction of evil is so great that only His plan could ultimately redeem the planet from the corruption of sin. Now this is interesting because the word “redemption” is almost always used in Scripture of redeeming people from sin. It has that idea of purchasing or paying the purchase price of a slave. The focus in redemption is almost always people except in this passage.
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In this passage we’re not redeeming people but we’re redeeming the material, physical universe from the corruption of sin. It didn’t happen at the cross. The cross is what allows it to happen. It isn’t accomplished until when? When is this redemption of creation going to come into effect? At the end of the Millennial Kingdom. Not at the beginning but at the end because it’s only when the present earth is finally destroyed and new heavens and new earth are created that we have a creation that is free from corruption. So the creation is subjected to futility for a purpose. It’s not random. You don’t have to understand it. I don’t have to understand it. One of the most difficult things as a pastor when people say, “Why did this happen? Why did God do it that way?” I don’t know. All I have to know is that the Bible said this is why it happens and it happens for a reason but we don’t understand it. And I don’t have to explain it. Often we feel like if we can’t explain it, there’s not an answer. I know my brain is way too finite to come up with those kinds of answers and it’s unjust and unrealistic to say we ought to come up with those kinds of answer. We can’t.
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We have the general principle that God’s in charge and He recognizes that this is the only way to get a resolution of the problem of evil. So, “The creation is subject to futility, not willingly but because of Him who subjected it in hope.” God is the One who brought that judgment on the creation because in verse 21, “That the creation itself also will be set free [delivered] from its slavery [bondage] to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Now we’ve changed our terminology again. We’ve gone from “sons of God” which is huios [u(ioj] the adult sons of God back to “children of God” which is every believer when we experience our true freedom from the sin nature in glorification of phase 3. Verse 22, “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” Now, I didn’t have a tremendous amount of time to study this; I spent about an hour trying to figure out the meaning where this second phrase indicates birth pains. This phrase does not appear in the original Greek. It just says, “We groan together or mourn together and we travail together.” The examples that I saw in the Lexica that I consulted and I have about six or seven on my computer, which are all the best ones there are, never gave me any usage examples of these words being used in labor pains context. Now that doesn’t mean it’s not but I couldn’t find those examples. There’s not a sense of that in the passage. It’s just that the whole creation groans or laments. It’s an extremely picturesque word of someone who is in deep profound grief or mourning. The creation is personified as someone who is going through tremendous agony over grief over what has happened to creation over sin and it’s laboring, that is, it is in travail, it is going through constant shifts and changes. There are earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and all kinds of physical disasters that take place on the planet. “We know the whole creation groans and labors [mourns and is in travail] or is in agony together until now.
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Now this word sustenazo [sustenazw] is translated groaning together. The sus emphasizes together. It’s the Greek preposition sus plus the verb stenazo and when it’s combined together it means lamenting together. But the basic core word is stenazo which is the verb which we see showing up in two or three other verses here in this context. So, not only is the whole creation going through this physical agony but in verse 23 there’s something in addition going on, “And not only this…” Not only is the physical world going through this groaning, “but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.” So first of all let’s talk about the concepts of the first fruits, which is the Greek word aparche which is a concept that goes back to the Old Testament. It indicates the beginning of something. For example, it was an agricultural term and it was used to describe the first harvesting, the first time when you went out in the fields and you were able to harvest some of the crop or some of the fruit off the fruit trees and it’s that initial part of the harvest that was then dedicated to God in a first fruit offering. So the first fruit emphasizes something from the beginning.
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This first fruit is the first fruit of the Spirit or something that is the beginning of something that is of the Spirit’s work. So I think that the phrase there, “of the Spirit” which is a genitive phrase and it simply is what’s called an epexegetical or explanatory of the first fruits. We’re the beginning of the work of the Spirit. That wasn’t true in the Old Testament. They didn’t have the Spirit so this is emphasizing that there’s something new and fresh that’s happening in the Church Age that’s going to have a role, an impact in the future time when the groaning ends. Now that takes us right back to what we read in verse 17, this concept of being joint heirs with Christ. So we move back and forth in Paul’s thinking with the present suffering to the future glorification with Christ in an environment where there’s no longer any sin.
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“So we who have the first fruits of the Spirit” also emphasizes the idea of a pledge. We get this in the phrase that we find in that the Holy Spirit in his ministry as the sealing of the Spirit, is called the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession. There redemption is used in a future tense sense in . says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for or until the day of redemption.” So I think in both of these passages that which is redeemed is the same thing we have in creation, which is the ultimate completion of the application of God’s redemptive work. He pays the price at the cross but it’s not until that final part of creation is overhauled and restored to perfection that redemption is complete. That’s spoken of as a future tense in terms of the day of redemption.
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So we’re the first fruits. We’re the beginning but it’s looking forward to the completion of the work of the Holy Spirit. And so we read, “And not only this, but also we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit..” It also brings in the fact that we have the fullness of the Spirit. We have all of these magnificent blessings from God the Holy Spirit and yet we still legitimately groan. Now we don’t legitimately complain. Paul clearly knocks that out over in that we’re not to complain or be embittered but here we are to groan within ourselves. That’s an inarticulate groaning. Some people need to have this spelled out. That means you don’t have a gripe session with other Christians about how bad it is, living in a fallen world. It’s within yourself. Totally silent. We’re going to come back and have another concept of ‘within yourself’ in just a minute. That’s why I’m emphasizing this. It’s inarticulate. It’s not something that’s spoken about. It’s not something that’s talked about. It’s that we feel in the very core of our being that there are things that aren’t right with the world today. We see wars; we see famines; we see things that go wrong on cruise ships and we say, “This just isn’t right.” We’re living in a fallen world. Bad things happen because we live in a fallen world that is characterized by a lack of justice and righteousness. And sometimes nobody is to blame.
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In our arrogance we have to go out and find someone to blame all the time but there’s no one necessarily to blame. We live in a fallen world; everything we buy, everything we construct has to be painted, has to be repaired, and has to be kept up. At times it falls apart even when we keep it up, even when we paint it, cut it, repair it, it still falls apart when it’s least convenient because we live in a fallen world. But we have an internal sense that it’s not right. So, “Not only this but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of the body.” Now, this word “eagerly awaiting” means to anticipate something enthusiastically. It’s an excited anticipation of something that’s coming. Remember when you were about six or seven years old and for the first time in your life you really understood that Christmas meant that you were going to get all kind of goodies and you just couldn’t go to sleep on Christmas night because you were going to get a bicycle or, I don’t know, an Elmo doll, or whatever was popular back then. That’s it! You were going to get it and you could barely contain yourself. That’s eager anticipation. That’s how we are to look forward to the coming of Christ.
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We’re groaning, we have eager anticipation but that doesn’t justify believers who just got so tired of dealing with the garbage in the devil’s world that they committed suicide just because they knew they’d be face to face with the Lord. That’s not the way to handle it. We have to recognize, as our Lord did, that we’re living in this fallen, corrupted world for a purpose and we have a mission in this world. We have to engage that mission until the Lord takes us home. He’s the one who decides when it’s time to take us on a permanent R&R back to heaven. But until then we eagerly wait for that R&R. We’re eagerly looking forward to it just like kids at Christmas.
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We’re eagerly awaiting the adoption. Now wait a minute. This is a funny phrase here. It’s huiothesia [υἱοθεσία] which indicates that adoption which we’ve talked about before that every believer at the instant they receive Christ is adopted but this is talking about something in the future. Something future. We’re adopted at the instant of salvation. That’s clear from Galatians, chapters 3 and 4, dealing with the doctrine of adoption. But here the concept of adoption is explained in the next phrase which is an appositional phrase. It’s when you have a word and then the next phrase further defines the word. The adoption here is called the redemption of our body. The redemption of our body and this is the word apolutrosis [ἀπολύτρωσις] so we have here the idea that the fallen world is going to be redeemed and the body, the physical body, is going to be redeemed. That occurs for the believer at our resurrection when we receive a new physical body that somehow is produced from the molecules and the chemicals of this original body. The reason I say that is because the only model we have for resurrection is not the widow’s son with Elisha, not Lazarus, because they were just restored to this physical life. They hadn’t been dead long enough for the body to go through a lot of decomposition and decay. It had a little bit but God regenerated that body and gave them their life back but it was still a physical, mortal life. The only example we have of true resurrection is the Lord Jesus Christ and on that first day of the week following the crucifixion when the disciples, first Mary, goes to the tomb and sees that it’s empty and then the disciples come to the tomb and see that it’s empty, then Jesus appeared to them.
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The tomb was empty because God didn’t just say, “Poof, Jesus has a new body”. The body he had before is no longer there. That physical body that Jesus had in His humanity becomes what is transformed into his new spiritual body. How that happens, we don’t know. It’s going to be interesting because for most people in history we’ve actually gone through a long period of decomposition and decay and there’s not a lot left. Maybe a few bones here and there but if they went down in a shipwreck and they were eaten by four or five different sharks, then they’re just going to be spread all over the ocean. Or if they get hit with a five hundred ton bomb right on the center of head there’s not going to be a whole lot left of them left. There’s just going to be a lot of molecules scattered all over everywhere and if people are cremated and had their ashes scattered in the Mississippi River, then those molecules are going to be scattered all over everywhere. I think that the God of the Bible is powerful enough and knowledgeable enough to know where every one of those molecules are and he’s going to bring them all back together. Just think of all those believers who died before the flood and there wasn’t a whole lot left of their remains on the planet. That all got scattered and pretty much destroyed.
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There are some people who come along and say Christians shouldn’t be cremated. Some of their arguments are a little more serious but we lose the reality that we have a God who can put back together what we think is impossible to put back together. If you think that if someone is cremated and their ashes are scattered, and that God can’t put their bodies together from those ashes then you don’t have an omnipotent or an omniscient God. Now not everybody reduces it to that superficial kind of argument but some do. God can bring that body back together. I always have the silly question. If I were to die today and if my eye was given to somebody for an eye transplant, and my liver for a liver transplant, and a heart for a heart transplant and the Rapture occurred, do they get to keep the heart and the liver or do I get that back? Sometimes we all engage in overthink. All right.
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Redemption is only used a few other times in Romans. This word apolutrosis is used in, “We’re justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Redemption there is definitely related to justification which is not in the future but in the past. redemption is used in reference to forgiveness. It talks about the payment of a price. “In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.” It’s that payment of a price that occurred at the cross. , “The Holy Spirit is the guarantor of our inheritance until the redemption of this purchased possession.” That’s a future tense concept there for redemption. That’s the completion of the process. , “Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed until the day of redemption.” So there’s a past tense reality when the price was paid and its application over time leads to an ultimate full realization of the ending of the curse of sin.
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Now we come to verse 24, “For in hope we have been saved…” This, then is a reference term. It makes more sense if we say, “We were saved with reference to this hope..” Now this is the only time in Romans that I have found sozo [σωζω] here in a past tense. Every other time sozo is used in a future tense. , “We were justified that we might be saved..” Future tense. Other passages saved has to do with justification. This is the only time sozo is used in the passages on sanctification. So here it seems to be used as a synonym for phase One. Sometimes in the past I’ve said it’s never used for Phase One but this could be the one exception that it’s used as a synonym for that time in which we were justified at point of belief in Christ. “For we were saved with reference to this hope…” It’s just like the planet which is going to be overhauled with reference to hope. God subjected it to corruption with reference to hope in verse 20. We were saved with reference to that same future hope and that certain destiny.
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Then we see something interesting about hope, “But hope that is seen is not hope.” Hope is like faith. It’s not based on sight. It’s based on belief in something that is not seen, not felt, not subject to empirical verification. We’re simply trusting in the promise of God. Hope that is seen is not hope. “For who hopes for what he already sees?” If you hope it’s a present reality but hope focuses on a conviction of the certainty of a future reality. Verse 25, “But if we hope for what we do not sFee, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” But if we hope, if we have confident expectation for a future destiny which we do not see, we do not have empirical evidence of heaven. Listen, it does not matter how many children on numerous surgical tables have out of body experiences claiming they went to heaven while they were under surgery and write bestselling books about it and have credibility because their daddy is some kind of a pastor. It doesn’t matter how many of those instances people talk about, that’s hope that is seen. Our hope in heaven is spoken of in the Bible as an unseen reality. It’s not based on what some child comes back and tells us. In fact, if that does anything for your Christian conviction, then I don’t think you’ve ever learned any doctrine.
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Remember what happens with Lazarus, when he died and the rich man goes to torments and Lazarus is in Abraham’s Bosom, and the rich man says to Abraham, “Let Lazarus [not the Lazarus who was raised from the dead] go back and tell my brothers. And Abraham said, “That’s not going to work because if they don’t believe Moses and the prophets, they’re not going to believe somebody who came back from the dead.” See, Moses and the prophets and the New Testament are enough. You don’t need what some little kid writes in a bestselling book to give you extra confidence in the truth of Scripture. If you need that, then you don’t have much confidence in Scripture. Here’s my suggestion. You need to take a long, hard look at what you really believe, because Moses and the prophets and the apostles in the New Testament are enough. They’re more certain than what some little kid is going to tell you because he had hallucinations under anesthesia.
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So we hope for what we do not see. This is a universal principle. We don’t see it. We eagerly wait for it with perseverance. That means we endure suffering. Perseverance is always a term used in the Scripture for hanging in there in time of suffering and adversity. Verse 26, “In the same way the Spirit also helps in our weakness…” The word for weaknesses is the Greek word asthenes [ἀσθένεια]. Now that’s one of my favorite words because way back when I was just getting out of seminary I read a great article on praying for the sick in that was one of the best written articles I’d ever read in a theological journal and it was talking about we ought to pray for the sick. But the sick there isn’t the word for sick. It’s the word aesthanos in the noun form. It means those who are either physically weak or spiritually weak. In the gospels it’s used about 80 percent of the time for those who are physically weak or sick. Jesus healed the aesthenas but there are a few times it’s used for those who are spiritually weak. When Jesus talks about the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. He’s talking about spiritual inability, spiritual weakness, and spiritual weariness.
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“The Spirit also helps our weakness...” This is talking about spiritual weariness in times of adversity. It’s used that way in James. “But we do not know how to pray as we should...” Now I want you to pay attention to that sentence and think about that sentence because a lot of you heard me say, “Some of the time we don’t know what we should pray for as we ought.” It doesn’t say that. It makes a universal, absolute statement. We, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, as creatures, do not know how to pray. That’s an absolute, universal statement. It doesn’t say we don’t know how to pray in certain situations. That’s often how it’s used. It just says we just flat, period, all the time, just don’t know. Why? Because the data that we do know is such a microscopic, infinitesimal, small amount of all the information that goes into why that event is happening that we really don’t have a clue how to pray for it.
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But remember, that’s not an excuse to not pray. It’s not an excuse to just generalize your prayers and say, “God, you know what to do, so just do it.” Because the examples we have in Scripture are not that way. That’s why we have to study the Scriptures. The prayers of Paul are not generalized prayers like that. They’re very specific in ways we can be specific. In lots of ways we can be specific because we’re claiming promises, just as the psalmist does. Many of the psalms are prayers. But we don’t know how to pray for anything as we ought but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pray. Because we have a translator. So we pray and the Holy Spirit dusts off and cleans out and straightens whatever the prayer is so you don’t have to worry about “Oh, I said it wrong.” Guess what? A lot of us say it wrong, a lot of the time. The Holy Spirit cleans it up. Verse 26, “For we do not know how to pray as we should but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”
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This should be translated, “With unutterable groans”. The emphasis is on unutterable. It’s silent. Remember I talked about the fact that we groan within ourselves. It’s not audible. This is the Holy Spirit handling it in terms of silent prayer. Now there are those within the charismatic community who try to argue that tongues is a prayer language. They use this as a support for that. That it’s the Holy Spirit praying with these unutterable groans. I say, “Well, they’re unutterable. How come I hear it?” Not only that, but I had this conversation with one Pentecostal who said, “When I pray in my prayer language, God answers my prayer more often.” I said, “Really? How do you know what you pray for?” “Well, I don’t.” “Then how do you know they’re answered?”
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We don’t know how to pray as we ought. The Holy Spirit makes intercession. This is the word sunantilambo [συναντιλαμβάνομαι] and I’m not going to say it again. That’s a long word. It means to assist or to help. Let’s say Jess over there is working out to unload all the heavy furniture for the Camp Arete garage sale and he comes upon this large buffet. Jess has been working out so Jess manipulates it so he can actually pick it up off the ground and start shuffling like an old man as he moves it forward and moves it all by himself. Now that’s the picture here in sunantilambano. The Holy Spirit is the one who comes along. He doesn’t say, “You can’t carry that. I’ll carry it for you.” He doesn’t take hold of it and carry the weight all by himself. No, he says, “I’ll get this end and you get the other end.” He assists. He doesn’t take it away from us. He assists us in our prayer. We pray. He assists. We don’t say, “Oh, he’s going to do it anyway, so I’ll just go about my business and make some generalized statement.” No, that’s not the idea. It’s that he’s going to come along and say, “I’m going to take this end and you take that end and together we’ll make the prayer work.”
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So He comes in as an assistant with groanings that are unutterable. They’re inaudible groanings. This word for intercession is huperentechano [u(perentexanw] and it just means to pray on behalf of someone else. But in the next word we have a different word that’s going to be used for intercession. In verse 27, “And He [God the Father] who searches the hearts know what the mind of the Spirit is..” The Holy Spirit is one with the Father in the Trinity. They’re both omniscient so the Father knows exactly what the Spirit is thinking and He knows the mind of the Spirit “because the Spirit is making intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” This is a different word. It’s entuchano [ἐντυγχάνω] and it means to appeal, to make an appeal to someone. So the Spirit makes an appeal on behalf of the saints according to the will of God.” So we pray to the best of our ability. But we pray. We don’t back off; we don’t say, “I’m not really sure so I’m just going to let the Holy Spirit handle it.” We do it to the best of our ability and then unbeknownst to us, we don’t know how it happens. He sort of dusts it off and cleans it up, straightens out, and then it goes to the Throne of God. He is our intercessor.
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Verse 34, if you skip down, also uses this same word for the Lord Jesus Christ. That verse tells us, “Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.” So both the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ intercede for us. So that leads us up to verse 28 which says “all things work together for good”. In context, what are the all things in this passage? It’s the suffering we’ve been talking about since it was pointed out in verse 17 that we can be a joint-heir with Christ if indeed we suffer with Him. So when we go through all these adversities and all the things that make us groan, we can claim a promise that all things, all these things that cause us to groan, will work together for good to those who love God. There are questions about that. There are some alternate readings and so we’re going to have a take a look at some of the finer points in the exegesis of verse 28 when we come back next time. Now we understand the relationship between groaning, who groans, the earth groans, the creation groans, we groan but eventually that groaning is going to be converted into intercessory prayer to God by the Holy Spirit and eventually everything will be straightened out and evil will be destroyed at the end of the Millennial Kingdom.

Romans 092b-Strength for Those Suffering With Christ: Romans 8:28-30

Romans 8:28 NASB95
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
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Romans 092b-Strength for Those Suffering With Christ: The Doctrine of Calling – Part I
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Open your Bibles to Romans, chapter 8. We’re down to and 29. I’ve been reading through this chapter again and again this last couple of weeks. It’s so important to remember context. The more I study the Scripture, the more I’m impressed by how much we miss because we don’t look at favorite verses and promises by really examining how it fits within the context. One of the areas where there is an egregious amount of proof texting is in the area of the debates over the sovereignty of God versus the free will or volition of man. It’s important not to just grab verses as you read through theologies and other things written on this topic. They just list a string of verses and you look at a lot of those verses and you start looking at the context around there and you say, “I’m not sure that’s even talking about what they say it’s talking about. It doesn’t really apply to this situation.” So we need to look at that and one area we need to look at is .
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This is going to take several weeks because we have to slowly and precisely work our way through these words that are used here so we’ll have a number of word studies. Hopefully we’ll get into the first one tonight on the doctrine of calling. What does it mean when Paul uses the term ‘the called’ in verse 28 and then again in verse 30? Before we get there I want to look at context. Now when we study the Scripture there’s really four things that need to be evaluated as you study a passage. The first is really context. We have to really understand a number of things about its context. What kind of literature are we dealing with? Are we dealing with poetry like Proverbs or Psalms? Are we dealing with legal literature such as the Torah, Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy? Are we dealing with historical narrative which is what we’ve had a lot of in Acts? Are we dealing with epistolary literature like the letters where Paul is very methodically, logically, precisely building an explanation of important doctrines or teachings of Scripture? So that’s one area of context.
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Another area of context is the flow of the author’s thinking as he writes through the book. It used to drive me nuts when I was in high school and I would go up to Camp Peniel as a worker. We’d be given an assignment every day to read through three or four verses and then we had to write them out in our own words. You really have to think about something to do that and understand it. You have to learn to read well and back in 1967 and 68, all we had was a King James Bible. That was extremely difficult. Now when you have more up-to-date translations, it’s a little easier to do something like that. That was a hard thing to do with the King James Bible when you’re in high school. I wasn’t a dumb high school kid. I can’t imagine how a lot of people in high school are today because they just don’t have the reading comprehension skills.
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That’s why so many of these English translations that have been coming out the last twenty or thirty years seem to have dumbed things down so much is because the whole education system in the country has dumbed down so much that high school kids today, for the most part, read at such a low level of comprehension that if you want a high school kid to understand the Bible, you’ve got to translate it at a third or fourth grade level. That means taking out a lot of significant English words that have a time-honored tradition of theological significance. Words like justification, redemption, and propitiation just don’t communicate at all to people who are just the products of our public education for the most part. That’s why we have to go through and explain all of these different concepts.
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We have to look at the context, the literary context, what is said before a passage and after a passage. We have to ask how these verses fit in the flow of what the writer is saying. We have to deal with that and too often, what I find, is that people do Rorschach Bible study. The Rorschach tests are those ink blot tests that psychiatrists use. They have an ink blot and they put it out in front of you and you’re asked what it makes you think of. Somebody looks at a passage and they see a word there and they say, “Oh, I’ve seen that same word over here.” They start connecting the dots where they shouldn’t be connected. Just because there are similar ideas or words doesn’t mean that the context of one passage is talking about the same thing as another passage. You don’t need to connect those dots.
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Sometimes you’ll have passages that are talking about the same thing but not using the same vocabulary but those passages need to be connected together. The only way you get there is if you’re familiar with a text of Scripture. So we’re going to be doing some of those things as we go through here but we need to start with context and really understand the flow of what Paul is saying here in Romans, chapter 8. Remember he started off at the beginning talking about the contrast between those who walk according to the flesh and those who are walking according to the Spirit. So you have two different kinds of believers. You have those who are living as if they’re unbelievers; they’re walking according to the sin nature called ‘the flesh’ by Paul in many passages or they’re walking in fellowship with God, walking according to the Spirit and applying the Word of God daily, consistently in their life. Believers fall into one of those two categories. Those who are consistently walking according to the flesh are developing a quality of life called a death-like existence as a believer. They can’t please God, verse 8. If you live according to the Spirit, you’ll experience that richness and abundance of life from the Spirit.
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All of that leads up to the fact that there are two categories of believers that are addressed in those passages. One if referred to as “children of God”, which includes every believer. That instant you put your faith in Jesus Christ, that instant you believe Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, alone, is sufficient for your forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and justification, you receive new life in Christ. You’re a child of God. You’re adopted into the family of God. But then there’s another type of child of God and that’s called a ‘son of God” in this passage using the term huios, just as the Son of God in reference to Jesus Christ is called huois.
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Verse 14 says “As many as are led by the Spirit”. This refers to those who are following the leadership of the Spirit and are walking by the Spirit. They are pursuing spiritual growth and spiritual maturity so the term that’s used of them is a term that reflects a mature son. They’re called sons of God. There’s a contrast that’s then made in which we have covered extensively in the past. It requires a change in punctuation. Remember there was no punctuation in the original Greek. In fact, in the uncial manuscripts, all the letters were upper case with no spaces between any of the words and no punctuation. They didn’t divide words like we do by syllable with a hyphen at the end of the line. If they ran out of space at the end of the line, they just started on the next line. So you have to know the language. Now you think, “That would be pretty hard to read” but not if that’s how you learned to read and that’s what you’re familiar with. They understood that and they knew the language. That wasn’t something difficult to them. But what happens with us we come in and read a verse and we have to ask how we should punctuate that in English.
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The punctuation that we find in most Bibles is to put a comma after Christ in verse 17 which makes it look as if “heirs of God” and “fellow heirs of Christ” with a comma there, are synonymous. The problem with that is that it makes being an heir of God or joint-heir of Christ conditioned upon suffering with Him. Now the gospel doesn’t say that you can have eternal life if you suffer with Jesus. That’s not much of a free gift. If the gospel is not by works but by grace, then it’s a free gift and we simply accept the gift. We believe on Jesus. We don’t have to do anything. There’s no condition. We just believe the gospel. We accept it; we receive the gospel, all of these are synonyms for faith in Christ. So if we re-punctuate the verse it reads, “So if children.” Children is the word teknon and refers to every Christian who is a believer in Jesus Christ. Every person who is a member of the royal family of God. “If children heirs also, heirs of God…” This is where the comma goes, that’s the first category. Every child in the family is an heir of God.
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Secondly, then fellow heirs or joint-heirs with God on the condition that is expressed by the “if clause” that we suffer with Him that we also may be glorified with Him. Suffering entails spiritual growth and spiritual advance on the basis of obedience. Whenever we’re obedient, we’re going to learn things through suffering. In we read, “For it was fitting for Him [God the Father] in bringing many sons to glory.” That is believers in Jesus Christ and bringing us to glory “to make the captain [the Lord Jesus Christ] to make mature through suffering. So Jesus Christ had to grow to maturity learning in His humanity through the things that He suffered just living amongst unbelievers in the midst of Satan’s cosmic system.
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We’re going to go through suffering. Now as soon as Paul said that in verse 17, I think the editors are right that there’s a paragraph shift that occurs in verse 18 because it’s a slightly different focus. From verse 18 down to the end of the chapter, the focal point is helping us understand some things about suffering with Christ. So this topic, this idea of suffering with Christ, becomes the umbrella concept from verse 18 down through verse 39. Once you get the grip on the fact that this is the umbrella term which is dealing with understanding suffering in the life of the believer, then it becomes clearer. Suffering is part of God’s plan and purpose and this is how He has determined that we will be brought to maturity and in preparation for a future where we rule and reign with Christ.
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Let me show you how that works out. You can just circle some of these key words as we go through here. I want to trace this broad idea for you before we start getting down into the details of because if you don’t understand how the particulars, the details, orient to the general flow of thought then you can easily get off-track. We have to understand where Paul is taking us. It’s like looking at a map. I know some people are directionally challenged and as soon as I talk about a map their brain goes blank just like mine does when people start talking about numbers. When you look at a map, it gives you an overview. You look at the route you’re going to take and then all the different towns and cities you go through along the way begin to make sense in terms of how they’re strung together on the route from Point A to Point B. That’s what happens in the text. We’re getting the overview so the details make sense only as how they relate to that overview.
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Verse 18 starts with the word ‘for’. Most of the time in the English text when we see a verse start with the word ‘for’, it’s a translation of the Greek word gar which always introduces an explanation. Paul just made this statement, “If indeed we suffer with Him, that we may be glorified in Him.” Then he says, “Let me explain.” Not only does verse 18 begin with ‘for’ but it also brings in the idea of suffering so he’s expanding on our understanding of why we suffer and helping us understand that role in terms of our future glorification with Christ. Verse 19 begins with what? “For.” Circle that word. It’s a further development of the explanation. Verse 20 begins with “for”. In these two verses we introduce creation and how creation itself even groans under the curse of sin, which is explained in verse 22. So 18, 19, 20 and 21 [which is one sentence] all start with “for”. Then verse 22 introduces a fourth ‘for’ explanation and verse 23 develops the idea from verse 22 and then verse 24 begins with a “for”.
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Something happens in the flow of thought when we get down to verse 24 where Paul says, “For in hope we have been saved.” So now he’s talking about how this hope, our confident future expectation, is related to how we can handle suffering right now because we understand where we’re headed. Hope has to do with a future certainty. A confidence of a future situation so we’re saved with this hope, this confident expectation. Then he explains a little bit about hope in the rest of the verse and then verse 25 also talks about hope, “If we hope for what we do not see.” Then in verse 26 he says, “likewise”. I didn’t hit this last time. I didn’t catch this until this week. It says, “Likewise the Spirit also helps us in our weaknesses.” This word ‘likewise’ means in the same way or in a similar manner. In a similar manner to what? Well, the only thing we have in the immediate context is the hope. So the hope is a problem solving device. It’s a way to solve the problem of adversity. We’re in adversity.
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How do we handle it? We handle it because of that confident expectation. It’s that personal sense of our eternal destiny that helps us here. We know that God has a destiny where he’s taking us and that’s related to our confident expectation so we know God is doing something in our life even if we have to go through suffering or adversity right now. This serves a purpose; it has a purpose. Then he says, “In the same way, the Spirit also helps our weakness.” Well, hope helped our weakness. That’s what he’s implying there. Hope as a tool, a technique for handling adversity strengthened us in the weakness of having to deal with adversity. Weakness was a term that James used a lot in dealing with the same thing in facing adversity and trials or testing.
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So likewise, in the same way that hope helps us, the Spirit also helps us in our weakness. Then he explains how the Spirit helps because the Spirit intercedes for us when we don’t know exactly how to pray for circumstances or situations, the Holy Spirit acts as kind of a divine translator in articulating our prayers the way they ought to be. As I pointed out when we studied this the last time, that doesn’t excuse us for praying in a sloppy manner, an imprecise manner, or in a generalized manner. You don’t find any writer of scripture from David in the psalms, and David in the psalms all the way up through Jesus’ prayers and any of the apostle’s prayers, just bailing out in some sort of generalized prayer, saying, “Well, Lord, I don’t know what to pray for so the Holy Spirit will do it. Amen.” No, they craft their prayers. They articulate them to the best of their ability but they know that ultimately they don’t comprehend all that needs to be comprehended and the Holy Spirit is going to handle the situation but that doesn’t relieve them of their responsibility.
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Now we come to verse 28. Verse 28 says, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good.” What are the all things in context? It’s not necessarily every detail in life. It’s talking about this suffering, the adversity that’s been the topic since verse 17 which is how to handle the adversity, the suffering we face in life as we are pursuing spiritual growth, spiritual maturity with the end game of being a joint-heir with Christ in order to be glorified with Him. So fits within this flow. We see that Paul shifts his focus now to a general principle that is known to his audience. He includes the audience with himself and this is a principle they understood and he is appealing to the concept of God’s sovereign plan. It’s a plan of such a scope that God is able to orchestrate all the details and elements of history, specifically the elements of adversity in the life of a believer, in order to bring about maturity and glorification in the life of the believer so that he can rule and reign with Christ in the kingdom in the future.
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The next thing we should notice is at the end of verse 30. We read, “And those whom He predestined, He also called, and these whom He called, He also justified, and those He justified, He also glorified.” Now when was the last time we saw that word, “glorified”? We saw that back in verse 17, “and if children, heirs, also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.” So you see contextually we’re dealing with this issue of taking the believer through suffering through this aspect of glorification with Christ as a joint-heir with Christ. Although the principles we see here are in one sense true for every believer, Paul is not dealing with what’s true for every believer. Paul doesn’t focus on the lowest common denominator and say, “You’re a failure believer. You’re unfaithful. You’re not walking in the Spirit. This is what you get.”
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He assumes that if you’re a believer you’re going to do what you ought to do which is pursue maturity. So he focuses on the high road and he’s not dealing with the exception of the losers. It’s true for them. The person who is not pursuing maturity just gets mired up in a lot of adversity and self-induced misery as well. But Paul is talking about how the maturing, focused believer is aided by understanding God’s sovereign plan. The point I’m making here is that we have to understand to encourage us on how we look at our adversity in life as we’re pursuing spiritual maturity.
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Then look down a few more verses to . This is in the midst of a whole series of rhetorical questions that Paul asks. We’ll get into all of that when we get there. But look at verse 35. He says, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” In other words does any of this indicate that God doesn’t love us anymore? You’re going through difficult times. You’re going through hard times. You’re going through persecution. You’re going through imprisonment.
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Today I was looking at something on the Maritime prison in Rome. This was basically a hole in the ground. The way they treated prisoners in Rome was because they knew they were going to die, they didn’t really care so they just stuck them down in this dungeon and there was no sanitation, nothing down there. They were just left there. They just threw food down there and it was just an absolute horrid existence. You can certainly see why when people are going through extremely difficult times, they question if God loves them anymore, and why He takes them through this. They wonder if God hates them to take them through all this. So Paul is answering that kind of a question here. “Can anything separate us from the love of Christ?’ No matter how horrible it might get: tribulation, distress, persecution, or famine or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
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In verse 36 he quotes from the Old Testament. “For Your sake [referring to God] we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” Our lives are for Him to use however He deems necessary. In verse 37, Paul says, “But in all these things [adversities] we overwhelmingly conquer [we are more than conquerors] through Him who loved us.” That word for ‘more than conquerors’ is hupernikao, a compound word in the Greek. nikao is the verb form for someone who overcomes. The noun form is nikai where we get our word for the shoe brand, Nike, the conqueror or victor in the races. The verb is used for the participle for the overcomer in and 3. The overcomer is the believer who is really pursuing spiritual victory in his life through spiritual maturity. And this is a huper which means adding something to it. I’m tempted to translate it with a little German. This is the uber-conqueror. This the uber-victor. This is the uber-mature believer who is pushing off so the uber-mature one is who he’s focusing on.
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This takes us right back to the concept that he’s focusing on that he introduced in verse 17 which is how to be a joint-heir with Christ. We need to push on to be a co-heir with Christ and that’s done by how we handle suffering. So fits right in this context. It is a verse introducing a thought on how we are to think about the suffering and the adversity, that’s going on in our life. So that sets up the context. Now let’s look at this verse because this is a verse that is filled with some difficulties. I’m not just talking about understanding what it says; we have to first know what it says. ((CHART)) starts out, “And we know.” The top verse on the chart is the New King James Version. The second verse is from the New American Standard Version. The top verse reads, “And we know that all things work together for good.” So the main verse is sunergeo work together but the way it’s translated you have the Greek word for “all things” which can be nominative but the same form is also for the accusative. So it appears in that text that all things is the subject in sort of a passive construction, all things impersonalize or depersonalize construction, all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
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But it’s a little different in verse 28 in the American Standard and the NIV and about five other translations. Those read, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” Now the issue here is that we have a textual difference between two basic manuscript groups. This is what it looks like on the bottom of a Greek New Testament. I’ll explain this to you. What it tells you is that right up here where we have this Greek word theos or God is that that’s found in these five manuscripts here. And papyrus number 6A, which is Codex Alexandrinus, B, which is the abbreviation for Ephraim of Syria, 81 is another manuscript, which is a more recent translation. The biggies are A and B, which are fourth century manuscripts and so there’s some people who follow the principle that if it’s older, its accurate which is a fallacious principle because it can be a copy of an even older wrong document. So it’s not even an issue between the critical and the majority text at this point. And this line tells us what manuscripts support the reading of the text which leaves God out. That’s Sinaticus, which is one of the oldest and best manuscripts found on Mount Sinai at St. Catherine’s monastery at Tissendorf. Then these next four represent other uncials, or older, capital letter Greek manuscripts and then some other minor manuscripts. This funky looking “m” here stands for the majority text or the majority of manuscripts that come out of Greece and modern Turkey. These others stand for some other different translations and writers. So regarding all of this, you see there are only two basic strong manuscripts that support this reading and there’s a vast number that leave God out.
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Bruce Metzger, who before he died was considered one of the top two or three textual critics, even though he didn’t hold to a majority text. He was still recognized as one of the greatest scholars on textual criticism. He wrote quite a bit and was one of the major editors of the critical Greek text that we use. He also published a commentary back in the 80’s explaining why they chose certain readings over other readings. You can catch the gist of what he said here. He said, “Although the reading that has God in it [God worked all things together for good] is both ancient and noteworthy, a majority of the committee deemed it too narrowly supported.” In other words, it’s only in a few manuscripts. It doesn’t have enough support from different geographical regions as well as a number of manuscripts. “It’s too narrowly supported to be admitted into the text, particularly in the view of the diversified support for the shorter reading.” Then he lists all the different manuscripts that have the shorter reading. He then goes on to say, “Since sunergeo, ‘working together,’ may be taken to imply a personal subject, God, it seems to be a natural explanation made by an Alexandrian editor. The bottom line he’s saying is that the shorter reading is always to be preferred because the tendency of scribes was to add something in order to enhance the explanation. It’s implied that God is the One working all things together but that’s not what the text says.
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I think the reality is that usually the debate in textual criticism is between the critical text and the majority text view. But this isn’t even a majority text/critical text view. There’s just little support for this in the manuscript. It’s only accepted in a couple of English translations and the vast majority don’t accept that because the manuscript evidence is just too weak. So it’s implied in the text that God is the One who is working but it doesn’t state that. “We know that all things work together for the good to those who love God.”
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Now this raises the next question, “Who is it that loves God?” There’s two ways to look at this. This is a really tough thing to try to resolve. The first view is that this passage only relates to that class of Christians who are obedient to God and are advancing spiritually. The second view is that this passage refers to all believers whether they’re growing or not, faithful or not, or walking by the Spirit or not. Let me give you the rationale behind each view. The first view is that the passage only relates to that class of Christians that are obedient and walking with the Lord. That this is how the phrase “loving God” is used in many passages. Not everyone who is a believer not only in the Old Testament or in the New Testament is a lover of God.
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How does the Scripture say we demonstrate our love for God? By being obedient. The one who loves God keeps His commandments. So not everyone who is a believer keeps His commandments. So view one emphasizes that aspect. For instance in , “Showing loving kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep my commandments.” Those are viewed as going together: loving Him means you keep His commandments. states, “By loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice and by holding fast to Him for He is your life.” Love and obedience go together. If you say, “Oh I love God” and you’re not walking with the Lord and you’re not obedient, you don’t love God. You just have a lot of warm fuzzies about what you think is God but you don’t love God.
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Jesus says the same kind of thing in the New Testament. In , He says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” , “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me and He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.” Again, if you love God, you’re going to keep His commandments. , “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love.” Abiding in God’s love is another way of talking about fellowship so again it’s obedience. says, “For this is the love of God [the love for God or toward God] that we keep His commandments.” So how do you know if you have love for God? You keep His commandments.
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All of that is related to keeping His commandments. The first view would say, “Okay, this verse doesn’t apply to every believer. It only applies to those who love God, those who are pursuing spiritual maturity.” The second view comes along and says, “No, the concept of those who love God is defined clearly in context. Look at what it says.” “All things work together for good to those who love God.” Those who love God are then explained as those who are the “called according to His purpose.” Now who are those who are called according to His purpose? Well, that’s explained in verse 29, “For those whom He foreknew He also predestined..” Okay, how many people did He foreknow? Let’s just say five billion. He predestined all of that five billion to become conformed to the image of His Son. Any more? Any less? No, it’s the same number.
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It goes on in verse 30 to say, “And those whom He predestined, He also called.” Did He lose any or gain any? He doesn’t lose any or gain any. So the ones whom He foreknew, that same exact number, no more, no less, are predestined. That same number, “these He also called.” That same number, no more, no less, are justified. So that means that all of those who are saved and get eternal life and are justified are among those who are the set, fixed group who are foreknown, and that set, fixed group that are predestined, and “these whom He called, He also justified, and these whom He justified, He also glorified.” So, according to the explanation in verse 30, those who are called according to His purpose are everyone who is justified and everyone that’s glorified. He doesn’t lose any. It’s not admitting of any subset of faithless believers versus faithful believers. It doesn’t make that division at all so the definition of who are the called applies to every believer.
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Now, how do we resolve this? I think we resolve it by simply saying that this is true for every believer but Paul is simply applying it and addressing it to those who are pursuing spiritual maturity. It’s true for every believer in one sense but Paul, like John does in 1 John about the one who is born again doesn’t sin, he’s not using the term ‘born again’ as an exact equivalent that every person who is regenerated no longer sins. Because if that’s true, none of us is saved and we might as well go home. He’s talking about those who are regenerate, those who are begotten of God, those who are living as family members. He’s addressing the group that is pursuing spiritual maturity.
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That’s what you have with Paul also. He addresses those who are going somewhere. He’s not talking about those who are not going anywhere. He is encouraging, in the context, those who are pursuing spiritual maturity and spiritual growth. He’s not addressing those who have just decided to be unfaithful, to live in carnality and walk according to the flesh. Even though the principle applies to every believer, it is only a reality to those who are pursuing spiritual maturity because it is what strengthens and encourages them as they face adversity.
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Now that brings us to the big term right in the middle of this verse and it’s defined and used again in verse 30. That is the word ‘the called’. This is the beginning where we’re going to have to go through each of these concepts: calling, predestination, justification, and glorification. Let’s talk about some concepts related to the term “calling”. This is just a basic word. The Greek word is kaleo and it simply refers in a generic sense to an invitation to something. Just as we use our word call with a broad range of meaning, the word kaleo has a broad range of meaning but when it comes to theology, it is used to refer to the overall process, the whole process whereby an unjustified sinner comes to understand the plan of salvation and God’s invitation to them to receive salvation in Christ. It’s a broad term. It refers to that whole process from the beginning of understanding the plan of salvation, God’s invitation to every human being to accept that salvation, and ultimately to those who have accepted and received that salvation. So it’s a broad term. It can be used as generically as an invitation and then it’s used in a little more precise way.
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The second point I want to say about this in that in the development of theology, it’s come to pack on a lot of baggage. It’s got a lot of additional meaning that have been stuck on this. In the stream of Augustinianism, which I mentioned Tuesday night, which preceded Calvinism, the term became identified with a theological concept called ‘irresistible grace’. ((CHART)) I’ve got a little chart here which I put together, a timeline, and this may help you sort of conceptualize some of the things I talked about on Tuesday night. On the one hand, we have, both in terms of philosophy and theology, we have people who believe man is completely and totally free, that there’s absolutely nothing to hinder human will and human freedom. They believe man is free, just like Adam was created to make any decision, no external influence on him whatsoever. On the other extreme, you have those who believe that man is totally determined by God or by nature or by chemical makeup or by something like that so there’s no freewill whatsoever. They believe everything is programmed into your computer, your DNA. You do what you do because it’s all programmed. That goes by the name of fatalism or determinism. It’s impersonal.
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On the left side is those who believe man is absolutely free with absolute free will, like Adam. On the other extreme we have those who have an absolute determinism or absolute fatalism. Now I inserted this line of Roman Catholics in the middle ages. This was their big debate between free will and what we call Calvinism, a more deterministic view and those were the representatives in the Roman Catholic tradition. The first person to use the term ‘irresistible grace’ was Augustine. Augustine lived in the late 300’s, early 400’s, and he said that if God elected some and chose who would be saved and who would not be saved, then what brings those who were the elect to salvation is that God gives them grace but they can’t resist it.
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That became an extremely debated doctrine for the next hundred years until about 525 when you had a council that met in Orange. They left out irresistible grace from the Catholic doctrine of salvation. Pelagius was the British priest who believed that everything was free, so he was Augustine’s great opponent. So Pelagianism was declared a heresy but then you had the Augustinian viewpoint which is a very strong precursor to Calvinism but at the Senate of Orange, the Roman Catholic Church basically adopted a view of semi-Augustianism. This gets real confusing. You’re not going to get a test on this or anything but this gives you an idea of what was going on. In the Middle Ages there was also another intermediate view called semi-Pelagianism and it gets really weird. There were a lot of debates that went on long before the Protestant Reformation. That’s really the thing I want you to take away from this is that these ideas have been debated over and over again long before Christianity. They were debated among the Greek philosophers and a lot of those Greek ideas were brought into the church which affected how they interpreted Scripture.
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Even today a lot of the books that are written on free will and the sovereignty of God have a lot of philosophy in them and they just burst your brain cells. So this just gives you kind of a little historical background and this all leads up to the Protestant Reformation. By the time of the Reformation, semi-Pelagianism which is emphasizing a really heretical view of freewill dominates the Roman Catholic Church so when you have the Protestant Reformation, it’s spearheaded by a guy named Martin Luther who nails the 95 debate points or theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, which was the local Facebook page and calls for a debate over these 95 points that he thinks express all the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. He was in that order and he’s been reading Augustine and he wants to go back and get away from this “loosy-goosy, you can lose your salvation”, you can work your way to heaven kind of understanding of the gospel which was dominating the Roman Catholic Church and he wanted to go back to Augustinianism.
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Having said all of that, by the time you get past Calvin into the end of the 1500’s, there developed a lot of controversy over these issues related to free will and sovereignty among Calvinists. There was a theology professor by the name of Jacob Armenius whose teaching in Holland and his followers [he died in 1609] put together and summarized five basic points which they wanted to emphasize on how they viewed man’s condition and salvation. Those were called the Remonstrance and the Calvinists came up with what they called the counter-remonstrance which we call today the five points of Calvinism. That’s indicated by the acronym T-U-L-I-P. T stands for total inability. Because of sin, man is not capable of doing anything to not only please God but he can’t even exercise positive volition toward God without a work of grace changing him. The U stands for unconditional election, which means that God chooses who will be saved and who won’t be saved and that’s really what determines whether you’re saved or not. It has nothing to do with your volition or your belief in Christ if God chose you ahead of time. The L stands for limited atonement. If God is only going to save a few people then Christ only died for them. They ask, “why waste Christ’s blood?” If he died for the unsaved, He only spilled His blood on Calvary. That’s how they’ll argue that. The I stands for irresistible grace. This is the idea that for the elect to come to Christ God has to irresistibly draw them and He will only draw those who are elect. He won’t draw others. This is also called effectual calling. The P stands for the perseverance for the saints. This is their meaning of eternal security that Christ perseveres in keeping the saints saved. But for many, in the last hundred years or so, especially the last fifty years, the emphasis has been more on the fact that if the professing believer doesn’t persevere or continue in his faith, then he wasn’t truly saved to begin with. Not that he loses his salvation but he wasn’t truly saved to begin with and that form of theology is what we refer to as “lordship salvation” or “lordship theology”.
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Let me put a couple of quotes up here just to give you a little flavor of what is being said. ((CHART)) This long quote up here comes from Millard Erickson who wrote a three volume, now it’s a one volume, of systematic theology that has superseded Chafer and Berkhoff and others at Dallas Seminary and most seminaries today, except for Chafer seminary. He’s describing Calvinism here. He says, “We’ve already seen several characteristics of election as viewed by Calvinists. One is that election is an expression of God’s sovereign will and good pleasure. It’s not based on any merit in the one elected nor on foreseeing that the individual will believe.” Now this is a side point. In Calvinism belief is meritorious, that faith is given to you by God and that faith has merit. So we disagree strongly with that. He goes on to say, “It is cause, that is election is the cause, not the result of faith. Second, he says that election is efficacious. Those whom God has chosen will most certainly come to faith in Him and for that matter will persevere in that faith until the end. All of the elect will certainly be saved. Third, he says election is for all eternity. It is not a decision made at some point in time when the individual is already existent. It is what God has always purposed to do. See, that is fatalism. It doesn’t matter what you believe. God already made the decision for you. That is a form of fatalism or determinism. Fourth, he goes on to say, “Election is unconditional and doesn’t depend on human performance, specific action or meeting certain conditions, i.e., faith or terms of God.” There are some hyper-Calvinists who believe that if God wants you to be saved, you’ll be saved whether you hear the gospel or not. Then he goes on to say, “It is not that God wills to save people if they do certain things. He simply wills to save them and brings it about.” Finally he says, “Election is immutable. God will not change His mind. Election is from all eternity and out of God’s infinite mercy He has no reason or occasion to change His mind.” That’s his description of Calvinism.
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Then he goes on in his conclusion dealing with the work of the Holy Spirit and salvation, he says, “Salvation consists of three steps, effectual calling [irresistible grace].” This is not to be defined as God the Holy Spirit making a person’s faith effectual for salvation. That is redefining a classical, historical Calvinistic term. I’d had twenty or thirty guys go through seminary and it’s taking me a year or so to beat that wrong definition out of their heads because they read a Calvinist, they say, “Oh, this guy is right.” No, effectual calling is a Calvinist synonym for irresistible grace and you can’t ever re-define it. You have to let them use their terms in their way.
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Now, we had the word calling used several ways in the Old Testament and it simply refers to a commissioning. In , he says, “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness.” says, “But now, thus says the Lord, your Creator, O Jacob, and He who formed you, O Israel, Do not fear for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.” It relates to his commissioning of Israel. , “I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden wealth of secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name.” He is saying, “I commissioned you and gave you a purpose and a focus.
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Same thing in and all of this leads up to the fact that this is the same way Paul uses the term “called” when he says, “I, Paul, called an apostle.” He’s talking about it as a specific commission from God to be an apostle. But there is a commissioning at salvation for every believer and this is how the word calling is used. We’ll come back and take this up more in-depth next time but I wanted to at least get to this point. In , Paul says, “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling [the commissioning, the task which I set before you] with which you have been called. Every believer has this calling. This really refers to the end process of what began as the initial external invitation, external call to the gospel when you first heard it all the way up until you believed in Christ. Those who have gone through that process are referred to as “the called” because they’ve gone through that process. I skipped over a lot of stuff in the middle of this to get the overall view down and then next time I’ll deal with some questions and some other things there. We’re out of time today.

Romans 093b-Strength for Those Suffering with Christ: The Doctrine of Calling - Part 2. Romans 8:28

Romans 8:28 NASB95
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Romans 093b-Strength for Those Suffering with Christ: The Doctrine of Calling - Part 2. Romans 8:28
 
We are in Romans 8. This might have been one of those passages Peter talked about when he said there’s some hard things to understand in Paul. This is a difficult section and I think it’s difficult because so many people have heard what I think is sort of the surface or superficial interpretation of the passage. If you read it a certain way it’s easy to think this is talking about some sort of predestination passage in the typical approach of 5-point Calvinism. So many people have heard that and heard those kinds of definitions of the terms election and predestination that when they come to this passage and they read those words their brains have sort of been front-loaded with those definitions. What I’m hoping to do as we go through this section is try to unload those definitions and flush them out of our minds because the key terms that we see here, especially foreknowledge, election, and calling, all have to do with the plan of God for His people.
 
In the Old Testament, those terms had to do with the Old Testament collective people of God in terms of Israel. They were the elect or choice ones. You remember last summer we talked about the doctrine of the Magnum bar. We’ll be getting back to that again because there was this one ice cream bar that I was eating in Israel last summer that had in Hebrew on it the same word that’s used for elect. It’s usually translated elect or select in the Scripture. I asked our guide, “What does this mean?” He said, “Choice almonds.” The emphasis was on choice, a qualitative thing, not a selection process or election process with this picture of God somewhere in eternity past making a decision that He is going to create the human race and, knowing they will fall [or determining in Calvinism], He decides that he will select some for salvation and the rest are doomed to eternal judgment and condemnation. That’s the double-predestination view. Not all Calvinists take that view. That’s sort of the high Calvinist, superlapsarian view, depending on the order in which you place God’s thinking logically, whether he thinks about determining the fall before He chooses to save some. I’m not going to get into all of the intricacies of super-lapsarianism, infra-lapsarianism, and “Labrador retrievers”.
 
We’re going to get into just the terminology that’s used in the Scripture so we can think about it a little more clearly, a little more precisely. That’s why last time I took the time to give sort of a fly-over or overview of the chapter, especially the last half from verse 17 on to show that what the apostle Paul is doing in verses 18-39 is to help us to understand or to challenge us as believers to press on, to suffer with Christ, and to be joint-heirs with Christ. So the theme of suffering is introduced in verse 17 and then it is expanded upon in relationship to the believers’ future glorification with Christ, starting in verse 18. When we come to that well-known favorite promise of Romans 8:28, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose”, we have to locate that within this context.
 
Context is everything. It shapes our understanding of these words. As we come to Romans 8:28 I want to review a few things I said last time but I want to move forward into some other things we need to understand. ((CHART)) First of all the verse starts with that verb oida, we know, which is an interesting word choice for the Apostle Paul here. oida has an odd etymology in terms of its grammar and syntax but it’s one of two words that’s used in Greek for knowledge. The other word is the word I’ve transliterated at the bottom of the paragraph there, ginosko which has the idea of coming to know something where oida has the idea of something that is intuitive. When it refers to God, it refers to His omniscience, that which is known intrinsically to God. For human beings its either referring to intuitive knowledge of something we’ve already come to know, everybody has come to understand. It’s a perfect tense which means it’s completed action, so it’s referring to something that is already known. It was learned or acquired knowledge in the past and it is a first person plural which emphasizes ‘we’ as opposed to ‘you’. Paul is including himself along with his readers in this understanding of this basic principle of Romans 8:28.
 
Now if you look at the section we’re talking about Paul has significantly shifted to using a first person plural pronoun, starting back as early as verse 16, “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God.”  He’s including himself with his audience that they’re all children of God. I pointed out this is the Greek word teknon which indicates all believers are adopted into God’s Royal Family. Then in verse 17, he says, “If children, then heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed, we suffer with Him..” So he’s still using that first person plural. Verse 18, he talks about that fact that “the suffering of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Those glories related toward us in terms of the character of Christ being manifest in us. I pointed out that concept of glory is often a circumlocution, which is a fancy word for saying something in another way, a word substitution, which means His Essence. So the essence of God, the character of God is revealed in us.
 
Now that’s important because in Romans 8:29 we’re told we’re “predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ.” Predestination doesn’t mean choosing someone to go to heaven or to go to hell.  Predestination, as we’re going to see in a couple of verses has to do with God’s plan, God’s destiny for the believer. Not God’s destiny for some human beings and not others, but God’s pre-determined plan to conform believers to Christ. That is our preset destiny. God wants us to be conformed to Him and therefore the glory of God, in terms of His essence, will be manifested in us. Remember Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” We know from reading that that the glory of God refers to His character, His essence. So we fall short of that essence but that essence related to His image and likeness is going to be manifested in us.
 
As human beings we were originally created in the image and likeness of God and that image was defaced and corrupted by sin and in the process of sanctification, that likeness, that character of God, which is the same as the character of Christ, is being reformed and developed within us. As we go through these verses I’m just pointing out the number of times we have the word ‘we’. Romans 8:22 says, “For we know..” Romans 8:23 says, “We also have the first fruits of the Spirit..” Verse 24 and 25 say, “For in hope we have been saved but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” And then ‘we’ is used in verse 26, “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” So the whole context here is developing the idea that there is a commonality here between Paul, the apostle, and his audience. This is a shared common truth.
 
So it’s introduced in Romans 8:28 that we know something. In English we might translate it by putting a colon after something, leaving out that, which is indirect discourse stating a principle that is known. The principle is stated so you get the idea this was a universal truth accepted and known by all believers.  I’m now going to re-order the text to go into the word order we find in the Greek text for emphasis. “We know to those who love God.” This phrase is thrown at the beginning of the verse because Paul is encouraging those who want to be joint-heirs with Christ back in verse 17. It’s not that this doesn’t apply to carnal believers or to believers who just aren’t going anywhere in the Christian life but Paul, as well as the Apostle John as well, often when they are talking to believers they assume that if you’re a believer you’re going to want to excel and push toward maturity. They’re not accommodating to those who are failures.
 
They’re encouraging every believer to press on. While these truths, in some sense, apply to all believers Paul is really focusing on one category: those who love God. I pointed this out the last time that there are two views on this. One view is that this passage only relates to that class of Christians that are obedient to God, only to those who love God. It doesn’t apply to anybody else. But you see the problem with that view is that when Paul goes on to define those who love God, it defines them with this appositional phrase that they’re the ones who are “the called according to His purpose”.
 
Now that phrase is now placed within a series of steps from the foreknowledge of God to glorification in verse 29, showing that those who are the called are also the ones who are justified, no more and no less. They’re the ones who are glorified, no more and no less. Now all believers are “the called”.  Only some believers are really pursuing spiritual growth and spiritual maturity and so this applies especially to them.
 
Paul is thinking in terms of that special group who are faithful and growing. That’s the second interpretive option. Both are true in some sense. He’s emphasizing one to the exclusion of the other. He’s not saying that this doesn’t apply to every believer. It does in some sense but primarily he’s focusing on just the ones who are going somewhere. He’s focusing on the movers and he’s not focusing on the sitters. He’s just focusing on that one group. He doesn’t say the others weren’t called. He’s just not emphasizing them. So the second option is that this passage refers to all believers whether growing or not, whether faithful or not, whether walking by the Spirit or not. It’s primarily focusing on that class of Christians who are obedient to God.
 
We know this because throughout Scripture, those who love God are those who are obedient. Those who are disobedient don’t love God so the phrase “those who love God” is a restrictive term. Now all believers are called but not all of the called are pressing on but they have the potential to press on, the potential to grow. That’s why Paul is focusing on this because he is trying to motivate and challenge all believers to be obedient so they can suffer with Christ so they can be joint-heirs with Him. The New Testament passages like John 14:15 and 21 emphasize the fact that love is exhibited in action, in obedience. Love is not an emotion. There may be an emotional kind of love but love is an action. It is obedience to God. It is doing what God says to do. John 14:21, “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me.” The one who is disobedient isn’t demonstrating love. John 15:10, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” Once again, obedience and love go hand-in-hand. 1 John 5:3, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” How do we demonstrate love? Keeping His commandments.
 
Now, as we look at the text in terms of the word order, we read, “And we know that to those who love God, all things work together for good.” I pointed out last time that the “all things” references the suffering that’s mentioned starting in verse 17. “If we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.” Verse 18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Then we get into the issue of the groaning of creation, which is under a bondage of corruption in verse 21 and 22, “For we know that the whole creations groans and suffers the pains of childbirth.” Verse 23 talks about how we ourselves groan within ourselves waiting eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of the body.  So the “all things” relates to the negative features, adversities, the problems, the suffering that we go through in this life.
 
Now the way it is structured in the best Greek text.  Remember I pointed out last time that this isn’t even an issue in the debate between the majority text and the Nestle-Aland text. If you have a New King James Bible you will see in a footnote, it will say, “The NU text says..”  The NU are both upper case. The N stands for the Nestle-Aland text, which is one of the critical texts of the Greek New Testament. The U stands for the UBS4 text so that’s what that’s referring to. That’s the group of texts that believe that the oldest is the best. They usually go with three or four North African manuscripts agreeing together. They automatically agree with that, even though every other manuscript has another reading. But this doesn’t even relate to that issue at all. It is simply that there are a couple of North African texts from the late 3rd to the early 4th century that have the reading of God as the subject, God causing all things to work together for good. God showing up as the subject of the verb shows up only in three or four manuscripts and only two major ones. It’s easy to explain that some scribe wanted to clarify things so he inserted God because it appears that God would be the One who performed this. So “God causing all things to work together for good” would be the implication. But there are many times in Scripture where we have certain statements made that are impersonal. It’s not saying that the all things are actively causing their own outworking to good but that it’s stated that way. It’s an idiom of everyday speech.
 
This morning I was working through, in preparation for some things coming up in Romans 9 and relating also to predestination and election issue, volition and free will, I was working through Exodus in the passage which is dealing with the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.
Sometimes in two verses next to each other, sometimes in three verses next to each other, it’s stated different ways. One verse says Pharaoh hardened his heart. Then the next verse says Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and then the next verse says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Well, which is it?  What it is is that God is the ultimate cause of everything in the universe. He allows everything. But you also have the way you talk in everyday language about things. Pharaoh has a volition and he hardened his heart. His heart was also hardened and we’ll talk about that simply because of the way he responded to his circumstances. Then ultimately God is overseeing this, bringing about His plan and His purposes in the history of Israel but that doesn’t mean God is overriding Pharaoh’s volition.
 
But you have three different ways in which the language operates. One is sort of passive: Pharaoh’s heart was hardened but we’re not saying he didn’t do anything or make any choices. That’s just the way which people talk. That’s the idiom of language. What hardened it? Well he went through difficult times and that’s how he responded. It’s also true that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. The point I’m making from using that as an illustration is simply that we use language idiomatically all the time. Sometimes you have to understand that you can’t take an idiom or the normal way of speaking where we take an active verb or passive verb and express it passively or we take something that is personal and speak about it impersonally. These are just the way in which language is used.
 
So the best texts state, “We know that all things work together for good.”  That’s not saying the things aren’t actively working in everything. It’s understood. God is the One doing this and bringing about the results for the good. So “all things” refers to the suffering. That seems to be the subject because the topic of these previous verses are these things of adversity that we’re facing. So it’s just a common use of language for Paul to say, “These things will work themselves out to good.” The assumption is that because God has a plan and a purpose which Paul unfolds in the next few verses. So he says, “To those who love God all things work together for good.” Then he further defines those who love God as those who are called according to His purpose.
 
This is where we came last time to talk about this whole issue of “calling” and locate that within the context of a lot of modern, theological debate. Calvinism, especially high Calvinism, five-point Calvinism, has been on the resurgence for the last thirty or forty years. There are different theories I’ve heard for this. Of course, Calvinists will say it’s because it’s Biblical and more people are just getting back to the text. I don’t agree with that. I think it’s because Calvinism is an extremely tight theological system for people who love rigor and details and hyper-logic, they fall in love with this system of Calvinism. But it’s an integrated system and it has flaws. If you grant the assumptions of Calvinism then you have to grant, like any other system, its conclusions. I don’t grant the assumptions because the assumptions are often flawed in terms of their view of the sovereignty of God and the volition of man. I think Calvinists have a very low view of God. Their view of God’s sovereignty is narrow, not wide. Of course they say the opposite but for a sovereign God to be able to oversee and superintend all of the volition of mankind indicates the superiority of God.
 
But if God is Calvinist-presented, if God has predetermined each and every solution and every decision, then that conception of God’s Omnipotence and Omniscience is narrow.  My view of God’s Omniscience is much broader. In Calvinism God cannot know what will happen unless God has first pre-determined what will happen. So in strict Calvinism, God does not know all of the knowable, all of the potential, all of the possible, He only knows what will happen. In my view of the Omniscience of God, God knows all of the knowable. When Jesus made statements about Sodom and Gomorrah and Capernaum and Bethsaida, that if they had only responded to the grace that was given them, things would have been very different, then h\He knows what might have happened, what could have happened under other conditions. God’s knowledge is extensive; it is not narrow and restricted only to that which He has pre-determined.
 
In Calvinism what they do is take foreknowledge and they make it a causative element. God causes certain things to happen and that’s why He knows they could happen. We’ll get into that a little more but that’s sort of the set-up. Last time I gave you some quotes from Calvinists and I want to give you some more tonight so you can hear what they’re saying.
 
These quotes are from a book. I first read this book probably forty years ago before I went to seminary trying to think my way through these issues. It’s called The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, and Documented by David Steele, Curtis Thomas, and Roger Nicole. This first came out in 1963. In their introduction, sort of a summation of these things, in the effectual call of irresistible grace section, they say, “As was shown above [in their previous discussions on election and limited atonement] the Father before the foundation of the world [in eternity past] marked out those who were to be saved and gave them to His Son to be His people.” So in high Calvinism, before there’s even a decree for a fall, God decrees to save some and to condemn others. That’s supra-lapsarianism.
 
“At the appointed time”, they go on to say, “the Son came into the world and secured their redemption.”  In five point Calvinism, limited atonement means Jesus only died for those who were first chosen, the elect. Redemption only secures the salvation of those God chose. Everybody else is passed over. They continue, “But these two great acts, election and redemption, do not complete the work of salvation.” Now they’re going to talk about its application. They say, “Included in God’s plan for recovering lost sinners is the renewing work of the Holy Spirit by which the benefits of Christ’s obedience and death..” Notice they have two categories. Obedience which saves you. Christ’s active obedience is soteriological. Not just His death on the Cross but His active obedience in life. According to them, what saves is not just Christ’s death on the Cross; it’s His obedience in life. “The renewing work of the Holy Spirit by which the benefits of Christ’s obedience and death are applied to the elect.” [It can’t be applied to anybody else.] “It is with this phase of salvation [the application by the Holy Spirit] that the doctrine of irresistible or efficacious grace is concerned.”
 
 See in historic theology, efficacious grace is a Calvinist term. It doesn’t mean to them that God the Holy Spirit takes your faith and makes it efficacious for salvation. That is not a historic definition of efficacious grace. Efficacious grace is, and always will be, a Calvinist term. Therefore you can’t redefine it to be something else. It means that God the Holy Spirit graciously calls internally only the elect. “Simply stated, this doctrine asserts that the Holy Spirit never fails to bring to salvation those sinners whom He personally calls to Christ.” See, that’s the classic definition of efficacious grace. No one else uses the term but Calvinists. It doesn’t mean to make your faith effective for salvation. It means that the Holy Spirit never fails to bring to salvation those sinners who He personally calls to Christ. He inevitably applies salvation to every sinner whom He intends to save and it is His intention to save the elect.” He doesn’t apply this to anybody else, only to the elect and it is irresistible. In other words when the Holy Spirit begins this work you don’t have anything to say about it. Your volition can’t say, “Well, I’m not going to believe in Christ.” You can’t do that. It’s irresistible grace and it’s always effects its results which is why it’s called efficacious grace.
 
They go on to say “The gospel invitation extends a call to salvation to everyone who hears its message.” Now that’s what I called last time the external invitation to believer and unbeliever alike. “It invites all men without distinction  to drink freely of the water of life.” See it’s a free offer but they’re not free to respond so it’s a moot offer. “It invites all men without distinction to drink freely of the water of life and live. It promises salvation to all who repent and believe but this outward general call extended to the elect and non-elect alike will not bring sinners to Christ.” They’re saying, “You can offer salvation to all sinners but it won’t bring any to Christ unless they’re elect.” It’s not going to bring anybody else to Christ. Why? “Because men are dead in sin and under its power.” Even the elect are dead to sin and under its power. The gospel call can’t do anything, they say.
 
“Consequently the unregenerate will not respond to the gospel call in repentance and faith.” They can’t respond whether they’re elect or not. “No amount of external threatenings or promises will cause blind, deaf, dead, rebellious sinners to bow before Christ as Lord and to look to Him as the One for salvation. Such an act of faith is contrary to man’s lost nature.” Therefore the Holy Spirit must do something. We all agree that the Holy Spirit does something. What He does is the matter of contention. “Therefore, the Holy Spirit to bring God’s elect to salvation extends to them [only the elect] a special inward call in addition to the outward call named in the gospel message.” So there’s an outward gospel message to all but it can’t save anyone or bring anyone to salvation at all. That’s what they’ve just said. Only the inner call can do that.
 
“So through this special call the Holy Spirit performs a work of grace within the sinner which inevitably brings him to faith in Christ.” Inevitably. That means you can’t resist it. The unregenerate person receives this inner call. His volition doesn’t matter. He can’t resist it. That’s why it’s called irresistible grace. And it automatically and inevitably will bring him to faith in Christ. They go on to say, “The inward change wrought in the elect sinner enables him to understand and believe spiritual truth.”  Read that carefully.  What is the nature of that inward change? Is it just knowledge, the ability to understand the gospel? Look at where they’re going to go with this. That’s regeneration. That’s what they mean by an inward change.
 
The inward change wrought in the elect sinner enables him to understand and believe spiritual truth. In the spiritual realm he’s given the seeing eye and the hearing ear.” They’re not just limiting this to just understanding the gospel message. That’s what I would say. The Holy Spirit acts on all who hear the external call to enable them to understand the spiritual issues. What they’re saying is that the Holy /Spirit only acts on the elect. It’s not just knowledge; it’s not just understanding. There is a change wrought within them. They say, “The Spirit creates within them a new heart or a new nature.” That’s regeneration but they haven’t believed yet. See regeneration in high Calvinism comes before faith. They can’t believe because they’re spiritually dead. How can a dead person believe, they say. They have to be made alive first and then they can believe.
 
So they say, “The Spirit creates within them a new heart or a new nature. This is accomplished through regeneration or the new birth by which the sinner is made a child of God and is given spiritual life.” Now we understand that. We can all agree to that basic definition that regeneration means a sinner is made a child of God and is given a spiritual life. It’s just that they put it before he believes. They go on to say, “His will is renewed through this process so that the sinner spontaneously comes to Christ of his own free choice.” But they believe that the reason he comes to Christ of his own free choice is that he’s given a new nature that predetermines that he will respond to the gospel by faith.” Do you see that? Anybody want clarification? I want to make sure you understand what Calvinists are saying. This is the best way to do it.
 
“His will is renewed through this process so that the sinner spontaneously comes to Christ of his own free choice.” But he’s already regenerate. He’s regenerated before he ever believes because their view is that he can’t believe until he’s regenerated. “He’s given a new nature so that he loves righteousness and his mind is now enlightened so that he understands and believes the Biblical gospel. The renewed sinner freely and willingly turns to Christ as Lord and Savior. Thus, the once-dead sinner is drawn to Christ by the inward supernatural call of the Spirit who through regeneration makes him alive and creates within him faith and repentance.”
 
See faith is meritorious, they believe, and they think it’s given to the person so that they can respond to the gospel. God does everything. There’s no room for human volition. They only have free choice after they’re regenerate. And they’re regenerate and they can only exercise choice in the gospel after they’ve been given new life. I quoted these two reformed theologians last week, Louis Berkhoff talking about external calling. He was just simply recognizing there’s an external call but no one can really respond to it, he says. They can only respond to the internal call which affects regeneration. John Gerstner says, “The call is to whomever will, which only applies to the regenerate.” 
You didn’t read that in the little footnote when it says “whosoever will”, there’s a little asterisk there in their Bible and the footnote says, “only the elect”?  I’m being facetious. “Whosoever will” only if you’re elect. So the call, they say, is always to the regenerate, never to the unregenerate. Then I also had this quote from Millard Erickson last time, “Salvation consists of three steps. The first step of salvation is effectual calling. The effectual calling brings about conversion and regeneration.” He, too, has conversion before regeneration.
 
Not all Calvinists are the same. You have low Calvinism, high Calvinism, and hyper-Calvinism. Those are different strengths of Calvinism. But all of this relates to the doctrine of calling. So let me just highlight a few things on what the Scripture says about calling.
In the Scripture, calling or the called refers to the overall process by which unjustified sinners come to understand the plan of salvation and God’s invitation to them to receive salvation in Christ. I’m just emphasizing here that it’s an invitation. When I give an invitation, or explain the gospel on Sunday morning, that is an invitation to all. It’s an external invitation, a summons or a calling to respond to the gospel.
 
When we have the phrase “the called” it refers to those who have responded to the gospel by putting their faith alone in Christ alone. While there are others who were invited, those who rejected it are no longer consider to be “the called.” In Matthew 22:1-14 we have the parable of the wedding feast. Invitations go out to one and all but only a few respond. The ones who did not respond are no longer the invited ones because they didn’t show up. The ones who showed up in the banquet hall are the invited ones. They’re the called ones. Others were invited but they didn’t show up so they’re not considered the called anymore.
 
The most well-known use of this word ‘called’ or kletos is where it says “many are called but few are chosen.” We’ll come back to this again because the word chosen there is for the elect. So many are called. Why would God invite someone that wasn’t chosen or elect? It’s a conundrum. They have a problem about this in Calvinism. That’s why they have to say, “Well this is just the external call. The elect refers to the internal call.” But that phrase in the text refers to those who actually showed up. Matthew 22: 1-14, just to be clear, is talking about an open invitation, “many are called, few are chosen [those who show up]”.
 
 In over fifty uses in Paul’s epistles the word group has a more restrictive or technical use referring to those who have responded to the gospel. The called ones are anyone who believes in Jesus. They were the called ones. The others failed to respond. The ones who responded are the ones who completed the process and relates the purpose of the calling. Every one of these terms relates to God’s future terms, not a past action. That’s what I want to emphasize. It all relates to God’s purpose or plan. We’ll see that when we get into some text in a minute.
 
So point three is that the calling or the invitation for those who respond is effectual because they responded. Not because they were elect but because they responded and believed the gospel, they are saved. They are regenerate because they believe. Those who refuse to attend, though invited, are irrelevant to the invitation because they haven’t shown up at the banquet. This is related to Matthew 22. Since they did not fulfil the invitation they cannot be referred to as “invited ones”.
 
Now another way in which the word calling is used is in secular Greek in the Septuagint, the Greek translation 0f the Old Testament. The word group also had the idea of commissioning someone. In the Old Testament, the Greek word kaleo is used to translate the Hebrew word chara in the sense of service and dedication and this conforms to our sense of a commissioning. For example, “I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness.” This has the idea of why God calls Israel as a nation. They’re commissioned to be an example of righteousness to the nations. It doesn’t have the sense of “I have called you” in the sense of a name, which is what we have in Isaiah 43:1, “But now, thus says the Lord, your Creator, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel, do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are Mine!” It’s an identification usage there.  In Isaiah 41:2 it’s talking about Cyrus. God’s going to raise up Cyrus to bring the Jews back to the land and he’s referred to in another passage as the anointed one. The verse says, “Who has aroused me from the east Whom He calls in righteousness to His feet.” It’s a commissioning. The calling is related to purpose. It’s not related to salvation. It’s related to the fact that God had a purpose for raising up Cyrus. That purpose was for the Jews to return to the land from the Babylonian Captivity. So there the word calling has this idea of commission or focusing them on a purpose.
 
It’s used the same way in the New Testament where it’s calling every believer to serve in the body of Christ. Ephesians 4:1says, “Therefore I the prisoner of the Lord implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called.” The calling here refers to the purpose for which we were saved. We have a calling. We have a purpose. God did not save us just so we could go to heaven. There was a purpose in that calling. We are saved for a righteous purpose. The New Testament also uses it as it did in the Old Testament for just indicating the identification of a name, when they are called saints. It’s just a name. That’s just the nomenclature. Same thing in 1 Corinthians 1:2, “To the church of God which is at Corinth to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling.” That’s the naming of something.
 
Let’s go back to Romans 8:28. “And we know that to those who love God all things work together for good, to those who are the called according to a purpose.” We are to conform to a purpose. God had a purpose in calling us. So that purpose is future. The idea of our calling is to accomplish something, to bring something about. There is a purpose that God has. So what I’m pointing out is that the calling is oriented to a purpose.
 
Predestination is also related to conformity in the future to the character of Christ. These terms are not looking at something God did in the past but the purpose for which this has happened, that God has a plan and a purpose which he’s taking us toward. The word prothesis used here is from the verb protithemi and the verb has to do with a plan, a proposal, an intended act. prothesis means setting something forth, a presentation, a plan, a purpose. It means a person resolves to do something so it has to do with this idea of a future plan. It’s used in some interesting passages such as Romans 9:11.
 
Now this is the passage where it talks about Jacob I love, Esau have I hated. This is not talking about the individual, eternal destiny of Jacob and Esau. It is talking about God’s corporate plan for the descendants of Jacob, Israel, versus the descendants of Esau. It’s not talking about their eternal destiny plan but God’s plan and purpose for them in history. So Romans 9:11, having talked about just before that the twins in the womb, Paul says, “For though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to choice would stand, not because of works, but because of Him who calls.” God chose that the path of blessing from Isaac to Abraham would go through Jacob. It’s not a soteriological plan or choice. It’s that God chose that through Jacob God would develop his plan for Israel, not through Esau.
 
God chooses people for different purposes and roles all the time. That has nothing to do with their eternal destiny. So election is according to the purpose of God within His plan, not in terms of the end results of a person’s destiny, in terms of heaven or hell. Ephesians 1:11 uses these words again, that we’re predestined according to purpose. So God sets up the destiny, predetermines our destiny in Christ, to be conformed to Christ, according to His plan or purpose. It’s not this Calvinistic idea that God is determining who will be saved and who won’t be saved. Ephesians 3:11 uses the word again, “This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
 
Now where I’m going to go with this is that our election is corporate, just like election in the Old Testament is corporate and it’s election in Christ. Those who are in Christ share in Christ’s election and His destiny. We get there by making a volitional response to the gospel to believe it. Then when we’re in Christ and we share those blessings and that destiny. Now calling is always related to that purpose as I stated earlier. So we have passages like Galatians 5:13, “For you were called to freedom, brethren.” It’s not talking about you’ve been called to heaven as opposed to the lake of fire. It’s talking about God’s plan and purpose for the believer who is in Christ.
 
The believer in Christ is called to liberty. We’re to serve one another. Ephesians 1:18, “That the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling.” The hope of His calling is our future destiny to rule and reign with Christ which is then defined in the verse, “The riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” Our future inheritance. Ephesians 4:4 says, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling.” Hope is a future term. Calling has to do with our orientation to God’s future plan and purpose. Colossians 3:15, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which you were called in one body and be thankful.” So peace is part of why we were called. 1 Thessalonians 4:7 says we’re called for holiness. 1 Peter 2:21 says, “For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps.” We’re called to imitate Christ. 1 Peter 3:9 says we’re called to inherit a blessing. None of this is related to calling to go to heaven versus calling to go to the lake of fire. It has to do with our purpose as believers in the body of Christ.
 
Now this brings us to a critical passage in John 6. The key verses although there are others that you’ll hear Calvinists cite for efficacious grace or irresistible grace is in John 6: 37, 44, and 65.  In verse 37 Jesus says, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” In other words you can’t come to Jesus unless the Father gives them to Jesus, the Calvinists say. John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.” That verse is taken out of context and everything is loaded up on that one verse. They assert it’s saying you can’t come to the Father, no matter how much you want to be saved, you can’t come unless the Father draws you. That drawing from the Father is irresistible.
 
Then they’ll take the word helkuo that is used for drawing and is used of hauling your fish into the boat. See the fish was hauled in against his will. Or someone was hauled off to jail. See, they’re taken to jail against their will.  They import a secondary text as a primary meaning and say it means you are drawn against your will. That’s not what the context says. The next verse makes it very clear and we’ll get to that in a minute. The other verse is John 6:65 which says, “And He was saying, For this reason I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.”  So it doesn’t matter what you want to do. The Father makes the decision and you’re irrelevant to it. That’s their basic position.
 
 Now when you look at this you really have to look at the context and how some things are used within the Scripture. First of all, this is in the middle of the bread of life discourse. Jesus is talking about that He is the Bread of Life and the source of life. In the context of John, chapter 6, there is a disagreement that breaks out as the people start to challenge what Jesus is saying. But there are two groups of people in front of Him. There’s the group that is resistant to the gospel and to Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah and the group that has responded to His claims to be the Messiah. So there’s unbelievers and believers there. Verse 24 says, “So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples they themselves got in to the small boats and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus. When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”  Then Jesus begins to confront them in verse 26, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.” The only reason you’re coming to me is because you think I’m the federal government and I’m going to feed you, putting it into modern terms.
 
 So then they asked him in verse 28, “What shall we do so that we may work the works of God?” Jesus told them they must believe in Him who sent Me. We’re going to see here that several times through this chapter Jesus emphasizes they must believe. He does this in John 6:29, 35, 40, 47, and 64. He’s contrasting that some of them do not believe because Jesus knew who were the believers and the unbelievers. This is the context where Jesus says, “Of all that the Father has given Me, I should lose nothing.” Who is it that Jesus describes in this phrase? This is really interesting so I think I need to come back and review this next time. Who is Jesus talking about? Is he talking about church age believers today? No, he’s not. He’s talking about the people in front of him who were Old Testament saints who believed in Him. They had already believed the gospel. They were Old Testament believers and now they’re responding to Him as the Messiah. Now how can I say that? Because this phrase is not just used here in John 6 but several times in Jesus’ priestly prayer in John 17 and following.
 
In John 17:1 Jesus spoke these words, lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, “Father the hour has come, glorify your Son as the Son has also glorified you. As you have given Him authority over all flesh that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him.” Now that sounds like it would be all believers of all ages? Right? In John 17:6, Jesus said, “I have manifested Your name to the men you have given me.” Jesus is talking about present tense reality. Jesus is the One who personally manifested His name to those whom God gave Him. That’s not something He’s doing in the church age. That’s something He did personally in the incarnation. Jesus is talking about only those who God gave Him who were from the body of Old Testament saints in Israel. He says, “And they have kept your word.” It can’t be anybody future because there were people in the future who didn’t keep His word but these are those who kept His word. It’s a limited group. It’s the ones Jesus personally manifested Himself to and they kept His Word. They were obedient to Him. That limits it to an historical interpretation.
 
He says in verse 20, “I do not pray for these alone but also for those who will believe in Me through their word.” Who are the ones who will believe in Him? That’s us. He makes a distinction by verse 20. These are those who have been given to Him. Those who will believe from their word are a second group. That’s a future group. So when Jesus is talking about this group who have been given to Him through the Father, it’s this group of Old Testament saints who have to respond to this new claim that Jesus is the Messiah and they are making that transition during that particular age. So Jesus here is talking about those who are responding to His Messianic claim.
 
Now the last part of this is John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him.” Now if you isolate that it’s easy to come up with the Calvinist idea of this internal call but that’s not what’s going on here. The next verse says, “It is written in the Scripture, and they shall all be taught by God.” How are they drawn to Christ? They’re being taught by Isaiah. In the next verse Jesus quotes Isaiah 54:13 stating that the way in which men were drawn was through Old Testament Scriptures through the Word of God. That’s how God draws. It’s not an internal draw or an internal call. It’s talking about the external call that comes through the announcement of the gospel through the Scriptures. So the drawing of John 6:44 is understood only as the external call of the gospel, the gospel invitation. “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him.” And He draws him through being taught the Word of God. That’s how we’re drawn. This doesn’t have anything to do with the internal call of God the Holy Spirit. That’s just read into the passage.
 
So, wrapping it up, in conclusion, “calling” in the Scripture is not a reference to irresistible grace or efficacious grace or the efficacious call or whatever you want to call it. But it is a term referring to those who have responded to the gospel and are now oriented to a future plan and purpose of God in relation to their destiny with Christ. That’s the call. The “called” are those who have responded to the call of the invitation and are now identified with Christ and, therefore, are sharing His destiny, that predestined destiny that we have with Christ in the Millennial kingdom. So with that, we’ve completed Romans 8:28 and we’ll come back and look at Romans 8:29 and 30 next time.

Romans 094b-To Know Beforehand or to Lovingly Choose? Romans 8:28–29

Romans 8:28 NASB95
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Romans 094b-To Know Beforehand or to Lovingly Choose? Romans 8:28–29
I want to start this evening by going back to the topic I ended with last time. We’re in Romans 8: 28 and 29 and this is one of the key passages that Calvinists go to for election, predestination, and their view of foreknowledge and also it’s related to efficacious grace because of the word “calling” that is used here. So I want to go back to look at this particular passage in Romans 8:28. We’re talking about who are the “called”. Last time I ended looking at the key passages for the doctrine of the efficacious call, efficacious grace, or irresistible grace.
 
This is a Calvinist doctrine whereby they understand that all human beings are spiritually dead. Spiritual death is a penalty for sin. It means separation from God. It does not mean what Calvinists interpret it to mean as total inability. We believe in total depravity, that every aspect of man’s being is corrupt and has been corrupted by sin and is affected by sin and does not function in the way God designed. Man is not sick. He is spiritually dead which is separation from God. In Calvinist understanding man is totally unable. He is unable to do anything. He’s like a dead person. A dead person can’t respond in any way, shape, or form. They are completely inoperative.
 
When they hear the external call of the gospel, the call falls on unable, incapable ears which cannot hear and cannot respond apart from a work that they call irresistible grace whereby God the Holy Spirit, in high Calvinism, first regenerates the elect individual. Then they can hear the gospel. Then they respond in faith which is a gift given to them by God. In their system they view faith as something that man does, therefore it, itself, can be meritorious.
 
In contrast, I believe that faith is non-meritorious. It’s not the act of belief that has merit; it’s the object of faith that has merit. In salvation, it is the work of Christ on the Cross that has merit. Not our faith. I’m not saying because of faith. Ephesians 2: 8 and 9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” “Through faith” in the Greek is the preposition dia which is a genitive object. A genitive object indicates means or instrumentality. If it were in the accusative case, it would be translated “because of faith.” We are not saved because of faith. That would indicate that faith was the cause or merit for our salvation. But because it is through faith, faith is seen as simply a channel through which the merit of Christ comes in terms of providing righteousness for the individual.
 
Now in their view, the Holy Spirit is going to irresistibly draw the individual. He is going to enter into the individual’s spiritual life, regenerate him and then draw them in a way that cannot be resisted. That doesn’t mean it’s instantaneous. It may take time. It may take a period of years but that person can ultimately not resist this draw of the Holy Spirit. So I looked at three verses in John 6 last time that are the focal point for understanding this Calvinistic doctrine of the efficacious call or irresistible grace.
 
The key verse is John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.”  Now, just simple grammar, just simple observation. Who does the drawing here?  Is it the Holy Spirit or is it the Father? It’s the Father. He’s the subject of the verb. The Father does the drawing, not the Holy Spirit. But they’ll go to this verse because in their theology, they’ll say that the Father draws through the Holy Spirit as His agent. That’s fine but it also points up one of the problems we have, not just with the theology of Calvinism, but with a lot of people. It is that they don’t understand, no matter how much I try to beat it into their head, that you don’t interpret Scripture on the basis of your theological system. That’s like trying to put the cart before the horse. You let your exegesis develop your theological system but then you don’t go read your theological system into every passage that sounds similar just because it sounds similar. There are many people who do this. Probably ninety percent of Christians operate on that basis. They interpret the Bible on the basis of their presupposed theology rather than the other way around. We have to let the text govern our conclusions, not impose our conclusions upon the text.
 
We have to look at this particular verse in terms of its context and what is being said. The other verse is also one which is important to understand because it impacts our interpretation of this entire passage. It’s coming out of the episode of Jesus feeding the five thousand and then identifying Himself as the Bread of Life. He’s using a metaphor to describe the fact that he is the source of life, the source of spiritual nourishment.  In the course of that explanation, in verse 37, He says, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me.” Now that’s a definitive statement that everyone the Father gives to Him will come to Him. That has been taken, not just by Calvinists, but by many others to apply over a broad spectrum to anyone who believes in Christ from that time period all the way to the present and into the future.
 
The interpretation is that all that the Father gives to me refers to anyone who believes in Jesus Christ. If you’re Calvinist, that is a term that would be equated to the elect. What I showed you last time by going to other passages is that where that phrase is used is it does not refer to anyone across a broad spectrum of history who believes in Christ. It was a term used specifically by Jesus to refer to those who God gave Him, specifically the apostles but also others, during that unique historical period. So this isn’t a broad spectrum term for all the saved of the church age. It is a narrow spectrum reference.to those who the Father gave to Jesus. It is primarily referring to those who were already classified as Old Testament believers.
 
When Jesus was born, if you remember, when His parents took Him to the temple, there were two people who came to His parents in the temple. They were anticipating the arrival of the Messiah and they knew immediately that this was the Messiah. They were already believers in an Old Testament sense and at that point they couldn’t become church age believers because Jesus hadn’t gone to the Cross. The church isn’t born until Acts 2 but they’re believers in an Old Testament sense. There were a number of people in Israel like that. Remember the apostles, John, Andrew, Peter and James were already disciples of John the Baptist when Jesus came to call them. So they were already believers. What I’m saying is that this is a term referring to specifically apostles but in a little more general sense, I think there’s some places where it could apply to a broader group of people of Old Testament believers. They were making that transition from the dispensation of Israel into eventually the church age. So we looked at that last time.
 
The other thing I pointed out that I want to drive in again was that the issue in salvation isn’t whether or not you’re elect, or whether or not you’re drawn but the issue is whether or not you believe. It’s never expressed in the Scripture in any way other than someone who believes in Jesus. Even if you hard press a Calvinist they have to admit that the only way you know if you’re elect is if you believe in Jesus. That’s the only issue. That’s what’s pointed out in John 6:29, 35, 40, 47, and 64. The issue again and again and again is stated. In fact, 96 times in the gospel of John the issue is belief. Believe. Believe. Believe. Believe. And after reading the gospel of John I still have trouble understanding why they want to insert repentance or anything else into what must be done in terms of a response.
 
I recently had a discussion with a seminary student about this. The gospel of John is written to clearly explain what a person must do to have eternal life. “These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you will have life by His name.” Not believing and repenting, not by believing and being baptized but just by believing. Ninety-five or ninety-six times, depending on the text, you have this one condition to acquire eternal life and that is to believe. A couple of other times it’s expressed as receiving or accepting Christ, John 1:12, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” That’s a synonym for belief.
 
The first thing I looked at last time, rushing towards the end, was John 6:39. “This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.” So the question is what does that refer to?  The way to do Bible study is when you do words or phrases you look to see other places where those words or phrases are used.  If it’s not real clear in one place, then maybe there are some other places where it’s clearer. Then you use the clear passages to interpret the ambiguous passages because there are some passages where certain things are ambiguous. But that’s because there isn’t enough information given in that verse or sentence to hang our definition of a word or a phrase. So we go from the known to the unknown.
 
We looked at some other passages and interestingly enough they’re mostly used in John 17:1. John 17 is the true Lord’s Prayer. Matthew 5 is not the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ High Priestly prayer, as it’s usually referred to, when He prays the night before He went to the Cross. He prays for His disciples. Now it’s always a little difficult in places to determine when He is praying for His disciples or giving them commands, whether that has a narrow application to only His eleven disciples now [Judas has already been removed] or whether he is speaking to the entire church through the disciples. But there are usually some really clear indications when he’s talking only about the eleven. So let’s look at these passages.
 
The prayer begins, “Father the hour has come; glorify Your Son that Your Son may also glorify You even as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him He may give eternal life.” Now there’s our phrase again. The Son was given authority over all flesh so that He could give eternal life to a subset of that all flesh, that is, this group that God has given Him. Now that’s all we’re told in verse 2. Verse 6 uses the phrase a little more when it says, “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world, They were Yours. You gave them to Me and they have kept Your word.”
 
So who are the men You have given Me? It just says the men you have given me. It doesn’t say men and women. He’s not including the Marys or many of the other women who were involved in His ministry. Here it’s clear he’s talking about the men God gave Him which would restrict this to the eleven disciples at this point who are His. Then in verse 9 He says, “I ask on their behalf [pray for them]; I do not ask on behalf of the world, but of those whom You have given Me; for they are Yours.” Contextually He’s still talking about the eleven disciples. Then in verse 12 He says, “While I was with them, I was keeping them in Your name which You have given Me, and I guarded them and not one of them perished except the son of perdition [Judas Iscariot] so the Scripture would be fulfilled.” The word “perdition” is from the same root as the word “perish” in John 3:16 so it indicates unbelief. The whole point I’m making here is that that’s not a phrase that talks about even all the believers of His time. It’s talking about a set group.
 
Now let’s go back to our passage in John 6:44. There Jesus said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him.” Now that looks like that’s a universal statement. Unless there is an action of the Father drawing and attracting an individual to Jesus no one can come to Him. There has to be some sort of action on the part of God. What action is that? Here’s the issue. Remember the Calvinist will say this is an irresistible grace calling of the Holy Spirit. It’s internal. But is that what the verse is saying because the next verse contextually gives Jesus’ support for this. “It is written in the prophets [Isaiah 55:14] and they shall all be taught by God. Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.” Hearing and learning from the Father is a response to the Word of God. That quotation [Isaiah 55:14] and John 6:44 is talking about an external call or invitation of the Word of God presenting the claim of the gospel to an individual. On the basis of that, God works in and through His Word to call people to Himself.
 
This is not talking about the inner call of the Holy Spirit. It’s not talking about the irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit or the effectual call of the Holy Spirit. It is the external attraction of the Word of God, the external call. That’s all that I covered last time. Now it brings us back to Romans 8: 28 and 29. Romans 8:28 says, “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Now we covered that extensively in the last couple of lessons. In order to understand what he has just said, the apostle Paul is going to expand it a little bit because he’s talking about facing difficult circumstances, facing adversity, facing suffering. And he says, “We know that all things work together for good.” That’s the suffering in context going all the way back to verse 17 of chapter 8. Then he explains it a little more. That’s indicated by that first word “for” or gar. In the Greek that always introduces an explanation and often that explanation borders on expressing a cause or a reason for something that was just said. So that’s happened here. He’s made this universal principle that y’all know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. Why does that happen? Why is that important? He’s challenged them that there are two groups of heirs, those who are heirs of God with no condition attached and those who are joint-heirs with Christ, if they suffer with Him.
 
Now that’s the key issue because once he’s said that back in Romans 8:17, then he goes off to explain the significance of suffering in the life of the believer in preparing them for the future ruling and reigning with Jesus Christ in the coming kingdom. Suffering with Christ will be used to bring them to maturity and the basis of how they grow mature and the basis of how they will be given rewards and responsibilities and privileges in the future Messianic kingdom. So he’s going to explain all of this and he starts by giving us a chain of events from eternity past related to God’s plan and purposes for the believer.
 
As I pointed out before, Paul is addressing his audience as if they’re all highly motivated believers who are pursuing the greatest amount of spiritual maturity. I do this same thing. I address those in the congregation as if they want to go somewhere. Somebody said, “You’re trying to move the movers.” I’m not addressing the folks who are sitting on the sidelines. I’m trying to challenge those who are going somewhere to keep going there. It’s not that I’m ignoring the ones who can’t make up their minds but the train’s already left the station but I’m trying to minister to those who are on the train and going somewhere, not those who are trying to figure out if they want to be on the train. They’re going to figure they want to be on the train by hearing the Word of God as the Holy Spirit makes it clear in their lives. But the role of the pastor is to move with the movers and say, “Look, we need to go to spiritual maturity. I’m going to take you there. Let’s go. Who wants to go with me?”
 
As for the ones who can’t make up their minds, I’m not going to sit in the back with those who want to stay in their diapers and mess their diapers and forget about everybody who wants to grow to spiritual maturity. And that’s how Paul is. He’s addressing the ones who want to go somewhere. It’s not that he’s marginalizing, belittling, diminishing, or minimizing the ones who want to sit around in their diapers and figure out if they really want to grow up or not. They will eventually, hopefully, go forward. The ones who don’t, well they’re going to fall by the wayside, and they’re going to end up with lives characterized only by wood, hay, and straw. They’re going to be failures at the judgment seat of Christ. But Paul’s focus is on those who want to go somewhere.
 
And so he’s challenging them with this plan of God. God’s got a plan! That plan is to conform you and me to the image of His Son and He uses suffering to do that.  When we understand the role of suffering and adversity in our lives it changes how we respond to it in our lives because we understand it has a purpose and a dynamic. God is using that to change our character so that it reflects the character of Christ, the image of His Son.  That’s the first part of Romans 8:29, “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined [set up the end game for us] to become conformed to the image of His Son that He [Christ] would be the firstborn among many brethren.”
 
We’ll get to the second half of the verse later. Before we get there we have to understand this word “foreknow” and we have to understand its relationship to the next word “predestination”. Those are clearly two separate concepts. That’s one of the first observations I have. When it comes to understanding foreknowledge, there’s a problem. The problem is that many people when they read this at a surface reading, they think that this is talking about simply knowing something ahead of time. It’s prescience, knowing something is going to happen before it happens. However, when you come to Calvinism they say, “No. No. No. It is not knowing something is going to happen because God can’t know what is going to happen unless He’s determined that it’s going to happen.” Understand that? In Calvinist thought God can’t know something until first he determines it. So they connect this foreknowledge to predetermination and they connect it to election.
 
Now we don’t have the word “election” anywhere in this passage. It’s not a passage about election but because they define calling as choosing, then they define foreknowledge as choosing, or having an intimate relationship. They tie all these words together and they’re talking about God choosing who will be saved and bringing about His plan for them. So I want to read to you just a couple of examples of some Calvinist commentary writers and how they explain this. The first is Douglas Moo, who is a highly respected commentator. He teaches theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School up in Chicago and has written numerous commentaries, including several on Romans. He writes about foreknowledge here. “In the six occurrences of these words in the New Testament, only two mean know beforehand.” What he’s talking about is the six occurrences of this word proginosko. Now the root word ginosko means to know. The prefix pro means “before” so it means to know beforehand. He looks at this verb and says there are six uses of this word. You have the verb and nouns as well but here he’s looking primarily at the verb.
 
He continues, “Four have a different meaning. Acts 26:5 and 2 Peter 3:17. The three others besides the occurrence in this text, all of which have God as their subject, so the words going to change its meaning because God is the subject. That’s a fallacy. That is a fallacious way to do a word study but it’s very common among Calvinist theologians. He says, “All which have God as their subject mean not know before in the sense of intellectual knowledge or cognition [I would add “ahead of time”] but enter into relationship with before.” He says that’s what foreknow means, “to enter into a relationship with someone ahead of time.” You knew that, didn’t you? You look at the word “foreknowledge” in the dictionary and that’s not what it means so they change the meaning. He continues, “It means enter into a relationship before or choose or determine before.” Then he cites Romans11:2, 1 Peter 1:20, Acts 2:23, 1 Peter 1:2. “If then,” he says, “the word means to know intimately for whom God knew intimately ahead of time.” That’s how he would translate Romans 8. “Since the word means know intimately or have regard for, this must be a knowledge or love that is unique to believers and leads to their being predestined.” You got that, right? I just want you to experience and read how they argue.
 
Then we have another guy. Absolutely brilliant. I didn’t have great warm-fuzzies about Thomas Schreiner because of his hyper-Calvinism. I heard him speak at ETS a couple of summer’s ago. ETS means Evangelical Theological Society. I went to the conference in Atlanta because the focus was on a lot of really errant theology of this British Anglican priest by the name of N.T. Wright. N.T. Wright has negatively impacted several formerly solid congregations in this country and that’s why this is an issue. We have people in this congregation who have family members who are in those congregations and this garbage that N.T. Wright has formulated… This guy is incredibly brilliant. Tom Schreiner is too. He really impressed me with his devastating critique of N.T. Wright at the ETS Conference so my respect for him really went up. These guys make anybody that we know that knows the languages pale in insignificance. N.T. Wright probably has forgotten more about Greek and Hebrew and has a prodigious memory, almost a photographic memory and can cite from memory sources throughout patristic writings and throughout any kind of secular writings. His arguments are so loaded with minutia data that it just overwhelms you with his argumentation. How in the world can you go through and analyze three or four thousand references that he’s just thrown at you when you can just barely read Greek or Hebrew and he’s quoting them all in the original language?  So they’re very overwhelming in terms of their intellectual academic accomplishments but it’s not about the details. It really just down to some bottom-line issues.
 
Tom Schreiner is also a very strong high-Calvinist. He’s written a massive commentary on Romans and he writes regarding our view, “Some have argued that the verb proegno [foreknow] here should be defined only in terms of God’s foreknowledge.” What he means about that is His prescient knowledge ahead of time. That is that God predestined to salvation those whom he saw in advance would choose to be part of His redeemed community. This fits with Acts 26:5 and 2 Peter 3:17 where the verb proginosko clearly means to know beforehand. According to this understanding predestination is not ultimately based on God’s decision to save some. Instead God has predestined to save those who He foresaw would choose him.” In his thinking, choosing Him is a meritorious act. They think positive volition is meritorious. That’ where they get hung up. “Such an interpretation is attractive in that it forestalls the impression that God arbitrarily saves some and not others. It is quite unlikely that it accurately represents the meaning of proginosko in reference to God’s foreknowledge as it is Romans 8:29. The background of the term that is proginosko should be located in the Old Testament where for God to know referred to His covenantal love where He sets the affection on those He has chosen.” What’s the word he’s talking about now? The Hebrew word yada which means to know. Did he just shift terms on us? Yes, he did. He went from proginosko to yada as if they were related. This is typical of Calvinist argument. He went from proginosko to yada and those are not equivalent terms.
 
Here’s the fundamental error. When you take a compound word, it does not mean what the root word means. You can’t use the root word as your standard. When you take a prefix like “fore” and add it to the word “stalled” which he just did, the meaning of “forestall” cannot be arrived at by understanding the word “stall”. It has a different set of meanings. That’s why they generated the word. Word meanings come not from dictionaries but by usage and word meanings are not the sum of the parts. They’re usage. Okay? Now he goes on to say, “The parallel terms “consecrate” and “appoint” are noteworthy for the text is not really saying that God foresaw.” I’m not going to read any more of this.
 
Then there’s Palmer. I quoted from that last week. This is a small book that a lot of people hand out on the Five Points of Calvinism. They state, “When the Bible speaks of God knowing particular individuals.” Notice. Where is the word “fore”? It’s not there.  See, they slide back and forth. This is a slippery trait in a logical fallacy is to shift between different terms as if you haven’t changed terms. You start off talking about apples and then suddenly you’re talking about oranges but you never really told anyone that you changed the terms. “When the Bible speaks of God knowing particular individuals, it often means He has special regard for them, that they’re the object of His affection and concern.” So “knowing” in their view has to do with this intimate knowledge and affection. That’s what “to know” means, they say.
 
Now, in some places it has an intimacy to it, such as “when Adam knew Eve”, but that’s an idiomatic expression and it’s not saying that “know” always means or has as part of its meaning that intimate knowledge. All I’ve done so far is set up the problem for you so that you understand where Calvinists come from. Some of you talk to Calvinists so you’re familiar with this but some of you may not.
Bob Beaver reminded me we got into some good discussions with my good friend, Wayne House. Now Wayne is a sharp guy. He’s a great theologian in many areas but Wayne is a five-point Calvinist. I’ve been cornered by him and a couple of others at conferences and we’ve had lengthy debates over these things. It was kind of fun on that first Israel trip some years ago because all of a sudden some of the folks from this church met a real live flesh-and-blood five-point Calvinist. They had a real teachable time. They learned some things trying to interact with someone as knowledgeable as Wayne and going through this stuff.
 
What does foreknowledge mean? Usually during a word study you don’t start off by going to a dictionary. People who write dictionaries, the lexicographers, they’re the ones who studied all the different ways in which a word was used and then they give you their categories, how they summarized and categorized the evidence. You don’t look to their summaries first because if you’re really good, and this is how we were trained at Dallas Seminary, we should be able to do the same work they do. If you’ve got a masters in theology from Dallas Seminary, I was told by a guy who got this from an accrediting agency, that a masters of theology from Dallas Seminary, at least in the 70s and 80s, was regarded more highly by accrediting agencies than a PhD from most schools. It’s a four-year 130 hour training program. If you have a heavy emphasis on Greek or Hebrew, by your third year you ought to be equipped and trained enough to be able to do word studies almost as well as any of these lexicons. So you can check their evidence and their evidence needs to be checked at times. One of the primary lexicons, The Great or Large Lexicon, in the print version originally was known by its authors Liddell-Scott. It’s a very old classical Greek dictionary that covers the whole span of Greek from Classical Greek in 4th and 5th century B.C. all the way up to the Koine period. It gives examples, even Scriptural usage, of different words.
 
Liddell-Scott was revised and expanded a little bit by a man named Jones so now it’s referred to as Liddell-Scott-Jones. It  says there’s two meanings to proginosko. One is to “know, to perceive, to understand beforehand and to prognosticate, foreknow, and learn things in advance, to judge beforehand in the sense of evaluating something ahead of time.” Now, did you see anywhere in there a definition relating to choice or election or loving relationships or predestination? No. They don’t recognize any of those nuances as part of the meaning of this term. That dictionary covers from Classical Greek in the 5th and 6th century B.C. all the way up through the New Testament period.
Now Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lists two meanings: “to know beforehand or in advance, that is to have knowledge of something” and then “to choose beforehand”. They only focus on New Testament meanings. The only passages they use to cite the meaning of choosing beforehand are Romans 8:29, Romans 9-11, 1 Peter 1:20 and then they say Acts 6:25. Notice the passages we want to know the meaning for are the ones they list. Those are the passages in question. You can’t define the term in a dubious question by going to a dictionary that says this is the only place this term is used in this way. This is the same kind of error that Arndt and Gingrich had in the meaning of “tongues”. They say it means three things: the organ in your mouth, speaking in human languages, and it means ecstatic utterances. For ecstatic utterances it lists 1 Corinthians 13. Wait a minute. How do you know it means that in 1 Corinthians 13 if it doesn’t mean that anywhere else? This is a linguistic fallacy. It’s like defining a word by itself. You can’t do that.
 
The point I’m making is that these dictionaries, including Moldin and Milligan which looks at all the usage of words in the Koine papyri, say that the word means to foreknow or to know previously. In other words, the dictionaries do not recognize any other meaning except to know something ahead of time. That’s it. So where do these guys come up with the idea that in these three or four passages in the New Testament and only in the New Testament, and just because God is the subject, that it means election, choice, or to know something intimately? They have read their theology into the text. They’ve done a top-down study.
 
Now there’s another lexicon out there that’s more popular. If you’ve seen the Complete Word Study New Testament, this is edited by Spiros Zodhistas who is Greek and he’s written quite a bit. His dictionary is geared more to laymen. In fact, one of the founding members of this congregation used to be on his board. In this book he says what is means is “to perceive, to recognize beforehand, to know previously, to take into account or consider something beforehand, to grant prior knowledge or recognition to someone beforehand. The first meaning is used of mere prescience. Then he gives a theological definition, not an evidence in terms of the lexicon data. It’s read into the data.
 
Now the New International Dictionary of New Testament theology has a real concise statement in terms of all the usage prior to the New Testament. It says, “The corresponding noun, prognosis is a medical, technical term since Hippocrates.” You go to the doctor and you get a prognosis, same word. “It denotes the foreknowledge which makes it possible to predict the future.” That’s how the word is used. That’s the core meaning. It does not have this idea of intimate knowledge or choice or election.
 
What are some of the passages where the term is used? We’ll look at these in detail. Acts 26:5, “Since they have known about me for a long time [or from the first].” This is not a debated passage. Everybody agrees that this is prescience or knowledge ahead of time. Then there’s Romans 8: 29, the passage we’re studying. Romans 11:2 which is in the context of whether God has thrown away His people. Paul answers by saying “No, may it never be. God has not rejected His people, whom He foreknew.” Who are His people? Israel. So here foreknowledge is used in relation to God’s plan for Israel. 1 Peter 1:20, “For He [Jesus Christ] was foreknown before the foundation of the world.” 2 Peter 3:17, “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand.” This is again not talking about a theologically relevant idea but in terms of everyday human experience you knew something ahead of time. So obviously, the primary meanings of the known passages are simply to know something ahead of time.
 
Then we ran into it in Acts 2:33 when Peter says that “Jesus Christ was delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God.” Again it’s talking about Jesus Christ. It’s not talking about choosing people for salvation. Then 1 Peter 1:2 talking about that the recipients of Peter’s letter that they were elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. So that, as you’ll see when we get there, election is based on foreknowledge. Not the other way around. Foreknowledge doesn’t mean choice. There’s a redundancy there.
 
Now let’s go back and just kind of look at some of these passages. Turn to these passages. I’ll take two or three minutes on each one and it might help you understand. You can make some notes in the margins so you can recover this later on. The question we’re addressing is whether proginosko means to know beforehand only in the sense of prescience knowledge, that is, knowledge before the fact or does it mean to elect, to determine, or to lovingly choose beforehand? Those are the meanings that the Calvinist commentators tell us it means. The first thing we saw was that the only attested meaning outside the Bible and the meaning in several New Testament passages indicates that it means “to know beforehand” with the exception of these four verses. Therefore, since the meaning everywhere else is to know beforehand the burden of proof is on the Calvinist theologian to say that it means something it doesn’t mean in any other location. Okay, they’ve got to prove that because they’re going against a mountain of data. They’re saying that in these four verses it doesn’t mean what it means everywhere else. That’s essentially their position.
 
The second problem we have to deal with is that in terms of basic word meanings and word studies. Words do not change their meaning just because God becomes the subject. When we read that a person loves, using agape and then God loves, the word love doesn’t change its meaning. agape means agape whether God is the subject or man is the subject. Obviously the dimension of God’s activity is going to be greater but it’s not that love means one thing when it talks about men doing it and it means something completely different when God does it. That’s a logical fallacy. That’s a fallacious methodology.
 
So we look at Acts 26:5. The context here is that Paul is witnessing when he’s been called before King Herod Agrippa, the Second, and he is giving a defense for his gospel. Paul had gone to Jerusalem. A riot had broken out and a Roman cohort had surrounded him, protected him, put him under arrest, taken him under house arrest to Caesarea and Paul claimed the right of a Roman citizen to appeal his trial to Rome. He’s been under basic house arrest in Caesarea waiting for his transport to Rome. During this time he got this opportunity to talk to Agrippa. So talking about all the Jews that got mad at him in Jerusalem and he says, “They know me. I lived here. I was one of the top rabbinical students in Gamaliel’s yeshiva. Everyone knows me.” So in verse 5 he says, “They knew me before.” Before this event occurred, they already knew Paul. Now there’s a couple of important things to point out here. When Calvinist look at this term proginosko they want to define that as having an intimate relationship or else lovingly choosing someone ahead of time to have a relationship with. That’s their idea. They will say, “It doesn’t mean knowing about someone, it means knowing someone intimately.
 
In Romans 8:29 we read, “For whom God foreknew.” Not who God knew about but who God knew. The problem is that when we look at the use of this term here, Paul is saying “They knew me.” Did all those Jews in Jerusalem have a personal, intimate knowledge of Paul? No, they did not. They knew about him but they didn’t know him in the sense that the Calvinists want to import this intimate knowledge into the term. So the idea of the term “about” doesn’t have to be stated. It’s embedded in the meaning of the Greek. I’m going to show you an example of that in Hebrews 6:9. The writer of Hebrews says, “But beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you.” Now in the Greek there’s no “of” there. Better things is actually an accusative case. A genitive case would give you the right to include “of” but it’s not a genitive case. Better things is the direct object of the verb. It’s in the accusative case. The verb is “we are convinced” but “of” is embedded in the nuance of the verb itself. We know “of” better things. We know “about” better things.
 
So that idea of knowing about Paul means the “about” is included in the concept there. That’s how the Greeks would say it. They just wouldn’t add that preposition. It was embedded in the sense of the verb. So in Acts 26:5, it’s simply stating that they knew “about me from the first”. They’d heard all about him so the verb there just simply gives us a core meaning of knowing something beforehand.
 
The idea of knowing “about” is important to understand as we look at a couple of other passages. In 1 Peter 1:20, we have again the use of the word proginosko. However, unfortunately, the New King James Version and the NIV version have chosen to translate proginosko as foreordained. But foreordained translates another Greek word, proorizo. We’ll talk about that later. proorizo  is foreordained; proginosko is foreknown, completely different concepts. They muddied the water by translating proginosko as foreordained here and that’s wrong. The NASB and the NET Bible have correctly translated this as foreknown and maybe some other Bibles as well.  Now the context here is a statement about redemption. “Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers but with precious blood, as a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.” Verse 20, “For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world.” This is the participial form of proginosko and is a masculine singular genitive which means it has to refer back to a masculine singular genitive noun which is Christ. The foreordained here refers to Christ who was foreordained. So now we see that foreordained is used in relation to Israel and its also used in relationship to Christ.
 
The thing that you should notice here is there’s a contrast in this verse. The second half of the verse says that He was manifest in these times for you. That’s a time contrast with what? That He was known beforehand. See you have a beforehand and a now. It’s a temporal contrast. If you take out the knowledge beforehand aspect and just say this means choice or election, then you lose the emphasis of Peter here that there’s a contrast between God setting up His plan in eternity past beforehand and now it’s come to pass. It’s a “then” and “now” emphasis in this particular verse. Foreknowledge here simply means that God in His omniscience knew from eternity past what His plan would be in bringing about salvation in relation to Jesus Christ.
 
Then we have 2 Peter 3:17 which is pretty simple. It’s just a very clear meaning of knowing something ahead of time, prescience. Paul reminds his readers that the Lord will come as promised and the earth and its elements will pass away. Since they know these things before or since they’ve been told what will happen ahead of time, they can prepare themselves for it, “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard.” These passages clearly talk about the fact that foreknowledge, proginosko, means to know something ahead of time. So following the principle that the known helps us interpret the vague or the unclear, we’ve got to say those other passages make it pretty clear that the word means knowing something ahead of time.
 
Next time I want to come back and look at two other passages that are very important. One is Acts 2:23 where Peter says that Christ was delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God. Then we’ll get into the Peter passage, which is really interesting. It talks about the “elect according to the foreknowledge of God.” In the Greek it’s a totally different word order. It means basically the same thing but when you look at the word order it says some interesting things because Peter is talking to a select group there. It’s why he calls them elect but it’s not what you think.

Romans 095b-o Know Beforehand or to Lovingly Choose: Part 2 Romans 8:28-29

Romans 8:28 NASB95
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Romans 095b-o Know Beforehand or to Lovingly Choose: Part 2 Romans 8:28-29
 
Now we're continuing our study in Romans 8:28 and 29 and we're focusing on understanding these important terms that are used in Scripture. Now they’re not used a lot in Scripture. Terms like foreknowledge and predestination are words that are used just a few times. They represent God’s plan. The most important thing to remember is that they represent God’s plan. Now over the course of the history of the church there have been various positions that have been taken regarding the understanding of these concepts. There have been major battles and splits in churches and denominations over many of these things that are taught.
 
For some people they just go way over their head and that’s fine. It’s tough sometimes to try to think our way through these issues related to God’s control of history and God’s control of His plan, on the one hand, and human responsibility and responsible freedom of choice on the other hand. Both are true. We began the study in this section two or three lessons back. I think that a God who can allow man freedom to make decisions and yet oversee all of the circumstances in history so that, despite the chaos that is there from sin and despite the chaos that is there from evil decisions from human beings, a God who can still orchestrate the affairs of history to bring about His desired ends is greater than a God who is in control of every decision and every action and every aspect of what is going on in history.
 
I do not believe that God is a deterministic God in that sense. Scripture teaches that He is a personal God and He is sovereign over the universe and He has the plan that He is working out. Within that plan He allows for free will decisions but He’s constructed reality in such a way that He is still able to handle the chaos that comes as a result of free agents making decisions. Now I always have to caution people by saying we’re free but only in a limited sense because of sin. There are certain things that we are unable to do and sin does impact that. Ultimately when it comes to the most important issue in life which is our salvation, there is an aspect of our responsibility that comes into play in terms of making a decision.
 
Even in explaining that, we have to recognize that in the division of theological camps in this area, one side, usually referred to as the Calvinist side or the Lordship side, view even the act of faith as something that has merit in and of itself. Therefore the faith that saves is not the same as the faith we use to, for example, get up in the morning and go in and, however bleary-eyed and  stumbling we might be, when we hit the button on the coffee maker we have faith it’s going to start. I don’t know about you but at my house I hate those little breakers which they have all over the kitchen. I’m not always sure although I always have faith that when I press that button it’s going to start. However, about once a week something has happened overnight when nothing’s been on to pop that breaker hidden away on the countertop in the kitchen somewhere and the coffee pot doesn’t turn on. I then have to find that little button and press it in and then the coffee pot comes on. But that’s faith.
 
We have faith that when we go to start the car in the morning, that the car will start. We have faith in lots of different things. Faith, in and of itself, in contrast to the Calvinist position, doesn’t have merit. Anybody can believe anything and everyone believes things. That’s why at one level you have a picture used many times in Scripture of faith that is compared to eating. Jesus even talked about this in relation to himself as the Bread of Life. “He who eats my flesh…” He’s not talking physically eating His flesh. He’s not using a literal figure, he’s talking about taking something to make it part of our own selves. Anybody can eat, anybody can drink, so it is not the act of faith itself that has merit. It is the object of faith that has merit.
 
 The object of faith in salvation is the work of Christ on the Cross so that faith is non-meritorious. It does not bring us any credit because we believe. It is the object of belief, our ability to understand the gospel is enhanced through the enlightenment of God the Holy Spirit who works in and through the preaching of the Word of God and the explanation of the gospel.  He opens the eyes of the unbeliever, enabling them to be able to understand the gospel and then make a choice as to whether to accept or reject it.
 
So when we explain the issues related to God’s sovereignty and human responsibility they’re both true. One does not cancel the other because they, in another sense, operate in different spheres. For example, in the sphere of creation and human activity, we think about cause and effect but that is a creation sphere idea of cause and effect when everything operates on a timeline continuum and one thing causes another. You often hear Calvinist say that if God does not determine the decisions of the creature then the creature makes the ultimate determination and therefore, God simply responds and He becomes a responder to the decisions of the creation. That is a cause-effect issue. Embedded is that is an assumption that cause and effect in the realm of the Creator is identical to cause and effect in the realm of the creature. When they use the terms cause and effect they don’t mean the same thing. 
 
One other thing that really helped me to understand some things is to realize in Genesis, chapter one, when God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that is in them, and all of the plant life, Adam and Eve, and all of the physical laws that operate on Planet Earth, it was absolute perfection. There was no corruption in the human race or in the animal kingdom of creation or in the inanimate aspect of creation. Yet, God embedded, because of His omniscience and His foreknowledge, God embedded within the DNA structure of all living things and within the laws of physics that operate and govern everything else, a flexibility so that when Adam sinned as a result of the free exercise of his volition and set a reverberating spiritual tsunami through all of creation, it reverberated in such a way that it changed the inherent nature of creation. Everything became corrupt. Not just man dying spiritually but it impacted the animals. In the curse in Genesis the word ‘curse’ often brings to mind some sort of juju black magic but that’s not the sense of the meaning of the word in Scripture. It’s more the idea of the divine judgment on something.
God said that the serpent would be cursed more than all the beasts of the field. Note that is a term of comparison. It implies that all the beast of the field would also come under judgment but the serpent more so. In Romans 8 as we have already studied, we’ve seen for example in verses 20 through 22 the creation is subject to futility. It’s under the bondage of corruption. The whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs until now.
So we see all of inanimate creation is depicted here as groaning and suffering because of the judgment of God on all of the universe for sin. But God had built into every aspect, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy of the universe, God built a flexibility into everything physical and spiritual to handle the chaos that would come when spiritual death entered the universe. That helps us to understand that God created man, the human race, in such a way that even when they made free will decisions and go completely off the rails, God’s sovereignty is great enough to incorporate that chaos into His plan without losing control and without losing the ability to bring His plan to its intended end.
How He does that we don’t know but we can understand that both principles of God’s sovereign control and free human responsibility can take place without them being contrary to one another, especially when we understand how things function within the realm of the creator and how things function within the realm of the created are not identical. So when we extrapolate from our frame of reference within creation to the creator, we often enter into logical fallacies and irrational leaps because we’re trying to compare an apple to a cactus prickly pear fruit instead of two apples. They’re not the same. The realm of the creature doesn’t function like the realm of the creator. They are two completely different things. There may be some similarities but they’re only analogous. They’re not identical or as philosophers like to call it, univocal. They are different. They are not completely opposite one another, which is another term called equivocal, which means they have nothing in common, they’re analogical. But that gets into a lot of other technical vocabulary and we’re not in Philosophy 201 here so I’m not going to go any further down that road.
 
But I hope that kind of gives you an understanding or a framework because I know we have at least three people here tonight who haven’t been part of this study in the last three weeks. I want y’all to understand that I know this is a tough, tough topic and subject to encounter. It’s easy if you haven’t listened to the whole framework to maybe misunderstand. I hope I’m a clear teacher. In fact, one year when I was probably about twenty –one or twenty-two years of age I went to a large Bible church here in Houston just to visit and the pastor, whom I have since come to know very, very well and we actually believe pretty much the same thing, taught on this passage. I thought he was taking a very high Calvinistic position and I couldn’t have been more wrong. He’s never taken that position but that’s what it sounded like coming out of the pulpit. It’s easy to misunderstand some of the things being said sometimes.
 
This is a mature doctrine. Peter in 1st Peter talks about the fact that the apostle Paul has said some things that are very difficult to understand and this is one of them. There are many other things that Paul teaches that are also difficult to understand so if this is a tough thing to understand for you, then just set it aside and think about it later. Eventually as you mature and reflect on these things, then you will gain greater insight and understanding. We’re in one of the great passages of Scripture: Romans 8:28 and 29. This is a tremendous passage for understanding God’s provision for us and that God is in control.
 
The context is dealing with suffering. There are a lot of people going through suffering. I know of people in this congregation who are going through a lot of difficult times. As a congregation, it seems right now that we are going through a period where’s there’s a lot of health testing that I’ve observed. Some people know of some and not of others but there’s a lot of health testing going on right now. We need to be in prayer for one another. There are other difficulties going on in terms of financial challenges, in terms of just physical educational challenges and job challenges. We all face those things. These are all part of the adversities of life. Starting in verse 17 of this chapter, Paul shifted to introduce the topic of suffering to challenge believers to recognize that if we endure in the Christian life, if we press on toward spiritual maturity, suffering and adversity have a purpose and we will be rewarded at the judgment seat of Christ.
There are two categories of rewards covered under the concept of inheritance in these passages. One is the level that’s provided for every believer as heirs of God [verse 17] and the second are joint-heirs with Christ and that’s conditioned upon suffering with Him. That is going through the various levels of adversity in life and applying the word of God to those levels of adversity so we can grow and be rewarded with Him and be glorified with Him in the kingdom when we will rule and reign with Christ. All of that I covered before. That’s the context.
 
So suffering, the suffering we go through as believers, the suffering from sin on creation, all of these things are the context. When Paul says we know that all things work together for good, the all things, in context, are talking about all of the difficulties, adversities, challenges that we face in life.  God brings about something that’s part of His plan in our life. This is not purposeless. There is a purpose for this. There is a plan. You and I do not perceive the plan. We don’t understand how these things are working together but God does. When we get to heaven we may see how these things have all worked out and come together. But we don’t know the plan. Every now and then we get little glimpses of things that happen. Every now and then we recognize that there are things going on in our life that are just sort of unusual and they’re not coincidental but we have no idea where God is taking us or how He’s going to use some of these circumstances.
 
We know God is in control. But God is not in control to the exclusion of our volition. So Romans 8:28 just basically emphasizes the fact that God is in control. God has a plan. You and I may not perceive it or understand it but God does and that’s all that matters. Our responsibility is to trust Him and to remain obedient in the midst of those challenges. So Paul says in verse 28, “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” As I’ve said before Paul addresses his readers as if they’re all pursuing spiritual maturity. Now he knows that there are some who haven’t quite made that decision yet. There’s some who won’t ever make that decision. There are some who will decide to make it to the second grade. There are others who will decide to drop out at the fifth grade level. Others make it to the seventh grade and others are still going to be pursuing spiritual growth all the way to the day they die. But Paul always addresses everyone as if they are high achievers.
 
I understand that as a pastor. I treat everyone in the congregation as if they’re all pursuing spiritual maturity. If they’re not here on Tuesday and Thursday night, I assume they’re all watching it at home. I know some aren’t but I treat the congregation as people who are all on the same train, as it were, going to the same destiny which is to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ to the maximum. I expect everybody to get on that train at some point or another. So that’s who he’s talking about.
 
These are the called. The called is a term which simply summarizes those who have responded to the invitation of the gospel to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior. If they have responded, they are the called. They are the invited ones and they have been called according to a purpose, which is God’s plan for the human race. And then he’s going to explain this a little more in verse 29. “For those whom He foreknew…” Verse 29 brings us back to the word called. He’s going to plug the concept of being called into the stream of decision making within the plan of God.
 
He starts out saying that first of all in this stream of events, there’s foreknowledge, second there’s predestination, then there’s calling, then there’s justification and then there’s glorification. That comes in verse 30. He says, “For whom He foreknew he also predestined…” Then here’s another observation I didn’t make clear last week. In a minute I’m going to go over the quotes from a couple of Calvinists who have written commentaries on Romans and their quotes are typical of the way Calvinists interpret predestination. They usually interpret foreknowledge as some sort of choosing or as a synonym for election and predestination. The problem is this verse and another verse we’ll look at tonight clearly distinguish these activities.
 
Foreknowledge cannot be defined as being chosen or lovingly selected because that comes under the purview of the next word. We have to keep these activities distinct from one another because they’re not treated as the same thing. Douglas Moo, the well-respected theologian scholar and professor of theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, has a general framework of high Calvinism that I do not agree with. Nevertheless he does say some good things on some points based on word studies and language but he falls apart here.  The main thing I looked at last time was his definition of foreknowledge. He says it does not mean “to know before in the sense of intellectual knowledge or cognition or what we would call prescience.” Prescience is a compound word made up of “pre” meaning before and science meaning knowledge, to know something ahead of time.  He says it doesn’t mean prescience but that it means to enter into relationship before or to choose or determine before. As I pointed out, that is not evident in the way the word is used.
 
Another writer I referred to last time was Thomas Schreiner and he said, “The idea of foreknowledge really is determined by the word knowledge.” As I read through this last week I read the word forestall. Stall is the root word but the meaning of forestall cannot be determined and is not the same as the root word, stall. We’ll look at some other examples. What I mean by that is that foreknowledge cannot be determined by the meaning of its root, knowledge. This is called a root fallacy in terms of word study or a fallacy related to etymology. This is typical reasoning for the Calvinists who will shift from foreknowledge to just knowledge and go back to the Old Testament where they look at just the word know and try to derive the meaning of foreknowledge from the word know. So Schreiner concludes that “foreknowledge relates to His covenantal love in which He sets His affection on those whom He has chosen.”
 
Choosing is election or selection which is a totally different word in the context and in the process. They tend to muddy these things up. They try to take these words that are used in their sense for election and they give them such synonymous definitions that they’re all really saying the same thing. That’s not fair to the writers of Scripture. Palmer in his book, The Five Points of Calvinism, says, “When the Bible speaks of God knowing a particular individual, it also means He has a special regard for them, that they’re the object of His affection and concern. So that again shows what he’s talking about.
 
Then I just gave you some definitions, “to know beforehand, or to choose something beforehand.” That’s the basic meaning of the word in all literature outside of the passages we are looking at. As I pointed out last time, when you have a word in Scripture that you’re not sure what it means in this context, you can’t assume a meaning and say that’s what it means in this context where in every other context it means something else and you list this one context as the exception and it means what you want it to mean. You can’t do that but that’s essentially what they’ve done. They say the subject of the verb here is God so the word has a completely different meaning when God is the subject than when anything else or anyone else is the subject of the verb. That is another fallacy in word study. The word is going to mean the same thing regardless of who’s performing the action. So I pointed that out last time and I pointed out some other dictionaries and some key verses that we went through. Acts 2:23, 1 Peter 1:2. I stopped right about here looking at 1 Peter 1:20. I went through all of these and I stopped right about here.
 
Let’s turn in our Bibles to Acts 2:23 to begin. The way that you know the meaning of a word in Scripture is that you look at how the word is used. That’s the same thing in English. When you go to Webster’s Dictionary or Collins or the Oxford English Dictionary, the lexicographers, the men who are writing the lexicons, are simply studying how people use a word. That’s why you will sometimes see new words enter into a dictionary or you will see new meaning enter into a dictionary. In some dictionaries you will even see words like “ain’t”. I remember in elementary school teachers would say that wasn’t in the dictionary because it’s not a word. Well, if a word enters into the language of the people often enough, it becomes a usable word and it will have a dictionary meaning. It may be improper grammar or other things may be problems but what determines meaning is not the dictionary. The dictionary is simply organizing and categorizing the way people are using a word.
 
Over time words change in meaning. For example, in the early 1600s when the King James Version was translated, the word charity was equivalent to what we would refer to today as unconditional love. Love that was not determined by the behavior of the object of love but was determined more by the objective character of the person who was doing something to benefit the other person. Today the word charity usually refers to some sort of benevolence type of ministry that’s provided for people who are in need. It is a form of love, but charity is no longer considered a synonym for love. The word has changed its meaning over time. So the meanings that are listed in the dictionary change to reflect the usage.
 
When you do a word study in Scripture, which is what I try to teach pastors and students of Greek, you don’t start by going to the dictionary. You start by going to a concordance or using a Bible study program to give you a listing of every place that word is used. Then you analyze that word usage in those verses to determine its characteristics, its qualifications, and the range of meaning within that word. After you have thoroughly investigated all of those verses so that you’re familiar with the data, much like a crime scene investigator shows up at a crime scene on NCIS or CSI or CSI New York, or any of those other shows we like to watch, the investigators are just presented with a lot of data but they don’t know what it means yet. They have to analyze each piece of data to see what they can learn from it in what is called an inductive study. Once they have analyzed all of that and come to thoroughly understand the evidence, then they begin to make associations and then come to conclusions. Then they have to check and double-check those conclusions against other facts to make sure they didn’t miss something.
 
 That’s the same thing we do in a word study. You look at all the places where it’s used. You look at all the conditions. You weigh the data and then the last thing you do is check it against some of the dictionaries and some of the other sources which have extended discussions and analysis and then you may discover that you missed something. You may discover that the dictionary says this word means something and you haven’t found any evidence of that. I can point out at least three examples, this word being one of them, in Arndt and Gingrich where they have introduced a category of meaning to the word that, I believe, is read into debatable passages. But if you look at how the word is used outside of those debatable passages, there’s no evidence anywhere else that it has that meaning. Everywhere else where foreknowledge is used in Biblical Greek, other than about three passages in the New Testament, it always has the idea of knowing ahead of time, knowing beforehand. So you can’t say that you think that in Romans 8:29, 1 Peter 1:2, and Ephesians 1, that in those passages it means God has a prior, loving relationship that He’s chosen and that’s the meaning of foreknowledge. Where’s your evidence of that? There is none. You can’t use those verses to be your evidence.
 
So we come to a passage like Acts 2:23, one we’ve studied before, and this is in the midst of Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost. This is the first day of the church, the day the church was born and God the Holy Spirit ascended upon the eleven disciples and the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem when they were together. He hovered over them like a flame of fire and they heard a rushing wind so they were having a full sensory experience. Peter then began to explain what was going on. He does so in light of Old Testament passages but what’s really important is his analysis of God’s plan that we’re looking at. He says, starting in verse 22, “Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, [empirical, confirmatory evidence] just as you yourselves know this Man [Him, Jesus Christ] delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God…”
 
 In this first phrase we see the role of God in His overriding plan of human history. But who is the object of God’s foreknowledge? It’s Jesus Christ. Is His foreknowledge of Jesus Christ here related to salvation? No, it’s not. It’s related to the role that Jesus Christ would play in history. Now a little later on we’re going to look at how foreknowledge is used in relation to the nation, Israel, and in relationship to the Jews. God had a plan for them within human history. God selected them for a plan and a purpose within His plan. The context is not related to individual selection of people for salvation or for justification. It has to do with God’s general plan and purpose for their life.
 
 On the one hand, there’s a plan of God that His Son, Jesus Christ, would be delivered over to the authorities and He would be crucified but that doesn’t negate the individual responsibility and free choice of the Jewish leadership, and not every Jewish person because many were believers in an Old Testament sense by this time of the Cross. Their leadership, the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians, made their determinative choice as the representatives of the people to reject the Messianic claims of Jesus. So they had a responsibility. Peter says that on the one hand God had a plan of redemption and this was the plan and on the other hand he says, “You [accusing the audience as part of the responsibility of the Jewish leadership] you nailed Him to a Cross by the hands of godless men…” He was emphasizing their role and responsibility.
 
It hasn’t been diminished one little bit because God had a plan to do this and they did it, they chose to do it, they went along with the plans and the rejection of the leaders so they are fully culpable in the death of Jesus Christ. “…you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death.”  Now the word boule simply means a will, purpose, an intent, or a plan to achieve something or to bring something about. It adds an adjective to the word purpose, “determined” which is not within the context. It doubles the meaning in order to emphasize a determinism, I think, within the passage. It is simply that He was delivered according to the plan or the purpose or the intent of God and this intent, this boule often indicates a choice, a will, a determination to do something based on reflection and deliberation. God had a plan that was well thought-out in terms of the particulars. So Christ is delivered over on the basis of this plan of God and the foreknowledge of God. The plan of God clearly took into account information available to God through His omniscience.
 
 Omniscience, as we’ll see in a minute, includes all the knowable, everything that God knows. His knowledge is not like our knowledge. His knowledge is direct. It’s intuitive. It’s immediate. He does not add things to it. He does not ever acquire knowledge or lose knowledge. He immediately, directly, and intuitively knows everything in terms of all its relationships, all of its causes, all of its effects. Nothing is left out. He knows all of the actual things that will happen and all of the potential things that will happen. So, typically, in Calvinism, they will say that God elected, He chose some to salvation.  Now in some systems they don’t go as far as to preterism which is double predestination, that is, predestining some to eternal life and some to eternal death in the Lake of Fire. They’ll just say that God elected some to salvation and He passed over the others. They were already condemned so He just didn’t elect them.
Others will say He actively elected to send them to the Lake of Fire, that’s what’s called a “higher” form of Calvinism. Then when you ask them on what basis God chose some to eternal life, they’ll say that’s in the secret counsels of God. The problem is that they’re excluding knowledge. Anything available to God through His omniscience is excluded because they have this weird way of talking about God’s knowledge, that God can’t really know something unless He’s determined it. And He can’t determine it if there’s freedom because you can’t know what’s going to take place if you can’t determine that it’s going to take place. They get caught up, I think, in to a logical cul de sac that has to end up in determinism. Here Peter clearly says that God, in terms of His planning, takes into account information available to Him in His omniscience and His knowledge about what will take place and what might take place in human history ahead of time.
 
Now let’s go to the next passage which is in 1st Peter. If you don’t learn anything tonight, you’ll learn at least where Acts is and where 1st Peter is. 1st Peter is near the end of the New Testament after Hebrews, James, and then 1st Peter. Now there’s something interesting about 1st Peter, James, and Hebrews which we’ll see in this first verse. This may be a brand new insight for some of you. I first hit this reading through a commentary and some writings by Arnold Fruchtenbaum who I respect for many, many things. When I first read this, because of my training and everything I’d heard before, I said, “I don’t think that’s right.” Then I started doing a lot of research and reading and I went, “Oh well, I think Arnold’s right here.”
 
You have to pay attention to where the words are. What’s happened in a lot of these interpretations related to these epistles is that we have a history of interpretation that’s sometimes affected by bad exegesis. In 1st Peter 5:13 Peter concludes with a greeting saying, “She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you greetings, and so does my son, Mark.” He mentions Babylon and from the 2nd century B.C. and on there has been a trend to interpret that word Babylon allegorically, that it’s not referring to the literal Babylon on the Euphrates River in what is now modern Iraq but that this is just a code word for Rome. That is how numerous people have interpreted 1st Peter, that he’s writing to the churches in Rome. They say he’s actually in Rome when he’s writing this but the reality is Peter was an apostle to the Jews and Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles. If you haven’t learned anything in our study of Acts I hope you’ve at least learned that much. Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles. That doesn’t mean he never spoke to Jews, as we know, but that was his primary target audience. Peter is primarily responsible for taking the gospel to the Jews.
 
Outside of Jerusalem, the largest population of Jews in the first century was in Babylon. How did they get there? They got hauled there during the first destruction of the temple in the three deportations conducted by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the Babylonians, 605, 597, and 586 B.C. That’s when Daniel and his three friends were taken over in 605. So a huge number of Jews were taken over when Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was destroyed and they were taken to Babylon. Until 1948 of this last century, just 66 years ago, there was always a large contingent of Jews in Iraq.
 
In 1948 a lot of Arabs living in the area of the West Bank fled the war that approached prior to the beginning of the War for Independence in March and April of that year. Some were forced to flee because they were in strategic, significant geographical locations and the Haganah, which is what the Jewish army was known as at the time, ran them out of their villages but the vast number of them left because they believed the propaganda of the five Arab nations that invaded Israel that the war would be short-lived and they would defeat these horrible Jews and the Zionist entity would be destroyed and they would come sweeping in and everybody could come back home. That created this so-called refugee problem of Palestinian Arabs. They chose to flee. They chose to believe the lie. They chose to leave their homes and as a result, they became refugees and they’re still refugees. There were about 750,000 Arabs who were displaced.
 
The other part of that story is that only the Palestinian refugees are given inheritable refugee status. You have refugees from any other conflict in the world and it’s limited to those individuals and their refugee status is not passed on to their descendants. Today we have about three and one half million Palestinian refugees. Now how did we get there from 750,000? Because they had babies like rabbits and those babies were given refugee status and they’re put under a special UN Refugee committee that only oversees that one and only refugee problem which is the Palestinians and they give them lifetime benefits and their children lifetime benefits. If they leave and they come to Canada or the United States or Mexico or Brazil or wherever and they become successful doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, then they continue to get their subsidy from the UN and they continue to be identified as Palestinian refugees. This is part of when they talk about the right of return and try to figure out the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East that’s what they’re talking about. It’s a never-ending problem because they’ve created a unique standard of refugees.
 
At the time that happened in 1949 when those approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs left and were displaced, most people don’t understand the other side of the story. Approximately that same number of Jews were forcibly evicted from their homes in Morocco and Tunisia and Egypt and Syria and Lebanon and Iran and Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and all these other areas so that the Israeli War for Independence created two groups of refugees, the Palestinian Arabs and all these Israelis who were forced to give up all their bank accounts, all of their possessions, all of the things they owned, everything but what they could carry in a suitcase. They were forcibly deported from Iraq and Iran and all of these other Arab countries. Until 1948 you had an enormous Jewish population and it traced all the way back to the early part of the sixth century or late seventh century B.C.  It was centered in Babylon and later it was centered in Baghdad.
 
This was where Peter went. Peter was an apostle to the Jews and he went to Babylon where there were Jews because he was taking the gospel to the Jewish community and so he went to the largest Jewish community. If we understand Babylon to be literal Babylon, and since we believe in literal interpretation of Scripture, we’re forced to do that, it makes sense. It’s historically viable. Then it changes our understanding of what happens in verse one. Peter identifies himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ to the elect. To those who are elect, to the choice ones, residents of the dispersion as the King James Version translates it. The Greek word is diaspora. This is a technical term which has been used since the sixth century B.C. to designate the Jews that were scattered from their promised homeland. The diaspora began in 605, 597, 586 B.C.  There was a partial return that occurred in approximately 538 B.C. and a few more that came back over the years but the ones that returned in 538 when Cyrus allowed them to return from Babylon came mostly from the area of Iran and Babylon. They didn’t leave their homes in Cappadocia and in Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Egypt, and Rome and all these places where they had established communities. They came back mostly from Babylon and Iran to resettle on Ezra and Nehemiah and Zerubbabel. That was the beginning of the Second Temple Period and it became known more technically as the diaspora. So Peter is writing to the residents of the diaspora.
 
Who are the residents of the diaspora? Are they Gentiles or are they Jews? They’re Jews. They’re Jewish Christians, Jewish believers. Just like the writer of Hebrews is writing to a Jewish audience, the writer of James is writing to a Jewish audience, and so is 1st Peter being written to a Jewish Christian audience with a Jewish-background. In Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. This is the area that is now known as Turkey. So he is writing to the elect who are first defined by their location. He’s writing to these early churches which had a primarily Jewish aspect to them, located in the area of Turkey.
 
The second thing he says is to give us a basis for them being called the elect. This is given in the second phrase, “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father by the sanctifying work of the Spirit.” The next phrase gives the purpose of why they are the elect. The issue we need to address here is the phrase, “according to foreknowledge.” What comes first? Elect or foreknowledge?
Foreknowledge because elect is on the basis of something prior and here it’s foreknowledge. Foreknowledge comes before election, not after. 
 
The second thing we need to understand is the nuance or the idea or basic meaning of the word “according to”. It’s the Greek preposition kata which usually means according to a norm or a standard and we see that the preposition usually qualifies an action idea when it’s used with a verbal term such as elect or making a choice. So it’s going to qualify that term. Now we have a parallel verse related to the anti-Christ in 2 Thessalonians 2:9, which states that the anti-Christ is coming “according to the working of Satan.” Now that’s our parallel. What does it mean that the anti-Christ will come according to the working of Satan? That means his position and his power at that future time is going to be on the basis of or because of Satan working in him. It almost has the idea of because of Satan’s empowerment or Satan’s enablement. So if we take that idea that we see in the parallel phrase in 2nd Thessalonians 2:9 or a similar phrase and apply it to 1s Peter 1:2 what we see is “according to or because of the foreknowledge of God.” The foreknowledge of God is what shapes the choice.  The foreknowledge of God becomes the foundation for the making of the selection which is identified in the main verbal idea of election. So according to the foreknowledge of God qualifies and gives the foundation for the verbal idea for election. This means that the ground for the action, or the reason for the action of election, is the foreknowledge of God.
 
 One commentator, William Kelly interprets is as “Election is grounded in or election is a result of foreknowledge.” Another tries to explain it as election depends on foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is the condition. All of these explanations are trying to get at the same idea which is that God first knew all of the knowable in His omniscience, then He knew what would take place because of His foreknowledge and then He made His choice on the basis of the information available to Him in His foreknowledge.
 
As we wrap up here, I was thinking about this the other day. It took me back to something that happened in Sunday School class when I was in high school. Pam and Tinker were there with me at the time. We talked about it the other day. We had a Sunday school teacher named Bill Gleason. I must have been in about the 9th grade at the time. I don’t remember anything else we ever learned in that Sunday school class but I remember this. He came into the Sunday school class and he had a large television set. Do you remember the old box sets from fifty years ago?  He put that up on the table in front of them and he plugged it in and said this was a special set he had designed so that it could show what people were going to do that afternoon. As he looked at that he said he could tell what some of us were going to do. He picked a couple of kids and told them what they were going to do that afternoon. He asked them, “Am I, by my knowledge of what you’re going to do this afternoon, causing you to do what you’re going to do? Not at all.”  That illustration always stuck with me.
 
Foreknowledge is that God knows what’s going to happen. He’s not making His choice because He sees faith in you. Calvinists say that’s what we’re trying to say. But we’re not. People may say that out of ignorance but the Scripture always says that we’re saved through faith, not because of faith. The cause of our salvation is the death of Christ on the Cross. We’re saved through faith. That makes faith non-meritorious. It’s simply the channel. It’s like the pipe or the tube through which God’s salvation flows to us from the Cross. We’re not saved because of that but that’s the means by which the work of Christ is applied to our life. We are saved through faith.
 
So when we plug that in to Romans 8:28 and 29, “For whom He foreknew…” God in His foreknowledge is going to elect certain people. We’re going to get into this next week. I’m going to give you a little foreshadowing here. There’s three different views of God’s plan of election. Over the course of my life, I’ve held all three. The first is the Calvinist view that God just chooses based on His character and His knowledge. That’s a determinative knowledge in a Calvinist sense. That was Lewis Sperry Chafer’s view. When I first read Chafer I thought, “Well, I was always taught that Chafer knew what he was talking about. I guess I’ll believe what he says.” I don’t believe Chafer was right on that because Chafer was an ordained Southern Presbyterian and I think he was more Calvinistic than most people think. He would be called a light-to-moderate Calvinist. That was his position.
 
The second position is that God elects solely on the basis of his foreknowledge. Again, it interprets elect as an individual selection to salvation. I don’t see elect used individually except with the plan for the Lord Jesus Christ going to the Cross. What I do see is that God has a plan for groups. He has a plan for those who are the descendants of Abraham. God has a plan for those who are in Christ. Those who trust in Jesus as their Savior are entered into union with Christ and therefore become identified with Him as the elect. We are elect corporately by virtue of our union with Christ. We’ll get into that a little more as we go through some things coming up.
 ((CHART)) What we see here is that God knows all of the knowable. I should have made that circle as large as I could make it but I just wanted to get across the idea that foreknowledge is just a subset of all that God knows. Foreknowledge relates to what He knows will take place. Omniscience has to do with all the things He knows could have, might have, or would have happened under different circumstances taking place.
 
Thomas Edgar, who has taught Greek for many years at Capitol Bible Seminary and is a graduate of Annapolis, took his commission in the Marine Corps, went to Dallas Seminary for his Th.M. and his Th.D.  Hopefully, he taught Dan Ingraham everything Edgar knows about Greek which is a lot. Edgar wrote a great paper on foreknowledge. He concludes saying, “Thus, God knows everything that will happen if He causes it, if He causes only some of it, or if He merely allows it to happen. Since He is omniscient He knows what will happen even if He allows the universe to be completely random. He knows what will happen regardless of the cause. Whether man can philosophically explain how this works is irrelevant since man has no ability to explain something that only God possesses and nothing apart from Scripture.” That’s a great quote. It takes a lot of time just to think and to ponder that particular quote.
 
Anyway, next time I’m going to come back and talk about God and contingency. Now that’s another fancy term. God knows all the things that could have, would have, should have, taken place but won’t. Now that’s an incredible concept known as God’s knowledge of contingent things. What could have, might have, should have, and would have if you had made another decision. If you’d married somebody else. If you’d gone to a different school. If you had decided to live in another state or take that other job. God knows everything that would have happened in your life. He knows all the variables. God is so great that He is able to still work out His plan and purposes no matter how you want to use your decision to mess it all up. You can’t. He’ll work it all out for good.

Romans 096b-Predestination?  Romans 8:28-29

Romans 8:29 NASB95
For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren;
Romans 096b-Predestination?  Romans 8:28-29
 
We’re in Romans 8:28 and now we are getting into one of the other key words in Romans 8:29 and that is predestination. It’s a concept that is often misunderstood and the reason it’s misunderstood is because we all, including me, have this tendency, no matter our background, is that when we think we understand it, we create a Scriptural paradigm or a theological paradigm or grid. We then become intellectually lazy and rather than looking or studying or trying to discern what that verse is saying in context, we try to interpret that in light of our theology, not in light of its context. And that’s bad. We all do it to one degree or another but there are some systems that are more prone to it.
 
Probably a good deal of systems are more prone to this, especially some of the great systems such as Calvinism, on the one hand, and Arminianism on the other. Interestingly enough, in one of Wesley’s commentaries, he actually inserts concepts into the translation of this verse so that it works within his system and he can avoid the implications of eternal security. He did this because it’s a great verse related to eternal security. On the other hand, among Calvinists, there is also the equal egregious error of taking a term like foreknowledge and making it equivalent to foreordination or election. While these are concepts that are similar and that relate to one another, they’re not synonymous, they’re not identical. Otherwise the Apostle Paul would be redundant in what he is saying in this verse. He is clearly spelling out a progression that occurs in terms of the thought or the planning of God as we look at it from a human perspective.
 
So in Romans 8:28 and 29, we read, “And we know that all things work together for good…” One thing that really hit me today as I was going over this for the umpteenth time the last few weeks, is how important it is to understand that Paul is writing this verse to comfort those who are going through adversity and going through suffering. It’s not just the comfort that comes from the first part of the verse. The first part of the verse that we know all things work together for good is where we stop of stop, at least I have over the years. We’re thankful that God’s in control, He works all things out together for good. But there’s more to it than that.
 
As you go through the rest of verse 28 and its connection to verse 29, it expresses the fact that what is going on and our response to it is all part of a plan that has been laid out and is overseen by God the Father so we can take comfort in knowing that the adversity we’re going through is part of a plan. It’s part of a blueprint that is designed to ultimately bring about the construction of spiritual maturity for edification within our own souls and the construction of something new in our souls called the image of His Son. So the adversity is the only way we can get there. This gives us a fresh perspective on this verse.
 
Paul is not writing a theological treatise related to election and predestination and foreknowledge. He’s not writing as a Calvinist or an Augustinian or as an Arminian or any other school of thought. He’s laying down a principle for comfort in the midst of adversity. That often gets lost as we get through dealing with these other terms. Now understanding these other ideas must be set in that particular context. I think when we look at some of the other passages, that becomes clear. We always have to go back to that important rule of context, context, and context.  “So we know that all things work together for good…” In context all things are suffering and adversity we go through as we pursue the objective of being a joint-heir with Jesus Christ so we’re prepared to rule and reign with Him. So, “All things work together for good to those who love God to those who are the called according to His purpose…”
 
There’s another plan there. He has a blueprint, a plan. He has a roadmap to spiritual maturity, if I can use that as another analogy. Spiritual maturity is then defined as “being conformed to the image of His Son” in the next verse. Who is he talking to here? Is he talking to unbelievers or believers? He’s talking to believers, isn’t he? Now that’s one thing that just really hit me today because as we get into this and we’re talking about foreknowledge and predestination, there are too many people, who when they start talking about this in terms of election and predestination are focused on these doctrines as they pertain to identifying the saved. See, Paul isn’t worried about identifying the saved here. He’s focusing on comforting the saved but he is focused on the fact that these terms that he used such as “called” “foreknew” and “predestined” are terms related to a spiritual life issue.
 
He’s talking not here about how to become saved. This isn’t a soteriological justification issue. He’s talking about sanctification, how the believer is to be conformed to the image of His Son. That’s the whole context here. We’re not talking about making sure you’re among the elect or making sure you’re among the predestined. What we’re talking about is the fact that as a believer there’s a plan and that plan is to conform you to the image of His Son so that shifts the focus a little bit. It’s easy how its gets kind of slippery when we’re dealing with these issues here. All of a sudden we’re talking about soteriological issues related to phase one, justification, rather than the second stage which is what happens after we’re saved. Too many people spend all their time talking about phase one and justification without ever going past it. That’s one of the failures in a number of denominations. You can go there and learn how to be a Christian for years but they never answer the question, “after salvation, then what?” That’s what this is focusing on, that phase after salvation.
 
We looked at Romans 8:29 and 29. We went to 1 Peter 1:12 to show that election is that process of God’s choosing a group. Here it’s applied to a group of Jewish believers, members of the diaspora, who are Jewish converts to Christianity. That’s what makes them that “choice” group. That choice is according to a norm or standard or pattern. That’s what the Greek preposition kata means. It’s translated “according to” here and that’s what you find in every Greek lexicon. It means according to a norm or standard or a pattern and the election, the choice, occurs on the basis of something. You can even say it’s almost cause, not quite but close to that idea, because of the foreknowledge of God the Father.
 
So the foreknowledge, God’s knowledge of what will take place in the future as part of His omniscience, is abundantly clear that that is what precedes election. That informs God’s choice. That’s even more clear when you get down to 1Peter 1:20 which is talking about Jesus Christ. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, not foreordained but foreknown, same word, that this must be informed by the meaning and use of the word back in 1 Peter 1: 1. This is only nineteen verses later. It has that same idea.
 
Foreknown has to do with God’s knowledge of how things will be in the future. Now let’s just stretch our brains a little bit. In God’s omniscience He doesn’t ever learn anything. He doesn’t perceive things in terms of a progression. He perceives things as they will be all at once, simultaneously. For us we look at them in terms of this before and after and succession of events. But in the omniscience of God He knows all things instantly and completely and intuitively and He’s always known it this way so that His knowledge is exhaustive and it is complete. It never increases. It never decreases. It is intuitive while our knowledge is discursive. We learn things in pieces and we learn things over time and we constantly come to greater knowledge.
 
So we looked at foreknowledge last time just to see that foreknowledge or prescience, the idea that God knows what will happen ahead of time, but He doesn’t make His selection of believers because He sees faith. I pointed that out last time and I can’t make this point strongly enough. Within Calvinism we have to understand that a system is a system. It all hangs together as an integrated system. Within Calvinism faith is meritorious. Faith is doing something good. It has merit. It has value to have faith and therefore for the unbeliever to be able to do anything of value, including to believe, God must first change the nature of the unbeliever. That’s called regeneration. In high Calvinism regeneration precedes faith. God the Holy Spirit has His effectual grace, irresistible grace, which works upon the heart of the unbeliever and changes it. As an inevitable result, according to Calvinists, he will believe in Jesus as Savior and he will also inevitably grow.
 
They reject our view of foreknowledge and they would say that anything God does on the basis of foreknowledge is letting man know what it ultimately works. They don’t understand faith is something anyone can do. Therefore it’s not special. It’s a means, not a cause. That’s reflected in the grammar of the New Testament. When we have verses like Ephesians 2: 8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith…” The grammatical construction in the Greek is the preposition dia plus a genitive which means through. If cause were the idea then Paul would have used an accusative case because dia plus the accusative means because. So we’re saved not because of faith but through faith. The cause is God’s love and the cause is Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. That’s the cause of our salvation.
So we looked at Romans 8:28 that “we’re called according to the purpose of God.” That’s explained as to “those whom God foreknew, He also predestined.” ((CHART)) So I closed out last time with this double circle which is a subset of everything God knows. God knows all the knowable. He’s always known all the knowable. And all the knowable includes not only what will happen but might happen, what could have happened. We’ll look at that in a minute.
 
Thomas Edgar put it this way in his article, Foreknowledge, “God knows everything that will happen if he causes it.” See the Calvinist says God only foreknows what will happen. Only because it will happen can God foreknow it, meaning God can only foreknow what He has predetermined will happen. So therefore God really doesn’t know all the knowable, according to them. That it’s not such infinite possibilities that His omniscience can grasp. But omniscience can grasp it because it’s infinite. What Edgar is saying is that God not only knows everything that will happen if He causes it, He knows what will happen if he causes only some of it. He knows what will happen if He merely allows it to happen. Since He’s omniscient He knows what will happen even if He allows the universe to be completely random. He knows what will happen regardless of the cause. Whether man can philosophically explain how this works is irrelevant since man has no ability to explain something that only God can possess, without which God knows nothing apart from the Scripture.
 
One of the problems I pointed out last time is too often we try to impose our view of cause and effect on the Creator. Now let’s look at a couple of passages in Scripture that give us some examples of how God knows what would have happened otherwise. In technical philosophy these are called counter factuals. A factual is a fact, what happened. A fact is that on March 6, 1836 the Alamo fell. But what would have happened if the Alamo hadn’t fallen? God knows. See, that’s not a fact but it’s a counter factual. What would have happened if George Washington had been killed when he was fighting in the French and Indian War? What would have happened under any number of circumstances that you can think of in history? Those are counter factuals.
 
What would have happened if you’d gone to another school or university than the one you went to? What if you had chosen another job than the one you chose? What if you had married someone different from the one you married? Those are the counter factuals and God knows all of those. Counter factuals is the technical term that philosophers use. Let’s turn to 1 Samuel 23. This is that horrible period in David’s life between the time he knew that God had anointed Him in 1 Samuel 17 to be the king of Israel but Saul is still on the throne. Saul is still God’s man to rule Israel and during part of this time David was Public Enemy Number One and most hated by Saul. Saul has all of his army out looking to kill David.
 
David has been hiding now among the Philistines. He fled to Gath. Gath is a city down in what is now the Gaza strip. If you know anything about Israel you know where that is. It’s not in the land. It’s down in the land of the Philistines, the enemy of Israel. He fled down there and then after that in the beginning of chapter 22 he escaped to the cave of Abdullam. Then it’s after that that Saul murders a priest. In chapter 23 the Philistines are fighting against another town, Killah, and they are pressing it much like Sderot today, a tiny town in Israel that is the closest town to the border with Gaza and the Hamas are standing missiles and rockets over to Sderot on a regular basis. Fortunately they have Iron Dome to defend themselves now but it was that kind of thing.
 
Killah was under the thumb of the Philistines who were stealing their grain and so David now inquires of the Lord in verse 2, “Shall I go and attack these Philistines? And the Lord said to David, “Go and attack the Philistines and deliver Keilah. But David’s men say to him, Behold, we are afraid here in Judah. How much more then if we go to Keilah against the ranks of the Philistines?” They’re saying they don’t have the resources to fight the Philistines. Verse 4, “So David inquired of the Lord once more. And the Lord answered him and said, “Arise, go down to Keilah, for I will give the Philistines into your hand.” Verse 5 says, “So David and his men went to Keilah and fought with the Philistines, and he led away their livestock and struck them with a great slaughter. Thus David delivered the inhabitants of Keilah.”
 
Then Abiathar the son of Ahimelch the high priest came down to David at Keilah. He went down with his ephod which was a sign he was a high priest. Saul was told that David had gone to Keilah and in verse 7 “Saul said, “God has delivered him into my hand…” Saul is saying I know where David is and I can attack him. He’s vulnerable militarily and we can lay siege to the town and capture him. “So Saul summoned all the people for war, to go down to Keilah to besiege David and his men.” Verse 8, “Now David knew that Saul was plotting evil against him, he said to Abiathar the priest, “Bring the ephod here.” So now he’s going to inquire of the Lord. “Then David said, O Lord God of Israel, Your servant has heard for certain that Saul is seeking to come to Keilah to destroy the city on my account. Will the men of Keilah deliver me into his hand?” So he asked a very specific question. With the ephod I believe he had access to what was called the “urim and thummin”. We’re not sure exactly what they were but they were stones that the High Priest had that maybe changed color, maybe they glowed, maybe they vibrated. We don’t really know but somehow God communicated direct revelation through the urim and thummin.
 
So David inquires of God, “Will the men of Keilah surrender me into his hand?” He’s asking if he’s going to get betrayed. His second question is whether Saul is really going to come and then he says “O Lord God of Israel, I pray, tell Your servant. And the Lord said, “He will come down.” God doesn’t answer his first question but he answers the second question and David says again, “Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?” And the Lord said, “They will deliver you.”
 
So what does David do? He leaves. “Then David and his men, about six hundred, arose and departed from Keilah, and they went wherever they could go. “When it was told Saul that David had escaped from Keilah he gave up the pursuit.”  So see God in His omniscience says this is what’s going to happen. Saul’s coming and yes, the people will betray you. But David does something different and that changes the whole scenario. So Saul doesn’t actually come and the people never betrayed David. So we have flexibility within the plan of God. There’s the function of volition. David could have stayed there and had a fatalistic attitude, saying “Whatever happens God will protect me.” Or he could take action and leave and then none of the other things happened. God knew what would happen under other circumstances. It’s not set in stone.
 
2 Kings 13:19 is another example. So let’s turn there. This is a situation that occurs at the time of the death of Elisha. Elisha was the second great prophet in the Northern Kingdom during its worst period of spiritual apostasy under Ahab and his descendants. So Elisha becomes sick with an illness. He’s about to die. Joash, the King of Israel, the Northern Kingdom, came down and wept over him. He was fairly positive.  He said, “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen. And Elisha said to him, “Take a bow and some arrows.” So he took a bow and arrows. Then he said to the king of Israel, Put your hand on the bow.” And he put his hand on it, then Elisha laid his hands on the king’s hand. He said, “Open the window toward the east”. He opened it. Then Elisha said, “Shoot.” He shot and he said, “The Lord’s arrow of victory, even the arrow of victory over Aram [Syria]; for you will defeat the Arameans [Syrians] at Aphek until you have destroyed them.”
 
Elisha is using this as sort of an object lesson to show that shooting the arrow shows military victory over the Syrians. And he makes the point over them that you’re only going to destroy them if you strike them until they are completely defeated, totally defeated. You’re not going to have a peace with them and a line of demarcation like we drew back in the 50s between North Korea and South Korea. We still have a problem today. You completely, totally defeat the enemy so they don’t come back later. So Elisha said, “Take the arrows” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground…” Elisha didn’t tell him to stop. He didn’t tell him how many. He just told him to hit the ground. “So he struck the ground three times and then he stopped.”
 
Elisha got mad at him. In verse 19 he says, “You should have struck five or six times, then you would have struck Aram until you would have destroyed it. But now you shall strike Aram only three times.”  So what does Elisha know? He said, “If you had only had the courage and stamina to keep hitting the ground, then you would have destroyed the king of Syria. But since you only struck the ground three times you’re only going to defeat him but it’s not enough for total defeat so it’s going to be a problem.” Elisha shows that he knows what would have happened if he had only chosen to hit the ground more than three times. So God has made him privy to that information. He knows the counter factuals which would have happened.
 
Isaiah 48:18 is another passage that says God knows what would happen under other circumstances. It says, “Oh that you had heeded my commandments [if you’d only obeyed me; if you’d listened to my commandments, then your well-being would have been like a river and your righteousness like the waves of the sea].” He’s talking to the nation Israel saying that if you’d only listened to Me [God] you would have had peace and righteousness but you didn’t. God knows what would happen if you’d made other decisions.
 
Then we have Jeremiah 38:17 and following. The time is toward the end of the Southern Kingdom. Zedekiah is the king, the last king, and Zedekiah had Jeremiah brought to him at the third entrance that is in the house of the Lord. Jeremiah’s been in prison, put there by the king. The king told Jeremiah he was going to ask him something and not hide anything from him. Jeremiah said, “If I tell you, will you not certainly put me to death?” But Zedekiah swore secretly to Jeremiah saying, “As the Lord lives who made this life for us surely I will not put you to death nor will I give you over to the hand of these men who are seeking your life.” Notice he knows the doctrine of creation. Zedekiah understood some truth. He might have been a believer but an extremely apostate believer.
 
Next we get to verse 17, “Then Jeremiah said to Zedekiah, “Thus says the Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, “If you will indeed go out to the officers of the king of Babylon, then you will live, this city will not be burned with fire, and you and your household will survive [if you surrender]. Verse 18, “But if you will not go out to the officers of the king of Babylon, then this city will be given over to the hand of the Chaldeans and they will burn it with fire, and you yourself will not escape from their hand.” Then Zedekiah, the king, said, “I dread the Jews who have gone over to the Chaldeans, for they may give me over into their hand and they will abuse me.” But Jeremiah said, “They shall not give you over. Please obey the Lord in what I am saying to you that it may go well with you and you may live. But if you keep refusing to go out, this is the word which the Lord has shown me.” In other words God has shown that if you obey Him and surrender then you’re going to live and Jerusalem will not be destroyed. But Zedekiah disobeyed so he was destroyed; Israel was destroyed; the first temple was destroyed. So we see once again that God knows what would happen under certain circumstances. The point is that God’s foreknowledge includes alternate scenarios.
 
We see this in the New Testament. Matthew 11:21 and again in verse 23, Jesus pronounces a judgment on these small towns along the Sea of Galilee because they had witnessed some great miracles. They knew Jesus was who He claimed to be but they had rejected Him. Jesus says, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. It wouldn’t have taken as much. They would have changed their minds long ago and regretted their position if they had seen what you had seen”. God knows the alternative. Then he pronounces a judgment on Capernaum in verse 23, “And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day.” Of course, we ask the question, “Then why didn’t God give those kinds of miracles to Sodom and Chorazim and Bethsaida? I don’t know. But what this does show is that God knows what would happened under other circumstances and other conditions.
 
That means that there are variables within history. As I pointed out last time, just as God created the design of the universe that even though sin brought this incredible amount of chaos into the universe and introduced an unbelievable amount of chaos into the DNA of the human race and brought death and disease and suffering, God so structured our DNA and our biological makeup and the makeup of the world to have the ability to handle that and for the world to not be completely destroyed by it. So God is able to deal with all of the variables that come as the result of what appears to us to be randomness of human free choice.
 
Note foreknowledge then leads us to the next category in Romans which is predestination. “Those whom God foreknew…” These are the same group of people. He doesn’t lose any. He doesn’t get any more. That’s what Charles and John Wesley couldn’t get around. It tells you that the same group that He called, that He foreknew, that He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He justified, those are the ones that are going to be glorified. He doesn’t lose any. Wesley introduces a phrase in there, “These He will justify if they persevere.” He believed if they don’t persevere, they won’t be justified, they won’t be glorified. He didn’t believe in eternal security. He’s not listening to what the passage is saying.
 
I have a couple more quotes for you from well-known historical Calvinist theologians and documents. This first one is from A.A. Hodge. Archibald Alexander Hodge, the father of Charles Hodge. A. A. Hodge was named for Archibald Alexander who founded a school called Law College. It was a small in-house training school for pastors in Princeton, New Jersey. Today we know of it as Princeton University. A. A. Hodge was named for Augustus Alexander who was the first theology professor at the Law College. There were a string of Hodges, Augustus Alexander Hodge, Charles Hodge, and then Casper Hodge who went into the early part of the 19th century and then one of Charles Hodges’ students, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield. This was a theological dynasty in the northeast. In many ways, though we would not agree with their degree of Calvinism, because of their staunch defense of the truth of Scripture inerrancy and infallibility of the Word of God against the onslaughts of liberalism and liberal theology in the 19th century, their impact has lasted until the present time in evangelical Christianity among those who are conservatives and fundamentalists because they are the ones who were the brain and trust who really laid down the foundation and the theological arguments for the inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility of Scripture. To that we owe them a great and tremendous debt. They put their finger in the dike even though everybody else around them was pulling their finger out and running for cover. They did a great job. But we do not agree with everything they say.
Here’s how Hodge defines predestination. “Predestination is that which is designating only the counsel of God concerning fallen men, including sovereign election of some and the most righteous reprobation of the rest.” It’s called double predestination. According to this view some are predestined to heaven, the elect. The others are predestined to reprobation.
 
There is an English document from the 17th century called the Westminster Confession of the Faith, which was where Presbyterians and Anglicans came together and hammered out basic theology of the Reformed Anglican Church in the 1600s. Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 3, paragraph 3 states, “By the decree of God for the manifestation of His glory some men and angels are predestined to everlasting life and others foreordained to everlasting death.” Again that is predestination in their view. If you ever deal with a strong Presbyterian orthodox church or a strong Calvinist, this is their doctrinal statement, the Westminster Confession of Faith. Under paragraph 5, we read, “Those of mankind who are predestined unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose and the secret council and good pleasure of His will, hath chosen to Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or good works or perseverance in either of them or any other thing…” That excludes anything, no foresight whatsoever is involved in God’s election. It continues “…any other thing in the creature, its conditions or causes moving him thereunto and all to the praise of His glorious grace.” So you see they are saying God selects who will be saved and who will not be saved but He doesn’t act on His knowledge to do it. There’s no room for his foresight or His actual knowledge of the way things will be.
 
Another definition from the Dictionary of Theological Terms states, “Thus reprobation has two parts to it: “preterition…” That’s a good word for you. I have an app on my iPad™ that gives you a new word of the day every day and preterition showed up as the word for the day last week. I knew what it meant. I said, “Give me a new word. Give me something I don’t know.” “…preterition or the passing over of some in the decree of election. This is the sovereign prerogative of God, as Calvin long ago pointed out, God owes no man anything and no man can justly argue against the righteousness of God in passing him by in election, so leaving him to his own sinful self-determination.” The second part of reprobation is condemnation, the act of the sovereign judge. It is passed upon sinners. No man will be damned except for sin.” That’s the negative side of predestination.
 
Then from the Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, predestination is defined as “the sovereign determination and foreknowledge of God. Some theologians connect divine predestination with the central events of salvation history, especially the death of Jesus as foreordained by God. In Calvinist theology the doctrine of predestination more specifically holds that God has from all eternity chosen specific people to bring into eternal communion with Himself. Some Calvinists [high Calvinists] add that God has also predestined or ordained the rest of humankind for damnation. Now just a word. One of the reasons I call them high Calvinists although some people call anybody who’s a little more Calvinist than they are a hyper-Calvinist, but that’s not an exact term. Actually these terms, low Calvinists, high Calvinists, and hyper-Calvinists are technical terms. A hyper-Calvinist is someone who believes that God has decreed who will be saved and they will be saved whether you give them the gospel or not. As one Baptist leader told the young missionary at the end of the 1700s, “God is going to save the elect in India whether you go there and take them the gospel or not. That’s hyper-Calvinism. High Calvinism is just five-point superlapsarianism Calvinism. We won’t get into all of that.
 
So we have the Greek words for election, the term proorizo, the prefix pro which means ahead of time or beforehand and the second term is orizo which is the root of the word. Again, it’s a compound word which we saw with proginosko. proorizo means to decide on something beforehand, or to decide beforehand, according to Arndt and Gingrich Lexicon or to predetermine. The point that we will see is that predestination really isn’t a correct term to translate proorizo at all. It implies some things that are not in evidence in the passages. The issue is what are we deciding upon ahead of time? 
 
There are only a few instances of this word in the New Testament so you go to the root to see if you can get some insight into the meaning because meaning should come from usage and if there aren’t very many examples then we’re somewhat limited. You have to be careful not to commit what is called a root fallacy which is where you take the meaning of the root word and that shapes the meaning of the compound word that is built upon it. So orizo is the basic meaning of separate entities and to establish a boundary and it has the idea of defining ideas of concepts or setting limits or explaining something. The second meaning is it means to make a determination about an entity, to appoint something ahead of time, to fix something ahead of time. It has a range of meanings so basically it means to decide upon something ahead of time and it relates to God determining something beforehand or it means to decide a destination or a destiny ahead of time.
 
God has decided that the church is a body of believers ahead of time. He has a plan, a roadmap and that roadmap is that everyone who trusts in Christ has to grow to spiritual maturity so they can rule and reign with Him in the future kingdom and the only way you’re going to have the capacity to do that is if you have your character transformed so that you are like Christ and not like fallen Adam. That’s what Paul states in Romans 8:29, “For those whom He [God] foreknew…” God knew all the options; He knew who would respond in non-meritorious faith. “…He also predestined them [not just as a group but also as individuals] to become conformed to the image of His Son…” He set forth a plan. He appointed them to a destiny.
 
Does that mean they can say “I don’t want to play that game? I’m going to go wallow in the pig sty like the prodigal son.” Yes, they can do that. God has still appointed an endgame. That endgame plan is for them to be conformed to the image of His Son. The purpose is stated, “…so that He [Jesus Christ] might be the first born among many brethren.”  The many brethren are all of us. He’s not the first born alone but that He has a cadre of qualified believers from all the centuries of the church age who will rule and reign with Him in the kingdom. The emphasis here is not that Jesus might be the first born. He is that. He is the preeminent One. That’s what the term first born means. But the emphasis is that He will be the first born among or with many brethren. He’s not going to be like David with only three or four hundred mighty men out in the wilderness. He’s going to have hundreds of thousands of brethren who are qualified to rule and reign with Him in the Millennial Kingdom.
 
We see some other senses of the word “predestination” in Scripture. There are only six passages, five other than the one we’re looking at, where the word proorizo is used. In Ephesians 1:5 we’re told that God has predestined us, He has set as our objective, as the goal for every believer adoption as sons, adult sons, by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. Notice that it’s not that we’re predestined to spend eternity in heaven; we’re predestined to adoption as sons in Jesus Christ. In verse 11 that adoption as sons, not as children, but as adult sons, is related to inheritance which is what we’ve been talking about in Romans 8.  Verse 11 says, “In Him also we have obtained an inheritance being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things after the counsel of His will.” God set a destiny. He said, “I’ve got a plan. I’m not going to just save them and say they’re going to come and be in Heaven with Me forever. Now that they’re saved, there’s an objective here. Now that they’ve started to first grade, the objective here is to graduate from high school. Now that they’ve started the training by becoming part of the family, the destiny is for them to be conformed to the image of Christ. Now that they’ve entered into the family of God there’s a training that has to take place so they can be an adult son and enjoy all of the privileges and responsibilities of being an adult son.”
 
The word is used again in Acts 4:28. It appears from the context that this is not talking about being predestined to salvation. It’s talking about something completely different. It’s a prayer, “And to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur.” God worked out your plan and purpose in history. It’s not talking about the individual selection and predestination of some to salvation and some to eternal condemnation. It’s not even in the context. In 1 Corinthians 2:7, Paul says, “But we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery [never before revealed in history], the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory…” So God had in His eternal omniscience the concept of what would be revealed in the Word of God. That was what God predestined, the Word of God. It’s not predestined to eternal salvation or eternal condemnation.
 
In Luke 22:22, “For indeed, the Son of Man is going as it has been determined…” It has been set forth by the plan of God. This passage is using proorizo but not in a sense of selection for salvation or condemnation. So again we keep running into this particular problem. ((CHART)). Here are some other verses where the noun is used but it basically comes to the same point that it’s not based on selection to eternal life or not.
 
So in closing, just to wrap it up, Genesis 1:26 and 27, God created the human race in His image. When Adam sinned that image was marred, defaced, corrupted, but not destroyed. Every human being is born in the image and likeness of God. We are still finite representations of God. We have self-consciousness so we can have God-consciousness. We have mentality and intelligence so we can think God’s thoughts after Him. We have a conscience so that we can know God’s will and be obedient to that which is right versus that which is wrong. All of this is related to the makeup of God so this composes the soul which is the way we represent God and we work that out through our physical bodies on this earth so that it is through them that we fulfill the mission to rule over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the field, etc. 
 
We’re created in the image of God. That image is defaced and corrupted by sin. How do we get back to where we’re supposed to be? The writer of Hebrews states it in five verses quoted from Psalm 8. This is one of the most significant passages for understanding the spiritual life in all of the Bible. He introduces this statement by saying, “But one has testified somewhere, saying, “What is man, that You remember him?” God, why do you care about the human race or what is so significant about human beings? Of course, the answer is that we’re in the image of God. But the Psalmist is saying what’s so special about man? It continues, “Or the Son of Man, that you are concerned about Him? You have made him a little lower than the angels.” We don’t have the capability of angels. We’re lower than angels. “But You have crowned him with glory and honor and appointed him over the works of Your hands. You have put all things in subjection under his feet. For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him.”
 
The point here is that because of the corruption of the fall, while we’re still in a position of authority over creation, we can’t fulfill our ultimate mission because of this chaos of the fall. The chaos of the fall has to be remedied and creation redeemed by Jesus. [Romans 8:17 and follows]  In Hebrews 2:9, “But we do see Him [Jesus] who was made for a little while lower than the angels [a human being] , namely Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned Him with glory and honor.” Because He executed the plan of God and He led a sinless life and because He submits Himself in obedience to the will of the Father [Philippians 2:5-9], in the suffering of death, because of that He was crowned with glory and honor that He, by the grace of God might taste [fully take in or fully enmesh Himself] for everyone. It’s not “taste” like taking a little nibble; it’s fully taking it in.
 
Verse 10, “For it was fitting for Him [God the Father] for Whom are all things and by Whom are all things in bringing many sons to glory…”  Look, who comes to glory? We have been crowned as human beings with glory and honor and the creation is supposed to be put under our feet but it’s been all screwed up because of sin. Then Jesus comes along and He’s glorified because of the suffering of death He endured as the payment of sin for everyone and now in conclusion, “It was fitting for God the Father, for Whom are all things and by whom are all things in bringing many sons…” That’s all those other believers to glory, their originally intended position, to first make the captain of their salvation mature through suffering.” Jesus had to learn obedience through suffering. Not that He was disobedient. He had to grow up and mature as a believer. He had to learn to eat. He had to learn what utensils to use to eat what food. He had to learn that when His mother said to do something that He did it. Now He never disobeyed her but He had to go through that process. He had to grow up. He had to learn Hebrew. He had to learn to speak it. He had to learn to write it. He had to learn to read the Torah and He had to learn to memorize it. And when He went to the temple when he was 12 years old and He just confounded all the religious leaders, He did that because He was sinless and He did it out of His own human ability. He’s not saying, “Okay, I’m going to pierce the wall into my omniscience and I’m going to really screw these guys up by using my omniscience to confound them.” Jesus did it from His humanity. If he did that, he would have violated the whole principle of kenosis that’s laid down in Philippians, chapter 2. He’s living His life on the basis of the Holy Spirit in His limited humanity by depending upon God, not by handling problems and challenges to His spiritual life by depending upon His Divine power. He’s doing it in His humanity to show what we can do if we would just trust God.
 
When you put all these things together we see that the theme that runs along with predestination and with foreknowledge is to handle suffering and to understand the purpose of suffering so that we can be conformed to the image of Christ and that only comes through spiritual growth.  We have to learn obedience just as Jesus did. That’s what Paul is saying in Romans 8. Next time we’ll come back and we’ll press on to Romans 8:30 and beyond which won’t be quite as rugged and detailed as getting through these two verses.

Romans 097b-Secure: God Will Save AND Protect Us

Romans 8:30 NASB95
and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.
Romans 097b-Secure: God Will Save AND Protect Us Romans 8:30-39
 
The last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at a very important passage dealing with God’s provision for the believer in time of suffering. I have found, in my reading at least, that very few commentators or scholars really hone in on the contextual unity we have here in the last part of Romans, chapter 8. It flows out of Romans 8:17. Just to remind you, it’s at that verse that Paul introduces the topic of suffering and adversity in the believer’s life and that this suffering is not random but that there is a purpose to it. That purpose is to train us. It’s to discipline us, not in a negative sense. It’s to teach us discipline. It’s to remove distractions, to prune things from our life that distract us from pursuing spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. The purpose for the suffering ultimately is to help us in our spiritual growth to conform our character to the image of Christ which is brought into the picture in Romans 8:29. That’s the focal point, the destiny that we have to be mature believers, to be Christ-like in our character.
 
Suffering is emphasized in verse 18 and that’s where we start this discussion where Paul begins to talk about suffering and that goes all the way down to Romans 8:28 where, as I pointed out, we read, “And we know that all things work together for good.” The “all things” there relates to the suffering, the adversity, the difficulty, the challenges that we all face in life. In focusing attention on that, he emphasizes that all creation is under the judgment of sin and he uses the anthropomorphism of groaning. The creation which is non-physical but just a material universe without feelings and emotion and doesn’t have the ability as personified and it’s said to be groaning because it is under the bondage of corruption, expressed in verses 21 and 22.
 
In the context adult sons is different from the term children of God as it is used in verse 16. Children of God refers to every believer as a child of God but only some believers achieve son-ship in the sense of being adult, mature believers and this is expressed in the term sons of God at the end of verse 19. So that’s our focal point as believers. We’re called to focus on the goal that we are to grow up to be mature believers. In verses 28 and 29, Paul is first reminding us that everybody suffers, whether Christian or not because we live in a fallen world but specifically as Christians we’re living in the devil’s world. It’s not only a world of corruption. It’s under the authority of Satan as the prince and the power of the air and, as such, we go through additional suffering.
 
Now, not everybody wants to think of it as suffering. Some people think what they’re going through isn’t really suffering. They think of suffering only in terms of things uncomfortable or things on a scale of 1 to 1. They want to limit suffering to the most extreme forms of 9 and 10. Suffering covers the whole realm of opposition that we face, difficulty that we face in life, whether it’s at a level 1 or a level 10. Every time something doesn’t go quite the way we want it to and usually those are the minor things and we get irritated and we get grumpy and we get frustrated, we just fail the test. Most of us fail the test. Most of us fail tests because we’re dealing with adversity at the level 0.001 level, not the level 10 stuff. It’s that really minor stuff that irritates and aggravates us and tends to get us out of fellowship very quickly so we have to learn to just relax as we go through life and to trust God and not let either the minor things or the major things knock us off course.
 
It’s in that context that the Apostle Paul, comforting suffering believers, expressing the fact that God has this unbroken chain of events in terms of His oversight of our salvation and our spiritual life that gives us comfort and security in the midst of an ever-changing chaotic world. So we have security. Not just security in the sense of the doctrine of eternal security, we have that, but we have security in the fact that God will save us eternally and eventually in terms of phase three but He will protect us even when we are going completely wrong, living in the devil’s world, living in a corrupt environment. So Romans 8:28 and 29 tell us that God in His Sovereignty oversee all the events that take place in history. God in His sovereignty works all of these things together for good so that when we get to the end game which for us is the Judgment Seat of Christ and then the return of Christ at the end of the Tribulation to establish His kingdom and we rule and reign with Him, when we get there, we’re going to see that everything we went through in life worked together, was orchestrated by God, to produce spiritual maturity in our life.
 
The issue for us is are we going to stay the course? Are we going to respond to the challenge? Or are we going to give up? So, “All things work together for good to those who love God…” I pointed out that refers to every believer but especially those who are pursuing spiritual growth because “those who love God” demonstrate it by obedience to Him. Those who love God are called according to His purpose and that purpose is also expressed as being conformed to the image of His Son. Then we get to the chain, “Those whom He foreknew, He also predestined [set a destiny for them out there]…”
 
We’ll go to verses 31 through 39 for a conclusion to this section. It’s also a conclusion to everything Paul has said up to this point in Romans so the next verses we’re getting into are going to be a good opportunity to review some of the key ideas we’ve seen in Romans so far. First, He has a destiny for us. It’s like a coach; we’ve got a team. The goal of the team is to be Super Bowl champions and He’s going to always treat every player on the team as if they are going to be the greatest player in their position to ever play the game. Are there going to be some who are going to fail? Yes. Are there going to be some who will be injured and they’re not going to be able to make it very far? Definitely. That’s what’s going to happen in every body of believers but you don’t focus on building a great team by focusing on the ones who haven’t decided if they’re going to play to their very best ability. You develop a wonderful team by focusing on the ones who really want to exploit all of their abilities and all of their capabilities and develop them. Hopefully, that will develop them and that will encourage and inspire and motivate the ones who haven’t quite decided how much they’re going to devote to the end game.
 
The end game, using an analogy of football, is to be a championship team. That championship team is analogous to believers who reach spiritual maturity and are manifesting the character of Christ in their lives. That’s the destiny God has set before us. It’s not a destiny related to salvation which would be comparable to getting on the team. He’s talking about those who are already on the team and how they are to focus on suffering and dealing with suffering in terms of getting to that championship Super Bowl game. That’s the focus here. It’s on sanctification. We’re not dealing with justification. The predestination here has to do with God’s destiny for believers, not God’s destiny for unbelievers. We’re not talking about salvation. In verse 30 he develops a chain. We’ve talked about each one of these as we’ve gone through here.
 
“And those whom He predestined, He also called, and those whom He called, He also justified, and those whom He justified, He also glorified.” So there’s a chain that is set up here. This is one of the really great verses on eternal security. In fact, John Wesley, who was a reformer within the Anglican Church in the mid-1700s even inserted something into a translation. Later his followers were called Methodists but initially they were called Wesleyans. He wasn’t the founder of the movement; it was George Whitfield who was the founder. They disagreed over the doctrines of Calvinism. Whitfield was much more of a Calvinist, a predestinarian, than was Wesley and his brother, Charles. Whitfield left to go to America on his first evangelistic speaking tour and truly he and Jonathan Edwards, a pastor in Northfield, Massachusetts, really lit a fire under people. That became what is known as the First Great Awakening. While Whitfield was out of England, Wesley used his influence to turn his followers against Calvinism, even though he had made a pact with Whitfield that they weren’t going to make an issue out of the doctrines of Calvinism. Wesley promised he would not use it to split their reform movement in the Anglican Church. So when Whitfield came back, he discovered this movement they had begun was anti-Calvinist. To his credit and grace orientation, he did not make an issue of it and relinquished any influential leadership within the group to John Wesley. Wesley, when he was translating this verse, when he got to the end of verse 30 where it says, “those whom He justified, these He also glorified,” he inserted, “if they persevere to the end.” He didn’t believe in eternal security. That was the real issue.
 
Today in a lot of the debates between Calvinists and those who are not Calvinists, in America the issue is usually around the extent of the atonement, whether Christ died only for the elect or if He died for all mankind. That seems to be the big issue that usually is raised in America, among the evangelicals. I remember in the fall of my second year at Dallas Seminary, Francis Schaeffer had written a book, “How Shall We Then Live?” and they had produced this huge multi-media film and lecture series and there were some cities like Houston and a few other cities who just got the film series and there were others, like Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York, where Francis Schaeffer came and gave additional lectures. I remember going to Moody Auditorium at SMU with a lot of other seminary students, including Tommy Ice, and we sat down on about the fourth row from the front. The entire Schaeffer clan was sitting down in front of us. Charlie Clough and a contingent from Lubbock Bible Church was sitting behind us.
 
Dallas Seminary was just seething with debate over Calvinism. Every time you sat down you got into a hot debate with somebody over election, predestination, the extent of the atonement or something. A very well-known Greek professor by the name of S. Lewis Johnson had at one time been quite the student of Lewis Chafer but when he went off to England to get his doctorate he came back a five-point Calvinist. Because he was a true southern gentleman from South Carolina, he realized that, though he didn’t technically violate the doctrinal statement, he had the integrity to see that it violated the spirit of the doctrinal statement so he resigned his position. Now we have faculty members at Dallas who violate the doctrinal statement verbatim and in spirit and try to figure out some way to use post-modern logic to justify their disagreement so they don’t have to resign because they lack integrity. But Lewis Johnson was old-school.
Dallas was just a hotbed of activity. It was great for me as a first and second year seminary student. I had not been well-educated in a lot of these issues about the history and intricacies of the argument so I just loved it. All this hot discussion. Anyway, at the Schaeffer conference there were a lot of questions and someone stood up and asked, “Dr. Schaeffer, do you believe in limited or unlimited atonement?” I just loved his answer. He said, “I was warned that if I came to Dallas, I would be asked that question. Let me answer it this way. God is sovereign enough to accomplish exactly what He wants to accomplish the way He wants to accomplish it.” That was it. That was a great way to just dodge the whole question and just leave it up to God.
 
One of the key issues in the U.S. is that it’s always debated over the issue of election and unlimited atonement. But if you go outside the U.S., the issue is eternal security. You go to Russia, you go to Ukraine, and you go to Belarus.  All of us who go over there find that the key issue is eternal security. It doesn’t matter what else you believe. It doesn’t matter how much you emphasize free will and how much you de-emphasize any kind of election or irresistible grace, if you believe in eternal security, the Russian Baptists brand you as a hyper-Calvinist because for them that’s the issue. It’s eternal security.
 
Even in this country there’s a lot of concern over whether or not a person can be eternally saved if they commit certain sins. In fact, I heard a debate on Hugh Hewitt’s talk show the other day. They were talking about something related to this and morality and whether God could really save someone who committed extreme sins like adultery. I’m in the car and I try to call in but I always get a busy signal. He’s talking about murder is just one of those sins someone can’t be forgiven of. He’s Jewish. I want to call in and say, “What about David?” They always ignore David and his conspiracy to kill the husband of Bathsheba, Uriah the Hittite, and that David is just as guilty of murder as anyone. But God forgave him of murder and adultery and all these other sins but they tend to conveniently forget that.
 
But we see here is a great verse on eternal security. ((CHART)) There’s this great chain of terms here that apply to the same, exact group of people and there’s no way you can exegetically break this connection. It’s like one time when I asked Al Ross a question. He was head of the Hebrew department when I was at Dallas Seminary. He had written a doctoral dissertation at Dallas on the Table of Nations and had gone on and gotten a second doctorate at Cambridge with an emphasis on Rabbinic theology. By the time he was forty he’d forgotten more about Hebrew than most students ever learned. I asked him about gaps in the genealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 10. He said, “With the numbers there you can’t break them. It’s impossible exegetically to break them. There can’t be any gaps in those genealogies.” You see, the problem we have is with archeology. It seems to put the age of civilizations much older than those numbers would allow. But you can’t break the numbers.
 
Well you can’t break this chain either. It may be uncomfortable for those people who don’t want to believe in eternal security but you can’t break it. You have a set group of people who start and at the end there’s a set group of people who are glorified. The last sentence in verse 40 is “and these whom He justified, He also glorified.” No one slips through the cracks. No one is dropped out of His hand. Jesus holds us in His hand. The Father holds us in His hand. He doesn’t lose one. No one slips in either. Those who are glorified are the same ones, no more and no less, than those who are justified.
 
If you just back it up, those who are justified are those who are called. Those whom He called, these He also justified. This doesn’t have to do with irresistible grace of God, the Holy Spirit as defined by Calvinism, but by the fact that God in His foreknowledge, that is, knowing who would respond to the gospel ahead of time, gives them a clear understanding of the gospel. But He gives others a clear understanding but this is an internal calling that is related to the Word of God, which is the external call as we pointed out in John 6, so this is related to those who are foreknown.
 
That’s the key thing. It starts with the foreknowledge of God as we see in the chain. “Those who He called, these He also justified” tells you it’s the same group of people. It’s the same thing in predestination. Those He predestined, He also called.” It’s the same at the very beginning. Those He foreknew, He also called.” Now going back by way of review, what did we say foreknowledge was? Foreknowledge is not election. It’s not a pre-determination or not a synonym for foreordination. It is a term meaning to know something ahead of time. That’s how it’s used in extra-Biblical literature, literature outside the Bible. That’s how it’s used in a number of places in the Bible and there are four places, as I pointed out, that there’s a debate because they’re related to salvation and you can’t just generate out of thin air a unique meaning for those few instances because God is the subject. That violates all the rules of lexicography.
 
Foreknowledge is the foundation and the cause for election as Peter says in 1 Peter 1:2, so that’s very clear that foreknowledge means that God in His omniscience takes into account those who would believe. He doesn’t elect, predestine, choose, whatever you want to call it on the basis because someone believed. But God, out of His own will and His own desire, predestined, or chooses a destiny for that group that will respond by faith because He has known whom they will be from eternity past.  He doesn’t cause their salvation or cause their faith, as Calvinists say, but His foreknowledge takes that into account.
 
One of the things which we’ll discover when we get more into the doctrine of election, which will come in chapter 9, that election for church age believers is corporate, not individual. God is not electing for individual salvation. It has to do with the fact God has elected those that are in Christ and He has predestined those who are in Christ to a destiny. So this gives us a chain grounded upon God’s foreknowledge. It’s the same group which means that no matter what you’re going through, no matter how chaotic life may be, no matter what suffering in our context you may face, you’re not going to lose your salvation. You’re not going to miss out on being glorified. God is going to take those who are justified and that same group will be glorified. God will not lose any. That’s the point here.
 
Remember that this passage here is really a passage of comfort to believers who are facing suffering and adversity and hostility. Then He is going to focus our attention on all that God has provided for us in the immediate context. It is a reminder that God is in control even in the midst of suffering. In the broader context of chapters one through eight, He is reminding us that God is the one who has not only condemned us under spiritual death but He justifies us and that justification is based upon His love and that love is not going to lose us. So the next nine verses are not only a conclusion to the spiritual life discussion of Romans 6, 7, and 8, but they’re a conclusion to the whole first eight chapters of the book.
 
Paul does this in a rhetorical manner where he raises seven rhetorical questions, and each one sort of advances the understanding. A rhetorical question is a question that is raised by a speaker or a writer and he doesn’t expect an answer to it. In fact, when he raises the question he assumes that the answer will be obvious and then he goes on to base the next point upon that answer to the first question. So Paul sort of stacks these on top of one another but in between a couple of them he does give the answer because it’s not quite as obvious as some others. As he does this the idea is to bring us to the point of the conclusion in verses 38 and 39 that nothing can separate us from the love of God.
 
What’s significant about that is that he has in his audience, as we’ve seen in the church in Rome, a number of Jewish background believers who have become believers in Christ. As a result of that, they might ask the question, “Well if we can’t be separated from the love of God, what happened to Israel? It seems like God has pretty much separated them from His love right now. Is there a future for God’s people, Israel?” And that’s going to be the focus of the next three chapters, Romans 9, 10, and 11. So Romans one through eight have focused on justification and sanctification. Then there’s a shift that occurs in Romans 9-11 to show how God’s righteousness is also consistent with His plan for Israel and consistent with everything that is taking place with Israel at that time in terms of their Divine discipline.
 
Then he asks the first question, “What then shall we say to these things?” He doesn’t give an answer to that. He just states the question, “What then shall we say to these things?” And then he answers it with his second question, “If God is for us, who is against us?” Then the answer is self-evident. If God is for us, nobody can really be against us. So if God is on our side, God plus one is a majority, so it really doesn’t matter who is against us because they can’t defeat God. So that’s the second question he asks in verse 31.
 
Then he asks the third question in verse 32 and in that question, he gives an answer. “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” We understand that God gave us everything in Christ. Then he asks a fourth question in verse 33, “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?” This is when he gives the first answer, “God is the one who justifies…” So how can anyone bring a charge against the elect, bring condemnation against a believer if God has already justified him? So that directly relates to the eternal security issue. If you are a believer, then you are in Christ, and by virtue of that, you are elect. And if you are in Christ, then no charge can be brought against you. You’re not going to lose your salvation. You have received the righteousness of Christ and been declared just because of that. So there is no sin you can commit that is too great for the grace of God. There’s no sin that you and I can commit that wasn’t foreknown by the omniscience of God in eternity past and that wasn’t paid for on the cross.
 
People who think, “Oh I can do something that will cause God to take away my salvation” fail to understand that the Scripture teaches that Christ paid for all sin and in God’s omniscience He didn’t forget one. He didn’t forget that you were special. Of all the billions of people on the planet, you were the one that committed a sin that God didn’t take into account on the cross so you’re going to lose your salvation? I’m being a little facetious but thinking you can lose your salvation is really just an act of arrogance, thinking that you’re the one who can do something God forgot about and is too great for the grace of God. If you understand what sin is, then it’s amazing that any of us get saved because sin is anything that violates the character of God. Anything that violates the character of God, whether it’s a little white lie or whether it’s genocide, it doesn’t matter. One act of violation of God’s character is enough to cause Divine condemnation. It doesn’t matter if it’s large or small.
 
In fact the original sin was nothing more than eating a piece of fruit. It’s not very dangerous; it’s not something that causes a lot of problems for people; it’s not horrible. But its consequences were egregious because it violated the character of God. So the fourth question is “Who can bring a charge against God’s elect?” The fifth question in verse 34 is “Who is he that condemns?” The condemnation is then contrasted with Christ’s death on the cross and what he did in payment for it in his elevation to heaven. Verse 35 brings us the sixth question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” And then this is further enhanced by the seventh question, “Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
 
I think it’s interesting that Paul doesn’t list sins there. He lists horrible things that happen because when we go through tribulation and distress, we say, “What happened to God’s love? Why is God letting this happen to me?” One of the things I struggle with in having discussions with some of my Jewish friends is this sticking point of the holocaust. This last week was Yom HaShoah which is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I was in Half Price Books over the weekend. I took some books in to get the pittance that they give you when you turn your books in but it’s better than nothing. Usually you spend it on something else. I found a small copy of Elie Wiesel’s book, “Night,” which was his first book. Elie Wiesel was a young survivor of Auschwitz. He wrote his reflections. He was raised as an Orthodox observant Jew on the path to being a rabbi and he came out of Auschwitz an atheist, doubting the existence of God. As did many Jews coming out of the Holocaust, wondering how could God let this happen? Questioning the goodness of God.
 
This is the major issue in the minds of many Jews. How could God choose them and then let them go through something like that?
It’s interesting that this last week in relation to that, the Jerusalem Post or another Jewish news item suggested a reason I thought was interesting because if a Christian had said it, they would get blasted by the press. This Jewish writer suggested that maybe it was because Jews just wouldn’t get up and leave Europe and go to Israel, that they were so comfortable being ensconced in the Gentile communities of the western world that they were in danger of losing their identity and God had to do something extreme to wake them up to get them to go back to Israel. Like I said there have been one or two Christian pastors who have made that statement and they have been castigated by our liberal press as being so lacking in compassion and forgiveness but this was an interesting article.
 
I think this is an accurate question that many Jews ask how a loving God can let horrible things happen. So this is a question that happens with people when they go through extended suffering. We get so self-absorbed and so focused on the pain that we ask why isn’t God helping us. So we’ll start with this first question.  “What then shall we say to these things?” What Paul is doing assuming that this is true; everything he’s just said in Romans 8: 28, 29, and 30, so what’s the point?  Why is this important? What should our response be since these things are true?
 
So he brings that to the forefront and this is a question we should each ask ourselves. In light of our belief that Romans 8:17-30 is true, what difference does that make in how we handle and face challenges, adversities, and difficulties in life? Then he asked the second question, “If God is for us, who is against us?” This points us to the omnipotence of God and it is a way of stating what is called an a fortiori argument. This is a Latin term for “from the stronger” and he’s going to state it here in one way and then he uses another form of the a fortiori argument in verse 32. The a fortiori argument is an argument that says if something is true, something that is larger or greater, then something within that scope that’s lesser would also be true.
 
For example, I could say, “It rained all over Houston last night.” I was in San Antonio last night and it was dry there but I looked at the radar loops this morning and saw that a lot of rain came through Houston so it’s likely to say it rained all over Houston last night. It rained over all of Houston is the universal statement. You might say, “Did it rain in the Heights?” Well, if it rained all over Houston, that’s the greater, then it would rain in the Heights, which is the lesser. You might say if it rained all over Houston last night, did it rain in Spring Branch? Yes, if it rained all over Houston, which is the greater, then it would be true by force of logic that it rained in Spring Branch. If it rained all over Houston last night, did it rain in Tanglewood? Yes, it rained all over Houston last night which is the greater, so it rained in Tanglewood, which is the lesser.
 
So if God is for us, and God is the most powerful force in the universe, God and God alone is omnipotent, then if God is on our side, then nothing can be against us. There’s nothing in the universe that can stand up to the omnipotence of God. This is an argument, from the stronger to the lesser. If God is for us. He’s on our side. If we are facing suffering, no matter how great it may seem, if we’re facing suffering God is for us, and whatever the source of the suffering, just the general corruption of the universe or some sort of Satanic-inspired attack, God is still greater than that because He’s greater than anything that exists inside the universe.
 
The a fortiori argument is then taken in a little more detail when we get into verse 32 which states, “He [God] who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” This is an extremely significant verse and one that’s very much worthy of your attention to memorize for difficult times. Paul starts off with the clear statement that God did not spare His own Son and with His Son He gave us everything and the argument here is that if God gave us everything with His Son, then whatever else we might need to handle the details of life, God has given us those lesser things as well. It’s a movement from the greater to the lesser.
 
I want to look at some of the terms here because it helps us review some of the doctrines we’ve studied in Romans. In the first statement he said, “He who did not spare His own Son…” This is the verb PHEIDOMAI which simply means to spare something or to withhold something of value from someone. It’s a statement that God did not withhold anything when he gave His Son. John 3:16, “God loved the world in this way or in such a manner that He gave His unique, one of a kind, Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” So God gave the most. He gave the greatest degree in giving His son. He did not hold back.
 
Now there’s an interesting connection here because this is a word that’s not used very much. I think it’s only used a couple of times in the New Testament but it’s used in the Septuagint in the Old Testament in Genesis 22:12.  Here we have the story of Isaac. Rabbinical studies focus on Isaac and they teach that Isaac wasn’t a small boy. That’s often what we see depicted in some Christian books. I think, unfortunately, that Christians writers who are writing books for children, in order to get them to relate to Bible stories like David and Isaac, they want to portray them as little boys but in both cases, these were young men, at least late adolescent, if not young men in their twenties.  I think Isaac had probably reached physical maturity, anywhere from 18 to as old as 20-25 years of age.
 
We have this word in Romans 8:32 PHEIDOMAI used here in Genesis. God is speaking to Abraham after this whole event takes place when an angel stayed the hand of Abraham and God said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld [spared] your son, your only son, from Me.” To understand this we have to realize what a prize Isaac was to Abraham. Abraham loved Isaac more than anything because Abraham and Sarah had not been able to have children. God had promised and promised and promised that Abraham would have a son with Sarah, not Ishmael from Hagar. So Abraham loved Isaac and as the years went by and Isaac grows up, God is testing Abraham again and again as he grows to maturity, understanding that Isaac is the child of promise.
 
Now God gives the ultimate test for Abraham. It’s not a test to see if Abraham is willing to kill Isaac. That’s how people present it so much by asking if Abraham is willing to commit murder for God. That’s a human viewpoint distortion. We have to look at through the lens of Scripture. Now the Old Testament doesn’t give us some of this information but we do get it later on in the New Testament in Hebrews. In Hebrews 11:17 we’re told that “By faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son, [same as is used of Jesus Christ] it was he to whom it was said, “In Isaac your descendants shall be called. He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead. Abraham is not thinking, “I’m going to murder my son.” No, Abraham finally understood over the course of His life that God made a promise and God is going to secure that promise. God does not go back on His word. God was able to re-invigorate Abraham’s and Sarah’s sexual and reproductive capabilities so that ten or twenty years beyond their ability to have children, this was regenerated. Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac. If God can do that, Abraham has finally learned that even if Isaac dies and the seed line has not progressed, God will fulfill His promise and He will bring Isaac back from the dead. So Abraham understands that the issue isn’t was he willing to murder Isaac or not. The issue is whether he will trust God to raise Isaac from the dead or not. That’s the perspective.
 
So Abraham fulfills the test. If we look at Genesis 22:2, we read, “Now it came about after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac…” This is a foreshadowing of God giving His only Son, Jesus Christ. Notice that God doesn’t even take into consideration Ishmael because Ishmael was sort of an accident by way of Hagar but that’s not Abraham’s son that is his heir. Verse 2 continues, “Go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.” The land of Moriah is believed by the Jews to be where Solomon built the First Temple. It was there on the foundation stone in Jewish tradition which is the stone that the Dome of the Rock is built on. That rock that’s in there that none of us have been able to go see for about fifteen years. They won’t let Christians in but that rock that’s there is thought by Jewish tradition to be the place where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. That is on Moriah.
 
A burnt offering is a very specific term. This is described in Leviticus 1. You have to slaughter the sacrifice, then you dismember the sacrifice, put the carcass on the altar and then build up the firewood around the carcass and light the fire until everything is completely consumed by the fire and the smoke and the offering all ascends to heaven which is why it’s called the Hebrew word alah, meaning to go up. So Abraham isn’t just told to sacrifice him but sacrifice him as a burnt offering. This is a pretty extreme thing for a parent to do to a son. So Abraham, we’re told, “rose up early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day [they’re coming from the south] Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place form a distance.”
 
Now there’s another interesting thing here. A place along what is known as the Way of the Patriarchs has been discovered. There’s a trail that runs from the north through the south by Jerusalem and to the south in Israel. From the hill country in the north through Shem and down past Jerusalem, down past Bethlehem, down to Hebron. Hebron is where Abraham was living. This is approximately a day’s journey from the temple mount. This one location I went to last year that at this location, it’s the first time you can see the Temple Mount if you’re walking from the south. There is a mikveh there, which is a ceremonial washing place that they’ve discovered from the second temple period because as pilgrims would make their way to Jerusalem it was at this place where they first could see the Temple Mount. They would get up in the morning and have a ceremonial washing to make sure they were cleansed before they went to the Temple. They would arrive at the Temple Mount by that afternoon.
 
It is believed that location is close by the location where Abraham arrived and saw the hill of Moriah for the first time. “So Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there, and we will worship and return to you. So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son’,” Isaac had to be a strong young man to carry all the wood. Because it takes a lot of wood to burn up a human carcass. So he has to carry the wood and he took in his hand the fire [in a brass or bronze censor] and the knife. And the two of them went together. Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “My father”. And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said “Behold the fire and wood but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
 
Here’s the clue to Abraham’s mental attitude. “Abraham, said, ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son’.” Now that clues us in doctrinally what this is depicting. This is depicting a substitutionary sacrifice and that’s the whole point of this episode that God is the one who supplies the substitutionary sacrifice. So Abraham before he ever gets there says that God is going to provide a lamb. He knows that because of who God is and His character that he’s not going to have to actually kill Isaac and if he does, God’s going to bring him back to life and God will provide the perfect sacrifice. So they go on together and in verse 9 we read, “Then they came to the place of which God had told him, and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar…”
 
If Isaac is over the age of 16, Isaac recognizes what’s going on and he’s doing this voluntarily.  In Rabbinical theology they refer to this as the akedah, the binding of Isaac. They emphasize the fact that Isaac had to do this willingly. Isaac is showing just as much faith as Abraham is. He has figured this out. He’s not dumb and he could have easily fought his father and run off. But he has to submit to his father and to being tied and bound and being put on the altar. Then verse 10, “Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.” At this point the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven. Most artists depict this with an angel, not realizing that the angel of the Lord is God, Himself. God stayed his hand and said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God, and you have not withheld your son, your only son from Me.” 
 
That’s the point. That’s the emphasis of this verb in Romans 8:32 that nothing is withheld by God. He has given everything already for our salvation and so if He has not withheld anything, to the extent of giving His Son to die on the Cross for us all, He can give everything else we need. The phrase “for us all” is the Greek phrase HUPER, the preposition plus the genitive emphasizing substitution. That’s the emphasis in this sacrifice in Genesis 22, substitutionary death. God provides a substitute for Isaac, just as God provided a substitute for all of us. There are two prepositions in Greek that emphasize substitution. The first is the preposition ANTI and we see it in some other contexts here: Matthew 2:22 when Joseph heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod. You see, it’s one thing in place of another. That’s the idea of ANTI. Matthew 17:27, Jesus is talking about the tax to Caesar, “However so that we do not offend them, go to the sea and throw in a hook, and take the first fish that comes up and when you open its mouth, you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for you and Me.” It’s “in place of”, that’s the idea of the preposition. In Luke 11:11 Jesus says, “Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish; he will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he?” The same idea where anti is replacement or substitution so this is the idea here. You can’t avoid it.
 
The atonement is an example; the atonement isn’t some sort of general satisfaction of God of justice to the universe which is called the governmental theory. It’s a substitutionary atonement. Now for examples of HUPER we see in passages like Matthew 20:28, “Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for [instead of, or in place of the] many.” It is substitutionary. Luke 22:19, Jesus said at the Last Supper, “This is my body which is given for [instead of or as a substitute for] you.” In John 13:37, Peter uses it. It’s not a salvation passage. Peter says, “Lord, why can I not follow You right now? I will lay down my life for you.” Peter understands its substitution. So this is the idea. Romans 5:6 and 7, “Christ died for [substitution] the ungodly.”
So in Romans, chapter 9 when we look at what Paul is saying there in reference to God’s gift of Jesus, “How did God who did not spare His own Son, but delivered us up for us all [substitutionary idea], how shall He not with Him give us all things?” This is a reminder we already have in Jesus everything necessary to face and handle any adversity, any suffering that may come along.
 
Next time we’ll come back and look at the remainder of these questions as to who could separate us from the love of Christ. Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? We’ll come back and probably wrap up this chapter next time.

Romans 098b-No Condemnation: Justification

Romans 8:33 NASB95
Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies;
Romans 098b-No Condemnation: Justification
 
We are in Romans, chapter 8. Last week we came out of and now we’re in the last section, the last nine verses of this wonderful chapter. We’re focusing on the various questions that Paul raises to drive home his point. These last nine verses not only serve as a conclusion to chapters 6, 7, and 8 but they also form a conclusion to the entire first eight chapters of the epistle. At the same time they form a transition to what is coming up in chapter 9, which is a major shift in focus for God’s plan in Israel.
 
The major theme in Romans, as we have seen, is God’s righteousness and how do we as fallen sinners have any kind of fellowship or rapport with God who is perfectly righteous. This has been demonstrated in chapters two and three that man is unrighteous. We’ve seen that the only solution to that is the imputation of righteousness, which we review tonight. Imputation and justification are covered in the last part of chapter 3, chapter 4, and chapter 5, which forms the transition to chapter 6. Chapter 6 focuses on how the justified person is supposed to live the sanctified or the spiritual life.
 
Then coming out of these chapter, the question that is raised is if God is so faithful and God is so righteous, then what about the fact that the Jews seem to be getting shunted or set aside in favor of the Gentiles right now. Has God forgotten about His people Israel? Chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus our attention on God’s righteousness in relation to Israel and the promise to Israel. When we get into those three chapters there are some really wonderful things there. But there are some complicated passages, some complex verses, that we’ll need to work through but as long as we remember the context we can work our way through them without a lot of difficulty.
 
Unfortunately, what happens is that when we sort of chop things up people can read theology into various sections. Last time as we looked at verses 31 and 32, I pointed out that there are seven rhetorical questions that Paul asks. A rhetorical question is a question that a writer or an orator uses in order to focus the thinking of his audience but without expecting an answer. So by asking these questions, Paul is doing a couple of different things. He’s reminding people of what he has taught. He is focusing their attention on what to think logically about the conclusions to what he has said so that he can lead their thinking to the proper conclusion which is stated and emphasized in verses 35 down through 39. That is, the security of the believer in God’s faithfulness, because God is immutable; God is faithful; God is righteous. Therefore, nothing can separate us from the love of God so it’s a great passage on eternal security.
 
But before we get there tonight we’re going to look at verse 33 and perhaps verse 34. They are connected in terms of the fact that verse 33 focuses on justification. Justification is almost always set up or spoken of in a context where the opposite is emphasized as well and that is condemnation. So justification is brought up in verse 33 and that leads directly to the next rhetorical question, which is “Who is he who condemns?” 
 
Now these are the questions that are asked. The first is the general question, “What then shall we say to these things?” Having gone through the doctrines covered in the first eight chapters, Paul says, “What shall we say to these things? He concludes by saying “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Now this statement is what is known as an a fortiori argument. Last time I gave a couple of illustrations and somebody came up afterwards and said that having heard about this for years and having it explained for years, my illustrations were so simple that they finally understood it. Well, I guess it takes a simple mind to give a simple illustration!
 
An a fortiori argument, which is a Latin phrase, is basically an idea stating that the strongest premise, such as John is worth a hundred billion dollars, then the conclusion is that he can pay your electric bill. Because he has a hundred billion dollars he has all of that wealth then a paltry $150 to $250 electric bill would be nothing for him to pay if he is worth a hundred billion dollars. So the argument is from the stronger to the lesser. So if God is omnipotent and God is able to handle every situation, then moving from that, God is able to handle any situation, any difficulty in your life or my life. If God is in control of human history, then that means God is perfectly capable of handling any problems that come up in your life or my life. That’s called an a fortiori argument.
 
The emphasis here is in the context of dealing with adversity. Adversity is going to come up again in verse 35 when Paul asks the question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?” In other words, if we’re going through difficult times is that a sign that God no longer cares for us, that God is not in control or our circumstances are so out of control that God is rather helpless? Now that is a conclusion that some people have reached in trying to deal with the problem of evil and the problem of suffering. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book a couple of decades ago called Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. His basic conclusion was that God just can’t control these things. He’s not quite omnipotent. If He was, and if he was really a loving God, then He wouldn’t let these bad things happen to basically good people.
 
We understand from Scripture that God allows evil to run its course because God allows His creatures to exercise free will. They can make good decisions or bad decisions. If they make bad decisions there will be worse consequences from those bad decisions. In order to allow human volition to run its course, it means God must allow those consequences to come. It’s not that God is not in control but that God is allowing mankind to work things out according to his own volition.
 
As a result of that, there’s going to be opposition to Christians living in the Devil’s world. We call it the Devil’s world because he’s called the Prince of the Power of the Air, he’s called the God of this Age, and because this is the Devil’s world he has stolen the authority of it from mankind. Man was placed on earth as God’s representative. In it says God created man in His image and likeness to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field. When man disobeyed God by yielding to Satan’s temptation in the garden, then the result was that Satan usurped a temporary authority over the planet. Therefore we’re living in the Devil’s world.
 
When Satan tempted Jesus he offered him the kingdoms of the world. Jesus did not say, “Well who do you think you are? I run things, you don’t. You don’t have the right to offer me the kingdoms of the world.” Jesus didn’t say that because he recognized that until Satan is finally defeated and destroyed at the end of the Tribulation period, he has usurped this authority and the current environment is in the Devil’s world. Therefore we are going to face adversity just because we live in a fallen system, a corrupt system, so there will be things that don’t go right.
 
Most things don’t ever go the way we think they should but more than that we will also face overt hostility. There are several examples of ways in which in our culture we are facing increasing antagonism as Christians. 1963 is a date that many scholars choose for a variety of reasons as the time when we moved into a post-Christian environment. It has to do with various political decisions, various judicial decisions, and things of that nature. Since then things have been deteriorating many decades but finally due to a variety of factors by 1963 we could say we have moved in our culture beyond the influence and sort of used up the last part of the legacy of the Puritans and evangelicals who founded this country.
 
Now we see different ways we are attacked. One way in which we’re attacked is that some eleven or twelve years after the attacks on 9/11 the media often labels conservative Christians with the same broad brush-strokes as Muslim extremists. One fundamentalist is the same as another fundamentalist, they say. Just because one’s a Christian and one’s a Muslim doesn’t make it any different; you’re an extremist, therefore, you are a problem. We see this bubbling up when we pay attention to some of the blogs and some of the news items that are coming out after this horrible thing that occurred in Boston this last week, the explosions, the bombs set off. Well you already have some people saying this type of bomb is typical of right-wing extremist. They never say it’s left-wing extremists; they never quite admit it. It’s right-wing extremists and they say it’s probably someone from some Christian group or some right-wing, ultra-conservative group so they begin to attack Christians and say that fundamentalist Christians are just the same as fundamentalist Muslims.
 
No one ever stops and asks how many times do we have Bible-believing, conservative Christians going around blowing themselves up to kill other people in order to make their point. Now you may have some Catholic extremists during terrorist activities in Ireland or things like that but we’re not talking about things like that. We’re talking about conservative Bible-believing Christians. It just doesn’t happen. They don’t do things like that. You may have some radical, pseudo-Christian groups like the Aryan Brotherhood or some others who do some other things but they’re not conservative Bible-believing Christians. So the world seems to be attacking more and more various Christians.
 
Another way in which we’ve seen this is that for the last two or three decades the civic observance of Christianity and nativity scenes at Christmas, and resurrection celebrations and motifs at Easter have been challenged. It seems to be okay in some places for an Islamic crescent to be permitted or for a Jewish menorah to be permitted but not a nativity scene. In New York City, where nativity scenes have been banned, lawyers argue that Jewish and Islamic symbols have a cultural or secular dimensions but that nativity scenes were purely religious and so had no place in the Christmas holiday. Another event that happened very recently, just within the last month, a school principal in Alabama made national news by prohibiting any mention of Easter, Easter bunny, or Easter eggs because it might be a religious offense to non-Christians. As I listened to all of this discussion about this I never heard anyone stand up and say, “Wait a minute, the term Easter really has its derivation from Ishtar, the pagan goddess of fertility.” That’s where you get the bunny and the eggs. There’s no bunny hopping around outside the empty grave. When the stone rolled back there weren’t painted eggs inside the tomb that the two Mary’s suddenly found in their early morning Easter egg hunt. All of these trappings they’re attacking have nothing to do with the Resurrection story at all. No one ever said that. It’s like these traditions that have attached themselves like Velcro to the Biblical event. There was a lot of to do about that.
 
Now in Texas you can Google this. About 80% of the school districts in Texas and many other states have adopted a curriculum that is blatantly pro-Moslem. It’s called the C-scope curriculum. In history it compares those who were engaged in the Boston Tea Party, the Patriots who incidentally were being honored at the Boston Marathon, and says they are really terrorists and what they did at the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism and therefore, those Christians are not any different from Islamic terrorists. This has been verified by the Texas legislature and part of the problem is that there’s a lot of secrecy involved with this. They’ve had days when they’ve had their women students wear hijab and dress like that but they would never do that with Christians or let everybody wear a cross one day so they could see what it would be like to be a Christian. So this has been accepted and a lot of people are waking up to this right now.
 
In 2009 an activist judge in New Hampshire ordered a home school mother to stop home schooling her daughter because the little girl “reflected too strongly” her mother’s Christian faith. So here we have a judge telling a mother she has to put her child in public school because she’s communicated too much Christianity to her children. Media Matters, which is a non-profit media watchdog organization on the liberal side, stated clearly in its application to the IRS for its application for 501C3 status that it would be an anti-Christian organization and they were given non-profit status. Bumper stickers have been seen saying, “So Many Christians; So Few Lions”. The overt hostility to Christianity increases.
 
Recently in the news a German family was seeking asylum, political asylum in the U.S. from Germany because the Germans were going to force them to quit home schooling their children and put them into public schools so they were seeking asylum here. Our president and his administration are not going to grant them asylum and are sending them back. They’re being covertly persecuted for their Christian beliefs and we’re not going to protect them.
 
Then recently I had this e-mail sent out to everyone. An army officer, Lt. Colonel Jack Rich told other officers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky that specifically Christian organizations like the American Family Association and Christian Research Council are domestic hate groups because they oppose homosexuality. We’re going to see more and more of that kind of thing if we accept homosexual marriage. When anybody speaks out against that they will be considered to be a hateful person. That term hate is being redefined as if you disagree with what is politically correct then you are a hate monger. This just goes on and on.
 
We are living in a time of hostility, increasing hostility, toward Christianity. The reality is, though, God is greater than all of this and even if we end up going to the lions like the Christians did in ancient Rome God is greater than any opposition and so we need to trust the Lord and He is going to provide for everything. When we ask the question, “What shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” the answer is that no one can ultimately destroy us or destroy our salvation.
 
This was emphasized in , again, “He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” He did not spare His own Son in the same way, as I pointed out last time, as Abraham who would not spare or withhold from God because Abraham understood that God would bring him back to life even if he died. I pointed out from that, that this is a great verse for understanding substitutionary atonement: that He delivered Him up for us all.
 
We have passages like , , that use this same Greek preposition huper, as well as the second preposition peri emphasizing substitution. Two great verses we’ve seen in Romans for this are and 7, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare to die.” This is emphasizing substitution. Christ died in our place.
 
 That led to the next statement or question on Paul’s mind. He says, “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?” I want you to look at the first verse in , “Therefore there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ.” That is a clear statement coming out of everything Paul has said up to this point that there’s no condemnation against the believer. Paul is reminding us of this in verse 33. “Who then can bring a charge against God’s elect?” And he answers it, at least the way it is translated in the NKJV; it is translated “It is God who justifies,” as if it is an answer. Now some of you may have a different translation that handles that differently. The problem in the Greek is that there are no punctuation marks so generally speaking, most translations handle this as if the question is in the first part of the verse and then it is “God who justifies” moving us to the next point. That’s how the NKJV handles it and the NASB and the NIV. Some may be a little different so I just wanted to raise that point that if yours reads differently you’ll know why.
 
I believe the second part of the verse is the answer to the first verse so we’ll look at this as we go through the passage. Now the main verb that is used in the first part of the verse “bring a charge” really clues us in to what’s going on here. The verb is egkaleo. The root is kaleo, which means to call. For example we studied that root verb in verse 28, “those who are the called according to His purpose” but it has this en preposition which gives it a different meaning. At its root it would have the idea to call in somebody but it’s used in the concept where you’re calling somebody in to answer certain accusations that are brought against them. And so it came to mean to accuse someone or to bring a legal accusation against someone in a court of law. So what we see against the context here is not experiential relationships but legal standings.
 
I remind you of that because this is what is so important in understanding the Biblical teaching on justification. Justification doesn’t mean, “just as if I had never sinned”. That’s one of those little sayings people come up with and they think it helps them to remember it, but justification doesn’t mean “just as if you’d never sinned.” You have sinned but you are credited legally with the righteousness of Christ. All of this has to do with legality in the courtroom of God. Righteousness is a word having to do with the standard of God. The same word that’s used to righteousness is also used for justice in both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and Greek of the New Testament.
 
So that when we read these terms they drive us to understand this as a courtroom setting. In justification we are declared righteous. That doesn’t mean we are righteous. It doesn’t change our makeup. This is the idea that you get in Roman Catholic theology, that there is an infused righteous so that a person becomes morally changed. We’re not morally changed. Our legal standing before God is what is changed. This is the historic understanding of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith.
 
Now Paul asks this question, “Who shall bring any charge against those who God has chosen?” The term that is used for “chosen”, often translated God’s elect, has an interesting background to it. It’s the word eklektos. We get our English word eclectic from it, choosing different things to put things together. You might have someone purely conservative, someone else who’s purely liberal, and they’re going to pick and choose different things, a sort of patchwork quilt of ideas. That would be called an eclectic system because they’ve chosen different things. That’s the root word eklektos. Now this is often thought to refer to God’s selection of individuals for salvation. But again that’s not what it’s saying.
 
I’ve dealt with this back in , , and 30, in terms of understanding the calling of God and predestination. The word eklektos was not used there. We get an idea there from some ice cream bars. I pointed this out when I came back from Israel last year, the doctrine of the Magnum bar. If you don’t remember or you weren’t here, one of my favorite things in life is ice cream. I could just live on ice cream. Good ice cream, not some of this swill they serve at some places. It’s got to be good ice cream. A lot of ice cream bars you get in America when you go into some convenience store are not of good quality but Magnum bars are really good quality ice cream. They really have a wider variety of flavors outside the U.S. but anyway, they started selling them in the U.S. not long ago.
 
In Israel I had a habit of having one or two or three a day whenever we would stop. I kept trying to learn to read the Hebrew writing and the labels. Modern Hebrew is a little different and they have a very sophisticated way of taking root words that I would know from Biblical studies and they add a lot of different suffixes and prefixes in order to allow these words to work with a lot of modern vocabulary. You might have a basic word such as rapha which in Scripture talks about health or healing and a form of it becomes a term for a doctor. A feminine form would be a term for a nurse or hospital. All these terms would be built off of that same basic Biblical root.
 
I was asking our Israeli guide what a word on the Magnum Bar meant. It was mobecharim. He said that means choice almond. The hard consonants in the middle “ch” that’s the word for election or elect in Hebrew. That’s the counterpart to eklektos. I thought about that and it’s one of those things where the lights go on and that the idea here isn’t selection in terms of choosing one person but looking at it as a group, as a collective whole, that this is a choice group, emphasizing the quality of the group.
 
As a result of that as I did some additional studies with various writers and found that this has been set forth by many people as the primary meaning of the Greek word eklektos and the doctrine of election in the New Testament really focuses on a collective sense and it focuses on the qualitative aspect of the body of Christ. This is reinforced by the fact that in the Greek here in the word eklektos there is no article in the Greek. I’m getting into a lot of technical grammar here but it’s important in terms of understanding the difference. In English we have an indefinite article and a definite article. “A” or “an” are indefinite articles. So I could hold up a piece of paper and say, “This is a piece of paper.” It’s just a generic or any piece of paper. But if I say, “This is the paper” then I’m indicating its individuality and I’m distinguishing it from all other pieces of paper. That’s how the definite article works in English.
 
Technically it’s improper in Greek to refer to the article as a definite article because there’s no indefinite article. There’s no “a” or “an”. You either have a word with an article or a word without an article. There are about nine different ways in which the Greek article can function other than just distinguishing this one thing from all the other things in its class. This is what’s going on in John, chapter 1 when John says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.” There’s no article with theos there, the word for God, and it’s emphasizing the qualitative aspect of the noun and not the distinguishing it as The God: all of the attributes of God, all the qualities of God as part of His nature. This word eklektos here doesn’t have an article so it’s emphasizing the qualitative aspect of this group. It’s in the plural indicating the collective so it’s a collective noun where it’s emphasizing the quality of the noun so this reinforces the idea that who should bring a charge against God’s choice ones.
 
If you’re a part of that group of God’s choice ones and you are if you put your faith alone in Christ alone, then you are in Christ and you are part of that choice group known as the saints in the church age. Then if you’re a part of that choice group, the implication is that there’s no one greater than God so there’s no one can bring a charge against you, that is, a legal accusation against you. The NKJV translates mobecharim there as choice.
 
There’s an Old Testament example of how this word is used. “Among all these people there were 700 choice men [a battle with the tribe of Benjamin]. It is used to indicate the qualitative aspect of a group. Now the question asked, “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?” and the answer is that it’s God who justifies. What’s the implication here? The implication is that if God has declared someone to be just, then no one can appeal that decision because there’s no higher court. No one can bring a charge against us. This is just great news for us to understand that one of the implications of the doctrine of justification is that we’re declared not guilty. We’re declared righteous so that can never be reversed. That can never be turned back. We have a security in our salvation that can never be lost because there is no one that can ever be lost. There is no one that has more power, more ability than God to bring a charge against us and to overturn His decision. We are declared righteous.
 
This has a certain implication. I want to connect it to a verse we’ve discovered several times. I think it’s important to just tie some of these concepts together for us. In we see the flow of what Paul is saying here. The moment we are saved, we are identified with Christ and that identification places us in Christ. This is a specific term Paul uses a lot to talk about our new legal standing before God because we’re in Christ. We’re covered by the righteousness of Christ. Verse 12 says, “Having been buried with Him in baptism by which you were also raised up with Him…” This is what happens and water baptism pictures this. At the instant you’re saved there is a legal transaction that takes place instantaneously in heaven. Jesus Christ, using the Holy Spirit, identifies us with His death, burial and resurrection. So just as in water baptism a person is immersed in the water, indicating identification, when they come out they’re in a new state. The water pictures cleaning just as the utilization of the Holy Spirit would indicate positional cleansing from all sin. And so that baptism by the Holy Spirit is something that applies to us the work of Christ on the Cross so we’re completely cleansed of all sin, positionally. We are no longer unjust; we are declared justified.
 
Then in verse 13 Paul says, “When you were dead in your transgressions [in the past as an unbeliever] and the uncircumcision of the flesh [terms that refer to the fact that the person was not yet a believer, they were still in their sins and spiritually dead] He made you alive.” That was the position we became regenerate. We were spiritually dead and then God made us alive together with Him.
 
Then we have another participle for forgiveness. It shouldn’t be translated as a finite verb. It probably has a causal sense to it or maybe a temporal sense. “He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us.” So the question is, when were sins paid for? When were they canceled? When were they forgiven? Were they forgiven when you trusted Christ or were they forgiven when Christ died on the cross? According to these verses they were forgiven when Christ died on the cross when He nailed it to the cross. Then it’s applied or realized in the moment of regeneration when we trust in Christ. As we looked at we see that the key idea here is this participle “having forgiven” which is charizomai, the gracious canceling of a debt. It emphasizes grace and it emphasizes the cancellation of a sum or money or a debt that is owed and it means to forgive or pardon an action so if it’s translated casually it has the idea because “He had already forgiven or cancelled our sins.” He regenerated us because He had already cancelled the debt in the past. Or it could be translated as a temporal participle. “He made us alive again after He had cancelled the debt.” They both make the same point. Verse 14, “Having canceled out the certificate of debt.” That word for canceled means to wipe out, to rub out, to erase, eradicate, or remove. That’s why we can say there’s no condemnation against us.
 
Who can bring a charge against us? None because the certificate of debt, the indictment, has been wiped out, blotted out, erased at the cross by the work of Christ. Not by anything you have done or that I’ve done. We can’t do anything. It was completely done and finished at the cross so that the charge, the indictment against us is dealt with and wiped out at the cross. Then we say, “Well, isn’t everyone saved?’ The reason people aren’t saved is that they’re still spiritually dead. The indictment was wiped out at the cross but their condition of being spiritually dead continues. We’re born spiritually dead and that condition isn’t changed until we trust in Christ. At that instant when we trust in Christ we are regenerated. Why? Because He’s already canceled the debt. The legal debt against us was canceled at the cross and it’s applied and we’re regenerated when we believe. That’s when we become regenerate.
 
Now this word exaleipho meaning to rub out or to erase is the counterpart to the Old Testament word machah which also means to wipe something out. We have it used in a couple of significant passages, for example in where the Psalmist prays, “Hide your face from my sins and blot out all of my iniquities.” It’s that idea that God’s going to cancel or wipe out the sins against us. In that case it’s talking about forgiveness for sins after salvation. In Isaiah God says, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins.”
 
This is a great comfort to people because so many people live through the Christian life so concerned they’re going to lose salvation, so concerned that they’ve done something that made God mad at them and God’s not going to save them. They think that they’re going to lose their salvation. Yet we have great comfort from both Old Testament passages and New Testament passages that God promises a complete eradication of sin and that He will not remember it. That means He’s not going to hold it against us ever again. , “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect. It is God who justifies.”
 
Let’s quickly review how justification takes place. There are really two doctrines that come together in justification. The first is imputation and the second is justification. Now these are not part of everyday language. You’re not going to go down to HEB and find somebody using the word imputation. You’re not going to find too many people talking about justification. You’re not going to go down to the local bar and find anybody using those kinds of words. We’ve lost that. These are words that were common words in English fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years ago. A lot of which is a result of the influence of the Bible, because people read the Bible. These were words that were used to translate the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament into English so they were a part of everybody’s vocabulary. The more we move away from Christianity the Devil attacks through our vocabulary. People don’t read their Bible any more. They lose Biblical vocabulary in the culture. So we sometimes have to redefine those words.
 
Point 1. Imputation is the action of the Justice of God [God functioning as a judge] whereby He either assigns condemnation or blessing to someone. Condemnation is a sign credited or attributed to a human being. There are two categories of imputation: real imputations and judicial imputations. You’re not going to find too many people who teach this anymore. I didn’t generate this. I think there were older nineteenth century theologians who used these distinctions. Lewis Sperry Chafer did an excellent job making these distinctions. Unfortunately theologians today don’t think very precisely and I don’t find anybody who discusses this. I know that when I went to Preston City Bible Church in 1998 when I went up there for an interview, one of the questions they asked was to explain the difference between real and judicial imputations. That was on other ordination exams that were used in a variety of doctrinal churches. If you had never read Lewis Sperry Chafer you wouldn’t know those distinctions. Since Dallas Seminary basically quit requiring students to read Lewis Sperry Chafer after the mid-seventies on, Preston City Bible Church had gotten a number of questionnaire responses form candidates who couldn’t answer the question. Consequently all of the 100 applications they’ve received for the position they all got thrown in the trash because nobody knew how to answer this very basic question just because they hadn’t read Chafer.
 
Point number two is to define real imputations. Real imputations credit something to a person which truly belongs to him. What this means is that what is being credited to somebody has some sort of affinity or some sort of similarity between what is being imputed and the target. There’s a compatibility between the two things. For example, in the Old Testament we’re told that Adam’s original sin is imputed to every human being’s sin nature at birth. That imputation of the guilt of Adam’s original sin to a corrupt sinful infant at birth shows there a compatibility there. There’s an affinity between the sin nature and the imputation of Adam’s original sin. And the same way, when a person is regenerated and is given a new human spirit, which is oriented to heaven and eternality, eternal life is imputed to that human spirit so there is an affinity between what is imputed and that to which it is imputed. That’s a real imputation, meaning there’s a real similarity between the two.
 
Point three says that judicial imputation has a disconnect between what’s imputed and that to which it’s imputed. They don’t fit. They don’t go together. It is simply a judicial declaration. For example, at the cross you have the perfectly righteous Jesus Christ to whom are imputed our sins. There’s no affinity between His perfect sinless nature and our sins. So it’s a judicial crediting of something that really doesn’t belong to Him. The same way when we believe in Christ His perfect righteousness is then imputed to us. It doesn’t belong to us, it doesn’t coordinate with anything in our lives, but it is judicially declared to be ours. So this is a judicial imputation given to us. Now that distinguishes the different kinds so when we say God imputes something to us, it’s not something we deserve, something that is natural to us. It’s something that is purely the result of a legal declaration.
 
The fourth point is that imputation derives from a Latin term imputare which just like the Greek word logizomai, it’s an accounting term and it means reckoning or charging something to someone’s account. If you’ve got a background in bookkeeping or accounting then you understand this concept of imputing or crediting something to someone’s account. It would be comparable to someone who has a 300 credit rating going to a mortgage company to take out a mortgage and someone who is related to him, a father or mother who has a 790 credit rating coming in and saying they will co-sign on the loan so that the bank doesn’t look at the lousy credit of the person who is applying for the loan. They look at the credit of the person who is co-signing the loan because they know their credit is what matters. They’re taking responsibility for the loan.
 
Imputation has this idea of legally crediting something to someone’s account. So the first judicial imputation that occurs in terms of all of salvation is the imputation that happened in A.D. 33 when all our personal sins were credited to Christ. This is what occurred between 12 noon and 3 P.M. when God covers the face of Jerusalem and Golgotha there so that no one can see what is happening on the cross. This is the first time Jesus cries out, “My God. My God, Why are you forsaking me?” because at that point the perfect Lamb of God without spot or blemish receives in His person the judicial imputation of our sins. He becomes legally condemned, legally guilty, for our sin and pays the penalty for it.
 
and 15 talks about this, “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, [the imputation of spiritual death] even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died [the imputation of Adam’s original sin to all human beings], much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many [the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the many].
 
So this is the second judicial imputation which is Christ’s Divine righteousness to man. This is in , “The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned, for on the one hand the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift [that’s Christ’ incarnation and atonement] arose from many transgressions resulting in justification.” So Christ’s righteousness is credited to us so we can be declared righteous. The seventh point is that the result is then that man is declared righteous, He is not made righteous, sin isn’t overlooked, and the penalty is paid for. It’s not just as if I’d never sinned. We’re declared by God to be righteous, not because of anything we’ve done but because of we possess the righteousness of Christ.
 
((CHART)) So here’s a diagram. Here we are as sinners. We have no righteousness. says, “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.” At the cross, Jesus Christ who is perfectly righteous receives the imputation of our sins, our lack of righteousness. says, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” So “he who knew no sin was made sin” is a judicial imputation—so that we who lack righteousness can be made righteous. That is a judicial imputation So that our lack of righteousness is covered by Christ’s perfect righteousness. What God is looking at, then, is that perfect righteousness of Christ and on that basis, His righteousness we’re declared righteous and God can bless us. This is by faith alone.
 
This is what we saw in referencing that at that point Abraham had already believed in the Lord and the Lord had imputed it to him as righteousness. That imputation of righteousness comes through faith alone. The Old Testament also has a picture of this where Zechariah in chapter 3 is having a vision and God shows him Joshua, the high priest, standing before the Angel of the Lord who is probably the Lord Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Satan, the accusing one, is the one standing at the right hand attempting to bring a charge against Joshua. That’s the question here in , “Who can bring a charge against you?” The only one who’s going to try is Satan. He tried to do that with Joshua but the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you.” This would be the Angel of the Lord saying to Satan and God the Father. “The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebukes you. Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and was standing before the Angel. Then in verse 4 we read, “Then He answered [God the Father on the Throne] and spoke to those who stood before Him and said, “Take away the filthy garments from him.’ And to him He said, ‘See I removed your iniquity from you [the cleansing of sin] and I will clothe you with rich robes.” And he said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head,” and they put a clean clothes on him and the angel of the Lord stood by. So this is a picture of how we are clothed with the perfect righteousness of Christ. Because of that we are declared righteous.
 
So the emphasis in is to remind us that no one can bring a charge against us. No one is qualified to because we are among God’s choice ones, because we’ve put our faith in Christ and been declared just. Now next time we’ll come back and look at verse 34 because that takes the question to the next level, “Who is he who condemns?” It’s a reminder that Christ died, furthermore He’s risen and He’s the one at the right hand of God who makes intercession for us. So because Christ is at the right hand of the Father no one can bring condemnation because every time they do, He’s just going to point to the cross and say, “I paid for the sins there. They’re taken care of.” Satan can’t bring a condemnation against us. Then that leads to the next great question, “Who will separate us then from the love of God?” The answer is “no one”. We’ll get into that next time and finish up chapter eight.

Romans 099b-Eternally Secure in Christ’s Love

Romans 8:34 NASB95
who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.
Romans 099b-Eternally Secure in Christ’s Love
 
We’re in and in this last part we come to one of those great crescendos of Scripture where the Apostle Paul just takes us to the very heights of significant Bible truth. The focus here is on the security of the believer in the love of God. God’s love for us, which is consistent with His righteousness, is not conditioned upon anything that we do. Last time, as we wrapped us our study of Romans 8:33, I talked about and reviewed us on the doctrine of justification by faith, pointing out that we’re justified not by our own righteousness or anything that we have done but we’re justified by the righteousness of Christ which we possess because when we trust in Him, His righteousness is then imputed or credited to us and God the Father looks at the righteousness which we now possess which is Christ’s righteousness, not ours, and declares us just.
 
God’s love is then free to embrace us fully because we possess the same righteousness that He possesses. It’s not on the basis of anything we’ve done or haven’t done because we’re still sinners but above and surrounding the fact that we are sinners is this great doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Because we possess His righteousness then Paul goes on to emphasize in verse 34 that there’s no basis then for condemnation. Because we have the righteousness of Christ we are therefore secure in God’s love because God’s love is compatible with our perfect righteousness which comes from Christ. Therefore, there’s really no basis for condemnation.
 
As we look at this passage I pointed out when we got into verses 31 through 39 that there are these seven rhetorical questions. The force of these questions is to cause the reader or listener to follow a certain logic chain, a logical chain of thought from his opening question, “What shall we say to these things?” This causes us to think about the application and implication of what he has said, not only in the previous three chapters related to sanctification because also to the previous eight chapters in the book as he’s bringing this opening section to an end. Starting in chapter nine, which I hope to begin in the next lesson, we see a return to the theme of righteousness in terms of if God is righteousness, then how does this relate to His plan for Israel.
 
In these seven questions we’ve gone through the first four. What shall we say to these things? If God is for us who can be against us? Obviously no one. How shall He not freely give us all things and the implication of the question is that because He gave us everything in Christ, He will continue to supply everything for us no matter what suffering or adversity we might face. Then the fourth question we covered in verse 33: Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? Since God is the one who justifies there’s no one who can bring a charge against God’s elect.
 
Now the fifth question is “Who is he who condemns us?” This is followed by the sixth question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” People say maybe there are circumstances or situations and then Paul’s answer is the seventh question. “Shall tribulation or distress, nakedness, peril, sword or any circumstance separate us?” This drives him to the greatest statement here of security which comes in verses we all know very well, in verses 38 and 39 that Paul says He is confident that nothing, and he goes through a series of things that are opposites to show that there’s nothing within God’s creation that can separate us from the love of Christ.
 
So the question of verse 36, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” is answered by verse 39, the last verse in the chapter, that nothing shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
 
So let’s look at verse 34. The question, who is it that can condemns us drives us to think about who is the one who is the ultimate judge. Before whom will we stand? Now, as believers we know that we will stand before the bema seat, bema is a Greek word meaning a high, raised platform. This was the seat upon which judges in athletic contests would sit. There were also raised seats where the proconsul would sit and they would bring before him various cases to be tried so this was the seat of the judge. The bema seat refers to the judgment seat of Christ. Christ will judge the church and evaluate us in terms of our spiritual growth and in terms of our spiritual production. This is described in , talking about the fact that some of our works done in the flesh, wood, hay, and straw, versus that which is done when we walk by the Spirit, gold, silver, and precious stones, is all that survives for evaluation purpose, all that is done in the Holy Spirit.
 
There are several other judgments that occur at the time Jesus Christ returns to the earth. There’s the Sheep and the Goat judgment. There’s the judgment of the anti-Christ, the judgment of the False Prophet, the judgment of Satan where he’s cast into the bottomless pit in chains for a thousand years. Then there is a subsequent judgment at the end of the Millennial Kingdom, the Great White Throne judgment. The judge at that time is Jesus Christ. We know this because of what Jesus taught in John, chapter 5:22 and 5:27. Later we’ll look at Jesus Christ, Himself, as the One who has been delegated the authority to judge all things at the end of time.
 
During the Tribulation we have the Judgment Seat of Christ, then the judgments that occur during the Tribulation and the Great White Throne Judgment are all conducted by the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said in , “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son.” Now the reason the Father commits the judgment to the Son is because the Son is like us. When Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, entered into human history and became a human being, He lived His life under the same conditions that we do with one exception. He was not born with a sin nature. He did not receive the imputation of Adam’s original sin and He committed no personal sin. That was His test, whether or not He would live His life in His humanity in obedience to God the Father with dependence upon God, the Holy Spirit. He passed that test in contrast to the first Adam who failed that test.
 
Adam failed the test in the Garden of Eden and so Jesus Christ is born in the same condition as Adam initially without sin and yet Jesus Christ passes the test that Adam failed. So because he passed those tests and then He is eventually crucified and buried and resurrected He is elevated to the position of the right hand of God the Father. And then from there he comes, as we’ll see in a second, to judge the living and the dead. He is the One who has that judgment. So we are judged by a peer, one of our own, a human being who has gone through all of the tests, all of the issues, that every human being goes through. No one can stand before Him and say, “Well, we just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t possible.” Jesus is going to be the One who says he did it in His humanity for us. He’s not living His life in a redemptive aspect but in order to demonstrate that it could be done.
 
So judgment is committed to the Son because He is our peer. All human beings will be judged by our peer. states, “And He [God the Father] gave Him [Jesus Christ] authority to execute judgment because He is the Son of Man.” In that verse we have the title for Jesus that relates to His humanity. He’s the Son of Man. In Hebrew idiom if you are a murderer, you would be called the son of a murderer in that you portray the attributes of a murderer. If you’re a fool, you would be called the son of a fool. If you are a human being, you’re the Son of Man. If you’re God, you’re the Son of God. So that phrase doesn’t emphasize derivation or procreation as much as it indicates you participate in all of the attributes of that particular noun which is the object of the preposition. So Son of Man emphasizes His humanity.
 
Now in , “Because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed…” Again the emphasis is on the fact that it is the humanity of Christ that is significant in relation to the judgment that He brings; not only at the Judgment Seat of Christ, but in all subsequent judgments. Then Paul says, “He has given proof [assurance] to all men by raising Him from the dead.” So part of the resurrection is to show that God the Father validated Jesus in all that He did but that He is also promoting Him and elevating Him to that position to be at His right hand to be qualified for the next stage in God’s plan, which is to be a judge.
 
It’s interesting that in the early church they wrote several creeds. A creed was a distillation of their basic belief systems, summarizing it in a rather short form. One of the earliest creeds that we have written in 325 B.C. at the Council of Nicea really focused on the deity of Christ. A major part of that Creed, in the middle part which is still recited by many churches and many congregations is a focus on the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. “But for us and our salvation He came down from Heaven by the power of the Holy Spirit. He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried. On the third day He rose again in accordance with the Scriptures and He ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His Kingdom will have no end.”
 
Notice how in the creed they distilled the significance of the post-crucifixion work of Christ. It focuses on His resurrection, ascension, session (to be seated), and His return to judge. Those four things are emphasized in all of those early creeds about Jesus.
 
Another early creed from that same time period, the 4th century A.D., is the Athanasian Creed. It was named for Athanasius, the great Bishop of Alexandria who stood his ground against those who sought to minimize the humanity of Christ and that whole battle that took place. It seemed like the victory had been won at Nicea but it actually continued for another thirty years and there were times of defeat and victory for Athanasius. He was exiled three or four times before there was a final conclusion to the debate over understanding what the Scriptures taught on the Deity of Christ, that He was fully God and fully man. In the Athanasian Creed we read, “For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.” That’s the hypostatic union. hupostasis is the Greek word meaning a joining in one person of both humanity and deity. So God and Man is One Christ, that unity of hupostasis who suffered for our salvation, descended into Hades, rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into Heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty from whence He will come to judge the quick and the dead.” Quick is just an Old English translation for the living. So we see this same emphasis on the same four important doctrines: the resurrection, the ascension, the session, and then coming to judge the quick and the dead. So Christ ascended to Heaven. He’s validated by God the Father and He sits, not on His own throne, but as emphasizes, He sits on the Father’s throne.
 
He is sitting as says at the right hand of the Father to await the giving of His Kingdom, based on Daniel, chapter 7. When the Ancient of Days [God the Father] gives the Kingdom to the Son of Man, then the Son of Man will return to the earth and will judge the nations of the world in their rebellion at that great final battle campaign of the tribulation of Armageddon. At that point He comes, but in the meantime He is at the right hand of the Father, which is a position of exaltation.
 
This is emphasized in a number of New Testament passages. I’m only going to show you five of them and just briefly touch on them to show you the importance of this doctrine in the New Testament. In in Peter’s Day of Pentecost message he said, “Therefore, having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father, the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear.” So the giving of the Holy Spirit is directly related to Christ’s ascension and session. This is the first thing that happens after the session is that He pours out the Holy Spirit on the church.
 
Then in , “He [Jesus Christ] is the one whom God exalted to His right hand as a Prince and a Savior to give repentance to Israel and the forgiveness of sins.” Notice how the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of the Father is connected to His work as Savior and granting repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. So that’s how it’s expressed there, indicating God’s plan for Israel in the future. That’s going to be a major theme once we get into Romans, chapter 9.
 
Then in Ephesians 1:26 “Which He brought about in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at the right hand in the heavenly places.” The writer of Hebrews stated in 8:1, “Now the main point in what has been said is this: we have such a high priest who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.” This emphasizes the fact that the focal point right now is on Christ’s high priestly ministry over the church, not his kingship right now. You’ll often find in a lot of contemporary choruses and hymns an emphasis on addressing Christ today as King. This is not Biblically correct. Christ is not viewed now as the King but as the high priest. His kingship comes when God the Father delegates that to Him right before the Second Coming and then He comes to assume that position. He’s not identified as the King of kings and Lord of lords until He’s ready to come with His kingdom in Revelation, chapter 19 at the time of the Battle of Armageddon.
 
So right now He’s in that position of being seated at the right hand of the Father in a high priestly role. That’s also emphasized in , “Who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, after angels and authorities and powers had been subjected to Him.” It’s interesting because in Paul says that he’s persuaded that all these things, angels, principalities, and powers, can’t separate us from the love of God. Why? Because they’re under the authority of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. So Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father in a high priestly ministry which focuses on His role as the one who prays for us as our intercessor. 
 
This is an extremely important doctrine. We’ve already seen in the Holy Spirit is the One who intercedes for us in verses 23-26. “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” So the Holy Spirit is the one who prays on our behalf. He helps our prayers because no matter how bright you may think you are; no matter how theologically astute you might be, what the Scripture says is that we really don’t know how we ought to pray. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pray. It means that you and I just don’t have omniscience. We don’t really understand all the facts so God the Holy Spirit helps us. He’s sort of our Divine simultaneous translator to straighten out our prayers on their way to the throne of grace.
 
We don’t pray to the Holy Spirit. Every now and then I hear people who pray to the Holy Spirit but you don’t pray to the one who intercedes for you. You pray to the one they are praying to. The same is true with the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s our intercessor. You don’t pray to the Lord Jesus Christ. He prays to the Father for us. We don’t pray to Him. We pray to the Father. Lot of people aren’t clear on this concept. I had a discussion with a pastor some years ago and he was under the impression that the only reason people said that you only pray to the Father was because in every example Jesus gave of prayer he said to pray to the Father. Well, Jesus wouldn’t pray to Himself so that argument doesn’t follow, this man believed. That’s true but the point that he missed was that’s not the traditional strong argument here. The argument is you don’t pray to the intercessor. You pray to the Father and the intercessor is the one praying along with you or on your behalf. Just like if you’re talking to someone through a translator, you don’t talk to the translator, you talk to the person you’re talking to and the translator is the one translating what you’re saying.
 
There are two keys verses on the intercession of Christ. One is which emphasizes His intercessory advocacy, “Therefore He is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” So He is continually interceding for us. This is another tremendous verse on eternal security that He is the One who brings our salvation to completion and He is the One who stands as our advocate with the Father. This is brought out even more in , “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” So right there He’s showing that one of the purposes for learning doctrine and for studying the Word is so that we don’t sin. It’s not so that we can sin and then utilize grace to get out of it or to be forgiven but we are to study so that we do not sin. And if we do, which we will, not because we’re permissive but because we recognize that we all have sin natures. “… And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.”
 
Christ stands as a defense attorney, advocating for us with the Father because when Satan attempts to condemn us for our sin then Jesus Christ, as it were, points to the fact that we have received His perfect righteousness and because of that our sin is no longer an issue. So He intercedes for us. In that sense, as we look at , “Who is it that condemns?” No one because the judge is the Lord Jesus Christ and the Lord Jesus Christ is our peer, our intercessor, our advocate, and so no one can bring a charge that would stick because He has paid for our sin.
 
Now we come to the next verse. Verse 35 asking the next question, the sixth rhetorical question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” This is followed up by a second rhetorical question which is the seventh in our list which focuses our attention a little more on what possible answers there might be of things that could separate us from God. In the sixth question the Greek word separate is chorizo. In the translation it looks like a Spanish sausage, chorizo, but it’s not. I always remembered that word by the Spanish word because I needed little memory devices to remember the words. This is a word only used eleven times in the New Testament so I thought of sausage. When you make sausage you first have to divide up all the different whatever you put into the sausage before you blend it so that’s how I would always remember the meaning of this word which is to divide or to separate. That’s the idea here.
 
Who will separate us? It’s a future tense verb so Paul is saying what possible thing could happen in the future that could ever separate us or divide us from the love of Christ? This phrase “love of Christ” is an accurate translation of the verb agape. It could be taken as love from Christ or love toward Christ and it should be understood here as love from Christ which is an objective genitive. It is Christ’s love for us just as we’ll see in verse 39 where it’s God’s love for us. The question is, is there anything that can conceivably separate us from God? Once we are saved, is there any way we could lose our salvation? Is there anything that we could possibly do that could cause God’s love to kick us out of the family?
 
Paul does everything he can in verses 35 and then again in verse 38 to talk about the fact that nothing can possibly do this. I just want you to think a little bit about the construction of these two verses, separated by verses 36 and 37. He says in verse 35 “Who will separate us from the love from Christ?” Then he lists seven things: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword. All of those that can happen to us in this life, up to the point of death.
 
When we get to verses 38 and 39 he’s going to add ten more things but these are things that are beyond the physical realm and would be beyond the material realm. Death and life. Notice they’re pairs, except for one which is a three-element. These are known as a figure of speech called a merism. A merism is, for example, when Scripture says, “God created the heaven and the earth.” Is there anything not included with those two extremes? The heavens represents the extremes of the skies, and the earth is the finite globe on which we live. Day and night. We are to meditate on God’s Word day and night. Is there anything time frame left out of that? By using the two opposites it brings together the totality of what lies between those two opposites. So we have those pairs, and in one case three things, that indicate a totality of environments.
 
“I am persuaded that neither death, nor life…” This includes all our existence. Then “…angels.” That refers to the elect angels, the holy angels. “…principalities or powers…” That refers to the hierarchy of the demonic powers. “…Nor things present, nor things to come…” That includes anything now, anything that could come up in the future. That again covers the totality of things. “…Nor height, nor depth…” Two opposites with everything in between.  “…nor any other created thing…” Just in case anything was left out.
 
Paul is saying in these two lists that anything that could conceivably happen in this life up to the point of death, and anything beyond death is covered. Every possible contingency is covered and there is nothing at all that can separate us from the love of Christ. That is because God’s love for us in Christ is not based on who we are. It’s not based on what we’ve done because we’re still sinners after we’re saved. We still commit sin. We can still commit sins as evil and wicked as any sin we committed before we were saved. If you’re like me and you were very young when you were saved then you really didn’t have the opportunity to exploit your sin nature a whole lot before you were saved. That came later, trust me. We all exploit our sin natures and we become quite good and crafty at that. Even after we’re saved. But we’re saved, not because of who we are or what we’ve done, but because we have Christ’s righteousness. That’s our legal possession so God’s love for us is based upon our possession of the righteousness of Christ. That wasn’t ever based on anything we can do. So if we didn’t do anything to gain it, we can’t do anything to lose it.
 
On the flip side, think about this: if you can do something to lose it, trust me, somewhere in the web of a person’s theology who believes that you can do something to lose your salvation, they’re hiding works somewhere; because if you can do something to lose your salvation, somehow you’re doing something to get it. And that always seems to go together.
 
So let’s look at this list of things that come out of our day-to-day life experiences that Paul lists here as potential things that could separate us from the love of Christ. The first two are tribulation and distress. These words often are used together as synonyms describing the totality of facing the challenges, the difficulties, the heartaches of life, all that we think of in terms of adversity. Both in terms of the external circumstances that are adverse and hostile to us as well as our inner reactions to those things. The first word is thlipsis which is a word that refers to trouble that brings about distress, oppression, affliction, depression, or tribulation. These are the ways in which the word is translated.
 
It is sometimes used to talk about the persecution and the distress that occurs during that period we refer to as the Tribulation even though that’s not the best term to describe it. That is the term that’s become the popular word for describing the seven-year period known in the Old Testament as the Time of Jacob’s wrath, the time of the seventieth week of Daniel in the vision Daniel had in the time God was giving to Israel.
 
So thlipsis simply refers in a general sense to any sort of distressing circumstances emphasizing both external, the horrors of the external circumstances and situations as well as the internal anxiety and fear or distress that it brings about. The second word, stenochoria, also emphasizes a set of stressful circumstances and is usually translated as distress, difficulty, anguish, trouble, or affliction. The words overlap one another so by using both of them together it pretty much covers the spectrum of any kind of negative difficulty. In Paul writes, “But in everything commending ourselves as servants of God, in much endurance, in afflictions, in hardships, in distresses…” Here we have both words used, tribulations is the word thlipsis, and distresses is the word stenochoria. Numerous times these are used together.
 
Then the next word that is used is diogmos which indicates external persecution of opposition for our faith in Christ. , Paul says, “For we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your patience [endurance, hupomones] and faith in all your persecutions, diogmos, and tribulations, thlipsis, you endured.” Notice how in many other passages you get this same collection of words that we have here.
 
Then the next word is limos, indicating hunger or famine, just going without enough food. Paul and the others, when traveling from city to city things could occur to make it take them longer than they expected. They might get trapped by inclement weather and not have enough supplies with them so they would go without. The next word gumnotes, is translated naked in modern Greek. We think of that as someone stripped of all their clothes. That’s not the main idea of this word at this time in history. It more often meant just being without adequate clothing. So it was used metaphorically for destitution so Paul was left without quite enough food, going hungry at times, and at other times he didn’t have enough clothes on his back. He might get caught out in weather where it was colder, didn’t have enough clothes with him. Maybe some of these times happened when he was shipwrecked and other disasters so he lost what he had. So that’s the emphasis there: the loss of the details of life.
 
Then we have kindunos meaning physical hazards, dangers, and risk and machaira, which is sword. Sword is often used metaphorically or figuratively for bringing about death. So when he talks about peril or sword, it means his life was in peril or was threatened. Now a passage that describes many of these kinds of circumstances Paul underwent is a passage you should be familiar with. I want us to read through this in . As we read this I want you to think about not just the ministry for pastors, for missionaries, for the apostles, and what is involved in serving the Lord. It’s not limited to apostles, or pastors, or teachers or missionaries. This is something we are all called to do because that’s the point of the passage in as we are called to serve the Lord no matter what it might cost us. So Paul rehearses some of the adversities he faced. He’s asking these rhetorical questions because he’s been coming under attack from his critics in Corinth. They’ve been criticizing him for any number of things so he says, “Are they servants (ministers) of Christ?—I speak as a fool—I am more so; in far more labors…” He is indicating the ministry requires labor.
 
Sad to say, there are too many who use it as an excuse for laziness but there are those who do that. “…in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death.” This refers to being flogged, being flagellated as a punishment. We only know of a few times Paul was put in jail or prison but according to this there were many more circumstances where he was under attack by local populations and was thrown into jail for a night or more. He then says, “Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine stripes [forty stripes minus one].’ Five different times. We don’t know of any of those. They’re not recorded in the book of Acts, except for maybe the one in Laodicea. The Mishnah said you couldn’t whip more than forty times so they always subtracted one in case they miscounted. So five times he was flagellated forty stripes, minus one.
 
Verse 25 says, “Three times I was beaten with rods…” In the south we used to call that a caning. It happened one time on the floor of Congress. Congress used to be much more physically violent than it is today. A bunch of wienies are up there now. They just yell words at each other but back in what has been called “the good old days of the early 19th century”, there were occasions when one congressman would get so angry with another that he would take his cane and beat the other one. So we just think things are violent today.
 
Verse 25 continues, “…once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep.” Only one shipwreck is recorded in the book of Acts. Verse 27, “I have been on frequent journeys...” Paul was always on the road. I wonder if anyone has ever added up how many miles the Apostle Paul walked. “…in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the sea, dangers among false brethren.” Verse 27 continues, “I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger, in thirst, in fasting often…” That’s not necessarily fasting for prayer. In the context that would be going without food. “… in cold and exposure.” In other words, not having the right clothing appropriate to the weather. In verse 28, he says, “Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches.”
 
Now there’s another passage in 1 Corinthians where he has a similar list of things. In he said, “For I think that God has displayed (exhibited) us apostles last of all, as men condemned to death because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.” See our witness is not only to other human beings but also before the angels. He went on in verse 10, “We are fools for Christ’s sake but you are prudent (wise) in Christ; we are weak but you are strong, you are distinguished but we are without honor.” He’s being sarcastic here because the Corinthians thought they knew so much. In verses 11–13, he says, “To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, and are poorly clothed and are roughly treated (beaten) and are homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands; when we are reviled, we bless, when we are persecuted we endure; when we are slandered (defamed) we try to conciliate (entreat); we have become as scum (the filth of the world), the dregs of all things until now.” 
 
So you see there are many negative circumstances that can occur, not that they will but that they can occur in the Christian life. In fact in 1 Timothy, chapter 4, Paul told Timothy that “those who desire to be godly will endure suffering.” So this is something that is part of the Christian life. As we read in if we are going to advance and mature in the Christian life and if we are going to be rewarded as joint-heirs with Christ then we will go through suffering in this life as we seek to obey the Lord and live out the Christian life.
 
This is the picture we have as described in but Paul’s point is that none of these things that we face mean we are separated from the love of Christ. How often when people go through hard times when they lose loved ones and near ones and dear ones due to death, when those around them fail them and disappoint them, become hostile to them, betray them, that they think God has somehow betrayed them because life has become so difficult. But the reality is that none of these things indicate that we are separated from the love of Christ. In fact, they may very well demonstrate that it is God’s love that is maintaining us, and keeping us, and providing for us, in the midst of all that difficulty, just as God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness when they were under divine discipline. Now all of this can be a form of discipline, it can be negative as punishment, but it can also be positive as God is using these negative circumstances to build Christ-like character in our lives.
 
Then we come to , “As it is written, “For your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” This is from . is a psalm dealing with an event, not sure which event it is, in the life of Israel. It’s a time when they are facing military disaster, a time when the people’s security is threatened and they are crying out in lament to God in confusion because it seems as if God has deserted them and they are forgotten by Him. There are just a couple of things I want to point out. The things that they mention in this Psalm beginning in verse one, “We’ve heard with our ears, O God. Our fathers have told us.” So this is going back to the time of the exodus. “The work that You did in their days, in the days of old. You with Your own hand drove out the nations [the time of the conquest]. Then you planted them, You afflicted the people [removing the Canaanites from the land]. Then You spread them abroad for they did not gain possession of the land by their own sword and their own arm did not save them. But it was Your right hand and Your arm and the light of Your presence, for You favored them.” In other words they’re reminding God that He gave them the land. It wasn’t something they earned by their own military might or strength but because God gave them the victory. Then in verses 4 and following they restate their confidence in God, “You are my King, O God; Command victories for Jacob. Through You we will push down our adversaries. Through Your name we will trample down those who rise up against us. For I will not trust in my bow, nor will my sword save me.”
 
In other words it’s not against technology; it’s not against military training, but it’s pointing out that’s not the solution ultimately. It’s God and trusting in Him. It goes on to say, “You have saved us from our adversaries, and You have put to shame those who hate us.” In God we have boasted all day long.” But now the problem is stated in verse 9, “Yet You have rejected us and brought us to dishonor, and do not go out with our armies.” This is a time of military defeat. “You cause us to turn back from the adversary; and those who hate us have taken spoil for themselves. You give us as sheep to be eaten and have scattered us among the nations.” This very likely could be referring to a time after the Babylonian captivity. There’s a lot of debate among scholars as to when this was written. We don’t know because there’s no indication in the text. “You make us a reproach to our neighbors; a scoffing and derision to those around us.” They’re going through suffering, tribulation, adversity, persecution; all of these things.
 
That’s the context for this quote from verse 22 which reads in the Psalm, “But for Your sake we are killed all day long; we are considered as sleep to be slaughtered. Arouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever. Why do You hide Your face and forget our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our body cleaves to the ground, Arise and be our help…” The point is that they’re making is that as we serve God, even our own lives become a sacrifice and an offering for the plan of God.”
 
This reminds me of three verses that we find in the New Testament related to our lives being a sacrifice. One familiar verse that comes to mind is . Then in it says, “But even if am being poured out as a drink offering…” Paul recognized his life, as he was in prison at the time, was a sacrifice to God. “…poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all…” Near the end of the next imprisonment in Rome he says, “For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come.” Then one of my favorite verses in times of difficulty is Job’s statement in , “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him…” That no matter how bad things appear nevertheless I’m still going to trust in God.
 
In Paul moves on and says, “But in all these things…” Now what is the “all things” we’re talking about in this chapter? It’s suffering, the suffering we endure for Christ, suffering with Him. “But in all these things (all suffering and adversity) we are more than conquerors (not just the noun nike where the athletic shoe get its name it’s hupernike, the one who is the superior overcomer, the uber-conquerer) in all these things we are uber-conquerers through Him who loved us.”
 
See if we face adversity on the basis of God’s provision for us, then no matter what happens, even if our life is lost in the process, God is glorified and this brings honor to Him and this is part of His plan. And then Paul concludes by saying, “For I am convinced (persuaded) that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height, nor death, nor any other created things, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The verb that is used at the beginning is peitho meaning I am persuaded, I have come to a conclusion on the basis of evaluating all of the facts, I am convinced of something as being absolutely true. Coming from the Apostle Paul, this isn’t him just expressing a human opinion but under the inspiration of God He is expressing the Divine viewpoint that all of the information, all of the evidence we have is such that we can have no other conclusion except that nothing in God’s creation can possibly separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. For if we trust in Him, then Christ’s righteousness is ours, God loves us because of that righteousness, not because of anything we’ve done but because of what Christ did. On that basis we’re saved so circumstances, whether in this life or beyond this life, no circumstance, no situation can threaten our security in Christ.
 
I’ve already pointed out that these circumstances are set in groups of opposites to indicate the totality of the circumstances so that nothing can possibly separate us. It’s the same word here, chorizo, that is used back in verse 35 where it says, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Here’s the answer. Nothing shall be able to, in the future, nothing shall be able to separate us from the love from God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And that emphasizes that it’s not the love from God which is in you. It’s not focused on you; it’s not focused on me; it’s focused on the fact that we are in Christ, and because we are in Christ and we have Christ’s righteousness we can’t be separated from the love of God.
 
But there might be an objection. There might be some in Rome who were Jewish-background believers who might say, “Well, that is fine and well, but it looks like the Jewish people have suffered a lot of persecution and suffering and distress and they’re under the heel of Rome and it looks like God has forgotten them. So if God has forgotten them, how can we be sure that God won’t forget us?” That’s the lesson that Paul answers starting in the next chapter where He’s going to demonstrate that God’s love for Israel has not faltered either, even though they are now going through distress and adversity and tribulation. God’s love will eventually bring them to salvation, as well. So next time we’ll come back and start with chapter 9.

Romans 100b-God’s Righteousness Toward Israel

Romans 9:1 NASB95
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit,
Romans 100b-God’s Righteousness Toward Israel
 
Open your Bibles with me to Romans, chapter 9. We’re going to move into the next section which hangs by itself. We often speak of the Church Age as “the great parentheses”. Now we’re going to be talking about God’s plan for Israel in these chapters and I learned something new on this trip to Israel. In many churches when they do a series on Romans they call “the great parentheses.” The exposition of Romans in those churches jumps from to . is ignored in a number of churches so that was sort of a new insight that I picked up on this trip, along with many others.
 
That tells us something of the importance of , especially in light of today with the rise of Israel, the Jews coming back to the Land starting in the early to mid-19th century and then just exploding in the first, second, third Aliyahs around the turn of the 20th century. Then came the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 when something that has never, ever happened in history has now happened. That is the resurrection of a people in their historic homeland based on the plan of God. And that hasn’t happened to any other ethnic group where they have been restored once they have lost their historic homeland. You can think through history, going back into ancient history with the Assyrians, with the Parthians, with the Romans later on, the Celts, the Picks, and the Saxons. History moves on.
 
The Jewish people were expelled from their land in A.D. 70 and have returned, almost to the point where we’re within a very short time of an equilibrium where there will be as many Jews living in the land as outside of the land. That has not happened since 586 B.C. In fact, it might not have been that true at that point because you’d already had the ten northern tribes expelled in 722 B.C. So it has been an extremely long time since there has been a major Jewish presence, a dominant Jewish presence in the land since the first group was expelled by God in 722 B.C. So this is significant and that’s why there’s been so much last days chatter and excitement and stimulation and everything. We’ll talk about some of those things as we go through this chapter.
 
We need to understand a little bit about its context before we go much further. At the end of , Paul has been talking about the faithful love of God and God’s faithfulness and the fact that His promises can be counted on. Paul concludes that great chapter with the final statement in verses 38 and 39, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” So the focal point of those last nine verses has been on the faithfulness of God.
 
What can separate us from God? Who can bring a charge against God’s elect? Verse 35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” and yet remember at this time the population of the church still had a large Jewish segment to it, even in Rome. There was a large Jewish component in Rome and those from a Jewish background would be raising the question, “Well, wait a minute. How can we count on God’s faithfulness? It seems like He has turned His back on the Jews? It’s like He’s turned His back on Israel and Israel is no longer significant.”
 
Paul is going to shift gears in the beginning of chapter 9 to talk about God’s continued plan and purpose for Israel. That even though Israel, as Paul says in the beginning of chapter 11 that many in Israel have hardened their hearts and turned away from God and rejected His Messiah, nevertheless, God has not turned His back permanently on Israel, has not forgotten them. God is still going to be faithful to His promises in the Mosaic Covenant to restore Israel to the land.
 
Now an important question someone might ask is that if the Abrahamic Covenant was temporary, if it wasn't permanent, and that was no longer in effect, then Christ’s death, as Paul says in , if Christ’s death is the end of the law, if that’s true, then these promises for a return that are in and , then those would be thrown out as well. And the answer to that is that those promises that God gave, that He embedded in the Mosaic Law that He would return them permanently to the land, is simply an addendum at the end of the Mosaic Law to affirm the fact that He is still true to the promise that He made to Abraham, that this land would belong to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants in perpetuity forever.
 
That even though God would implement disciplinary action of removing ethnic Israel from the land that God had promised them according to the judgment stipulations in and , God would still remain faithful to His promise to Abraham and would bring them back so that’s kind of how that fits together. But I just want to wrap up one thing very briefly. There was a little point of confusion at the end of the last class before we go forward. If you just look at for a minute there’s a quotation there from the Psalms. , actually. Last week the only thing I had up on the screen and when I dealt with this it was in light of 42:23 and that confused everyone, as well it should. I was doing my studying in reference to the Hebrew text and there are some verses in some Psalms that are numbered differently in the Masoretic text than in the English Bible. Frequently in the Psalms Hebrew verses are one verse off from the English but in this case it’s two chapters and one verse off so that Psalm 42:23 in the Masoretic text is and I was going through that at the end of class last time. Afterwards about five people mobbed me and wanted to know what was going on. It’s just numbered differently and I had unwittingly typed in the verse from the Hebrew text I was using instead of the English text so you can correct your notes on that.
 
Okay, as we come to Romans, chapter 9, we see it is an introduction to this section on God’s continued plan for Israel. In Paul is going to establish the justice of God in relation to Israel’s rejection of the Messiah. There are several things we’re going to have to deal with in this that are very important and germane to some trends that are going on in Bible study and theology that you may or may not run into but you ought to be aware of these things that are going on. One of these trends that has cropped up is that there has been a trend among some evangelicals to deny the reality of Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. In fact in the last couple of days I have a great video of a lecture that Doctor Michael Rydelnik gave at Liberty University about a month ago at the invitation of Randy Price who’s the head of the Jewish Studies Department at Liberty. Dr. Rydelnik is the head of the Jewish Studies Department at Moody Bible Institute and graduated from Dallas Seminary three or four years after I was there. I think we overlapped a year.
 
He points out in this lecture that when he first was interviewing the faculty members at Dallas Seminary in 1979 at that time there was only one professor that held to the fact that the Old Testament was filled with Messianic prophecies. I had not realized when I was there that most of the Old Testament faculty did not believe that. At most they believed there was one clear Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament and that was , “The Lord said to My Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” That in the opinion of some evangelicals is the only genuine Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament.
 
That is not true at all. That shows the influence of a pernicious error that had invaded, as early as the Protestant Reformation, from a string of anti-Messianic interpretations that came out of the development of rabbinic Judaism but it took a thousand years for rabbinic Judaism to really come up with answers to Christians’ use of Messianic prophecies from the Old Testament. A lot of Jews were getting converted as they read , as they read , and as they read . These passages resonated with Messianic implications, including . But if you listen to some Old Testament scholars today, even among evangelicals, they do not believe these are Messianic at all. They believe they were fulfilled historically but they just had sort of an application in some general sense to the Messiah and that the disciples just used that and sort of re-shaped these things.
I pointed out Tuesday night that when the scribes known as the Masoretes solidified the current text that we use called the Masoretic text which was solidified and formalized between 300 and 900 A.D. they added vowel “points” to a consonantal script which was all that the Hebrew text was. In some ways they changed words. We had a great example in our text on Tuesday night of where he talked about the “remnant of Edom” which would have made that prophecy to be fulfilled historically with Edom but the consonants in Edom are the same as the consonants in Adam so if you just change the vowels you change the phrase “from the remnant of Edom” to “from the remnant of mankind” which throws the significance of that whole prophecy into a kingdom or Millennial or Messianic Kingdom fulfillment, indicating that’s a Messianic prophecy. Interesting things like that happen and have really disrupted things.
 
In the Protestant Reformation a lot of pastors, scholars, and theologians went to rabbis to learn Hebrew. That was the only place they could learn Hebrew.  In the course of that some of them were influenced by the thinking of an 11th century rabbi named Rashi who originated a lot of these alternate interpretations and so they filtered into the evangelical church and they’ve been there all along. We’re going to see that in a number of ways this is not true; there are genuine Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. Michael Rydelnik has spearheaded the scholarship on this with his book, “The Messianic Hope” which is very technical. If you don’t know Hebrew you’ll have difficulty but you’ll catch some of the things. He’s done a good work. He’s working now on a Messianic commentary on the Old Testament and I’m really looking forward to what he’s going to do.
 
Anyway, we’ll get into some of those issues because the Old Testament clearly predicted a Messiah, that He would be the son of Jesse, the son of David and that he would be of the tribe of Judah and numerous other things, such as being born in Bethlehem, that he would be crucified between two thieves and that He would be betrayed and the price of his betrayal would be thirty pieces of silver and on and on. These were very, very clear prophecies from the Old Testament. So that’s part of what we’ll look at but some other things we’ve got to look at are the trend toward the “repopularity” of replacement theology today. It goes by some other names. We’re also going to have to look at some things related to interpretation, literal versus allegorical interpretation, and we’ll going to look at the rise of anti-Semitism.
 
is really at the core of understanding those types of things that are going on. They’re as much present with us today as they’ve ever been and while anti-Semitism sort of went underground for a while after the holocaust, it’s rearing its ugly head currently. It’s not only through the influence of Islam but through the influence of a lot of Christians who have never really understood the significance of these issues and how it’s related to the interpretation factor and some other things. We’ll be hitting on all of these as we go through our study of Romans, chapter 9.
 
So let’s just look at the introduction here.  The first five verses provide us with an introduction to these three chapters. It’s going to begin with a very personal statement by the Apostle Paul related to his deep care and concern and his emotional distress over the fact that his people, his countrymen, his family perhaps, his loved ones perhaps, his kinsmen, have rejected the claims of the Yeshua of Nazareth to be the Messiah. So he begins by expressing a very personal statement, “I tell the truth in Christ. I’m not lying. My conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing [continual] grief in my heart for I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh who are Israelites to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the [temple] service of God and the promises.” Six important things that lockdown Israel as still having a relationship to all of those. “Whose are the fathers and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh who is overall, God blessed forever. Amen.”
 
He starts off saying, “I tell the truth in Christ.” He’s not just making an assertion that he is telling the truth but that he is telling the truth in Christ, that he is using the phrase “in Christ” here in more than simply a positional sense. He is in Christ postionally but just because we are in Christ positionally doesn’t mean we can’t be out of fellowship at the same time that we are positionally in Christ. So here is one of the rare time that Paul uses the phrase “EN CHRISTO” when it’s not alluding to being in Christ positionally but is talking more of a fellowship type aspect. In context, it’s a parallel to the phrase “EN PNEUMATEO”, the Holy Spirit in the next line. I think both here should be understood instrumentally, a rare usage of that. I think it makes sense in the context.
 
“I tell the truth in Christ” is parallel to “bearing witness by the Holy Spirit” so both of these “ins” in English should probably be understood to be an instrumental “by” so it would better understood as “I tell the truth by means of Christ. I do not lie. My conscience bearing joint witness with me by means of the Holy Spirit”. We know that the Holy Spirit is the agent of inspiration, according to . The Holy Spirit is the One who moves the writers of Scripture along. God breathes out His Word through the writers of Scripture, according to . “All Scripture is God-breathed…” God is the active sense there. He’s the one breathing out through the writers of Scripture but the Holy Spirit is the active agent in overseeing the writing of Scripture. So this isn’t an inspiration in the way we think of Shakespeare being inspired or we may think of some other writer being inspired or Michelangelo being inspired or that sense. This is the sense of someone who is being breathed through, in a sense, by God so that God is guaranteeing that the result of what He is doing is without error. So Paul is affirming that what he is saying here is not his opinion but it is the revelation of Christ. Then he reflects upon his own state of mind, “That I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart.”
 
Here’s another one of those uses of heart, in fact the vast majority of times it refers to the thinking portion of the brain. Here it refers to the innermost part of man, the core of his being. In this case, heart would be a synonym for his soul and that when he thinks about the rejection of Jesus as Messiah by the Jewish people, by his people, he has great sorrow and grief. This is important to understand because somehow along the line, some Christians get the idea that having any kind of emotion is somehow wrong and having some sort of negative emotion is sin. That’s not true.
 
Jesus is described as having gone through great emotional distress in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He went to the cross. He was in turmoil, under such pressure that He sweated blood, the Scripture says. This is not an unknown phenomena. It’s not something unique to Jesus. It happens to people who are under extreme distress that the tiny capillaries just under the skin expel blood through the pores of the skin so it appears they are sweating blood because they’re under such emotional distress. Having certain emotions is not necessarily sinful. It is acting wrongly upon that emotional pressure that it becomes a sin. So we may have certain emotions present but acting wrongly upon them is what makes that a sin. So we can have sorrow and grief and we can operate on that and we can choose to have a great little pity party. We can just go out and cry and moan and feel sorry for ourselves and get all worked up and depressed and get negative because we had sorrow over things. But Christ Himself sorrows in the garden, and Paul says in that when someone close to us dies we sorrow or we grieve but not like those who have no hope. He doesn’t say you don’t grieve because you have hope. He says you don’t grieve like those who have no hope. We grieve, we’re sorrowful, we miss those individuals that have departed from this life and have gone to be with the Lord. We know that we will be gathered together with them in the clouds to be with the Lord forever. We will be reunited but nevertheless we miss those people. It’s okay to miss people and it’s okay to feel a little sad and sorrowful at times because they’re not here and we enjoyed them and now they’re gone.
 
It’s the same way if you have a close friend who moves across the country and you don’t get to see them or spend time with them as you would like. It’s the same kind of thing. It’s not something that leads us into a pity party and a guilt trip or great sorrow or anything like that. It is simply a legitimate reality that because we live in a fallen world we’re going to experience certain of these kinds of emotions. So Paul expresses this and it’s a very honorable and righteous reason for his sorrow. It’s the recognition that his loved ones, his kindred, his people, have rejected Christ as Savior. So it brings him great sorrow, continual and ongoing, which is the word there, ADIALEIPTOS. It’s the same word that is used in when it talks about praying without ceasing. It means continuously. It’s like a hacking cough. It’s not something that’s there every second of every minute, every minute of every day. It’s something there on an ongoing basis.
 
So he has this sense of grief and sorrow because his people have rejected Jesus as their Messiah. Then he says in verse 3, “For I could wish that I myself were cursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen, according to the flesh.” Here we have the word ANATHEMA, which is the word usually translated “accursed.” We get this word cursed and automatically we think of some kind of shaman, witch doctor, some kind of black magic, casting a black, evil spell on somebody. That’s as far from the Biblical concept as it can possibly be. The word indicates something that comes under Divine judgment. So Paul is saying he wishes that he were judged, accursed, judged apart from Christ. So he is basically saying I would rather lose my salvation and give that up so that all of my countrymen could be saved than to go on and be saved with them lost. It’s a hyperbolic statement and he doesn’t literally mean he would give up his salvation but it expresses the deep pangs of sorrow he feels and his genuine concern for the salvation of his kinsmen.
 
So he says that he wishes that he were judged or come under judgment or a curse or was separated from Christ on behalf of his brethren, his countrymen according to the flesh. He’s not referring to the sin nature here which is how flesh is often used but here he means in terms of their genetic relationship, their ethnic relationship. So he recognizes an ethnic unity with a group of people identified as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob whom he describes in this passage as Israelites.
 
In verse 4 he says, “Who are Israelites…” These are the descendants of Jacob. Jacob was given the name Israel by God Himself when Jacob wrestled with the angel at a place called Peniel on the Jabbok River across the Jordan in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon and the angel slapped him on his thigh, rendered him weak in his leg so there was that constant reminder there. Jacob was given that new name indicating his new identity. Paul continues, “Of whom the Israelites attain the adoption as the firstborn of God.” They are identified as such in . They are adopted. They receive therefore the glory of God by virtue of their position in relationship to God in the Old Testament, the Covenant. That’s a reference to all of the covenants from on: the Abrahamic Covenant, the Land Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the Mosaic Covenant. Those all pertain to Israel. I think in the context, looking at to 11, he has in mind primarily the permanent covenants, not the Mosaic Covenant; “the giving of the law [Mosaic], the service…” They were adopted to be a kingdom of priests, not just the Levites but the whole nation serving as a kingdom of priests in relation to all of the other nations. This was a position of high honor and promises. 
 
So all those promises that God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob related to the eternal possession of the land, the promise in the land covenant that the land would belong to Israel in perpetuity, the promises of the New Covenant, all these promises still belong to Israel. They are not lost or abrogated by Israel’s rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. So this gives us one of the strongest Biblical texts against the view that is known as replacement theology which is the idea that the church completely replaces Israel in God’s plan and God has no future use for Israel. That there’s nothing significant anymore about Israel or the Jewish people or the land over there in the Middle East. So that is the view.
 
This goes back to an understanding of . Let’s turn there and review the foundational summary of the Abrahamic Covenant. The covenant itself is not clearly stated until and then it is activated and actually cut or formalized in . In , “The Lord says to Abraham get out, go, move out [halak] of your country, from your relatives, from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” So Abraham has no idea what the land is going to be yet, which way he’s going to go other than he’s told to leave his home in the Ur of the Chaldees in what is now in the southern part of Iraq. He heads up the Euphrates River north to a place called Bethel which is now in the northern part of modern Syria. He’s going to remain there for a while until his father dies before God takes him the rest of the way to the land that He will show him.
 
Then in verse 2 God says, “I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great.” Those are personal promises to Abram himself. “And so you shall be a blessing.” He’s not making a declarative statement there that he would be a blessing. He’s making a imperatival statement that you are going to be a blessing. It is a mandate that Abram would be a blessing to those around him. This is one of those really remarkable things that we see in the modern state of Israel. This principle that the Jewish people are to be a blessing to the world is played out in modern rabbinic Judaism under a principle that has under Kabala some really weird Pantheistic ideas and there are a lot of notions attached to it that we certainly wouldn’t affirm but the core idea is called lekh lekhah meaning to repair the world. It’s the idea that it’s the role of Jewish people to do what they can to serve others in the world, to improve their lot, to make things better for everyone. I believe this is an application or an outgrowth that they are to be a blessing to the world.
 
As the Jews have returned to Israel, they have been a remarkable blessing to the world. They have received numerous Nobel prizes in fields of medicine, chemistry, economics, physics, and literature. They have developed biological pacemakers, they’ve developed a DNA nanocomputers which detect cancer cells, they’ve had these little camera pills invented in Israel that you can swallow and your gastroenterologist can take pictures all the way down through your system from your esophagus until it exits and we get all kinds of wonderful pictures and see what’s going on inside of you. That’s all a result of Jewish technology.
 
They’ve developed a number of different things in terms of pharmaceutical research, new drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. They’ve done remarkable work with stem cell research in treating multiple sclerosis. I have a friend here whose business’s corporate headquarters is about four miles down the freeway from here. He and I were in first grade through high school together. He is on international boards for I don’t know how many Jewish organizations. His wife, when I first met her about five or six years ago, at an AIPAC conference could barely walk. She was either in a wheelchair or on a cane because of MS. Lately, though, I’ve seen her run. You’d think she ran “into Jesus”. They bought a home in Israel and he divides up his time half way between here and Israel. She’s been going through stem cell treatment at Hadassah Hospital for her MS. It took about two years and you would not have a clue that there was a time when this woman didn’t walk or could barely walk. There’s almost no sign of the disease whatsoever.
 
None of that is available in the US because our lovely FDA won’t allow that but in Israel they have made remarkable advances in the treatment of diseases. In terms of technology, Microsoft and Cisco have their only research and development facilities outside of the US in Israel. Intel has their largest factory in Israel. On Wednesday of last week, I drove down to the Negev, the Hebrew word for south which is that southern desert area. We drove down towards Beersheba and went past the Intel plant. It’s just absolutely enormous. It’s developed many things. The use of voice mail technology originated in Israel. Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 chips developed in Israel. There’s a great book out if you want to read about this called “The Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor. It’s absolutely fabulous to read and if you’re at all interested in business or technology and leadership and innovation, that’s the book for you to read.
 
It shows the connection between their military culture and the way they develop leaders in the military. They have universal military service in Israel and the book explains how this plays a role in the corporate world. Because when you go get a job in Israel after you get out of the Army or college the first question they ask you is what unit you were in in the IDF. “Oh yeah, my Uncle Joe was in that unit or cousin so-and-so was in that unit.” They know everybody and they know exactly what you did and what your background is, what your capabilities are, what your training was. When you go into the IDF when you’re 18 years of age until you come out of the reserve when you’re 44, you’re with the same group the whole time. You develop a bond and a care and concern for one another.
 
It’s just remarkable and the leadership style that developed in the military culture comes over into the corporate world. And it’s not the same kind of military culture here. Here you have a commanding officer come back and the company commander will come back and tell the first lieutenant that this is their mission and this is what they’re going to do. He’s going to call in his platoon leaders and tell them what their different assignments will be. They’re going to go back to the platoons and divide their squads up and tell them what they’re going to do and everybody’s going to say, “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full”. They’re then going to go out and do the mission.
 
But in Israeli army they’re going to say, “Wait a minute. That’s nuts! You’ve got a screw loose. This is why this isn’t going to work.” Then they will have a rousing debate back and forth and in the process of that give-and-take they’re going to come up with a much better plan and they’re going to demonstrate ingenuity and innovation and creativity in the whole process. Then they’re going to come up with probably a better plan and go execute it. That doesn’t play well in the American corporate world or the military. They don’t know how to handle that but it’s very much a part of the Israeli culture. It blows away the American corporate world when they start interacting with Israeli counterparts.
 
Read the book. I recommend it. It’s got great ideas in there for some ways we could do some things a little differently and a little better by learning from the Jewish people. So they’ve also done a lot of development in the medical field. For example, ninety percent of American battlefield deaths have occurred before the wounded ever get to a field hospital. Half of those are due to “bleeding out”. An Israeli company called First Care addressed this by developing what is called “a life-saving bandage” which is now carried by every US soldier in the field. This was used to stem the blood loss of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords when she was shot in the head. Somebody had this life care bandage in the ambulance that the EMT’s had. That stemmed the loss of blood so that has saved an untold number of lives.
 
They’re also doing a lot with robotics now. You can find some video on this. They’ve developed basically an exo-skeleton that fits on the legs of a paralyzed person and enables them to walk again. It’s just incredible technology. We also had a briefing when we were there with a retired IDF colonel who was a spokesperson for the IDF for a number of years. She’s with an organization called Natal which has developed the foremost treatment in the world for treating PTSD because if you live in about thirty percent of Israel you’re having to deal with PTSD. If you live in some of those places where they get regular rocket fire, you’re under a lot of stress. In Gaza there’s a high level of PTSD. You go to some place like we did at Kfar Aza kibbutz about a hundred yards off of the border with Gaza. Seventy-five percent of the residents there have been directly affected by rocket fire from terrorists from Gaza. So this is a reality there. They’re doing remarkable things. Some Americans have taken notice of what Natal is doing. They’re starting to do some test projects with the U.S.in Jacksonville, Florida starting this year. The Israelis have also developed a medical tool called endopat which is a cuff which measures blood pressure from your fingers and can perform a complete heart analysis in five minutes and predict whether someone will have a heart attack within the next seven years. So they are at the cutting edge. This technology works its way out to the rest of the world. It’s blessing the rest of the world.
 
When it comes to agriculture we saw so many things I can’t even remember them all. We went to the Bakanie Institute which is one of the development centers for their Department of Agriculture. They showed us many of the things they’re developing. They developed a hybrid seedless mandarin orange that is exported all over the world. They’re trying to grow it in other places, right now in South America and some other places. They share the wealth voluntarily; it is not socialism. They share this with other countries.
 
Last year when I was over there we had some people talking to us from the Department of Agriculture on how the Israelis help agriculture in many of the countries in Africa. They’re dealing with desert climate so they’re introducing them to drip irrigation. They do things better than Americans do. Americans just think, “Oh, I’m going to help you out so I’ll throw a wad of cash at you. I’ll send over a lot of equipment and that’s going to solve your agricultural problems.” So the Africans get their John Deere and Caterpillar tractors and everything else and they drive them for a couple of weeks. When they develop a problem they just sit in the fields because they can’t read the manuals. They don’t know how to fix what broke because they can’t read a manual. What the Jews do, they send teams in. Some of these countries are Muslim so they don’t like Jews. They won’t let Israelis come in so the Israelis come in as a non-governmental organization, not as an Israeli organization, and they provide the same aid. They teach them how to read. They don’t throw gobs of money at them and give them equipment. They start off by teaching them how to read. So now they can read the manual to this equipment that U.S. and Europe give them that would otherwise just sit in the field and rust. How practical that is. How wise that approach is. So they do a lot of different things like that. They’re quite helpful.
 
They develop things for potatoes in storage. You know how they start sprouting. The Jews discovered that if you bathe them in a mint oil, the potatoes don’t sprout any more. Most apples are stored a year before they ever make it to the store. If you take a Granny Smith apple and if you store it at a degree or two above freezing it’ll keep for well over a year but the skin will start to oxidize and turn brown. So they discovered that if you put Granny Smith apples in a low-oxygen environment for two or three hours then the skin will not turn brown any more. You don’t have to keep it in that low-oxygen environment for long, just two or three hours, and that takes care of it. Lots of little things like that they’ve developed.
 
They put little sensors into plants and measure the water intake of the plant, when it’s had enough, when it’s at the bottom of the cycle so the sensor then sends out a signal when it needs water or when it’s had too much water. That’s measured in the desert environment where water is very precious. You have drip irrigation which targets water to each plant and you’re not just wasting any water. The Israelis have developed desalination plants and they’ve also developed plants for cleaning up the water so that eighty percent of the irrigation water they use comes from sewage water that has been treated and completely purified. So they’re doing remarkable things like that. This technology is then used in the rest of the world. 
 
That’s just some of the ways that Israel is a blessing to other nations. The other part of that we see is that there’s a promise from God that He will bless those who bless Israel and then He will curse those who curse Israel. In the Hebrew there are two different words for curse in verse 3. The first word is a strong word for judgment. “I will harshly judge…” Then the second word for curse, if we wanted to put it in the vernacular, we would say I would strongly judge those who “dis” you. It means just a slight disrespect. It means treating the Jews lightly and with disrespect. So it’s not just a matter of judging those who treat you badly but it’s a matter of judging anyone who treats the Jews with disrespect.  It has serious implications so this is foundation for understanding why anti-Semitism is wrong. Anti-Semitism is a scourge that has entered into Western civilization via the church. That is a great shame for the body of Christ to bear is the way that we shifted away from a devotion to the literal meaning of the text in order to go with an allegorical interpretation which has led to a complete rejection of Israel.

Romans 101b-Hermeneutics and Replacement Theology

Romans 9:1 NASB95
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit,
Romans 101b-Hermeneutics and Replacement Theology
 
In light of the trip I was on a couple of weeks ago to Israel I’m going to continue to show some videos. The sound quality on this one is a little shaky in the first 15 or 20 seconds because there was some machinery running in the background. Then that got shut off so that will pick up. The other thing that may be a little difficult for some of you is that the lady we’re listening to is an Ethiopian Jew, one of the so-called Falasha which is actually a derogatory Ethiopian term meaning a foreigner or someone who’s been in exile. I chose this particular one to show because it is an extremely moving story of her life.
 
I heard about five or six stories very, very similar to hers from the different Ethiopian Jews. This lady is a director at a Kibbutz known as Yemen Orde named for Orde Wingate. If you don’t remember, Orde Wingate was a British officer who was a little bit eccentric. Churchill and many others thought he was just about crazy. He was really one of the fathers or grandfathers of the whole concept of special warfare, special operations, asymmetrical warfare, that kind of thing. He was a little bit strange in that he would do things to test himself to see what a human being could endure. Instead of walking across the Sahara Desert at night he walked across it during the heat of the noonday sun with no water to see how long he could last, to test his own endurance. That way he could see what his men could actually endure under the worst possible conditions. He was dispatched by the British during the time of what is called the Arab Insurrection or the Arab Revolt, from about 1935 to 1938 in what was then the British mandate of what was Palestine.
 
What the British didn’t understand was how much of a Zionist he was. He was reared in a Plymouth Brethren home where he and his sister were taught the Old Testament and the whole Bible from the time they were infants. The value of the Jewish people and Israel to God’s plan was drilled into them so he had a tremendous love for the Jewish people. Unfortunately both he and his sister apostatized from the faith when they went into their adult years. His sister became a full blown atheist and he became something of an agnostic. In fact he loved the Jewish people and he loved the Old Testament God but he had questions about the Trinity and some other aspects which he never quite resolved. 
 
After his time in Israel where he trained Moshe Dayan and many other young men who later became the backbone of the IDF, the Israeli Army, the British pulled him out because he was so pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. During World War II he was responsible for running the Italians out of Ethiopia and so there was a connection there to the Ethiopians in his background. He came in from the west which was not thought to be possible so basically he snuck in through the back door with a small number of troops and surprised the Italians and ran them out of Ethiopia.
 
Then he was sent by the British during World War II to infiltrate India where he developed a group that went behind enemy lines, behind Japanese lines in Burma called the Chindits. He was killed when a bomber carrying him and several Americans flying over Burma was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire in 1944. After the war their remains were discovered and since most of those who were in the plane were Americans and because they had no way of determining whose body was which, they brought all of them back to Arlington National Cemetery and buried them in a mass grave there. Because of his devotion to Israel and because of his devotion to the Zionist cause he was given the title hayedid, a Hebrew word meaning “the friend”. Every year on the anniversary of his death the Israeli ambassador to the United States goes to his grave and has a ceremony where they recount his great deeds for Israel and put flowers on his tomb.
 
That’s a great story but there’s an additional story related to this Kibbutz named for him. It’s a youth village for troubled youth. They have a tremendous program and originally they started off with orphans that had survived the Holocaust and had no family. Eventually it turned into a place where other orphans and troubled youth could come and they do a tremendous job turning then around. During the Israeli War for Independence this kibbutz came under attack from the Arab forces and they were without food. There’s an Israeli legend, according to the author of this biography on Orde Wingate, “Fire in the Night”, by John Berman and Colin Smith. They identify that as simply a legend that his widow, Lorna, flew over the kibbutz and dropped Wingate’s personal Bible to the personal defenders. Instead they write, “Contrary to the popular Israeli legend, she was refused permission to make the flight for reasons of her own safety. Instead she handed the Bible to a group of women who with their children had been evacuated from the settlement. She inscribed it on July 5, 1948, “To the defenders of Yemin Orde. Since Orde Wingate is with you in the spirit although he cannot lead you in the flesh I send you the Bible he carried in all his campaigns and from which he drew the inspiration of his victories. May it be a covenant between you and him in triumph or defeat now and always.” That Bible is now preserved at another kibbutz, Ein Harod, which is near Harod Springs where Gideon called out the 300. We went there on our last trip to Israel. You see you do all kinds of things besides just look at Bible sites when you go over to Israel.
 
We went to the headquarters building at Ein Harod where Wingate ran his operations in training the special night fighters, the Haganah, the Israeli army at that time. So there’s a connection to there with Ethiopia. There are a couple of big pictures of Wingate and his widow standing with David Ben Gurion who was the prime minister of Israel in early 50’s. They were coming to begin this school they started after the war for independence.
Now this story of the Ethiopian Jews is a fascinating story. Lots of time you’ll hear that it’s just legend but we don’t really know how much is true and how much is not true. The legend is that in Ethiopia which is where the Queen of Sheba was from, the queen who came to visit Solomon is that she was pregnant with Solomon’s child when she went back to Ethiopia with an entourage of Jews. These Ethiopian Jews are said to be the descendants of that entourage.
 
There’s also other historical truth in that there were a group of Jews who went to Egypt after the destruction of the Temple in 586 and various other groups that went down to that area so we’re not really sure what their heritage is. They were called the Beta Israel, the house of Israel. Some think in their part of the legend that they descend from the lost tribe of Dan, that after the destruction of the northern Kingdom in 722 many of the tribe of Dan migrated down to Ethiopia.
 
Others believe that they are the descendants of Menilep the First of Ethiopia who was the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and that was the belief of the kings of Ethiopia, all the way down to Haile Selassie who was deposed in the late 50s. He claimed direct descent from the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. We don’t have historical verification of that so it’s uncertain.
 
There’s also the view that they’re descendants of Ethiopia Christians and pagans who converted to Judaism almost 1500 years ago and also the view that they’re the descendants of Jews who fled from Israel after the destruction of the Temple in 586 and went down that way. The view among the Jews in determining whether they were authentic really has quite a history. I was not aware of this because we just hear the story of the legend a little bit but as early as the 1500s Egypt’s chief rabbi, David ben Solomon Abuzimri known as Radbad, a nickname based on acronyms from his name, declared that in halecha, that is in Jewish legal sense, that the Beta Israel were indeed Jews. They’re known by the Jewish community as far back as the fourth or fifth century.
 
By the 15th century they were accepted that they are indeed Jewish. This position from Radbad was reaffirmed in the 19th century. Almost all leading Jewish authorities accepted Beta Israel as true Jews in 1864. In 1908 the chief rabbis of 45 countries also affirmed that Beta Israel were true Jews and then after World War II and after the they deposed Halle Selassie, they became increasingly persecuted by the socialist, Marxist dictators that ruled Ethiopia so they were left impoverished. They were prohibited form observing any of their Jewish rituals. They were prohibited from teaching Hebrew which they had been teaching their children from generation to generation. They observed all of the Mosaic Law. They had no idea that the Jews had returned to Israel or to Jerusalem because they were so poor and they were located near Lake Tana, a remote area in Ethiopia. They had no news, no idea, no awareness of anything going on in the outside world. So this young woman, who is probably in her early 30s, is telling her story. I thought it was much more compelling than most of the stories I heard. I listened to the whole thing a couple of times today. I’m half deaf so if I can understand it and you’ll work with the accent a little bit, then you’ll hear this remarkable story. She’s one of the directors of the youth village there.
 
If you wish to view this part of the class, please visit: https://vimeo.com/66875424
 
One of the reasons I’m showing these videos is to help us understand a little bit more about modern Israel and the role of Israel in the world because the assault on Israel today is coming not only from Islam and their historic anti-Semitism but we’re seeing a resurrection of anti-Semitism in the Christian community and the resurrection of some of the worst forms of Replacement Theology. So let’s open our Bibles again to and just review where we’ve been in our study.
 
Tonight we’re going to look at the issue of hermeneutics and Replacement Theology, all part of our introduction to understanding Paul’s focus on Israel and the Jewish people in . One quote I had here from the Baltimore Jewish Times of November 9, 1979 about the Falasha, “Once they were kings a half a million strong. They matched their fervor with faith and outmatched the Muslim and Christian tribesmen around them to rule the mountain highlands around Lake Tana. They called themselves Beta Israel, the house of Israel, and used the Torah to guide their prayers and memories of the heights of Jerusalem as they lived in their thatched huts in Ethiopia. Their neighbors called them Falasha, the alien ones, the invaders. Even after three hundred years of rule, even the black-featured faces that matched those of all those around them did not make the Jews of Ethiopia secure governors of their secure destiny in Africa.” That article was also significant because when that article came out in the late 70’s there were movements to begin the movement of these Egyptian Jews, the Beta Israel, to Israel. The publication of that particular article by the Washington Jewish Week caused something of an uproar. It was the leaking of information about the first attempt by the U.S. and Israel to bring them out of Ethiopia and into Israel. It delayed that for some time.
 
Okay. . As we saw last time in the first three verses the Apostle Paul emphasizes his emotional attachment, concern, and love for the Jewish people. He went so far as to say if he could he would die, be accursed eternally, he would be lost if they could all be saved. In verse 2 he says, “I wish myself that I were anathema from Christ for my countrymen according to the flesh.” There’s nothing negative toward Paul toward the Jewish people. He’s not blaming them to be Christ-killers. He’s not blaming them or saying they’re under the judgment of God and Christians should be hostile to them. He shows his great love for the Jewish people.
 
In verse 4 he describes them as Israelites to whom pertain, and this is a tense which emphasizes their present possession of the adoption from Exodus, where they’re adopted as God’s first-born child, from the glory, the covenants [Abrahamic, Land, Davidic, and the New Covenant). He’s saying these still pertain to Israel. They have not been abrogated. The giving of the law belongs to Israel. That not only describes a specific giving of the Law but the fact that God called out the descendants of Abraham to be the custodians of revelation, the custodians of the Scripture, preserving and passing it on. “The service to God” relates to their priesthood in the Temple and “the promises” which means these promises still hold true. They have not been set aside by God.
 
He says in verse 5, “Of whom are the fathers from whom according to the flesh Christ came.” This means Jesus is fully Jewish in his humanity “whose overall and eternally blessed God. Amen.” This is another profound statement there identifying Jesus as being fully God.
 
We looked briefly last time at the foundation of the Abrahamic Covenant, God’s call of Abraham in where He promised that He would make Abraham a great nation and He would bless Abraham personally. That’s not in the plural, it’s singular where God is saying He is promising to bless Abraham and “make your name great”. Then He says, “that you should be a blessing…” This is a command. I went over all the various things where Israel has done numerous things in agriculture and technology and medicine and numerous other things, advancing the field. One thing I didn’t mention last time is something called IsraAid. This is a team which the Israeli government has developed consisting of doctors and a range of other specialists, such as EMTs and nurses, and a whole array of emergency equipment which they fly into places like Haiti when they had the big earthquake three of four years ago and in Japan when they had their earthquake, and in Indonesia when they had the tsunami. When the earthquake occurred in Haiti the IsraAid was in Haiti within about 48 hours, a couple of days before the US was there. Notice that Haiti is just around the corner for us but Israel’s on-site solving problems, setting up triage, treating people, having surgery, rescuing people under the rubble, all of this on the spot again and again and again. They’re fulfilling that responsibility of being a blessing to the world.
 
Then the key promise here in verse 3, “I will bless those who bless you and I will curse him who curses you.” We saw it was two different Hebrew words used there. I keep emphasizing that the first word means a harsh curse and the second has the idea of just treating the Jews with disrespect. If you treat the Jews with disrespect, God is going to harshly judge you. That is one of the strongest verses to understand the horrors and the dangers for any people, any nation to get into when they get involved with anti-Semitism.
 
That’s what I pointed out last time that there are two ideas that have plagued Christianity. One is the idea of Replacement Theology and the second is Christian anti-Semitism. As Christians we have this horrible legacy from the middle of the 2nd Century where anti-Semitic ideas began to develop within Christianity, leading to some of the most horrible things being said about the Jewish people and being done to the Jewish people and on down through the Middle Ages and to the present culminating in the worst expression of anti-Semitism ever. This was the Holocaust that was carried out by the Nazi government by Germany during World War II.
 
A lot of people don’t realize this because it hasn’t been published but recently we learned about a study that came out from the UN. This study had been going on for two or three years investigating concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos. There are hundreds and hundreds of both cities and towns all throughout Eastern Europe that created two or three block ghettos and forced hundreds of Jews into those ghettos as a concentration camp. So the question was how many ghettos were there under the Third Reich. This study that came out in January was seeing if there were 5 or 8 or 10 thousand. It was actually 42,500. That blew everybody’s mind. Nobody had realized that.
 
What these two common views have in common is that they are built upon a fallacious view of interpretation that is not restricted to Biblical studies. How you interpret something, whether it’s an e-mail from a girlfriend or boyfriend, whether it’s a legal document, whether it’s the United States Constitution, whether it’s British Law, whether it’s Shakespeare or a modern dramatist, whatever it is, how you interpret literature is always the same. It’s always based on a literal, plain view of the language. Once you cut yourself off from that then an author can’t communicate to his subject.
It’s always interesting that in the modern or post-modern world of today, where you have these philosophers write condemning the historic view of any kind of a plain, literal view of interpretation, they do it in a way that they expect you to interpret their words in a plain, literal manner. That’s the only way you can understand what they’re saying and yet, they condemn that. We recognize that there are differences between different kinds of literature such as history, poetry, love sonnets, and drama. They all have their nuances but ultimately the interpretive framework is always based on a plain, literal interpretation. It doesn’t deny the use of figures of speech, it doesn’t deny the use of similes and metaphors, it doesn’t deny the use of symbols but those symbols and metaphors are used in a way that’s commonly understood to have something of a literal, specific, firm meaning.
 
So we need to begin our study of Replacement Theology and anti-Semitism as a backdrop for our study in by looking at the principles of interpretation. David L. Cooper was a missionary to the Jewish community. One of his young protégées was Arnold Fruchtenbaum and through Arnold’s ministries and that of others, David Cooper managed to put together a rather catchy definition of interpretation which is very clear. He called it the Golden Rule of Interpretation and it states, “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, make no other sense. Therefore take every word at its ordinary, usual meaning unless the facts of the immediate context studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths indicates clearly otherwise.” Okay, that’s a great definition so let’s talk about it a minute.
 
He starts off with “the plain sense of Scripture.” This refers to the language, the words, and what they normally mean when looking the words up in a dictionary. You understand that in a dictionary sometimes a word may have five or six different meanings. They’ll list them in order of the most common meaning and so on. Then when you look at a word you determine by the context what the meaning is. The meaning isn’t based on what Webster’s says. The same is true in Greek or Hebrew. The dictionary is simply the work of a lexicographer who has studied all the uses of a word and has categorized the major nuances that are found for the various meanings of that word in various cases of literature. That’s why when you look at say, an English dictionary from the 1800s or 1700s, words that are contained in that dictionary may have a different meaning from that same word today. Why? Because language changes with usage. Usage determines meaning, not the dictionary. Words don’t have absolute meanings.
 
Meanings are determined by context so when I teach word study to people who want to get into advanced study of the Scripture the key thing I tell them is don’t go to your lexicons and ask what the various ones say. Instead look at all the usages and categorize them. That takes a lot of time. We shortcut a lot because of the fact that we don’t always have the time to look at every single use of a word, especially if it’s a more common word, like pistis for faith or amen for faith in the Old Testament. This may be a word used hundreds of times. It takes a lot of time to go through and analyze each usage and the context of each usage in order to boil down your meanings.
 
Fortunately there are lots of lexical tools that have done a lot of that work for us. The more you study the more you come to understand those different nuances but you have to look at what that normal, plain meaning is. That’s the word that if I tell you something, you’re going to understand it. You’re going to read your instructions to fill out your income tax form. You want to make sure that you understand it in light of what the author said. That’s another aspect to interpretation. In order for one person to communicate to another person then the person that’s being communicated to needs to understand the intent and meaning of the one communicating. When you sit down and fill out your income tax and you read your instructions, you need to do it the way they say to do it, not the way you would like to do it. They have a word for people who fill that out on the basis of how they would like it to mean. They call them tax evaders and criminals. 
 
The same thing happened when you were say 14, 15, or 16 years old and you got a love note passed to you or now a love tweet or e-mail and your question is what did he or she mean? What did they intend to say? You don’t care what you would like it to mean; you want to know what they said. We know that to be true. But when we get to be a junior or senior in high school, all of a sudden, the teacher starts trying to tell us that the way to understand poetry is to ask what it means to you. Of course if you go to some Sunday school classes, you’re exposed to that much earlier. The teacher who’s lazy comes in and hasn’t ever studied anything and says, “Read this verse and tell me what it means to you.”
 
We have a culture that’s been brought up on this idea that the meaning of a text doesn’t reside in the text, in the words of the text, or in the mind of the person who wrote the text but in your mind. We call that a subjective meaning because you’re the subject and the meaning is dependent upon you. There’s not an objective meaning that is verifiable from the author. Plain sense is just taking it at its face value. Plain sense is common sense. If you read a passage of Scripture and it says that Jesus wept, the plain sense of that is that Jesus cried. So you don’t want to try to read into it something else. It’s in the context of the death of Lazarus so it makes perfectly good sense. There’s nothing contextually to make you think that this is really talking about some other kind of activity. So what’s he’s saying is that “when the plain sense makes common sense, don’t try to read something else into it.” It’s simple.
 
When Paul says, “To the Israelites to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law,” don’t try to make Israel there the Church. Don’t try to read in other passages the word “church” and say, “Well that must mean Israel.” I have another book to show you. Tonight’s really show-and-tell night. I’ve brought all kinds of things to show you tonight. This new book I’m working through is a two-volume book by Menachem Sokolov, written in 1920 on the history of Zionism. He’s one of the few Zionist historians that I’ve read that actually starts with British Restorationism. His first chapter is called “England and the Bible.” He writes about one of the primary principles that Martin Luther resurrected was literal interpretation. Luther only applied is as far as justification by faith. That was such a huge battle that he didn’t have time to push it beyond that in his system. So he still had a lot of non-literal interpretation in his theology but in his view of salvation much of it was based on literal interpretation. That was around 1517 when the Protestant Reformation began.
 
So now in Sokolov’s book we’re up to about 1600 and over those 80 years or so there’s been a development of theology as theologians have pushed out the application of literal interpretation to other areas of theology besides just salvation. So Sokolov, a Jewish author, writing about England says, “The education of a large number of Englishmen has consisted mainly in the reading of the Scriptures. The growth and the gradual diffusion of literal and moral thinking is due to the supreme influence of the Bible is the fact that can be recognized throughout the whole of English history. As a single instance we may take two writers who lived in different periods, one from the 1600s, one from the 1800s. The first is the Reverend Paul Knell, (1615–1654 – the height of the Puritan era) and Matthew Arnold (1822 –1888). Knell compared England with Israel. What other culture besides England has compared their experience with the Israelites? The answer is the black community. They’ve identified their slavery in America with the slavery of the Jews in Egypt. They made the same mistake because they idealized it and they used too much allegory. It wasn’t literal.
 
That was a problem that Sokolov is pointing out that preceded Paul Knell. He goes on to say, “Knell compared England with Israel. The name of Israel was used by writers of his age with so much laxity that it is impossible to define the sense with which it is generally intended to convey. It often meant the religion of Israel but other times it was used as if it were a synonym for the word church. But Knell used the word in its plain meaning. For him Israel meant simply the people of Israel or the land of Israel.” Literal interpretation. Israel means Israel. Israel doesn’t mean the church. The church doesn’t mean Israel. The term Israel is not a symbol for something. It’s not a code word for the church. The church is not the Israel of the New Testament.
 
That’s what a lot of people were doing up to Knell, and Knell is one of the few that began to shift with a literal interpretation. Most denominations, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and some Presbyterians were not literal. Those Presbyterians who were premillennial were more literal in these passages that related to Israel. This idea of literal interpretation doesn’t just apply to the Bible. It applies to any kind of literature. One of my favorite quotes is from Chief Justice Clarence Thomas at a lecture to the Manhattan Institute about seven years ago. He said, “Let me put it this way. There are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution. Try to discern the best we can what the Framers intended, or make it up.” You could insert the Bible for Constitution and it would be just as true. See that’s how people are with the Bible. They either try to determine what the plain sense of Scripture is in light of what the author intended or they’re just making it up. The trouble in a lot of churches and a lot of theologians is that they’re just making it up. Once you get away from a literal interpretation, it can mean anything and there’s no protection of truth any more. The truth, they say, is what it means to you and it can be different to what it means to me. That’s the same thing with the Constitution. You hear people talk about the Constitution as a living document. They mean that it doesn’t have to be interpreted any more in terms of the intent of the original author.
 
Well, tell me, when you get a love letter or a letter from the IRS, especially today, if you’re a conservative Christian, or if you get a tax notice or a greeting card from someone, how do you understand it? You understand it literally. You don’t understand it in a figurative, allegorical manner. You don’t say, “Well, what do I want this to mean?” That means it may have meant something different yesterday than it means today. We don’t do that in anything.
 
Isn’t it interesting that we have an administration today where the only amendment from the Bill of Rights that they think has any value is the Fifth Amendment. They trampled the First Amendment. They want to destroy the Second Amendment. They don’t care anything about the Fourth Amendment or the Tenth Amendment but they always claim the fifth because they trampled all over the other ones and that is not restricted to just Democrats. Trust me. There have been a lot of people over the years that have trampled over both ends of the spectrum because they don’t want to take it literally.
 
See, we elect people to defend the Constitution. They think we elected them to change the Constitution. We don’t hire a pastor to change the Bible but that’s what happened in the late 19th century with the advent of 19th century liberal theology. It went back to the same kind of non-literal interpretation and it produced a pseudo-utopianism that gave birth to a bastard child of Nazism. There were a lot of other elements that figured into that but that’s where the anti-Semitism came from. It had a long heritage in Western Europe and it was all built on a non-literal interpretation of the Bible. It bore its poisonous fruit in the Third Reich. 
 
What does the word hermeneutics mean? It’s from the Greek word hermenuo which is based on the Greek deity, Hermes, who was the messenger or interpreter of the gods. The word basically meant to bring someone to an understanding of something, to explain something, to make it clear, to make it intelligibly. So hermeneutics refers to the science and art of interpreting the Bible. It is both a science because it follows certain precise principles that must always be followed and an art, because it takes time and skill to develop it. This is based on a quote from Milton Terry from an earlier generation of his classical work, “Biblical Hermeneutics”.
 
Terry is good as far as he goes but he reached a point where he quit being literal. A lot of covenant theologians, once they get to unfulfilled prophecy interpret it in a non-literal manner although they interpret all of the prophecy that’s been fulfilled in a literal manner. Jesus was going to be born in Bethlehem (). He was going to be born of the lineage of David. They take all of that literally but as soon as it becomes unfulfilled prophecy they no longer understand it in a literal fashion. Milton Terry wrote in his classic textbook on hermeneutics that “Hermeneutics is both a science and an art. As a science it enunciates principles, investigates the laws of thought and language and classifies its facts and results as an art. It teaches what application these principles should have and establishes their soundness by showing their practical value in the elucidation of the more difficult Scriptures.”
 
This means that as you interpret the Scripture it’s not in isolation. It’s got a surrounding context. That context has a surrounding context and even that has a surrounding context. The passage we’re looking at in has a context of and is in the context of the epistle to Romans which is part of the Pauline epistles which is part of the New Testament, which is part of the Bible. So you don’t interpret just in light of a verse. You don’t just take out your scalpel and carve out two or three verses and try to understand them in isolation. Not only do you have the literary context of the Scripture but you also have its historical context, its cultural context, and all of those different aspects that are important. It concludes by saying “The hermeneutical art thus cultivates and establishes a valid exegetical procedure.”
 
Okay, now this is all spelled out in a lot of different Bible study methods. Peter Lange, a German, in his commentary on Revelation writes about the different types of hermeneutics, literal or figurative. He says, “The literalist (so called)”…” The reason they sort of qualify this is because our opponents say we have just a wooden literalism, that we don’t believe in figures of speech, we don’t believe in metaphors or similes. We just have a very rigid literalism. But that isn’t true. In other words if I tell you to go jump in the lake that doesn’t mean I’m telling you to literally go jump into a body of water. I just want you to go away or leave or quit bothering me or something like that. It’s an idiom. It’s a figurative way of speaking that has a literal meaning. We know what it means. If I tell you to go jump in the lake, not one of you would go find a body of water and jump into it. See, that would be literal interpretation but that’s not what we mean by literal interpretation.
 
Lange says, “The literalist is not one who denies that figurative language and symbols are used in prophecy. Nor does he deny the great spiritual truths are set forth therein. His position, simply, is that the prophecies are to be normally interpreted, that is, according to the received laws of language, as any other utterances are interpreted, that which is manifested so regarded. There are some passages of Scripture that utilize a tremendous amount of figurative speech.”
 
Let me read one to you. This comes from the Song of Solomon, one of my favorite, favorite little descriptions. Now think how you would picture this. I one time had an artist draw this literally and I can’t find it now. Picture this in a literal manner. This is Solomon speaking of the beauty of the Shulamite woman. “Behold you are fair, my love. Behold you are fair. You have dove’s eyes behind your veil.” Are we going to take that literally that she has literal dove’s eyes? It’s a literal veil. See we understand that in our language that this is a metaphor. He’s comparing her eyes to the beauty of a dove’s eyes. “Your hair is like a flock of goats going down from Mount Gilead.” So there’s a comparison there between her hair and a flock of goats. Is it comparing smell? Is it comparing color? Or is it comparing something that is flowing beautifully and gently down the slope? We know what it’s comparing. We understand that. We’re interpreting it literally but not woodenly. “Your teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep.” Just imagine what that would look like if you took it literally.
 
Okay, see, this idea that we don’t believe in metaphor or simile or idiom is just nonsense, it’s not what goes on. Gordon Clark who’s a well-known philosopher theologian, who has gone to be with the Lord, so he’s now a dispensationalist, does make a very intelligent comment here. He says, “If God created man in His own rational image and endowed him with the power of speech…” Notice he goes back to the creator concept, that God initiated communication and language and then He creates that in man as a finite replica of who God is. “…and endowed him with the power of speech then the purpose of language, in fact the chief purpose of language, would naturally be the revelation of truth to man and the prayers of man to God.” Language was originally created so that God could communicate information to man and man would communicate back to God. That’s the purpose of language primarily. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other aspects to it but that’s the primary aspect.
 
He says, “In a theistic philosophy one not ought to say that all language is devised in order to describe the finite objects of our sense experiences.” In other words, language isn’t there so we can talk about what we see in the created order. “On the contrary, language was devised by God, that is God created man rational for the purpose of theological expression.” Now I’ve always wondered why people, even pastors, seem to avoid discussing theology. I always thought that if the primary or highest purpose for language was for us to just talk about God, then if you’re with someone who doesn’t ever like to talk about God or theology, then Houston, we’ve got a problem.
 
Now Floyd Hamilton is a well-known antagonist to dispensationalist. He’s an amillennial covenant theologian and he writes about interpretation, just to show you the other side. He says, “Now we must frankly admit that a literal interpretation of the Old Testament prophecies gives us just such a picture of the earthly reign of the Messiah as the pre-millennialist pictures.” My! If we use literal interpretation, of course we’re going to end up with what they think but Hamilton goes on to say, “But that’s wrong. That was the kind of Messianic Kingdom that the Jews at the time of Christ were looking for on the basis of a literal kingdom interpretation of the Old Testament prophecy.” His subtext is that they were wrong and that literal interpretation about future things is wrong.
 
Another amillennialist, Verne Poythress, who wrote a really slanderous book against dispensationalist back in the 90s is a well-known theologian who teaches up at Westminster Theological Seminary but he needed a fact checker who would tear out every other paragraph because it is just filled with all kinds of falsehoods about what dispensationalists believe. He wrote, “I claim that there is a sound, solid grammatical full historical reason for interpreting eschatological fulfillments of prophecy on a different basis than pre-eschatological fulfillments”. Now where do we find that in the Bible? Are we going to interpret unfulfilled prophecy in a different way than we interpret fulfilled prophecy? He continues, “It’s therefore a move away from grammatical historical interpretation to insist that the House of Israel and the House of Judah () must with dogmatic certainty be interpreted in the most prosaic biological sense, a sense that an Israelite might be likely to apply as a rule of thumb in a short term prediction.” In other words, what he’s saying is that the House of Judah and the House of Israel just can’t mean the House of Judah and House of Israel, That’s just too common. Common as pig tracks, as some would say. But no! He’s shifting the rules of the game in mid-game.
 
O.T. Allis, another well-known Westminster professor, covenant theologian, wrote numerous commentaries and attacks and slanders against dispensationalists in the early 20th century says, “One of the most marked features of pre-millennialism in all its forms is the emphasis on the literal interpretation of Scripture. It is the insistent claims of its advocates that only when interpreted literally is the Bible interpreted truly.” Well, he’s right. That’s what we say. He goes on to say, “They denounce us as spiritualizers or allegorizers, those who do not interpret the Bible with the same degree of literalness as they do. None have made this point more pointedly than the dispensationalists. The Old Testament prophecies as literally interpreted cannot be regarded as being yet fulfilled or as being capable of being fulfilled in this present age.” He goes on to say that he doesn’t interpret it literally because we’re in the kingdom now.
 
We’ll stop there and next time we’ll come back and see how a shift away from non-literal interpretation impacts how the church historically viewed Israel and that’s the foundation for understanding this whole thing that’s now called Replacement theology and how Replacement Theology is rearing its ugly head today in a new form called Christian Palestinianism. This is a counter-point to Christian Zionism. When I was in Israel I heard two advocates of Christian Palestinianism address us. It was interesting to listen to them but as one of my colleagues said, “We were patient to the point of where we were almost ready to commit murder.” So one pastor sitting there did call them a liar to their face but we won’t mention any names.

Romans 102b-Israel: Replacement Theology

Romans 9:1 NASB95
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit,
Romans 102b-Israel: Replacement Theology
 
One of the things I got to do on this trip [to Israel], similar but better than last year, I got to go down and spend about three hours with a paratrooper company right on the Gaza border. If you think about Gaza, which is southeast of Israel, the border comes about five miles from the Mediterranean and makes a right-angle turn and heads due south. This outfit is right on that corner. They wouldn’t allow me to shoot any weapons which was a great disappointment to me. After the war last November when Gaza was shooting so many missiles at Israel, they couldn’t do any more live firing near the border. Now Palestinians, or Gaza residents, are allowed to come all the way up to the border fence so they have to avoid any kind of semblance of fighting. They gave me a little demo and gave me a rundown on their weapons. Then I walked around outside their living quarters and their training area to the border and walked along within the trenches. My guide was a paratrooper in 1973. He was having a lot of fun showing me things.
 
Let’s open our Bibles to Romans, chapter 9. I want to continue with what we were talking about last time, hermeneutics and replacement theology. Now I’m going to basically focus on some of the hermeneutics. We looked at this passage, the opening introduction to chapter 9. Now the three chapters, , are the go-to chapters that demonstrate in the New Testament that God has not departed, cancelled, or abrogated His promises, His covenants to Israel. But if you don’t interpret literally you’re not going to come up with the right answer. If Israel means Israel, that’s interpreting it literally.
 
If Israel is a term that refers to the Church, if Israel is a term that refers to Christianity, if Israel is a term for the Church in the Old Testament, and the Church is a term for Israel in the New Testament, then you can just about make the Bible say whatever you want it to say. This is the foundation for what is known as replacement theology. Where I’m going with this, which is foundational to understanding issues today, is how to understand a plain, literal translation. Then we’re going to see how that lays the groundwork, the soil out of which replacement theology and anti-Semitism grows. It doesn’t mean that if somebody holds to allegorical or non-literal interpretation that they necessarily hold to replacement theology or if they do hold to that, that they’re anti-Semitic. But once you lay that groundwork of allegorical interpretation, that’s the soil out of which the Holocaust came.
 
Its roots are in the late first century, as we’ll see. and 5 focuses on the fact that the Israelites, “To whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the service of God and the promises…” This is Paul talking about the Church Age. The promises and the covenants still belong to Israel. He’s using the term Israel here in its Old Testament sense, referring to ethnic Israel, not some sort of spiritual Israel, not just Israelites who trust in Christ but it still belongs to Israel. Just as the Abrahamic covenant applies to all Jews in the Old Testament, thus all males, as we studied on Tuesday night in Acts, had to be circumcised because they all participate in the covenant. It doesn’t mean all Jews are saved but that at a natural, physical level they are all beneficiaries of at least the earthly aspect of the promises of God.
 
This is also part of the Abrahamic covenant, . This means they were commanded to be a blessing to the world and God’s promise that He would bless those who bless them and will curse those who curse them. The Abrahamic covenant is the foundation for why we believe it is important for Christians to bless Israel. There’s a lot of different ways in which Christians can bless Israel but one of the ways we can bless Israel as a nation is in terms of our support for Israel. I remember hearing pastors teach about this back in the 90s and a lot of people asked, “Well, does that mean we have to approve of every decision that Israel makes?” No, that’s not what it means. Supporting Israel means that you support their right to exist as a nation, their right to self-defense, their right to defensible borders and their right to own and possess that which has been given them under international law. There are going to be good policies, bad policies, weak policies, and strong policies that come out of the Knesset, their parliament, in Israel that not only may we not agree with but that many Israelis may not agree with. They have something like 16 different political parties. There’s a proverb among the Jews that if you have three Jews, you have five opinions. So it’s just nonsense to say that if you support Israel you validate every decision their government makes. That’s not what that means.
 
Supporting Israel means that we support their right to exist, their right to legal borders that have been established through international law and that takes us back to San Remo in 1920 which we’d studied in the past. According to San Remo, which was signed off on by 55 nations, all of the land west of the Jordan River was to be reserved for a national home for the Jewish people. The Arabs ended up getting Jordan. They have Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. None of those nations existed prior to 1920. The previous legal owner of that real estate was the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire broke apart at the end of World War I, then someone had to come in and designate who the new sovereign states were going to be and that fell to the victors of World War I.
 
They did the same thing in Paris. The four great powers, England, Japan, Italy, and the United States met in Paris and imposed the Treaty of Versailles on the Germans but part of what happened at Paris is that they had to redraw the borders for Eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Austria, and the Balkan States. All of those borders were reestablished. A lot of people don’t understand that even if you don’t have a shooting war, it’s still a war. It could be a legal war but when you win, the surveyors are going to come out, re-survey the property, draw where the property lines are and all of that gets filed down at the courthouse.
 
But on a larger scale, at the end of World War I, that’s what happened at Paris. They sent out all the surveyors all throughout Europe and they redrew all the borders. No one questioned their right to do it. Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, and everyone in that area had new borders. They didn’t have time to deal with the border situation with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. So that put that off until they met in San Remo in 1920 and they redrew the borders and established the states of Syria, Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. It’s part of the same documents that said those nations were now coming into existence with those borders.
 
The Arabs accept all of that part but that same document said all the land west of Jordan was to go to the Jewish people as a national homeland. But they put Abdullah Faisal as the kind of Syria. The French, who were governing under the mandate of the League of Nations knew that King Faisal had been promised a position of power and leadership by the British if he would aid them in their defeat of the Germans and the Ottomans. The British were forced to fulfill a promise to him and the only thing they could do was give him the area now known as the Kingdom of Jordan. Winston Churchill was foreign secretary at the time and had to sign off on that. He hated doing it but it was the only solution. That left everything west of the Jordan River to be a homeland for the Jewish people.
 
That’s the only legal document that establishes legal sovereignty over that land after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Who owned that land legally prior to 1920? The Ottomans. No one else. The Palestinian Arabs aren’t there. The only people who have ever been given sovereignty there by the League of Nations are the Jews. That’s international law. The UN was supposed to defend all treaties and alliances established by the League of Nations under their charter when they first started but they didn’t do it. At the same time the Israelis were so concerned and decided they’d have “a bird in the hand rather than two in the bush” so they were ready to accept just any little piece of real estate now rather than wait for something later on. So they compromised.
 
Everybody just ignored this legal document and it went into the files so everybody forgot about it until the 1980s. Then two different legal scholars, Howard Grief who spoke to our group [in Israel last summer], and Jacques Gauthier have done all of the detailed intricate work on pulling this information out and making it available to people. It’s gradually gaining more and more of a following to understand these things. That’s the legal argument as to why Israel has to right to the land.
 
The Biblical argument, which matters to us even if a lot of people don’t care what the Bible says or what history says, but we should care what the law says. We claim to be a people who believe in the rule of law. We may not like the decisions made at San Remo but guess what, if we believe in the rule of law, that’s where we’re supposed to start. You can’t just ignore it and act like it’s not there. That’s what’s been going on for the last eighty years.
 
Because of that, we’d had all this mess as we ignored the rule of law. It all goes back to the Abrahamic covenant and God’s promises. So God promises to watch out for Israel. Now that hasn’t changed. As I pointed out in the previous two classes there are two basic errors that have really plagued Christianity: Replacement theology and Christian anti-Semitism. No one likes to call replacement theology by that name because it gave birth to the Holocaust. They claim not to believe it anymore but they still say the Jews aren’t God’s chosen people, the Church is the new people of God, and they still believe the same thing. Replacement theology got hung around the neck of the Holocaust so they don’t like it. But it’s coming back very big, along with anti-Semitism.
 
The foundation of these two things is the issue of interpretation. How do you interpret the Bible? David Cooper said, “When the plain sense of the Bible makes common sense, make no other sense. Therefore take every word at its ordinary usual meaning unless the facts of the immediate context are arguing for something else.” Now that’s literal interpretation. I gave you several quotes last time from non-literal, covenant theologians on how they interpret Scripture. One was from Oswald Allis, a very well-known, famous Old Testament scholar from Westminster Seminary in the first half of the 20th century where he said, “It’s the insistent claims of its advocates [of literal interpretation] that only when interpreted literally is the Bible interpreted truly. And they denounce us as spiritualizers and allegorizers, those who do not interpret the Bible with the same degree of literalness as they do. None have made this charge more pointed than the dispensationalists.” We are the whipping boy for everything that’s wrong because George Bush sent American troops into Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein. He was accused of running foreign policy according to these dispensationalists who love and hoped every day when they woke up that the Battle of Armageddon was around the corner. That’s how they caricatured us. They accused Bush of being a dispensationalist. I don’t think he ever heard the word. He’s from a Methodist background. They’re not dispensationalists. Probably the last president who understood anything about that was President Ronald Reagan. Allegedly he read “Late, Great Planet Earth” which made an impact on him.
 
Allis also said “The Old Testament prophecies, if literally interpreted, cannot be regarded as having been fulfilled or of being capable of fulfillment in this present age.”  That’s right, they can’t be fulfilled literally in this present age. They’re amillennialists which means no literal, thousand year, physical reign of Jesus on the earth so they’ve spiritualized the kingdom. The kingdom is now Jesus ruling over the Church from heaven.
 
If you pay attention to a lot of people they use terms like, “Well, we’re going to do this for the Kingdom.” I don’t see a lot of that terminology in the Scripture but it’s very popular among a lot of evangelicals today. It comes out of a non-literal interpretation and teaching on the kingdom. That’s their view. They have a non-literal view of the kingdom. They believe Jesus Christ rules and reigns in our hearts today so that’s the kingdom. We’re in the Millennium. Aren’t you glad? I always like what Tommy Ice says, “If we’re living in the kingdom today, then I’m living in a millennial ghetto.”
 
So we have some passages which I want to read to you. Some people think I make these things up. , “The wolf and the lamb [notice it’s not the lion here] will graze together and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountains, says the Lord.” Now this is talking about Israel and the kingdom once the Israelites have returned and Israel has been restored to the land and the kingdom established. This is comparable to what Revelation talks about the curse being rolled back.
 
We have antagonism and we have carnivorous animals in the animal kingdom because of the curse of sin. This wasn’t God’s original design or intent and so now we live in a time when the wolf and the lamb, well the wolf looks at the lamb like its dinner and the lamb is just too stupid to know. They will graze together in the kingdom. Notice the wolf becomes herbivorous. The wolf will graze. There will be a change that takes place in the animals. Just like the original animals were all herbivorous and their dental structure, gastrointestinal system, everything changed as a result of the curse. But they were still wolves and lions and jaguars and whatever. How do you normally take the words that the wolf and the lamb will graze together? A wolf is a wolf. A lamb is a lamb. A lion is a lion. And a serpent is a serpent.
 
As most commentators point out this reiterates a parallel statement from talking about when the root of Jesse, the branch, comes forward and rules over the Kingdom. So again it’s a Messianic prophecy about the millennial kingdom. In that passage we also read, “The wolf also will dwell with the lamb. The leopard will lie down with the young goat.” The only time now when a leopard lies down with a young goat is when the young goat is in its belly. It continues, “And the calf and the young lion and fatling together and a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze, Their young will lie down together, And the lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den…”
 
Are we to take this literally? A lot of people come to this passage and say, “Lions don’t eat straw. That’s absurd. The Bible must be talking about something else. We can’t interpret this literally.”  Now I’ll read from a scholarly commentary, “The New International Commentary Series on the Old Testament” written by John Oswalt. On Isaiah he writes, “With a classic set of images the prophet portrays the kind of security and safety from the result of the rule of the Messiah. The most helpless will be at ease with those who were formerly the most rapacious and violent.” Notice how he shifted it. He’s not talking about literal lambs or literal wolves or literal lions. He’s saying the lamb and the calf represent the most insecure and helpless in a culture and the lion and the bear represent the most rapacious, the most violent members of a culture. He says, “There are three ways of interpreting such statements. The first is literalistic [a hidden pejorative in the statement], looking for a literal fulfillment of the words. While this interpretation is possible, the fact that the lion’s being carnivorous is fundamental to what a lion is…”
 
Now where did he get that? He’s portraying right away that he has a faulty view of creation. In our view God did not create lions as being carnivorous. says that God created them to eat from the field. Then sin changed that. So that shows a non-literal view of Genesis as well. He continues, “Literal fulfillment of the Bible would require a basic alteration of the lion’s nature.” See he has set up a completely false description of what the essence of a lion is. This is just silly word games.
 
He says, “A second means of interpretation is spiritualistic. The animals represent various spiritual conditions and states within human beings.” Where does he get that idea? Is it in the text? No, you’re reading it into the text from some prior idea. “While this avoids the problems of literal fulfillment it introduces a host of other problems, chief of which is the absence in the text of any controls upon the process. Thus it depends solely upon the exegesis’s correspondence where correspondence might be.
 
The third way of interpreting this passage and others like it is the figurative…” I love the way he parses the difference between spiritualistic and figurative. It’s echoes one president and says it all depends on the meaning of “is”. The details of vocabulary is where the battle rages. So Oswalt concludes, “In this approach one concludes that an extended figure of speech [nothing in the text indicates it’s a figure of speech] is being used to make an overarching point, mainly that in the Messiah’s reign, the fears associated with insecurity, danger, and evil will be removed not only for the individual but for the world as well.”
 
How about Calvin? He said, “In a word under these figures the prophet speaks the same truth as Paul plainly affirm, that Christ came to claim out of a state of disorder those things which are in heaven and on earth.” See Calvin is interpreting this whole thing that it’s really talking about the church, He’s saying that once you’re saved the old sin nature, the “wolfness,” the lioness, that’s going to go away and everybody in the church is going to cuddle up together. That’s basically what he says. He said, “It may be thus summed up. Christ will come to drive away hurt out of the world and to restore to its former beauty the world which lay under the curse. For this reason the straw will be the food of the lion.”
 
And then in other quotes related to , he brings in the idea of the Church. So he’s saying this applies to the Church today. But it’s written by Isaiah. So that’s the problem that we see where the literal fulfillment goes. Calvin says about , which reads “But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create.” The context here is the new creation of the kingdom in the millennial kingdom. “For behold I create Jerusalem for rejoicing and her people for gladness.” Now our friend Oswalt says this isn’t literal Jerusalem but it’s talking about the Church. Calvin says, “At first sight this might be thought harsh but an excellent meaning is obtained that the ground of joy is the deliverance of the Church.” Where do we see the Church in the passage?
 
See, that’s how many, many Christians interpret the Bible. It’s through this kind of non-literal view. Incidentally, that’s why they get sucked into a liberal view of interpreting the Constitution as a living document, they say it’s symbolic. They’ve been prepared for that because they go to these liberal churches every Sunday and they’ve been taught this spiritualized, allegorized way of doing hermeneutics. And that was reinforced in every literature class they took in most colleges and universities.
 
I never could make sense of poetry until I had dear old Doctor Wyatt who had one foot in the grave. She seemed ancient but she was probably no older than I am now. But she seemed ancient when I was in college. She taught Wordsworth and Coleridge from a literal hermeneutic. She would show us pictures of the Lake Region in England and talk about their lives and talk about what was happening in their life when they wrote this poetry. All of a sudden poetry made sense because she applied a literal hermeneutic to poetry. It made it make sense.
 
I was brought up in a church that held to literal interpretation. That’s what formed my mentality and it was why I never could understand this subjectivism in interpretation. So Calvin says this relates to the Church. is the last example I’ll give you. The passage is talking about the Messianic Kingdom. “Now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills. And all nations will stream to it.” This is talking about a new mountain of the Lord’s. This is the millennial temple. There will be sort of an up thrust from the earth, the Temple Mount, and the new temple will be built on that if you interpret it literally. “And all the nations will stream to it and many peoples will come and say ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, the house of the God of Jacob that He may teach us concerning His ways and that we may walk in His paths for the law will go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
 
Now Oswalt has three paragraphs on trying to make sense out of the word, Zion. He says it can’t really be this tiny mountain in Jerusalem. It never did make sense to him. He goes on to say, “One does not need to give the actual city some sort of semi-eternal status. Jerusalem has become some sort of symbol of God’s self-revelation through history. There’s no life apart from Him who has revealed Himself supremely in that context.” He’s saying it’s not talking about literal Jerusalem. Where does he get this? Calvin said that it’s the restoration of the Church and that’s all we need to read. is about the restoration of the church? Then verse 4 says, “And He will judge between the nations, and will render decisions for many peoples and they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up swords against nation, and never again will they learn war.”
 
This is the verse that is over the entry way to the United Nations. This states their purpose for their founding the UN was to bring world peace by beating ‘swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.” By putting this Bible verse over the entry to the United Nations building, the U.N. took upon itself a Messianic mission. They are an idolatrous organization because they claim to be able to do what the Bible says only the Messiah will be able to do. So from that point, if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you should have nothing to do with the U.N. It has put itself in the place of the Messiah but then, I’m radical.
 
Oswalt says, “When these principles are extended to the nations, world peace can result. However the thought of producing peace on any other ground is folly. Until persons and nations have come to God to learn His ways and walk in them, peace is an illusion. This does not mean the Church merely waits for the Second Coming.” Where does he get the Church here? See, they’re reading the church into all of these different passages. That’s the main thing I wanted to illustrate and give you an idea of how the spiritual or allegorical interpretation works.
 
Now where did this come from? When did this come into the Church? Well the first person to really systemize this is Origen. His primary biographer, Joseph Trigg, who writes about him says, “The fundamental criticism of Origen beginning in his own lifetime is that he used allegorical interpretation to provide a specious justification for reinterpreting Christian doctrine in terms of platonic philosophy.” Okay? So basically Origen is the one who finally moved the Church away from a literal interpretation. Prior to that the Church had a mix. It’s not true they were always literal. They really hadn’t refined their view of interpretation so it was a mix of a little allegory and a little literal interpretation. That’s why they never got that solidified.
But Origen came out of Alexandria in northern Egypt. Alexandria had become the seat of Greek philosophy. After the Roman Empire conquered Greece the seat of Greek philosophy moved from up north in Greece down to Egypt. So the focal point, the development and teaching of Greek philosophy was in Alexandria. That was where they had the Alexandrian library which was the best library in the world at the time. So Alexandria is just a focal point for platonic thought. In platonic thought the literal, physical world is not really important. What’s important is what it stands for. It’s just a physical representation of the ultimate ideal. What’s important is the ideal, not the shadow that we see in front of us. So this affects their view of life.
 
If it’s a fact that material things are not that important, then material pleasures in Platonism and the way it affects the monastic movement later on are related. No need to feed the body. That’s evil. We need to just go into the desert, live by ourselves in a monastery and focus on the eternal things and everything will be wonderful. Greek philosophy dominated the area in Northern Africa.
 
Now in Antioch, the same Antioch in Syria that we’ve studied with Paul, was the location that stayed a center of strong, solid orthodox doctrine for several hundred years. Antioch was the seat of a literal interpretation. Those folks at Antioch emphasized a literal interpretation of the Scripture. Guess what? They were also premillennial. That also influenced all of the area up through Turkey and up through Constantinople. So those areas held to a more literal interpretation of Scripture and they were premillennial. A couple of the church fathers were Polycarp and Papias. The Alexandrians hated Papias but Papias and Polycarp were both directly discipled and taught by the Apostle John. Maybe Papias had even met the Apostle Paul. They had a literal interpretation and they were premillennial in their writings but they’re hated by the Alexandrians, including Origen. They just ridiculed them in their writings according to Eusebius who also ridiculed Papias.
 
So Origen comes out of Alexandria and he develops this whole way of interpreting Scripture. Ronald Deprose in his book, “Israel and the Church”, says of Origen, “He motivated this view by appealing to the view of divine inspiration and affirming that often statements made by the Biblical writers are not literally true and that many events presented as historical are inherently impossible. Thus, only simple believers will limit themselves to the literal meaning of the text.
 
What Origen did is that he said just like the individual is made up of body, soul, and spirit, every text has three meanings: the literal meaning, the soulish meaning, and the spiritual meaning. The literal meaning may or may not even be true but what really matters is the symbolic or spiritual meaning.” But how do you get there? There’s no control on how you get that spiritual meaning. Origen is the one who takes this after it’s already been developed for probably a hundred years and he systematized it. He was brilliant. A brilliant heretic, that is. He sets the stage so that within a hundred years of his death Augustine is going to take that and systematize that into a whole amillennial, non-literal interpretation that is inherently anti-Semitic and full bore replacement theology.
 
DeProse also says, “An attitude of contempt toward Israel had become the rule by Origen’s time [200–250 B.C.]. The new element in his view of Israel is his perception of them as manifesting no elevation of thought.” In other words he’s saying there nothing really valuable in the Old Testament. In the early church they began to dump the Old Testament. It’s not important; it’s tied to Israel; they weren’t important, they were saying. They called them the “Christ-killers.” They said it wasn’t important to know the Old Testament to understand the New Testament. He goes on to say, “It follows that the interpreter must always posit a deeper or higher meaning related to prophecies related to Judea, Jerusalem, Israel, Judah, and Jacob which Origen affirms are not to be understood by us in a carnal sense.”
 
In other words, there’s not a literal meaning to these words. He believed they were really talking about spiritual truths that belong to Christ and the Church. “In Origen’s understanding the only positive function of physical Israel was that of being a type of spiritual Israel.” He means the Church, us. See there’s an inherent anti-Jewishness, an inherent anti-Semitism that’s already percolating by the early 3rd century. He says, “The promises were not made to physical Israel because she was unworthy of them and incapable of understanding them. Thus Origen effectively disinherits physical Israel.” By one hundred and fifty years after the death of the last apostle, Israel is being cut out. This leads to what is known as replacement theology.
 
What I’ve done is shown how you move from a literal to a non-literal interpretation. Once you do that you pretty much cut your anchor cords to any kind of objective guidelines for determining the meaning of a text. This eventually led to treating all these terms, such as Israel, Judea, Judah, and Jacob in non-literal ways. So then Israel doesn’t mean Israel anymore, it means the Church, and the Church doesn’t mean the Church, it means Israel. This leads to replacement theology. So what is replacement theology? It is a view that the Church is the new or true Israel that has permanently replaced or superseded national Israel as the people of God and therefore, national Israel will not experience a restoration to the land of Israel or to a position of favor with God.”
 
In this quote national Israel basically means ethnic Israel or Jews. So replacement theology basically says there’s no longer anything about being an ethnic Jew or nothing significant about being national Israel but that the Church now inherits all of the promises that God made to Israel. Well, we just read that says the promises belong to Israel. This is a direct contradiction of Scripture.
 
Now another word that is used for replacement theology is a technical, large word, supersessionism. I wondered why they started using this but now I understand that no one wants to say they believe in replacement theology. When one thing supersedes something else, it basically replaces it. But now we have a nice neutral, academic term so we can blow smoke up everybody’s skirt. Supersessionism is another word that derives from two Latin words, super which means on or upon and sedere which means when one person sits on the chair of another and displaces the latter. So one thing replaces another, so that here we have Israel superseded by the church and Israel no longer matters.
 
Walt Kaiser, a dispensationalist, was the president of Gordon Conwell Seminary up at Boston. He writes, “Replacement theology declares that the Church, Abraham’s spiritual seed, had replaced national Israel in that it had transcended and fulfilled the terms of the covenant given to Israel, which covenant Israel had lost because of disobedience.” Replacement theology’s view is that the covenant with Abraham is not permanent because they killed the Messiah. That meant they lost the covenant. That ended it.
 
Deprose writes, “Replacement theology is the view that the church completely and permanently replaced ethnic Israel in the working out of God’s plan and as a recipient of Old Testament promises to Israel. Hans LaRondelle who is a covenant theologian says, “The New Testament confirms that Israel would no longer be the people of God and would be replaced by a people that would accept the Messiah and His message of the kingdom of God.” See that’s their message.
 
So if Israel doesn’t matter then it doesn’t matter who’s over there trying to carve out a nation on the west side of the Jordan. They are irrelevant spiritually and whatever they do doesn’t matter because God doesn’t have anything to do with the Jews anymore. You can see how this mentality gave rise to tacit approval of the Holocaust.
 
Now there are four different types of supersessionism. There’s political, which is the view that there was a replacement of the Jewish people, their worship and their land by a political power that claims superior religious status, so Rome dominated and defeated the Jews, Islam conquered the land, so they are superior to the Jews. That’s political supersessionism. If you go to Jerusalem, if you’re walking down from the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley from the Dome of the Rock, the Temple Mount, and if you get level with the Dome of the Rock which you don’t necessarily see from other vantage points, right behind it you can see the two domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher which is about a quarter mile on the other side. The Moslems built the Dome of the Mount higher than the Church of the Sepulcher to prove Islam was superior to Christianity. They put the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Temple to show they had conquered Israel. That is a political, militant supersessionism right there.
 
If you go inside the Dome of the Rock you see all the scribble on the walls but it’s the Arabic quotations from the Koran. All of those citations were chosen to be written inside the Dome of the Rock because they all say something about Jesus just being a man, Jesus couldn’t be God, God didn’t have any wives, and God didn’t have any babies. The whole Dome of the Rock is a theological statement of the superiority of Islam over Christianity and that Jesus is nothing but a man. I never heard that from anyone until lately but it’s there. You can find some websites that actually lists the English translations of all those citations.
 
Then there’s punitive supersessionism which is represented by such early figures in the Church as Hippolytes, Origen, and Luther and that’s the views that the Jews who reject Jesus as the Messiah are consequently condemned by God and have to forfeit the promises otherwise due to them under the covenant. It’s saying God replaced them as a punishment. These are not mutually exclusive. All of these types can all be present in the same group. There’s economic supersessionism which is using the term “economic” in a technical, theological sense and says that the practical purpose of the nation of Israel in God’s plan is replaced by the role of the Church. This is represented by writers such as Justin Martyr and Augustine.
 
Then there’s structural supersessionism. This is Soulen’s term. He’s another scholar researching on this. He believes that the de facto marginalization of the Old Testament is normative for Christian thought. The Hebrew Scriptures are considered to be largely indecisive for shaping Christian convictions. In other words, you don’t really need to know the Old Testament. See how that subtly infiltrated a lot of evangelicals, even dispensationalists. You start talking to people about the Old Testament. They don’t know it. They haven’t been taught it so much. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve spent so much time in my ministry teaching the Old Testament because if you don’t understand the Old Testament you don’t understand the New Testament.
 
Sadly, even within dispensationalism, many emphasize so much the truths related to being “in Christ” that they ignore the Old Testament. I knew of one teacher in Dallas, a great teacher, a great dispensationalist, but he spent forty years in his ministry teaching only the primary Pauline epistles, especially Ephesians, Colossians, and Romans, that focused on what we have in Christ. He never, ever taught the Old Testament. Well, if you don’t understand the Old Testament, you can’t really get your hands around the New Testament passages because they’re filled with quotations from the Old Testament. You have to understand the whole counsel of God. So these are elements that still survive in a lot of evangelicalism which have their root in hostility to Israel from the very early days of Christianity.
 
So what are the core beliefs of replacement theology? Well, it’s already 8:35 so I’ll stop here. This will be a good place to start next time. We want to finish out replacement theology and then we’re going to start on the rise and development of anti-Semitism and how that manifests itself today. I want to start addressing the question, “Can a person be neutral to Israel or anti-Zionist and not be anti-Semitic? Another way to put it is, “Is anti-Zionism just a mask for anti-Semitism? 
 
I’ll give you a hint. In most cases it is. Anti-Zionism when you understand history and all that is involved then you’re going to realize that it’s basically giving tacit approval to the destruction of Jews because you’re basically saying that you don’t want the Jews to have a home base, a free base, a place where they can be protected from persecution and where they can relax and not have fear that the government is going to attack them simply because they’re Jewish. So anti-Zionism is basically saying, “Oh, the Jews don’t need to have their own place. We can take care of them in the nations of the world where they can be safe and secure.” But that isn’t going to happen so anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic. I don’t care what some politicians say. I don’t care how they try to finesse it. If you don’t want to support Israel, if you don’t believe Israel has a right to defend itself, and a right to their borders, and that we should help them because that’s part of blessing Israel and that Israel even today is a distinct people of God and has a distinct role in God’s plan, then that’s a subtle form of anti-Semitism and is extremely dangerous. So as we go through this we’ll wrap this up as a backdrop for understanding the importance of understanding the doctrines contained in .

Romans 103b-Israel: Replacement Theology & Christian Palestinianism

Romans 9:1 NASB95
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit,
Romans 103b-Israel: Replacement Theology & Christian Palestinianism
 
There are probably only about five or six doctrines that I consider crucial today because they happen to be at the crucial points where Biblical correctness or Biblical orthodoxy is attacked. Of course, one of those is in the area of the gospel. That’s the whole battle between the free grace theology and “lordship” or some kind of works. Within evangelical circles, that’s the focal point of that battle related to understanding salvation. In the spiritual life, which we spent a lot of time studying in , the focal point of that battle happens to be in the area of the relationship of God the Holy Spirit. Do we just live our Christian life by being moral and ethical or is there a conscientious dependence on God the Holy Spirit. Of course you know the answer to that. It’s the second. There’s a conscientious dependence on God the Holy Spirit. We walk by means of the Spirit. It’s not a mystical thing because it’s connected to the objective revelation of God’s Word.
 
There are battles related to understanding God’s plan and purpose for history. That’s the battle between covenant theology and dispensational theology. At the root of that there’s another battle. The battle is how do you interpret the Bible? How do you understanding the meaning of the text? That’s another battle and that battle is germane to both the battle related to dispensational thinking versus covenant theology as well as the issue and role of Israel.
 
Israel is becoming more and more of an issue in recent years. It has been over the last century with the return of Jews to the land for the first time in the last 2,000 years. Is this significant for the plan of God? As Randy Price gave a paper several years ago at Pre-Trib Conference called, “Is the Return of the Jews to the Land Prophetically significant?” It’s important to understand how he said that. He didn’t say, “Is this a fulfillment of prophecy but is it prophetically significant?” The answer, of course, was yes.
 
But there a lot of Christians who don’t believe that. It’s not a majority of evangelicals. There are a lot of non-evangelicals. In fact, they think that you’re the enemy. You have been deceived and that Christians who believe that Israel is significant today, that’s one of the greatest errors, heresies, and dangers in the modern world. “The reason we have problems with the U.S. in terms of foreign policy, the reason we were attacked on 9/11 and many other things is because of the horrible, evil influence of you terrible wicked dispensationalists and Christian Zionists. It’s all because you support Israel that we have all these terrible things going on in the world. If we just got rid of Israel we wouldn’t have a problem.”
 
Now there are a lot of problems with that view. You need to understand that recent polls indicate that around 64-65% of the American voting public supports Israel. The reason they do, and we’re only one generation away from losing that, is because of the heritage of a plain, literal interpretation of Scripture. Why is it that the United States is so supportive of Israel and Europe is not? It goes back to the fact that Europe never was impacted by the consistent, plain, literal interpretation of the Scripture, except for England. Coming out of England, the English Reformation, the rise of the Puritans, they were on a literal interpretation and their focus on the value of the Jewish people, and that God had a plan that included the future restoration of the Jews to the land.
 
That was more consistently laid out in England and it certainly influenced the original colonists who came to the United States. So ultimately the reason is theological. What’s happened in recent years is that theological influence is evaporating. A recent survey indicated that probably 60% of the evangelicals who took this survey when asked why they support Israel gave a reason other than a Biblical, religious, or theological reason. They said it was because Israel is a democratic nation in the Middle East, they’re the only ally in the Middle East, because they share a lot of intelligence and information and technology and other practical reasons. But a theological, religious, or Biblical reason was not in the top five answers.
 
The more a person was involved in leadership in their local church, taught Sunday school, or were part of a teaching community, the more that changed. But that affected only older evangelicals who had a Biblical foundation but the younger Christians, who make up the so-called broad evangelical spectrum, that group is being taught less and less as the years go by. So they don’t know. In a few years we’re going to have the last of the World War II-era generation, that is, those who were born before the baby boomers and maybe some of the baby boomers as they pass from the scene and what will be left will be the post-baby boomers, the Gen-Xers and everyone else down to the Millennialists, those who were born in the 21st century, then what’s going to happen is that they’re so Biblically ignorant that they’re going to become easily swayed.
 
We’re at the high water mark of “philo-Semitism”, which is the term opposite of anti-Semitism. It means those who love Israel and love the Jewish people. We’re at the high water mark. The bad guys are gaining ground. We need to understand this because this is a flashpoint. One of my favorite quotes from church history is a quote from Martin Luther, who said, “If we defend the fortress at every point other than the one at which it’s being attacked, we will lose the battle.” So we have to define what the attack points are and we have to defend the castle at those points. That’s what I’m talking about, the gospel, hermeneutics, dispensationalism, Israel, the role of the Holy Spirit, and sanctification. These are the primary places at which the battle is taking place in our generation.
 
We may not like that. I don’t like the fact that I’ve had to spend a lot of time studying Islam over the last ten years. I really don’t care anything about Islam. It doesn’t do anything to get me excited. But that’s the battle today. We’re in a religious war whether this country wants to admit it or not. We are the objects of a religious war coming from Islam. If we don’t recognize that, we’re just living in a fantasy world. So we have to figure out where the attacks are and we have to shape our thinking to defend the fortress at those points, whether we like those points or not. We can’t pick and choose the battlefield. The battlefield gets picked and chosen by many other factors.
 
So the last couple of lessons are background to understanding the importance of the doctrine we’re going to cover in Romans 9-11. I’ve been addressing these basic, foundational issues. We started with the issue of interpretation. Today that’s really the issue. What does the Bible mean? Not so much what does it say, because a lot of people will agree with what it says, but what does it mean? We see a reflection that battle in the culture wars in our nation over the interpretation of the Constitution. Everyone knows what it says. People even know what the Founding Fathers meant. But as I heard one guy who called in on talk radio say, “Who cares what the Founding Fathers thought? Who cares what they said? Let’s get our noses out of the history books and just make law for today.” That person just absolutely showed their ignorance in terms of their total thinking. A person who is ignorant of history is bound to repeat history and repeat the worst mistakes of history.
 
Numerous people are making comments that way. We have to know the historical background of things so we not only don’t repeat those things but so we can really understand what’s going on today and why it’s going on so we can respond to it. Hermeneutics and interpretation is part of that. So as I pointed out in the previous lessons, the two basic errors we’re facing here in terms of the role and relationship of Israel and the church are first of all replacement theology, which I partially got into last time, and anti-Semitism. Probably won’t get there until next time.
 
What’s given rise to both is a non-literal, allegorizing, spiritualizing method of interpreting the Scripture. In other words, the view that we hold of Scripture is that you interpret the Scripture in the light of its immediate context. That’s called the historical method of interpretation. We do it in light of the normal meaning of the language, the words, and the grammar. That’s where we get the phrase “the historical, grammatical interpretation of Scripture.” So we go into the lexical meanings of the words and their relationship to the sentences and the syntax.  All of this is important and is arranged the way it is by God and is significant.
 
We interpret these things in terms of their normal usage. Part of normal usage includes things like figures of speech but figures of speech have a literal meaning as I’ve pointed out in the past. So we need to look and understand these things. Some of what I’m covering here may seem a little academic to some of you but it’s important as a pastor for me to make sure you understand and can identify where the wolves are and where the weeds are because you’re, as a sheep going out, you’re exposed to all kinds of stuff that comes into your mind from television to the news to whatever it might be, neighbors, people talking, and whatever. You need to be aware of this so you can develop your grid of discernment.
 
We have this emphasis in that the covenants, the promises still belong to Israel. That means that Jews today, regardless of whether they’re Messianic Jews, Buddhists Jews, secular Jews, atheist Jews, Hindu Jews, whatever, they still have a responsibility to the Abrahamic covenant to be circumcised. It doesn’t make them more savable or less savable. It doesn’t make them more spiritual or less spiritual because that wasn’t its function. Its function was to indicate that they were a participant in the covenant that God made with Abraham. That covenant is still in effect. It’s an eternal, everlasting covenant. It wasn’t a soteriological covenant or even a covenant of sanctification.
 
We’ll get into that a little more as we get into these issues in a few weeks related to that statement people go to and often misinterpret, “Jacob I love, Esau have I hated.” This has to do with God’s historical purposes for the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not soteriology or sanctification. Everything goes back to that great covenant as it’s summarized in . So just to review again David Cooper’s Golden Rule of Interpretation: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, make no other sense. Therefore take every word at its ordinary, usual meaning unless the facts of the immediate context studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths indicate clearly otherwise.” That’s the beauty of theology.
 
Last time we started on replacement theology. I have a couple of review slides just to get these definitions back in our mind. Replacement theology is the view that the Church is the new or true Israel and that it has permanently replaced or superseded national Israel or ethnic Israel as the people of God and therefore, national or ethnic Israel will not experience a restoration to the land as God promised or to a position of favor with God. In other words God had a plan for Israel but when they rejected the Messiah that purpose ended. They’re no longer relevant. They’re no longer ethnically any different than the Celts, the Mexicans, than the Spaniards, than the Asians, than the Japanese, the Siberians. They’re not any different, nothing significant about them.
 
Therefore, there’s nothing significant about the return of these Jews to the land. In fact, you’ll even find some people who believe in various ethnic theories that these Jews today aren’t even real Jews. They’re Tsars, going back to a Russian king in the southern part of Russia who converted the whole Tsar Kingdom over to Judaism so they’re not really ethnic Jews. There are a lot of different views. You get British Israelism, that the British are the ten lost tribes, other fantasy views that have nothing to do with history or the Bible.
 
So supersessionism comes from the word “super” and “sederi”, meaning one person sits on the chair of another in Latin so the Church just completely replaces Israel. The promises God made to Abraham that he would inherit the land from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates suddenly becomes a metaphor for heaven. So for two thousand years from Abraham to Christ that was correctly interpreted and understood to be a physical piece of real estate. But once the Messiah was rejected, according to them, now that’s heaven. It’s not a literal piece of real estate. See this is a hermeneutical shell game. They change the meaning and it has an implication for the faithfulness of God. It indicates that God may change the meaning of the terms of your salvation and maybe your salvation is secure today but maybe in a few centuries maybe you’re not. That’s terrible theology!
 
Walt Kaiser said that “Replacement theology declared that the Church, Abraham’s spiritual seed, had replaced national or ethnic Israel in that it had transcended and fulfilled the terms given to Israel, which covenant Israel had lost because of disobedience.” In other words, God had a condition in the Abrahamic covenant that if you don’t obey Him then this covenant’s over with. And that wasn’t there.
 
Ronald Diprose in his book on Israel says that, “Replacement theology is the view that the Church completely and permanently replaced ethnic Israel in the outworking of God’s plan and as the recipient of Old Testament promises to Israel.”
 
I pointed out there were four different types of replacement theology or supersessionism. Political, punitive, economic, and structural supersessionism and I’m not going to go back over the definitions of those.
 
So what are the core beliefs of replacement theology? First of all, national Israel has somehow forfeited its status as the people of God and will never, ever, ever again possess a unique role apart from the Church. There’s no distinction between Israel and the Church. This is one of the things that Charles Ryrie, professor of theology at Dallas Seminary when I was there, said in his book on dispensationalism. “There are three things that were unique and these three things together distinguished dispensationalism. One was a consistent, plain, literal interpretation of Scripture. Second, when you do that you will hold to a distinction between Israel and the Church.” His third characteristic was “that the overriding purpose of Scripture in history was the glory of God”, not just salvation which is what covenant theology does but that’s another story.
 
So this is one of the two key distinguishing facets of dispensationalism. The second core belief of replacement theology is that the Church is now true Israel, not ethnic Israel. So even the term “Israel” changes its meaning. Israel means the Church and the Church means Israel. Israel in the Old Testament is the Church of the New Testament. Israel is just a code word, according to them, for anyone who is a believer. That violates the principle of interpretation. Third core belief is that the result of this is that the Church has become the sole inheritor of God’s covenant blessings, originally promised to national or ethnic Israel in the Old Testament and thus, this rules out any future restoration of national Israel.
 
Therefore, if you believe this, then you don’t believe there’s any significance to present day Israel. How do you think that’s going to change how you view U.S. foreign policy? There is an implication in both views but if you hold to replacement theology, then it’s going to change your perception of what goes on in the Middle East. Ronald Diprose in his book says, “For replacement theology to qualify as a Biblical option, passages which allow such an interpretation are not enough.” See, one of the things people don’t understand is that there are certain passages when you take them out of context they could mean this or they could mean that but when you compare them with other Scripture and when you work out their implications they can’t mean those other things. They are in one sense possible but they are excluded as you think through the implications of those views. So even though there are some passages which may allow that, it’s not enough to say that’s what it means.
 
There needs to also be very positive passages which clearly teach the position and no passages that actually exclude it. So replacement theology fails on both counts. In terms of replacement theology they say the Church is the new spiritual Israel and replaces the Jewish people, which they say is the “old fleshly Israel.” They say Israel nationally just represents the flesh so they conclude that Israel was therefore an object lesson in sin and judgment. Can you see how that might lead to anti-Semitism? You just don’t have too much respect for the Jewish people if that’s your belief.
 
The church, they say, is the elect for all the ages, so it existed in the Old Testament. They believe that Jews who believe today are no longer Jewish, that the issue of Israel and the Jews are no longer relevant in the Church Age. Now if you remember, Tuesday night a week ago in Acts, I taught about this problem of what Paul said about circumcision. And that he had Timothy circumcised while at the same time, basically, he’s written in that if you get circumcised, you’re really under the whole Law so you really shouldn’t do that. I pointed out that either Paul is completely contradictory of himself or he’s talking about two different concepts.
 
In Galatians he’s clearly talking about those who think that circumcision will get you something in salvation or in the spiritual life. Whereas with Timothy there’s just an issue with his cultural acceptability so that he can gain a hearing without having irrelevant issues become issues while he’s ministering. In the course of the history of these ideas, people have gotten the idea from the doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, which says that if you’ve been baptized into Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, that that means that Jewishness is no longer relevant. That’s not what the passage is saying. What it’s saying is that ethnic distinctions, gender distinctions, and economic distinctions, in that passage, no longer impact the individual believer’s direct access to God. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t still distinctions between men and women or between Jews and Gentiles or between slaves and freemen. There are distinctions but they don’t impact their direct access to God.
 
So this idea has bled over even into some area of dispensationalists who teach that Jewishness no longer matters. It does matter. They’re still under the Abrahamic covenant. It doesn’t matter in terms of their justification or their sanctification but they’re still of value historically to their ethnic relationship to Abraham. So the fourth point here is that the covenant with Jews, according to replacement theology, is completely nullified.
 
Now I’m going to run through seven observations related to replacement theology. First, it teaches that the Church replaces or supersedes the nation, Israel, as the people of God. This view goes back to the middle of the 2nd Century A.D. You can see hints of it even in the early part of the 2nd century. For example take the epistle of Barnabas. It’s not a canonical epistle and it probably wasn’t written by Barnabas but it does date to the early part of the first century, maybe 110 or 120 and in it we read, “But He [Jesus] was manifested in order that they, the Israelites, might be perfected in their iniquities. And that we being the constituted heirs through Him might receive the testament of the Lord Jesus. Therefore He has circumcised our ears that we might hear His Word and believe for the circumcision in which they trusted is abolished. For He declared that circumcision was not of the flesh but they transgressed because an evil angel deluded them.” Where did that come from?
 
So there’s this incipient anti-Semitism that was starting to creep into the church. The Jews were starting to be blamed as Christ-killers. Many early Church theologians promoted replacement theology. Church history is so important to understand. I learned more about theology from studying Church history from ever studying systematic theology because you see it in the real time events of the debates that went on between people in trying to understand the Scriptures. You see it brought out in a little more relief.
 
In the last part of the Patristic era, which is the first three hundred years after Christ’s death, there was a growing acceptance of the replacement view. Factors such as the reception of the two destructions of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and again in 135 and the growing Gentile composition of the Church, in combination with the trend toward allegorical interpretation, led to a full blown replacement theology by roughly 300 A.D. You had the statesmen like Justin Martyr around 150 who was the first person to explicitly identify the Church as Israel. Then you have Irenaeus, a Church father, who said, “In as much as the Jews have rejected the Son of God and cast Him out of the vineyard when they slew Him, God has justly rejected them and given to the Gentiles outside the vineyard the fruits of the cultivation.” So we see this kind of thing going on.
 
Melito of Sardis, A.D. 180, says, “Israel was precious before the Church arose. The Law was marvelous before the gospel was elucidated. But when the Church arose and the gospel took precedence, this model was made void, conceding its power to the reality. Israel was made void when the Church arose.”
 
Next is Clement of Alexandria. Now last time I pointed out in hermeneutics the difference between Alexandria in Egypt, right on the Mediterranean, that they had become the heirs to Greek philosophy and Platonism. They became a center of allegorical interpretation.
 
In contrast, was Antioch. It’s the same Antioch we’ve been studying as the home base for Paul’s missionary journeys. Antioch was dominated by thinking in terms of a literal interpretation of Scripture. So which group do you think was a millennial? The Alexandrians. Which group was premillennial? The ones in Antioch. They believed in a literal millennial. So theology makes a difference in how you perceive these things. Now Origen came out of Alexandria and he formalizes allegorical interpretation and that wins out in the early Church. You see these ideas are already present there.
 
Tertullian said that “Israel had been divorced from God.” Cyprian is also another early Church father by 250 who stated, “I have endeavored to show that the Jews according to what had been foretold had departed from God, had lost God’s favor, which had been given to them in past times and had been promised them for the future while the Christians had seceded to their place.” See it’s much more refined now, this idea of replacement theology.
 
By the time Constantine made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire, you get the introduction with his idea of Roman political rule which is wedded to Christianity and this non-literal view of the kingdom now which begins to enter into the thinking of the western Church. So they saw the new covenant in Christ as a replacement for the old Mosaic covenant which represented Judaism and the Jewish people as a whole. Now historically, this led to statement where the Church was seen to be the fulfillment and replacement of Jewish ecclesiastical structures.
 
Recently, within the last ten years Pope John Paul II said that the Roman Catholic Church rejected replacement theology. What’s happening is you have to read between the lines and understand the nuances here. After the Holocaust, replacement theology has been so identified with the Holocaust that nobody in their right mind really wants to say they believe in replacement theology. So the Roman Catholic Church comes out with a formal statement a few years ago that said they reject their replacement theology but the Jews can’t call themselves the chosen people anymore. Do you hear the contradiction there? If the Jews aren’t the chosen people you’ve just validated replacement theology. They’re trying to say that replacement theology is a narrow definition of those who are wickedly anti-Semitic but they still believe the Church superseded the Jews. They just don’t want to go too far in light of the Holocaust. So they see the Church as the new people of God.
 
Now the second observation of this is that replacement theology has been the dominant view of the organized Church since the 3rd century until the middle of the 19th century. So if your dominant view is replacement theology, how many people are going to talk about the Rapture? They’re not going to even think about the Rapture. That’s why dispensationalism basically disappeared into the corners and crevices of Church history because the dominant view was amillennialism, allegorical interpretation, and replacement theology. You can’t get to dispensationalism unless you believe in a literal hermeneutic and a distinction between Israel and the Church. It won’t happen. So that’s why it’s such a late development.
 
There are elements of it very early in the Church and more and more scholars are finding more and more evidence of a pre-trib Rapture and other uniquely dispensationalist ideas much, much earlier in Church history. It wasn’t really a main idea so it was sort of buried off to the side. In the Patristic era they mixed a lot of these areas together so that leads to the idea of a replacement theology and pretty much ends the hope of any national Israel in the future. By the end of the Patristic era you had this incredible individual by the name of Augustine who was brilliant. He formalizes allegorical interpretation and an amillennial theology and many, many other things and also the idea that salvation is only in the church, meaning the Romans Catholic Church.
 
People ask when the Catholic Church started. It depends on what your criterion is. It’s probably somewhere between 600 and 800. These other ideas began to coalesce a little bit earlier. Augustine introduces ideas that are hostile to Israel. According to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Augustine introduced a negative element into judgment on the Jews. He did this by advancing this theory of substitution whereby the new Israel of the Church became a substitute for ancient Israel. So the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was supersessionist.
 
If you want to know how Germany, which was considered the most civilized nation in Europe in the 19th century, degenerated into the Nazi Party and the Holocaust in the mid-20th century, it goes back to this. It’s bred into the thinking of much of Europe. It goes back to the idea that the Jews are evil and they have been replaced by the Church. Martin Luther and John Calvin also held to this view and it wasn’t until you get to the Puritans that things began to change. Three of the great individuals who were influential were Plato, with the introduction of Greek philosophy which played a major role in Augustine’s view that the Church was the spiritual form of the kingdom and that the Jews were people to witness to and he held to a millennialism. Calvin held to the same kind of views. All are supersessionists. Calvin got much of his theology from Augustine and it’s also covenantal.
 
How does covenant theology view Israel’s national promises? They’re spiritualized into the Church. How does covenant theology view Israel and the Church? They’re one people of God, which is a buzzword. When I went through seminary a lot of these things were a little fuzzy, especially when you get this new idea called progressive dispensationalism. People were wondering what it was. Proponents of progressive dispensationalism tried to argue it was just a refinement and others, like Bruce Waltke, who was a former professor at Dallas, when he read their position said they were just covenant theologians and they don’t want to admit it. They’ve become amillennialist and they don’t want to admit it.
 
There are dangers in these ideas and we have to know what they are. Jerusalem, Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), for them is fulfilled. The Old Testament is annulled. Jerusalem is no longer significant. The Temple doesn’t need to be rebuilt. They’re post-Millennial, amillennial or preterists, which means they think it was all fulfilled back in A.D. 70. Armageddon is just figurative.
 
How many people think of Armageddon as something other than a literal battle that takes place in relationship to the Valley of Megiddo, located in the Galilee in Israel? Most people think if an asteroid is coming its Armageddon. We’ve discovered atomic bombs. It’s Armageddon. Armageddon has become a metaphorical term but it’s not used that way in the Bible. This view comes out of replacement theology.
 
There’s just one visible event at the end of history for them, the return of Jesus. The Millennial is not a thousand year period, it’s just a figurative event.  This comes out of Stephen Sizer’s book, Christian Zionism. He is a major proponent of replacement theology and he hates Christian Zionists.
 
On the cover of his book on replacement theology Michael J. Vlach uses these two figures, two statues which are in the Strasbourg Cathedral that were designed in 1230 A.D. This is before the Protestant Reformation. This is at the very height of a millennial allegorical interpretation. These two figures represent the Church, ecclesia, and the one on the right represents sunagoge. They represent the Church and Israel. This represents the view of the Church and Israel in the Middle Ages. It shows a supersession symbolism. ecclesia is standing tall and erect, wearing a crown and is in a dominant position whereas sunagoge, Israel, is blinded as a symbol of their blindness and spiritual status. ecclesia has a scepter representing rule. sunagoge has a dead stick indicating her despised and cast-off, wandering status. Since the Law has been abrogated Israel has been rejected. Notice the Law is a closed book held down by her side to show it’s no longer relevant or significant. That statue is a depiction of replacement theology.
 
It was in the Middle Ages that you started to see the rise of Christian anti-Semitism. You saw caricatures of the Jews and places where they had to wear badges or certain signs. This is when they’re first put into ghettos, restricted to certain areas of a city, and they couldn’t do business or go out of that area. It’s also at that time that you have the first rise in the 12th century in Norwich, England of the “blood libel”. The blood libel was the view that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to make matzo for Passover. That comes up time and again. One of the most famous instances occurred in 1839 in Damascus. Five Jews were arrested and put on trial and I believe Charles Churchill, an uncle of Winston Churchill, went to their defense and won the case so they were set free. This blood libel has cropped up again and again and again throughout Church history. Jews were described as devils and made to wear yellow rings and badges to show they were nothing of value to Christians. So this idea of Hitler having the Jews wear the yellow Star of David’s didn’t start with the Nazis. This goes back to the Christians in the early Middle Ages.
 
Third observation: Since the mid-19th century replacement theology has received serious criticism and widespread rejection. Over the last 150 years there’s been a backlash to it but it’s overly caricatured and it’s often identified as something related to that which brought up the Holocaust. There’s a shift away from this more overt supersessionism. David Holwerda in his book, Jews & Israel: One Covenant or Two, states, “The traditional view that the Church has superseded Israel which no longer has a role in God’s plan of redemption is no longer dominant. Even though no consensus has developed on how to evaluate the present position on the future role of Israel. The negative tones prominent in the Church’s traditional view has been mostly muted.” But they’re still there. They just want to call it something else.
 
Now what’s grown out of replacement theology which is really spooky and scary because of its influence today is something called “Christian Palestinianism.” The term was coined by Paul Wilkinson, a member of the Pre-Trib Rapture Study Group. He usually gives a paper every year. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the role of John Nelson Darby and the rise of Christian Zionism. It’s the antithesis of those who believe in Christian Zionism. Let’s define Christian Zionism. There’s a lot of weird Christians out there. We’ve got to love them because God loves them and they’re our brothers and sisters in Christ but they’re a little bit off-balance. They want to show up wearing Jewish prayer shawls and blowing a shofar and doing all this because they’ve almost assigned a mystical, magical quality to people who are Jewish. We’ve got to love them because they love Jews. They love Israel and they love the Bible but you don’t want some people to go out in public too much. The reason I bring that up is because I’ve had conversations with some people who’ve only run into the wacko extreme so they think that’s what Christian Zionism is. That’s not Christian Zionism at all.
 
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to return and establish a national homeland in their historic homeland, the land God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. It doesn’t mean you validate everything the state of Israel does, every political decision. They have a right of return just as the Italians had a right to unite and have a nation and the Germans had the right to unite and have a nation, and the same with the Czechs and the Hungarians, the French. The Jews have the right to have a Jewish nation with defensible borders which is on the basis of self-defense and the right to have secure borders and to live in their national homeland without fear of people shooting rockets at them every day or blowing themselves up on their buses. They can do whatever is legal and normal for any other nation to protect themselves and to provide security. That’s what Zionism is.
 
Christian Zionism comes from Christians who believe that’s true but they add a new wrinkle. They believe there’s a Biblical basis for the Jews returning to their homeland and Christians should support that because they see it as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Actually, when you and I talk to a lot of people who aren’t Christians they don’t care what the Bible says. They’re more concerned about other facets.
 
There are three lines of argument to support the return of the Jews to the land. There’s the Biblical argument which we’re all familiar with. There’s the historical argument that there have been Jews living in the land. They didn’t disappear. I went through a long study several years ago where I traced this all the way through from 135 AD all the way up to the present. There’s always been a Jewish population, a Jewish presence in the land. There’s been a Jewish presence in Jerusalem. Not many because at times the Moslems ran them out, the Byzantines ran them out for a while, Hadrian ran them out for a while but there’s always been a presence there.
 
Then there’s a legal argument based on the San Remo Resolutions coming out of the end of World War I. But all three of those lines of reasoning are rejected by these Christian Palestinians and you find this in a lot of Christian denominations. It is the official position of the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., the Church of England, and the United Methodist Church. I don’t think the Evangelical Methodist Church believes this. There’s a pastor of an Evangelical Methodist Church down in Sugar Land and I’ve run into him on my way back from Israel the last two years. He’s very pro-Israel. Others who hold to this view are the National Council of Churches, the Church of Scotland, the Reformed Church of America, the Methodist Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, Bethlehem Bible College, which has sponsored this Christ at the Checkpoint anti-Zionist, anti-Israel rally for several years, World Vision, World Council of Churches.
 
What’s the view of these? This comes out of the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism and says, “We categorically reject Christian Zionist doctrines as false teaching that corrupts the Biblical message of love, justice, and reconciliation.” You didn’t know that what you believe corrupts the Biblical message of love, justice, and reconciliation, did you? “With urgency we warn against Christian Zionism and its justification of colonization of apartheid and empire building.” I’ll talk about that next time under anti-Semitism.
 
The Church of Scotland says, “Christian Zionism seeks openly to use the Jewish Zionist cause in order to achieve its own theological and political reality. Christian Zionist worldview has cataclysmic consequences for religiously integrated lasting peace in Palestine.” See, it’s all your fault, you are a Christian Zionist! The problem is what you believe. That’s why there’s a problem in the Middle East. It’s your fault. You’re Christian Zionists. You believe that God has a future plan for Israel. They go on to say, “Christian Zionism portrays an unjust God with an unjust people and seeks to exclude and arguably eliminate whatever is perceived to be alien to its cause.”
 
Okay, another group that started up that has really promoted this is known as Sabeel. At the Fifth International Sabeel Conference in Jerusalem 2004, they said, “We warn that the theology of Christian Zionism is leading to the moral justification of empire colonization of apartheid and oppression.” Sounds like Democrats talking about George Bush, doesn’t it? John Stott, a very well-known British scholar, author of numerous books says, ”I, myself, believe that Zionism, both political and religious, is incompatible with Christian faith.” Then we get Hank Hanegraef, Bible Answer Man, who used to be on radio here, says, “Christian Zionist beliefs and behaviors are the antithesis of Biblical Christianity.”
 
Now here’s a good one from Gilbert Bilezikian, one of the founders of Willow Creek Community Church. The pastor is Bill Hybels and back in the 90s this was the largest church in the U.S. It’s been superseded now by Lakewood here in Houston. Willow Creek funded a movie that is very anti-Zionist. It’s called “With God on Our Side.” Bill Hybel’s wife and daughter are main promoters of this movie. Also, Rick Warren with the “purpose-driven heresy” coming out of southern California has done so much to destroy orthodoxy but he does it very subtly has also gotten on board with this.
 
So we need to know who the players are. A lot of you like to watch Fox News and for some reason, people at Fox News like to have Rick Warren on so you always have to know who the wolves in sheeps’ clothing are. Tony Compolo who is another popular Christian speaker, professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University and a former faculty member at University of Pennsylvania says, “The most serious threats to the well-being of Palestinians in general and to the Christian Palestinians in particular come not from the Jews but from Christian Zionists in the United States.”
 
So what are their basic beliefs? Most of this we’ve hit on already but they strongly reject literal interpretation in favor of spiritual hermeneutic, strongly reject dispensationalist which they love to hate. They affirm Liberation Theology. Hello, where have we heard of liberation theology before? This is socialism and Marxism applied and dressed up in Christian terminology. Does the name Jeremiah Wright mean anything to anybody? This was Obama’s pastor up in Chicago. Jeremiah Wright holds to black Liberation Theology.
 
There’s black, Palestinian, and all these different things but they’re all basically the same thing: anti-Christian, anti-freedom, anti-truth. They believe that “modern Israel has no connection with or justification for owning the promised land, that modern Israel is an apartheid state.” Now Melanie Philips is one of the good people. I love to read her books, one of which is called “Londonistan” talking about the danger of the Islamic community in Britain and how that’s changing things states, “So when Arab Christians reinterpreted Scripture in order to delegitimize the Jews claim to Israel, this kick-started replacement theology. [She’s a little off on her history there but she’s basically right.] which roared back into the imagination and sermons of the Anglican Church.” See the Anglican Church I the 19th century was very pro-Israel and very pro-Israel. That’s what produced the great leaders who led up to the Balfour Declaration. Melanie Philips goes on the say, “This revision isn’t held that Palestinian Arabs were the original possessors of the Land of Israel”.
 
There was no such thing as a Palestinian up until Arafat decided to co-opt the term Palestine which up until the mid-60s was used to apply to Jews. The Palestinian Brigade in the British Army were Jews and they wore a Palestinian Brigade patch but they were Jew and they weren’t Arabs. That’s all been distorted. Two hundred years ago there were just very, very few Arabs who lived in the land. Most of them were Bedouins or poor tenant farmers and nothing was going on.
 
In fact, one of the things I learned this last trip is one of the reason Israel was devastated so much of the 19th century was that the Ottoman Empire imposed a tax on trees. What do you think the unintended consequence of that tax was? Cut down all the trees. How does that change the environment? How does it change the topography? What’s that going to do to the topsoil? It absolutely devastated the land so it was swampy, it was arid, the land wasn’t worth anything, the topsoil was blown away in the hill country. It was terrible. So very few people wanted to even be there.
 
A couple of the key players in this whole movement. Elias Chacour is considered the godfather of Christian Palestinianism and he says, “We’ve been taught for centuries that the Jews are the chosen people of God. We do not believe any more that they are the chosen people of God since now we have a new understanding of the chosenness.” This is what happens when you don’t interpret the Bible right.
 
Naim Ateck says, “Strangers will stand and attend your flock and you shall eat the wealth of the nations. This exclusiveness text is unacceptable today. It must be de-Zionanized.” Just get out our razor blades and reinterpret Bible. He also says that Samson was the first suicide bomber. I thought you’d like that. “Christian Zionists thrive on war and conflict…” It’s all our fault! “Christian Zionist harbor an obsession with the Battle of Armageddon.”
 
Some of those who went on that first trip to Israel remember when Wayne House allowed a film crew to come along and film us. It was a big mistake. They turned it into a horrible movie. I’m not even going to tell you the name of it but one of the contentions is that we just loved and anticipated the Battle of Armageddon. They twisted everything we said. They say the only reason we want to get the Jews back to the land is so Jesus will come kill them all at the Battle of Armageddon, you anti-Semite you. I’d never heard that before. I had made a mistake. My mistake was that sometimes I don’t like to go away on conferences because I can’t see the immediate relevance. Right after I moved back here Tommy and Randy went to one of these groups’ major conferences in Chicago. They called me up to go with them but I had Bible class. Well, if I had learned what I had learned there we wouldn’t have gotten sucked into that awful thing. That’s why I go to conferences, to be informed. There’s so much garbage out there today.
 
Okay. Naim Ateck who is one of the leaders, the foremost thinkers in Christian Palestinianism says, “When confronted with a difficult passage in the Bible one needs to ask such simple questions as “is the way I’m hearing this the way I’ve come to know God in Christ?” See it’s totally subjective. He says, “Does this fit the picture I have of Jesus that God has revealed to me?” See, you don’t just go see what the text says. You just have this subjective image of Jesus and then you fit your beliefs into that. That’s what’s called idolatry.
 
Colin Chapman is another thinker. He says “The New Testament writers ceased to look forward to a literal fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies of a return to the land and a restored Jewish state.” You may say that hearing this is boring and you don’t like it but this is really gaining traction. I hate studying stuff like this because it doesn’t seem real edifying, but it’s protective. Okay, this is what’s going on and it’s increasing in its exposure. Stephen Sizer is a guy you just hate to have on the other side. Why? Because he grew up as a Christian Zionist. He says, “As a young Christian at Sussex University in the mid-70s I was strongly influenced by Christian Zionist leaders such as Tim LeHaye, David Posit, and Hal Lindsey, devouring his bestselling book, “The Late, Great Planet Earth” and hearing in person his lectures on eschatology and the book of Revelation, it seemed that the Bible was literally coming true in this generation. My conversion came in two parts [to Christian Palestinianism]…” I’ll just skip a couple of these quotes but you get the idea.
 
In he said, “This is perhaps the Apostle Paul’s most stark example of universalizing the new identity of the people of God.” That’s the phrase where Paul says, “greet the Israel of God.” What’s he’s talking about is greet the Jews who are believers. Israel always means the Jewish people everywhere it’s used in Scripture. But among the allegorizers they want to take that phrase and say that applies to the Church, the New Israel. So that’s a battlefield passage. Sizer says, “The Apostle is redrawing the definition for self-identity and with this new definition comes a realignment of the privileges that come with all identities.” He is a major influence in Britain.
 
Then we have N.T, Wright. Now why is N.T. Wright important? Because he has influenced at least one pastor who we ordained at Berachah twenty years ago and he has influenced others and it’s causing problems in some churches who have members who are family members of folks in this congregation. N.T. Wright says, “Israel’s story has been embodied in one man, Jesus. The whole story of Israel reached its intended climax with His death and His resurrection. His death is the exile of Israel and the resurrection is restoration of Israel.” See how allegory works there. He says, “The church seems to have taken the place occupied by Jewish ethnic identity. The Lord Jesus was reconstituting Israel around Himself, reinterpreting Israel’s eschatological hope, no longer literal, and reusing Israel’s prophetic heritage retelling it story and redefining what the kingdom meant. The promises to Jerusalem to Zion are now transferred to Jesus and His people.” Pure replacement theology. He goes on to say, “The American obsession with the Second Coming of Jesus, especially with distorted interpretations of it continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre.” 
 
Then we have this quote form Alan Hart who is a British journalist. I ran across a picture of him at a conference he’s attending entitled, “Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews.” He said, “It’s time to give Israel’s hardcore Zionists their real name. They are the new Nazis. If Europeans and Americans don’t stop the new Nazis, it’s likely their endgame will be the extermination of millions of Palestinians.” So we’re the new Nazis!
 
 Okay, I’m going to run through this very quickly. “Those who hold the replacement supersession view often use replacement terminology but reject the idea they’re replacement theologians. Here’s one from dear old Bruce Waltke who says, “The New Testament teaches the hard fact that national Israel and its law have been permanently replaced by the Church and the New Covenant. The Jewish nation no longer has a place as the special people of God. That place has been taken by the Christian community which fulfills God’s purpose for Israel.”
 
Observation five: Those who argue for fulfillment, enlargement language or transference language do not use different arguments than those who use replacement language. What this point is saying is that the term that people want to use today is fulfillment, enlargement, or transfer but it’s all a word game.
 
Sixth observation: Replacement theology is a legitimate title for the view that the Church supersedes or replaces Israel. That’s what it is and that’s what it means.
 
Last observation: Nations and promises to nations are not unspiritual nor are they things that need to be transcended. Replacement theology talks about Israel being redefined and physical land promises being transcended by greater spiritual reality but where does the Bible ever indicate that nations are unspiritual or lesser types that must give way to greater spiritual realities? Their whole methodology is flawed so they end up with a complete false view.
 
Now one last quote from Gary Burge a major influence and teacher at Wheaton. Wheaton has often been thought by a lot of people to be conservative. Trust me, folks. Wheaton hasn’t been Biblically conservative in their theology since World War II. Lots of people sent their kids off to Wheaton to get a good Christian education and they were spiritually eviscerated by the lousy theology at Wheaton. Wheaton hasn’t had somebody believe in literal Genesis creation since about 1950. Gary Burge says, “Reform theologians are not at all convinced that the promises to Abraham, much less Moses, are still theologically significant today. The work of Christ is definite. There’s one covenant and it’s with Christ.”
 
That’s the issue with replacement theology. Next time I want to look at the issue related to anti-Semitism and this is growing. According to the Anti-defamation League anti-Semitism is on a huge growth spurt worldwide. For the last sixty years since the end of World War II it wasn’t, because the anti-Semites were put in the shadows by the horrors of the Holocaust. But people and cultures have short memories. History disappears and vanishes into the midst of time and we’re on the cusp of a rising anti-Semitism. It’s increasing by leaps and bounds all over Europe and that’s just Christian anti-Semitism. Then you have Islamic anti-Semitism and that is also fueling the Middle East.
 
It’s not about the Palestinians. If you had a scale on cultural value, the Arabs think that the scum on the bottom of the ocean are the Palestinians. That’s why they don’t want to let them there in their country. They just leave them there to rot in these displaced person’s camps as just something to fester so they can keep tweaking Israel. They don’t care at all about the so-called Palestinian Arabs and have done nothing for them and that’s just been demonstrated in history. They just view them as a tool to fight those evil Zionists in Israel.
 
Next time when we come back I want to look at anti-Semitism, its Biblical roots, its historical and present manifestations. Then we’ve covered a good foundation for going into . affirms very strongly that God has not deserted His people Israel. Why is that important? Because if God goes back on His promises to Israel then how do you know that God’s not going to go back on His promises to save you? This is all about eternal security. Trust me.

Romans 104b-The Origins of Anti-Semitism (Introduction)

Romans 9:1 NASB95
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit,
Romans 104b-The Origins of Anti-Semitism (Introduction)
 
We’re in Romans chapter 9 and at the risk of being redundant at the beginning of each one of these classes I’m going to review the same basic materials so we understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. is really the foundation in the New Testament for our understanding of God’s future plan and purpose for Israel.  For ethnic Israel, that is.
 
 I brought some books this time for a little show and tell. One book I’ve been researching is Israel and the Church: The Origin and Effects of Replacement Theology by Ronald DiProse. He has spoken at the Pre-Trib Conference a couple of different times. You can go to the Pre-Trib website which is www.pre-trib.org and see all the papers that have been given over the past twenty-one or twenty-two years are up there under Archives. You can go through and find some of the presentations and papers that have been written by these guys that are much more detailed than what I’m presenting. Then another book is by Michael Bloch who is a professor at the Masters Seminary in California. His work on replacement theology is called Has the Church Replaced Israel: A Theological Evaluation.
 
One of the things I noticed in both these authors’ quotes is their use of the term “national” Israel. This is one of the troubles with having had one’s work as writer and editor is that you notice sometime later and you think you could have said it a little better. But to the writing of books, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, “there is no end.” You can edit and edit and edit and proofread, proofread, proofread, and it’s going to come back from the printer with errors you can’t believe you left in there. Trust me. I had an extremely detailed Hebrew professor who, like all Hebrew scholars, was very detailed minded. He published a commentary on Genesis and used his doctoral students to proofread the manuscript some three or four hundred times and it came back from the publisher with several hundred errors. You read it and you get too familiar with it and you let some errors by.
 
But one of the things that I noticed, is an important thing, in these two authors’ quotes they would talk about God’s plan for national Israel. I don’t think that’s the right adjective. It’s “ethnic” Israel. In the work that I’ve done on in the past I’ve always used that term. God has a future plan for ethnic Israel. National Israel, yes. But there’s not always been a time when there was a state, a Jewish state in the land of Israel. God always has a plan for the future of ethnic Israel. That’s a broader term and I think a more precise term when we’re talking about the future of Israel.
 
I have pointed out two things that have plagued Christianity. They have created incredible horrors down through the centuries killing millions of people and putting them through untold suffering. Nations have risen and fallen as a result of these errors which are all a result of fallacious interpretation. The first is replacement theology and the second is anti-Semitism. We talked about the issues related to hermeneutics or interpretation two or three lessons back. The last couple of lessons we looked at replacement theology and now it’s anti-Semitism. I was going to try to do anti-Semitism as one-shot but I was just reading too much and there was too much to cover so I’m not going to make it in one-shot. I’m going to do two shots because there’s one particular thing I want to do tonight. We’ll have time for setting the stage for anti-Semitism in the Old Testament. So we have these two errors that have to be addressed. Anti-Semitism is coming back and intensifying every year.
 
It’s interesting as I’ve gone through some of my reading I have looked at a book that has been incredibly influential over the years. It’s Anti-Semitism by R.B. Thieme, Jr. Its first printing was in 1974. I’m not sure when R.B. Thieme first taught on anti-Semitism. If my memory is right it goes back to when I was in early high school. I think he taught on the dangers of anti-Semitism before the ’67 war. Now the reason that’s important is that up until the ’67 war when Israel defeated the Arab nations and threw Jordan out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the U.S. wasn’t really that strong a backer of Israel. Once Israel demonstrated their ability to defeat their enemies, America all of a sudden loved them. America loves a winner. We love an underdog and we love a winner and Israel was a little bit of both. We became much more supportive. It was L.B. J. who was responsible for all of a sudden deciding to throw the weight of the U.S. behind Israel in that conflict. In the last fifty or sixty years some of the presidents we’ve had have been elected solely in relation to what they were going to do for Israel. Harry Truman, L.B.J., and Nixon, just to name few.
 
Anyway, R. B.Thieme, Jr. did a series on anti-Semitism in the mid to late 60s and then it was converted into a book by Ursula Kemp. She was my first grade Sunday school teacher. She’s still alive. She’s probably 89 now. She actually came over here to West Houston Bible Church a couple of years ago and sat down on the front row. She is a converted Jew. She was raised in eastern Germany. She was eleven or twelve when kristallanacht took place. Her family had to flee and buy their way out of Germany. They went to Shanghai where she finished high school, met her future husband, who was some fourteen or fifteen years older than she. Some of you might remember him, Scotty. He was with the British constabulary in Shanghai and took her as sort of a driver to a party that a co-worker was having at Christmas time. On the way back, Scotty told her, “You’re the woman I’m going to marry.” She thought he was crazy drunk or both. Actually, he convinced her that he was serious. He convinced her to help him write a letter so her father could understand, asking permission to come and call. A few months later the Japanese conquered Shanghai. Scotty was put in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for the duration of the war. They were allowed to write to one another, once a month, only ten words. Think about that for a writing exercise. She and Betty Thieme wrote all the Sunday school curriculum that I grew up under at Berachah Church. A lot of it has been converted into the children’s material now. Ursula actually did the work on this Anti-Semitism book and then it was revised later in the 80s.
 
This is a book that Tommy Ice read. He stands for a number of pastors I know who weren’t pastors at the time but back in the 70s they read this book and they realized the importance of Israel and the importance of the Jewish people. Many people who today are staunch, vocal defenders of Israel, like Tommy, got started because they read this book. It is a very well done book, written in ’74, updated in the late ’80s. At that time it cites recent studies by the Anti-Defamation League that anti-Semitism is on the rise.
 
Then during the ’90s Bernard Lewis’s book, Semites and Anti-Semites was revised. It originally came out in the mid-80s. The last edition was ’98, which was this copy. Again, he says that by the late 90s anti-Semitism is continuing to increase. I’ve read several other things I have at home on anti-Semitism and they say the same thing as late as last year. Every year the incidence in Europe, in America, around the world that are anti-Semitic are on the increase.
The memory of the Holocaust has faded. The generation that was involved in those activities is rapidly dying, rapidly leaving the scene, so the Holocaust is moving from an experiential memory to history. As it moves to history it fades from significance in the human race. That is the worst form of anti-Semitism that the human race has experienced but it’s not going to be the worst. The worst will come during the Tribulation period as we will see.
Romans, chapter 9 is where Paul is explaining God’s faithfulness to Israel though it might appear at the time that God has forgotten Israel, that Israel appears to have been set aside in favor of the church. But this is simply a temporary pause in God’s plan for Israel. God still loves the Jewish people. They’re still his chosen people. That has not changed. When we get to Paul again strongly affirms God’s love for the Jewish people and that there is a future in God’s plan for them.
 
Anti-Semitism is completely prohibited by the Scriptures. The foundation for this takes us back to , specifically in verse 3. This is the foundation for understanding why it is wrong to be anti-Semitic. God says, “I will bless those who bless you and I will curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” This doesn’t mean you’re going to like every Jewish person you meet. It doesn’t mean you have to like every Jewish person you meet any more than you have to like every Christian you meet. The Scripture says you are to love one another. What this does say is that holding their Jewishness against them is not acceptable. They may not be a nice person but everybody in any group has members of that group who aren’t nice. There are probably people in West Houston Bible Church that other people wish weren’t here because they give us a bad name. That’s just the way it is when you have any group of human beings.
 
This is the foundation here and it’s repeated again and again through Genesis. God has made a promise and He has set apart the Jewish people. I remember being asked on my first trip to Israel, “Why is it that people call it the Holy Land?” We can’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s holy because it’s something pure about it. Holy comes from the Hebrew word that means to be set apart. It is a set apart land and it’s set apart for the Jewish people. That’s why it’s the Holy Land. That’s an accurate term but it’s misunderstood. There’s not anything mystical, magical about the soil or anything else but it is territory that’s been permanently set aside by God for the Jewish people. No other people in history have been given a destiny tied to a piece of real estate like the Jewish people have. That’s what makes it special.
 
That’s why the Jewish people are a holy people, not in the same sense as we talk about the Church as holy because we’re set aside in Christ which is a different context. The Jewish people are holy because they have been set aside by God for a special plan. They are the ones through whom God gave His revelation. They are the custodians of the Scripture from the Old Testament and they are the nation that God chose through whom to give us the Messiah. He’s not through with them. There is a future destiny for the Jewish people in the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So even today because of the Abrahamic covenant which is still in force and has not been set aside or put on hold. God’s plan for the nation has been put on hold while God is working through the Church but the Abrahamic covenant is still very much in effect, as we have studied.
 
We have to understand that any form of negative thinking, religious thought or political thought against Israel can be anti-Semitism. The political and the religious thought is intimately connected usually. In some instances you might be able to separate them but ultimately they tend to be so interconnected that one effects the other. All of that comes out of a literal view of Scripture.
 
Now we’re going to look at this rise of anti-Semitism. We’ll look at cartoons and editorials. One anti-Semitic cartoon is a depiction of the Western wall where Jews come to pray and it has the word “hate” there and the inscription at the bottom says, “Worshiping their God.” This is the lie that is put out by anti-Semites. They say the Jews are filled with hate. They are racists. They are an apartheid state. All of this more than just more than typical invective coming from enemies. We look at a number of different wars that have occurred between historic enemies such as the French and the Germans, the Turks and the Greeks, the Turks and the Armenians, just different groups through history have had on-going land battles, claims over territory, territorial disputes, and they always generate a certain amount of invective against the enemy but there’s something distinct with what happens with the language used against Israel. The Jewish people are held to a different standard than everybody else. That what makes it anti-Semitism.
 
Then we’ll see that there’s a rise in what is called a “new” anti-Semitism. It does get a little more sticky and hard to understand because of the Holocaust. A lot of people went underground with their anti-Semitism and it came out as a disguised form under the disguise of anti-Zionism. They just masked it in the form of being anti the state of Israel. There’s an article in U.S. News and World Report that says, “Today several “isms” inhabit the world still. Among the most pernicious is the atavistic anti-Semitism and its twentieth century version, anti-Zionist.” Atavistic means primitive, an ongoing for centuries. They’re saying we’ve had this standard anti-Semitism and it’s morphed into twentieth century with the rise of the Jewish state. “These isms are graffiti on the wall of history, emblems of a poison still potent and raw. Evidenced most recently by the remark of Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammed who said, ‘Today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.’ ” See this claim that there’s this Jewish conspiracy that the Jews are behind the evils of the world. That’s part of anti-Semitic thought.
 
“Mahathir’s words were deeply condemned but obscure much deeper strain about this new strain of anti-Semitism which is not that it is directed at individual Jews or even Judaism itself. It is directed, rather, against the Jewish collective, the modern state of Israel. Just as historic anti-Semitism has denied individual Jews the right to live as equal members of society, anti-Zionism would deny the collective expression of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, the right to live as an equal member of the family of nations. Israel’s policies are thus subjected to criticism that cause it to be singled out when others in similar circumstances escape any criticism at all. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism as Israel is today, there would be no question of its right to defend itself. But Israel’s efforts merely to protect its citizens are routinely betrayed as aggression. It is a double standard.” The deputy foreign minister of Israel said in July 2002, “The wave of worldwide anti-Semitic attacks in recent months is the worst since the 2nd World War.” It’s been another eleven years since then and it’s even worse than it was eleven years ago. So this goes on and it continues.
 
As we talk about it we need to define it. What is anti-Semitism? What I did was put together a little collection of definitions because not everybody says exactly the same thing and it helped me to kind of think through this issue. Alan Dershowitz who is not someone with whom I am always in agreement; in fact, I am in agreement with him on rare occasions but his book, The Case for Israel, is pretty good. A few things I don’t agree with him on but overall it’s an excellent book and the way he structured the chapters have to do with the questions people ask. “Is Israel an apartheid state?” “Did the early Jews moving back take advantage of the Arabs and steal the land?” All of these charges are ones frequently made against the Jewish people so if you want to learn how to handle some of these issues if somebody raises a question; it’s a good resource. He says that a good basic starting definition of anti-Semitism is “Taking a trait, character trait, that is widespread throughout the human race, if not universal, and blaming only the Jews for it.” Everybody’s greedy. Everybody’s materialistic but we’re going to act as if the Jews are the root, the cause; and if it weren’t for the Jews, there wouldn’t be any greed or materialism or greedy corporations or capitalism or anything like that. Just blame the Jews.
 
On the one hand they’re blamed for capitalism and on the other hand they’re blamed for Marxism because Marx was Jewish. Many of the early leaders in the Marxist Revolution were Jews. Then we have Ron Rosenblum’s book, which is really a collection of essays from a lot of different sources.  He defines anti-Semitism this way, “It’s insisting that when Jews do wrong it’s because they are Jews, not because they are human.” He adds something very important to the definition. It’s not just having an antagonism toward the Jews and blaming them for something but blaming them because they are Jews. That’s a key element in his book.
 
Then we have the definition from The Compact OED, “A theory, action, or practice directed against the Jews, hence, anti-Semite is one who is hostile or opposed to the Jews.” What’s left out of that definition is “because they are Jews.” I see the same problem in R. B. Thieme’s definition in his book where he defines it as, “opposition to or prejudice against or intolerance to Jewish people.” What needs to be added is “because they are Jewish.” Not just antagonism, like antagonism against the French, against the Mexican, against the Germans, but it’s because of that additional element, because they are Jewish which really ties it together.
 
Notice how the Anti-Defamation League puts it, “It’s the belief or behavior hostile toward Jews just because they are Jewish. It may take the form of religious teaching that proclaim the inferiority of the Jews, for instance, or political efforts to isolate, oppress, or otherwise injure them. It may also include prejudice or stereotyped views about Jews.”
 
Now what’s important to understand when we start talking about the rise and development of anti-Semitism is that it has a spiritual explanation. I used this illustration Tuesday night. I’ve used it before but it is the best illustration that fits it. When I read the different works that I’ve got on anti-Semitism such as a four volume work on the History of Anti-Semitism since the Time of Christ to the Present by Leon Poliskov which is a quite detailed history of anti-Semitism and then I skimmed through The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, I see their struggle to explain it. That will just warm your heart every night. The one thing I read is a struggle to explain why this is going on.
 
There’s a story that Frederick the Great said to his chaplain one time, “Give me proof in just a few words that the Bible is true.” The chaplain said, “Sir, it’s the Jews.” The Jewish people’s continued existence is unique in history. There’s no other ethnic group that has generated hostility from every other nation on the planet, especially western and Arabic nations. Not so much your Asian nations but you have virulent anti-Semitism among the nations that have been influenced mostly by Christianity, sadly, and by Islam. That’s where you see the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism. As you look at attempts to explain why it is that there’s just one group of people, no other, that has generated a universal hatred that the Jewish people have. How can you explain that? How do you explain the fact that this is the same group of people who have managed to survive through four thousand years of history and all of the nations that have opposed them have been defeated and their anti-Semitism lies in the dustbin of history? You can’t explain that from a rational or empirical basis and yet that’s how they approach it.
 
Remember the illustration. When God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He told them to name all the creatures, to identify all the things, to guard and keep the garden. Their mission to rule over the planet meant they had to go out and learn everything they could about the planet and to develop it, to develop the natural resources, and to use it under the authority of God as God’s representatives over the planet. As they empirically investigated things, starting with Adam naming the animals, there were lots of things they could observe. But they could not observe a spiritual reality which is related to the prohibition God gave them that if they ate from one particularly tree they would die spiritually instantly. They could eat from all the other trees in the garden. They could eat from everything else God provided but if they ate from that one tree they would die spiritually. The only way they could access that truth was for God to tell them. They couldn’t learn it through experience, through observation of anything. They couldn’t learn it through reason or the use of their intellect. It had to be revealed to them.
 
When we come to the study of anti-Semitism and ask why we can only answer it if we take God’s version, God’s explanation, which ultimately is given in and 13. We’ll get there next time. We can trace it in the Old Testament and tracing it means tracing God’s promise that began in the garden to the serpent and to the woman. After the yielding to the temptation when Adam and Eve are spiritually dead, God appeared in the garden. They ran and hid. They sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness and then God outlined the consequences of their sin. In doing so He addressed first the serpent, then the woman, and then the man. To the serpent He said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.” That is an expression of history. There is a conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, the human race. Specifically the seed is going to be a focus on an individual, which is the Messiah. But here’s a broader more ambiguous promise but clearly a promise. It sets the parameters for understanding human history. Human history is set within the context of a broader warfare, the Angelic conflict, the Satanic rebellion or any number of different terms that have been used to describe this.
 
It is the fact that God has made a promise to provide a Redeemer that will be a human being, a Redeemer that will come from the seed of the woman who will provide salvation for the human race. That’s the antagonism. So Satan’s agenda in the Old Testament was to keep that from happening. Once it happened there were only a small group of promises that had not yet been fulfilled. Those were related to the Jewish people. So the only way that Satan can block God’s plan is to try to destroy all of the Jewish people. In the Old Testament he tried to destroy the seed of the woman that went through the seed of Abraham, down through the seed of David in order to keep the Messiah from coming. Now if he can destroy all of the Jewish people then Satan can say, “See, God, you can’t control history with these creatures who have free will. They’re just too chaotic. No one can control it. You can’t even be God. I win because I blocked you from fulfilling your promises.”
 
So we trace through the Old Testament this promise of the seed. Now the next major mention after is in , “Then the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to your descendants…” This is the word “seed” in the Hebrew. Seed is a singular noun but it’s among those group of nouns called collective nouns. That means that the same form can either refer to an individual or to a group. It’s like the word “deer” which is the same in the singular form and the plural form. You have to judge from context whether it’s talking about a singular or a group, a plurality. The same is true with this word which sets up some interesting exegetical issues that I won’t go into in this study. So God promises to the descendants, the seed, that He’s going to give the land to Abraham’s descendants.
 
He repeats that in . “I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth so if a man could number the dust of the earth your descendants also could be numbered.” It’s the word “seed” every single time. In again, “As innumerable as the stars in the Heaven so shall your descendants be.” Then we get into the fun verse, . God says, “Blessing I will bless you. I’ll multiply you and I’ll multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore and your seed shall possess the gate…” This is one of those places where the Masoretic text monkeys with the text a little bit so it won’t be Messianic but what you have in a number of the other readings is not a plural, their enemies, but His enemies, so it’s obvious in the mind of the writer the word seed shifts in the mind of the writer to a singularity, an individual, not the collective of the descendants of Israel. “Your descendants shall possess the gate of His enemies and in your seed [Paul quotes this in when he emphasizes the fact it’s a singular that refers to the Lord Jesus Christ] all the nations of the earth will be blessed because you have obeyed My voice.” So we follow the seed. This is important.
 
Now it’s coming to the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the Semitic line. The word Semitic is really sort of an ethnic term to describe those who are descendants of Noah’s son, Shem. Those descended from Shem, which includes many of the Arab tribes, are called Semites from that name. It includes both Arabs and Jews and sometimes you’ll hear people say, “Well we’re not really anti-Semitic because we’re Arab. How can we be anti-Semitic? Well, you can have anti-Semitic Jews, as well, and there are some that are that way. They’re called self-loathing Jews. This is a whole different minority category.
 
But the term of anti-Semitic is an assault on Jews because they’re Jews. It’s an anti-Jewish belief. It’s a hatred for the Jews. Now Abraham’s descendants were targeted. Then we get a refinement of the seed in the Davidic covenant, “When your days are fulfilled and you rest with your fathers, God said, “I will set up your seed after you who will come from your body and I will establish His kingdom.” So now we have this term seed identified as a singular, as an individual, but now it’s an assault on the Davidic line to prevent the Messiah.
 
Historically as we go through the Old Testament we see various assaults on the seed. There’s Cain’s murder of Abel in Genesis, chapter 4:8. It is one of the first attacks on the seed. Then there’s the corruption of the human seed through the infiltration of the fallen angels called the “sons of God” in , a term always used for angels and here it refers to fallen angels who took on human form and took human wives so they could corrupt the human gene pool to prevent a true seed of the woman coming from God incarnate as a human being—. Then we have the attempted rapes of Sarah and Rebecca when they’re included in the harems of the Philistine leaders and the Egyptian pharaoh, described in and then in 26:1-18. If they had been taken by the Pharaohs or the ruler of the Philistines then this would have caused great doubt upon whether or not their offspring were the offspring of Abraham or Isaac.
 
Then comes Rebecca’s plan to cheat Esau out of his birthright and the consequent enmity between Esau against Jacob might have resulted in the brothers killing each other off and this would stop the line. The murder of the male children in Egypt by the Pharaoh in . We have the attempted murders of David by Saul in and several other places. Queen Athaliah’s attempt to destroy the royal seed in . Remember she killed all but one who was hidden. That was Josiah who was hidden by the high priest in the temple.
 
Then Haman’s attempt to slaughter all the Jews in Persia, described in the book of Esther. There were also attempts to lead the Jews into idolatry, the worship of Moloch where they would emulate their children in the fires of Moloch’s belly where live sacrifices and burnt offers took place. This again is an attempt to destroy the Jews through the idols. We have Herod’s attack against the children of Bethlehem in and then many attempts during Jesus’ life which are part of the attempts to derail Him from being the Messiah. 
 
The rest of this evening I want to look at a major early attempt in the Old Testament to destroy all of the Jewish people in a huge assault. That occurred under the Persian Empire during the rule of Xerxes. This is in the book of Esther. Turn with me to the book of Esther and we’re going to take about twenty of twenty-five minutes and just skim the book of Esther. This is one of those great stories that I think suffers to some degree if we do just sort of a verse-by-verse or paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of it because we lose the drama of it. This is written as a drama. It is incredibly intense. It is a great story and you wouldn’t take a play and watch it one scene at a time over a period of twenty or thirty weeks. Now there’s benefit in doing that because you can teach a lot of different things, but we also gain much just from taking in the entire episode.
 
There are a couple of things unique and distinct about the book of Esther. The first reason it’s distinct is that it’s the only book in the Old Testament that has no mention of God. God is not mentioned and for that reason there were some who doubted whether or not it should be included in the Old Testament canon. It was accepted by the Jewish authorities even before the time of Christ as part of the canon of Scripture. It was part of the group known as the writings. Remember the Old Testament is divided into three groups, the Torah, the five books of the Law, the Nevi’im, the prophets and the Ketuvim, the writings. This is in the section of the writings as is Daniel.
 
There’s something distinct about both Daniel and Esther in that they depict the Jewish people in the diaspora and are out of the land which God has promised to them and they are living in a pagan world much as the Church is living in a hostile world today. There are certain lessons and application that we can take from it. How do we live wisely in the midst of a hostile environment? Daniel and his friends demonstrate a lot of wise principles on how to live in the midst of a pagan environment without taking everything to the level of a head-to-head confrontation. So they avoid a lot of confrontation by wisdom and the way they handle the conflict.
 
The same can be seen with Esther. Esther showed a remarkable amount of wisdom. God is in the background here. The fact that God is not mentioned doesn’t mean that God is not involved. It’s to teach the fact that in certain times of history God is not directly involved in things or He’s not seen as being directly involved but He is the hidden puppet master behind the scenes overseeing the events in history. He’s not there in an overt way. He is definitely providing for and protecting the Jewish people outside of the land in a hostile environment but He’s not seen. Neither is Satan seen, like we see Satan in the book of Job. Satan is the one who goes to God and wants to test Job. The curtain is drawn back so we can see what’s going on in the divine throne room when we’re looking at the book of Job. The writer of Esther doesn’t pull the curtain back for us. So we just see things as we do in our day-to-day lives as they are without an exposure of the spiritual realities behind the scene. We come to understand God’s hidden hand and His providential protection.
 
The events take place during the reign of Ahasuerus, which is the Persian name for Xerxes, when he has suffered military defeat by the Greeks. He’s come back and he is not in the best of moods and he is trying to drown out some of his sorrows because of his military defeat. The book begins by sort of setting the stage in the first chapter by showing why he is looking for a wife. Now we see that God is really working behind the scenes here. What happens here is that he throws a party. This party goes on for a while. His wife, Queen Vashti, is throwing a feast for the women at the same time. On the seventh day as they reach a certain stage of drunkenness at the king’s party and he wants to bring the Queen out in order to display her beauty before all of his men friends. There’s a hint there that this is extremely inappropriate but we don’t know exactly what that entailed. She refuses to do it and according to the laws of the Persians, this is an affront that is really punishable by death. Ahasuerus is gracious; he doesn’t have her executed but he does banish her from the court and for all practical purposes he divorces her.
 
This sets the stage for searching for a new wife. He has a beauty contest and talent contest and all of the best virgins in the land come forward to see who will be chosen by the king. It was a twelve month training process where they prepared them before they came before the king. One of the young ladies that comes is a young Jewish girl by the name of Hadassah. Her Persian name was Esther. Her cousin is Mordecai. We’re told in that Mordecai had raised her from childhood, that she was his uncle’s daughter so he was actually her cousin. She was much, much younger and her parents had died and so Mordecai raised her. He encourages her to go forward. He warns her not to tell anyone she’s Jewish. This is emphasized twice in chapter 20. In verse 10 we’re told that Esther had not revealed her people or her family for Mordecai had charged her not to reveal it.
 
Now why Mordecai did that we don’t know but this is important as the story unfolds because as the enemy, Haman, comes along he hates the Jewish people. He hates Mordecai which he transfers to all the Jewish people. If he had known that Esther was Jewish this would have changed the dynamics so for whatever reason under the providential oversight of God Mordecai stresses that she’s not to let anyone know she’s Jewish or who her relatives are. She is presented before the king and the king is going to fall in love with her, love at first sight, and she is the one who is going to be invited to be his new queen.
 
Now in chapter 3, all of a sudden we shift to the strong baseline and the evil villain comes on the scene, Haman. If you go down to one of the Jewish bakeries in town, if you go to Three Brothers in Memorial City area, you can buy hamantaschen. Hamantaschen is a tri-corner little cookie that they eat the feast of Purim. This is the origin of the Feast of Purim, one of the Jewish holidays and every year they put on a little morality play. The way you know the bad guy he wears a little tri-corner hat. At least that’s how Haman is recognized so the hamantaschen is a tri-corner cookie representing that. They’re not bad, as cookies go. They have some little fruit fillings and they’re tasty.
 
Haman is identified as an Agagite. Now Agag was the king of the Amalekites at the time of Saul. I talked about this on Tuesday night. The Amalekites were traditional enemy of Israel and they were sort of a large tribe of Bedouin desert pirates frequently attacking different groups all through the Middle East. They were a real scourge at that time. So God directed Saul to kill them, kill them all, men, women, and children, sheep, goats, cattle, everything. Saul disobeyed. He doesn’t kill them all. He lets Agag survive and it is believed that Haman is called an Agagite is because he is a descendant of Agag. He’s an Amalekite. He has a history of being the enemy of the Jews, the enemy of Israel.
 
So he comes and rises in the ranks of Xerxes. When he comes through the gates into the palace, everybody bows and scrapes and does homage to him except for one man, Mordecai. And every day everybody shows him this deference and respect and feeds his pride and arrogance except for Mordecai. This gets under his skin. He builds up this hatred for Mordecai, and he transfers that to all of the Jewish people and builds this intense hatred for the Jews. Haman wanted Mordecai to bow and scrape to him and show him a little respect. Mordecai wouldn’t do it. Then they told Haman that Mordecai was Jewish and so then Haman sought to destroy all the Jews who were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus.
 
First Haman decides he wants to kill the people of Mordecai so he goes to the king. He decides they need a date when they’re going to have this empire-wide assault and kill all the Jewish people. So they’re going to cast lots, called purim, which is where we get the name for the Feast of Purim, the feast of casting lots. So they cast lots; they pick a date, the 12th month of Adar and this is when they’re going to have this assault. He goes to the king and tells the king he’s going to give an enormous amount of money into the treasury if the king will sign this decree for the destruction of all these people who he says are really the enemies of the Persians and the king. Now the King doesn’t really know what’s going on and gets sucked in by his advisor. He’s kind of an absent king at this point.
 
The king then took his signet ring from his hand and gave it to Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the enemy of the Jews. So again we get this drumbeat roll: this is the enemy of the Jewish people. So he sent out couriers all over the land to get all the military, the militia, the national guard, all armed and ready to go on the 13th of Adar when they’re going to kill all the Jews.
 
But God is working behind the scenes. So no matter how dark things may appear in your life or mine, God is always in control. We never know what God is doing. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and the right hand is doing something very interesting. So Mordecai finds out about this and he is just terribly upset, as you can imagine. He tears his clothes and he puts on ashes and sackcloth and he goes out to the men of the city. When this visual expression of his grief comes to Esther’s attention, she is trying to get Mordecai to tell her what’s going on. He eventually gets a message to her and tells her this is really a position that God has placed her in to come to the aid of her people.
 
At first she’s a little resistant but in 4:13 we read, “Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, ‘Do not imagine that you in the king’s palace can escape any more than all the Jews.’” No one may know you’re a Jew but they’ll find out and you’re not going to be able to escape. “ ‘For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place.’ ” That’s his strong faith in the promise of God. It’s not stated as such but we know that’s what’s there. Even if you’re not the one to take advantage of this and be blessed by playing a part in the deliverance of the Jews, God’s going to bring someone else along because God’s not going to allow this to happen.
 
He tells Esther, “And you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?” What a great line. We never know what opportunities we might have in whatever place or circumstance that God has placed us. So Esther rises to the challenge and she tells Mordecai to gather all the Jews for a time of prayer and a time of fasting. And they do so.
 
She then sets a plan. Now this is a fabulous plan. She’s thought this through. We’re not told what came into this or how she came up with a plan or anything but she comes up with a plan. Rather than just confronting Xerxes with what’s going on, when she goes before him, and he recognizes her, instead of saying right away what the problem is, she’s going to build a trap for Haman. And it’s very subtle. She shows a lot of restraint and discipline and skill. This is a great illustration of what I’ve been talking about in terms of Proverbs on Sunday mornings in terms of wisdom. This is a great illustration of chokmah, wisdom and skill.
 
So after three days of prayer and fasting, she gets all dressed up, puts on her finest royal robes, and she’s going in to the inner court in the king’s palace. Now in Persian law, if she came out into the open, and the king didn’t want to recognize her, then that’s a death penalty. But if he picks up his scepter and he holds it out, she will come place her hand on it, then he has recognized her, and allows her to come forward. He accepts her and she comes in and she says that she wants to invite him and Haman to dinner the next day.
 
So the next day they come to dinner and they have a nice banquet dinner and wine. The king asks her what she wants to request. She says she’d like them to come back the next day. She’s not in a hurry. How many times when we’re witnessing to somebody, when we’re dealing with some problem, we get in a hurry? We want to rush things. She’s very calm, very relaxed, and she is waiting on the Lord. This is a great example of , “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.” God is working behind the scenes.
 
So this has just so fed Haman’s ego. He goes home and he’s just so excited. He’s just dancing on air. Verse 9 says, “Then Haman went out that day glad and pleased of heart; but when Haman saw Mordecai in the king’s gate and that he did not stand up or tremble before him, Haman was filled with anger against Mordecai.” It just ruined his whole day. He goes home, grumpy, kicking the cat, throwing everything against the wall. He calls for his wife and friends and finally begins to get back in a better mood and tells them all the great things that are going to happen to him, riches, honor, and power. He is counting all of his chickens before they hatch, as it were. He is living as though this is going to happen. He has created a false scenario for himself.
He tells that he’s been invited back by the queen the next day and he’s sure wonderful things are going to happen. But he told about his problem with Mordecai, how he sat outside the king’s gate and doesn’t give him any respect. So his wife and friends tell him to go ahead and build some gallows since he’s going to have so much power. That way he would be ready to execute Mordecai and to hang him for treason since he would have the power to do it. So he issues the orders to have the gallows built. He’s just rubbing his hands together in glee that he’s going to be raised to this position of power and at the same time he’ll be able to destroy his enemies and all of the Jews along with it.
 
But that night, God is working. Xerxes can’t sleep. He gets up in the middle of the night like many of us do at two or three o’clock in the morning. We turn on the television or pick up a book but we can’t sleep. Xerxes calls for one of his chroniclers because history puts people to sleep. He wants them to read through the chronicles of the king. In that, an event passed over earlier is discovered where Mordecai had discovered an assassination plot against the king a few years earlier. This had been recorded. Mordecai had reported those who planned this assassination of Xerxes and he’d never been rewarded. When this is read to the king he realized he’s never been rewarded. Why wasn’t some honor given to Mordecai for saving his life? They tell him no one did anything for Mordecai.
 
 The king asks who’s on duty in the court. They heard Haman outside and they brought him in. The king asked him, “What should I do to honor someone who has done great things for the king?” Haman, of course, thinks the king is talking about him. He’s so self-absorbed he tells him to bring a royal robe, and a royal horse the king has ridden upon, and put one of the king’s prince’s before him, leading the man through the city proclaiming, thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honor.”
 
So the king tells Haman, “Hurry up. Go get Mordecai and put him on the horse and take him through the city.” You can just imagine how Haman felt at that point. Worse than being sucker punched. He’s just seething on the inside but he takes Mordecai through the city and then afterwards, Mordecai went back to the king’s gate. Haman hurries home with his head covered. He knows that everything is about to crash in on him. He tells his wife and his wife says, “If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish origin, you will not overcome him but will surely fall before him.” She prophetically announces his doom.
 
So the next day the king and Haman go to dine with Esther. While they are there, Esther then tells the king how he has been duped into signing this order to allow for the assault and execution of all the Jews in the land. She says, “For had we been sold as slaves, men and women, I would have remained silent, although the enemy could never for the king’s loss.” The king wants to know who would dare do this awful thing. She tells him it’s that wicked, evil adversary sitting right there, Haman.
 
The king arose and lost his temper. You don’t want someone with that kind of power losing his temper against you. He looks outside, sees the gallows, and orders Haman to be hanged immediately upon the gallows that have been prepared for Mordecai. So Haman, rather than reaping a judgment against the Jews loses his life. God is protecting them. But then this date is still set; the law has been announced; so what are they going to do to save the Jews on the 13th of Adar?
 
Esther comes to the king with another plan to allow all the Jews to arm themselves, a good principle of self-defense, and to fight off any attacks. That is exactly what they did when the orders went out that they could do this, the Jews partied and celebrated all throughout the land, and then they prepared themselves. We’re told at the very end of the story that they killed 75,000 of their enemies. After all that happened and all the praise that Xerxes had for the Jews in the land, you would think that the people would be smart enough to see that the king liked the Jews so they shouldn’t fight against them but they fought and lost their lives. That shows the irrationality of anti-Semitism. It’s not rational. It’s not empirical. We can only understand it if we put it within the framework of spiritual warfare of the angelic conflict. It can only have ultimately a religious, spiritual explanation. We’ll get into that next Thursday night.

Romans 105c-The Reason for Anti-Semitism (Introduction) via

Romans 9:1 NASB95
I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit,
Romans 105c-The Reason for Anti-Semitism (Introduction) via
 
Open your Bibles to Revelation, chapter 12. Our topic this evening is still part of our introduction to . We’ll be dealing with some of the issues that relate to Christians and Jews. This is an important section, in fact, the foundational section in the New Testament as I’ve been teaching for the last several weeks on why God still has a plan for Israel. He has not turned his back permanently on Israel. There is a temporary shift in God’s plan as He closes on this new spiritual entity that came into existence on the day of Pentecost on A.D. 33 known as the Church. The Church is on this earth during this time period since A.D. 33 until the Rapture of the Church. We don’t know when that will be. We know it will be before the period known as the “time of Jacob’s trouble”, a reference to the fact that the focal point of history shifts back to God’s plan and purposes for Israel because he will fulfill His promises to Israel through the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant and the New covenant.
 
So we look at the fact there have been two horrible errors that have plagued Christianity down through the 2000 years of the Church Age in relation to Israel. The first is replacement theology. Replacement theology forms the theological foundation for the second error which is anti-Semitism. What formed the foundation for both of these is really a view of Scripture, an interpretation of Scripture which we refer to as allegorical or a spiritualizing method of interpreting the Scripture. This gradually came into influence in the Church in the 2nd century and became more formalized by the end of the 3rd century and the 4th century under first Origen and then Augustine so that from the time period of roughly 400 A.D. until 1500 A.D., approximate dates, 99.9% of Christians operated on this type of allegorical interpretation where Church didn’t mean the Church and Israel didn’t mean Israel. The Israel in the Old Testament was the Old Testament church so Israel in the Old Testament meant Christians and in the New Testament Church meant Israel, the spiritual Israel.
 
Under replacement theology the Jews were completely set aside by God because they were the ones who crucified Jesus and rejected the Messiah. For that they are permanently replaced by the Church in replacement theology. There’s no significance today for the Jewish people. There’s no significance today for Israel. There’s no significance today for any kind of future plan for Israel. That is typical of Covenant Theology, Calvinism, Roman Catholic theology, a lot of these other theological systems, other than dispensationalism. All other systems form some degree of replacement theology now.
 
As I pointed out in the last couple of weeks, replacement theology has become a strong negative so people today deny they believe in replacement theology because they’ve identified it with what produced the Holocaust. On the one hand they say they don’t believe in replacement theology but on the other hand they say the Jews can’t say they’re the chosen people. If they’re the chosen people then God still has a purpose for them. That’s still replacement theology. If you say the Jews aren’t the chosen people, that’s replacement theology by another name. You just don’t want to be associated with that term.
 
We know in our foundational verse as I’ve pointed out in the last few weeks that to the Israelites God said, “To whom pertained the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service, and the promises.” They still belong to Israel according to what the Apostle Paul says in . And the foundation is the Abrahamic covenant which was summarized in the first three verses of . It is an eternal unconditional unilateral contract between God and Abraham. In when the covenant is actually cut (that means when you have the formal ceremony) God caused sleep to come over Abraham. When God caused that sleep to come on Abraham then God, alone, symbolized by a fiery pot moves between the sacrifices. That indicates that God, alone, is binding himself to this contract. It’s not bi-lateral. It’s not conditioned upon anything Abraham does. God is the one who bound Himself to fulfill that covenant which means it’s an eternal, everlasting covenant.
 
 It’s important to understand this issue related to interpretation that:
 
“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, make no other sense. Therefore take every word at its ordinary literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths indicate clearly otherwise.”
 
That was articulated by D.L. Cooper and it’s a great summary of literal interpretation and normal main use of words. Now this is really important. I’ll give you an example. Just this week I got a new book hot off the press from Oxford Press. I think it’s titled More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism by Robert O. Smith. I had pre-ordered it six or seven months ago. It is a history of Christian Zionism. The author has his PhD from Baylor University and in his bio which I had not seen before, I discovered that he is an Evangelical Lutheran which is generally a replacement theology denomination. He serves with the World Council of Churches on their Palestine/Israel board. Now that tells you a lot about his slant. I’ve read through the introduction and the conclusion to get his focus and his orientation and I haven’t seen anything that set off really big bells. It looks like he had a lot of good scholarship. I’m sure there are going to be things I find within that I disagree with it but what I found interesting is how clearly he understands the issue of hermeneutics in this whole topic related to understanding the role of Israel.
 
He has a chapter which I haven’t read yet on William Blackstone and the document or petition he had which went to President Grover Cleveland in 1891 in order to secure the formal support of the United States to return the Jewish people to their historic national homeland. He predated the rise of official Zionism by six or seven years. So that later on in 1950 Louis Brandeis who was head of the Zionist Organization of America and later was to be a Supreme Court Justice, said that it was not Theodore Hertzog who started modern Zionism but it was a Christian by the name of William Blackstone. So he’s very significant but in this author’s discussion on Blackstone he points out that what Blackstone was doing was using a combination of literal hermeneutic, literal interpretation, and historicist interpretation so he understood that.
 
In fact, he also understands very clearly and accurately that this is the same thing that dominated a lot of the popular prophecy and pro-Israel speakers in the 20th century like Hal Lindsey. Hal is loaded with historicism. Joel Rosenberg is doing this right now. You’ve got a line-up and an alliance between Iran and Turkey and Libya and Russia. That’s and 39, they say. See all of a sudden you’ve slipped into historicist interpretation. Now I know you’re wondering what it is. Think about interpretation looking at the future in terms of three tenses. You have past tense, present tense, and future tense. We are futurists. We believe that all the prophecy in and 25 and Revelation from on is all future. That means that in the Church Age you cannot go and look at some event going on today and say, “Look, this is fulfilled prophecy.” You can’t do it. There may be things setting the stage for the future and I think in a vague sense you can say that the return of the Jewish people to the land today is at least a precursor of the return that has to take place prior to or at the beginning of the Tribulation.
 
There has to be a national government in place to start the Tribulation. The Tribulation doesn’t start with the Rapture like some people think. The Tribulation starts according to with the peace treaty, the covenant that’s signed between the Antichrist and Israel. Well, you’ve got to have somebody who can sign a peace treaty with Israel for it to start. So the kickoff of that time frame of the seventieth week of Daniel has to start with some sort of national government in Israel being able to sign this peace treaty. Then everything dominoes from there.
 
What we’re seeing now is prophetically significant. I use that phrase because it’s not a fulfillment per se but it is an indication that God is working. Today you have roughly five and one-half million Jews that have returned to Israel. Some people say, “That’s not important.” But that’s because you’re ignorant. Basically I’m going to call a spade a spade. There’s never been a significant return of the Jews to the land of Israel. Somebody might ask what about the time after the Babylonian captivity. Well, you only have 40–45,000 come back with Nehemiah and Ezra. You never had a huge amount. You never had more than say 30% of the Jews return from the diaspora at the time of Christ. Most of them, the vast majority of Jews, during the time of Christ lived outside the land of Israel.
 
So you never had a time in human history where you’ve had such a huge number, almost half or 45% of the Jews living in Israel, 45% in the U.S., and the other 10% scattered around the world so we’re very close to a time period when we’re going to have more Jews living in Israel than outside of Israel. That is, I think, a historically significant event in terms of the fact it’s a full bore, irreversible restoration of the Jews to the land. Now does that mean the Rapture is going to occur tomorrow? No. But it does mean God is continuing to set the stage for the events that will take place during the Tribulation.
 
One of the titles for the Tribulation is that it’s the time of “Jacob’s trouble”. That focuses us on the fact from Jeremiah in the Old Testament that this is a time focusing on Israel. This is not a Christian viewpoint. One of the things I’ve become aware of over the last seven or eight years is that in the intellectual community, especially the anti-Christian Zionist, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic community, there is this idea presented that the only reason Christians support Israel and getting Jews back into the land is because when Jesus comes back, two-thirds of the Jews are going to be killed. They think it’s really a plot to get all the Jews back so they’ll be killed. So you’re really anti-Semitic. That’s sort of their orientation.
 
What I point out in all of these passages in the Scriptures that talk about what eventually happens with the Jews and the end times all come out of Old Testament prophetic context. They don’t come from Revelation. They don’t come out of and 25. They come out of Old Testament passages. That’s where we get all of those numbers.
 
Now in previous lessons we looked at issues of hermeneutics, issues of replacement theology, and then last week I started with part one on anti-Semitism. We’re going to continue with the second part tonight. Last time I looked at one event in the Old Testament related to anti-Semitism. Today I want to look at why the world hates the Jews and why the Jewish people are unique among all the world’s people and have engendered such hatred, such antagonism, and such violence, that is unique to them. Now there are certain ethnic groups that have historically hated each other and fought each other. The Turks and the Greeks. The British and the French used to hate each other and fight each other for a long time. That’s beyond the scene now. Other groups have done that but no other group has engendered world hatred.
 
Last time we looked at some of the different definitions for anti-Semitism. The one that I focused on is the one from the Anti-Defamation League which states that “it is the belief or behavior hostile toward Jews just because they’re Jewish.” That’s the key phrase, “just because they’re Jewish.” Blaming the Jewish people coming up with conspiracy theories such as the elders of Zion or Jewish capitalists, or Jewish Marxists is one thing, but blaming the Jewish people because they’re Jewish and that’s what makes them the source of the world’s problems is anti-Semitism.
 
It can take many different forms. It can take the form of religious hostility because they turned their back on Jesus. It can take the form of economic hostility because they have too many money. It can be political because they have too much influence. But the issue is that there’s a hostility and prejudice toward the Jews because they’re Jewish. You go back to which says, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed.” 
 
Last time I traced the hostility of Satan to Messianic promises set forth in where God promised the serpent He would put enmity between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed. Satan is alerted there’s something to do with human descent from Eve and so before the call of Abraham, before there were any Jewish people, there was this assault on the seed of the woman. It starts with Cain’s murder of Abel, the invasion of the sons of God, the fallen angels, who take human wives in .
 
You have situations that then begin to develop with the seed of Abraham with the attempted rapes of Sarah and Rebekah when they are put within the harem of either Pharaoh and later, Abimelech, the king of the Philistines. The attempt to cheat Esau out of his birthright which created the enmity between Esau and Jacob, and the fear that Esau would kill Jacob, who’s the one through whom the line would go. These are all different aspects. The murder of the male children in Egypt by Pharaoh, the attempted murders of David by Saul, later on Queen Athaliah attempts to destroy the royal seed.
 
Then you see Haman’s attempt in Esther to destroy the Jews. The first clear event where Jews are being targeted by other human beings for being Jews is the event in Esther. In most of the literature related to the historical development of anti-Semitism they at least mention this. They don’t go back any further. That’s a Satanic attempt to destroy the Jews. We have to understand this. You don’t have other human beings attempting to destroy the Jews because they are Jews until you get to this event with Haman’s attempt to have all of the Jews in Persia destroyed and executed. Later on you have other attempts. Then comes the idolatry of the worship of Moloch which resulted in killing the children of the Israelites and then Herod’s attack against the children of Bethlehem to try to destroy the seed, which is Jesus Christ, and then other attempts during the life of Christ.
 
So what I want to do today is look at the framework for all of this which is given in Revelation, chapter 12, which depicts a future event. What happens in the way which the Apostle John writes in Revelation, he will often introduce a new topic and then he goes back to pick up historical threads so that what he is saying about this situation in terms of its future significance is connected to a historical flow. So that’s what happens here.
 
In , we read, “A great sign appeared in heaven…” Now there are five great signs in Revelation. In this chapter and chapter 13 we have three of them. These are the woman clothed with the sun in 12:1, a great red dragon in verse 3, and another sign appeared in heaven. The word “sign” is used three times in chapter 13 in relation to the second beast. What happens in this particular section is that there’s a pause in the action. You have the first seal judgments, which occurred during the first half of the Tribulation.
 
That brings us up to the time when the Antichrist really exposes himself and wants to be worshipped in the Temple. This is when he destroys the two prophets that have been challenging him through the first half of the Tribulation period and then we come to this announcement of the seventh trumpet at the end of chapter 11. Then there’s this pause that occurs where John goes back to connect some dots for us dealing with the woman, the child, and the dragon in chapter 12 and then the two beasts in chapter 13. Then in chapter 14 he again focuses on another set of people, the Lamb who is the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ and the 144,000. These are not temporal. He’s not discussing these in a temporal order but it’s sort of like a playbill you get if you go to the theater and it identifies who the characters are and it gives you sort of an overview of what the play’s action is.
 
Here we have the introduction of a woman who is depicted as being clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet and on her head a garment of twelve stars. You can read this in isolation from the rest of the Bible and you can sit there and say, “Well, I wonder what that can be.” A lot of people studying prophecy just sort of generate out of their own imagination what they think these symbols could be. But God doesn’t give us His Word in that way. God is always very clear and the symbols that we see in the book of Revelation are not just generated by the apostle John. At this point I just want to say that when you read a lot of this literature about Christians who support Israel, those who are opposed to Christians supporting Israel, often act as if we just sort of generate these theological ideas abstractly, that we don’t get them from the Bible. But that’s because they come to the Bible with a non-literal interpretation.
 
Now as Christians who believe in a literal interpretation that doesn’t mean that we don’t believe there are symbols used in Scriptures so that we can interpret them. We know this is not literally a woman who is clothed with the literal sun and she’s not standing on the moon and she doesn’t have a literal twelve stars surrounding her head. This is a vision and it’s a picture. Each of these elements mean something. So we have the woman and we have to discern the significance of the sun, moon, and the twelve stars. This, as I pointed out, didn’t come up for John on the Isle of Patmos. This vision God gives him is designed to connect to an Old Testament passage. This takes us back to . Once again we see the principle that the Bible interprets itself. You don’t have to go and gaze at your navel for twenty-four hours, go in the peyote tent with some Western Plains Indians, smoke dope, or whatever else people do in order to somehow come up with what this vision means. It’s real simple. You just study your Bible.
 
tells us about Joseph, the favorite son of his father, Jacob. As a young boy Joseph is a little pretentious. He’s daddy’s favorite. He has a couple of dreams that he wants to tell everybody about because he knows they mean he is something special in the plan of God. He gets a little bit of a big head over all of this and ends up irritating his father and irritating his brothers. But beyond that, we understand the significance of the dream. We’re told in “Now he had still another dream…”
 
It’s the second dream both indicating the same thing of his preeminence in the plan of God over his brothers. “And he related it to his brothers and said, ‘Lo, I have had still another dream; and behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.’ ” In we had twelve stars. In Genesis, there are eleven, because Joseph is the twelfth one. That’s why there’s a number difference. And so he tells his father about these same images. Do you think maybe they mean the same thing? Is Joseph’s dream trying to help us to understand what John is seeing on the Isle of Patmos? “He related it to his father and to his brothers and his father rebuked him and said to him, ‘What is this dream that you have had? Shall I, the sun, your mother, the moon, bow ourselves down before you to the ground?’ ”
Jacob understands this. He understands that Rachel, Joseph’s mother, is the moon and that the eleven stars represent Joseph’s eleven brothers. He’s very clear on that.
 
So gives us the identity of these symbols that are used in . So who’s the woman? The woman is Israel. She is clothed with the sun which is Jacob, the moon which is Rachel, and on her head a garland of twelve stars, the twelve tribes of Israel. Then in we’re told that she was with child. “And she cried out being in labor and in pain to give birth.” This is the ultimate destiny of Israel, depicted here as the woman, and she is going to give birth to the Messiah.
 
Then in verse 3, “Then another sign appeared in heaven and behold a great red dragon…” So we have this beast which shows up. “A great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns and on his head were seven diadems.” Now where do we go to find the significance of these symbols? We go back to when Daniel sees a vision of the different beasts that come out of the sea representing different kingdoms. When it comes to the last beast, it’s without description. He just can’t put words to it. The last beast is the beast that relates to the end times kingdom. That beast has ten horns. One of the little horns gobbles up three of them. So ten minus three is seven. This is why the great red dragon has seven heads. The Antichrist in his rise to power conquers three of the kingdoms of the ten. This is why you have ten horns that represent the original ten kingdoms. The seven heads and the seven diadems represent what happens after the conclusion of that event described in .
 
So we’ve defined the dragon and the seven heads and the ten horns. The dragon represents this end time kingdom that is empowered by Satan. It’s interesting how you have this imagery of the serpent (nachash) in and this reptilian creature becomes connected to Satan. It’s clear that the dragon is Satan. A lot of interesting connections we could talk about there but it would get us off track. says, “And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth.” This is a future event and it’s the time when Satan is going to be cast out of heaven and he’s going to take with him a third of the stars of heaven.
 
The term “stars of heaven” is frequently used to describe the angels. They’re metaphorically described by the term “stars”. This is where we learn that a third of the original angelic creation followed Satan in his rebellion. Babylon, which is the center of all the action, literal, historical Babylon in the future becomes the rejuvenated power base. Its symbol was the dragon. We’re told, “And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth.” This is Israel about to give birth, “So that he [the dragon] might devour the child.”
 
What this depicts for us is what I already described from looking at those various events from the Old Testament is that the Satanic strategy from the announcement of the gospel in to the cross was to prevent the seed from coming into human history to provide redemption for the human race. That is the first Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament and approximately half of them are fulfilled in the first advent. The rest will be fulfilled at the second coming. The first prediction is that the Messiah will be true humanity and enter into the human race as the seed of the woman so the woman here gives birth and the mission of the dragon has been to destroy the child to prevent salvation.
 
In verse 5 we read, “And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron…” This is the verse that gives us real clarity on who this child is because the child is said to have the purpose of ruling all the nations with a rod of iron. Where do we get any information about that? We get that from the Old Testament. is a Messianic psalm and in 2:7 the ‘Anointed One’ [verse 3] says, “I will surely tell of the decree of the Lord. ‘You are my Son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of Me and I will surely give you the nations for your inheritance…’ ”
 
Now that prophecy is fulfilled in where there’s a scene after Daniel has seen the four kingdoms and sees a vision in heaven where the Son of Man [Jesus Christ] goes before the Ancient of Days [God the Father] and asks for His kingdom. That occurs at the end of the seven years of the Great Tribulation. That’s what this is an illusion to in . God the Father says to God the Son, “Ask of me and I will give you the nations of the world as your inheritance.” Right now God the Son is sitting in a passive position at the right hand of God and the Father waiting the time when He will ask for the kingdom. He will ask for the nations as His inheritance and the earth as His possession and then the Father says to Him in verse 9, “You shall break them with a rod of iron.”
 
What has already been going on here at the first part of is that the nations are enraged against God and His Anointed One. This occurs as a prelude to the campaign of Armageddon. Then all the nations come together to fight God. The Messiah will come and He will break the nations with a rod of iron so that’s where we get this “rod of iron” terminology. So who wields the rod of iron? It’s God’s Messiah.
 
So when we look at and read that the woman, Israel, gives birth to a son who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron that ties this to the prophecy in , the Messianic prophecy. You can’t get that if you don’t know your Old Testament. This is why knowledge of the Old Testament is so crucial, especially if you want to understand anything about the book of Revelation. So she gives birth to a child who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron and her child will be caught up to God and to His throne. This is the Ascension.
 
Many of us have grown up with the NASA space program. They were honoring Neal Armstrong today. We saw all the early astronauts going up in the Mercury program and then the Gemini program and then the Apollo. Watching people take off in an airplane or go up into space in a rocket is not new to us. But in the 1st century to watch someone just go straight up in the air was something they had never seen, imagined, or thought before. Then all of a sudden Jesus goes up. [Shows an artist rendition of the Ascension] I just think the artist captured a great image here.
 
So we’re told from that she bore this male child who was caught up to God’s throne. We know Jesus is there today on the right hand of His Father. Then in verse 6, we read, “Then the woman fled into the wilderness…” The woman is Israel. The woman flees into the wilderness where she has “a place prepared by God.” What you don’t see here is that between verse 5 and 6 at least 2,000 years goes by. This is not unusual in understanding prophetic literature where the author just hits the high points and leaves a lot out in between.
So the woman is going to flee into the wilderness where she will “be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days.” That’s 3 and ½ years according to the Jewish calendar, a lunar calendar with 360 days in a year. This relates to the second half of the Tribulation period. Now if you remember in Jesus told them that when they saw certain things happening they were to flee into the wilderness. He told them how difficult it would be if they had children or other circumstances because immediately you need to head out into the wilderness.
 
This wilderness area is not in Judea proper. They would head south and then over across what is now the kingdom of Jordan into this desolate area around Petra, which was the location of an enormous city governed by the Nabataens back before the time of Christ. God prepares a place there where God will take care of them because they’re being attacked. What we learn from all of this is that Satan hates Israel. He had a plan in the Old Testament to destroy the seed and often that took the form of attacks on Israel. In the Church Age the only thing left for Satan to do since he’s been defeated at the cross is to try to frustrate God’s plan for Israel. If he can stop God from fulfilling the promises he made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that God would give them the land.
 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never owned anything in the land outside the Cave of Machpelah located in Iran and outside of a small piece of real estate that Jacob had up around Shem. They owned nothing in the land God had promised them. He had told them they would have all of this great land from the Great Sea to the River Euphrates and that all of this is going to be theirs. They never owned it in their lifetime. So when are they going to own it? God’s got to fulfill that promise by giving them ownership of that land when they are resurrected and brought back during the Millennial Kingdom. If Satan can stop that by killing all the Jews so that God can’t keep that promise (as long as there is one Jew alive, God can fulfill His promise), and God is prevented from fulfilling that promise, then Satan can say, “Checkmate. You might have defeated me at the cross but I checked you and you can’t be God in control of all these volitional creatures who are doing their own thing anymore than I can so you can’t be God.” That’s the angelic conflict. The first stage was to block the seed and the second stage is to block the fulfillment of the promises of God to the Jewish people.
 
So, just to fill in a few gaps here on this particular prophecy, where the woman fled into the wilderness. Where is this wilderness? In we’re told, “The sword of the Lord is filled with blood.” This is a picture of the great battle that will come about during the Tribulation period and especially at the end in the campaign of Armageddon.” It goes on to say, “It is sated with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.” This picture here has never happened before. It’s unfulfilled prophecy so there will be a great slaughter in Bozrah.
 
In and 2 we read, “Who is this who comes from Edom with garments of glowing colors form Bozrah? This One who is majestic in His apparel, marching in the greatness of His strength.” This is terminology used only of deity. Then he says, “It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.” This is clearly the Savior who is coming to deliver Israel. Then Isaiah writes, “Why is your apparel red, and your garments like the One who treads in the wine press?” Why, because we just read in there’s been this great slaughter with some of the armies of the Antichrist coming against the Jews.
 
recognizes this as well. We read, “I will surely assemble all of you, Jacob, I will surely gather the remnant of Israel. I will put them together like sheep in the fold.” Now the Hebrew word for sheepfold is bozrah. Bozrah is a location. We just read that He’s coming from Bozrah. “Like a flock in the midst of its pasture, they will be noisy with men.” [Shows a map and describes locations in Israel] During the Tribulation period at the half way point when these signs appear, such as the Antichrist exposing himself as wanting to be worshipped as God in the Temple, then believers are to literally head for the hills so they will be protected by God. They will head south past the end of the Red Sea and then across into the wilderness area of ancient Edom which is now modern Jordan to Bozrah, which is roughly in the same area as Petra. There they will be protected until finally at the end of the Tribulation period when they are almost completely destroyed they’ll finally turn and call upon the name of the Lord.
 
That is when the Lord Jesus Christ will return and He will defeat their enemies that have them under siege in that location and then he will lead them on a victorious march to free Jerusalem from the Antichrist and defeat the forces of the Antichrist and the False Prophet. What’s being pictured here in Isaiah is His return from Bozrah when His garments are covered in blood. What I’m describing here is the ultimate defeat of anti-Semitism which will not occur until the end of the Tribulation. This is what Christians believe based upon what Revelation says when we hold to a literal interpretation. Much of this also comes out of the Old Testament because these prophecies in Isaiah and Micah have not been fulfilled yet. They will be fulfilled in a future time.
 
Now all of this entire scenario of anti-Israel and anti-Semitism is based upon this angelic rebellion that took place at some time in eternity past. and tell there was a creature, the highest of all the angels, the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the most talented and capable and skilled of all God’s creation. He is filled with pride and rebels against God. He wants to be worshipped like God.
At some point God is going to bring judgment upon Satan and his angels []. God has prepared the lake of fire for them already. It’s a perfect tense verb indicating completed action. So the lake of fire has already been constructed. Now why aren’t Satan and his angels there now? I think there are a number of reasons. It’s not simple. You can’t just give a one-shot answer but they’re all related. It’s a complex of answers. I think at the root of that complex of answers is the challenge that this doesn’t fit the righteousness of God. How can a righteous God, a just God, a loving God send his creatures to an eternity in a lake of fire?
 
This is a major issue today. There are a lot of evangelicals who are turning away from a position of an eternal punishment in a lake of fire. That’s because we’re turned into a bunch of wienies and wimps. It also reflects the fact that as a culture, contemporary Christianity has a very weak view of sin and total depravity. The Calvinist have a strong view but many others do not. What happens in this issue is that the temptation of Adam and Eve when they chose to sin they plunged the human race into spiritual death. As a result of that they brought all of the horrors of human history into reality, such as famines, war, meteorological disasters, all of these horrible things that happen to people. The tremendous misery that has occurred and it’s not because somebody committed genocide. It’s not because somebody was a racist or somebody was an abortionist or any other horrible crimes that people think of as the most egregious sin. All of these things happen simply because a lady ate a piece of fruit. Just an innocuous act. Something that people do all the time.
 
That’s what precipitated all of this but that act of eating the fruit was in rebellion against God. Any act of autonomy and rebellion against God, no matter how innocuous it might appear, has the most incredible, horrible consequences. That’s why an eternal condemnation in the lake of fire is absolutely and totally just. So what is demonstrated through human history is that this act of rebellion, the act of Eve eating the “apple” is not just this little, innocuous act that has limited consequences, but it is so enormously horrible, worse than anything we can imagine, that an eternity in a lake of fire is a totally justified judgment and punishment.
 
All of human history is located in the context of this angelic conflict. This is what we get out of . There’s war in heaven, angels are waging war with the dragon and the dragon and its angels are waging war. Then we come to and it says, “And they [the devil and his angels] were not strong enough, and there was no longer a place found for them in heaven.” That doesn’t happen until midway through the Tribulation period. This makes the last half of the Tribulation really weird because in the Church Age demons and angels are invisible. But they’re going to become visible during the last half of the Tribulation. One reason for that is that the Tribulation is bringing to a conclusion all of these different streams of creatures and their relationship to God that have been part of the angelic conflict.
 
The final judgment that occurs in this great conflagration of the campaign of Armageddon is that which brings everything to a conclusion. At the end of that battle Satan is going to be bound in the abyss for a thousand years. The Antichrist and the False Prophet are thrown into a lake of fire. By assumption I believe that most of the demons are going to be sent to the lake of fire at that time and there is judgment of all the human beings in history.
 
The Old Testament saints are resurrected. The Tribulation saints are resurrected. Church Age believers have already been resurrected and the rest of the dead won’t come up until the end of the Tribulation period. This is at the end of the millennial period at the Great White Throne Judgment. But it’s going to be at that conclusion, at the end of the campaign of Armageddon that there’s judgment. It’s not the total end yet. There’s going to be a time when Satan is released for one shot at the end of the millennial kingdom. What it shows us is that human history is all designed to relate to this angelic rebellion and that’s why we have anti-Semitism. That’s the only reason we can truly explain why there’s only one ethnic group in all of human history that has survived for so long and has become the focal point of hatred and violence and vindictiveness by most of the human race, at least by the other descendants of Shem and the descendants of Japheth.
 
says that the “great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old, that is called the devil and Satan.” This is the passage that connects the dots for us in identifying the serpent for us in and as the great dragon. He is the one called the accuser, SHATAN, who deceives the whole world and his angels were thrown down to the earth with him. They’re going to be on the earth and they’re going to be visible during that last part of the Tribulation. It’s going to be weird. You talk about that scene from the first Star War movies where you have all the weird creatures. Yeah, it’s not going to be too different. It’s going to be weird.
 
In we read, “Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of the Christ have come…” See how John has telescoped all of history into this one factor. In the last half of the Tribulation this is going to be when the wrath of God is really poured out on human history. It’s when God is going to finally bring to an end the judgment on everything. It’s going to take three and one half years in those final judgments, as the trumpet judgments and the bowl judgments cleanse the earth of all this sin.
 
It continues, “For the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, he who accuses them before our God day and night. And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.” Now remember millions, if not hundreds of millions, are going to be saved during the Tribulation period. These are the ones who are speaking here. In verse 13, “And when the dragon saw that he was thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child.” So the persecution from Satan is going to intensify during the last half of the Tribulation period.
 
We’re not going to interpret this like a historicist and say this applies to anti-Semitism today because it’s talking about after the angels and Satan have been thrown out of heaven. It’s not talking about before. It’s talking about after so it’s going to be intensified during this second half of the Tribulation period. What happens as a result of his direct assault on the Jewish people in this last half is that God is going to miraculously and providentially protect them. “The two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she could fly into the wilderness.”
 
God is going to supernaturally protect them so they can escape into the wilderness, into Bozrah where “she will be nourished for a time [one year] and times [two years] and a half. That’s three and one half years. That relates to that same number of days we talked about a minute ago. This image of the woman escaping on the eagle’s wings comes out of , “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you to Myself.” Was there an eagle flying them out of Egypt in Exodus? No. See this is the imagery here, the metaphor. It’s a picture of eagles’ power and protectiveness so God is going to, through His power, protect them in their escape.
 
In , “And the serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, so that he might cause her to be swept away with the flood.” This is a depiction of the armies of the Antichrist in hot pursuit of the Jews as they’re seeking to escape into the area of Bozrah. In verse 16 we read, “And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and drank up the river which the dragon poured out of its mouth.” I think that means that God’s going to miraculously protect them through some sort of earthquake that causes the demons to be just absorbed into the earth like the judgment on the priests, Dathan and Abiram, in the rebellion of Korah.
 
says, “And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and went off to make war with the rest of her children [the Christians] who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” This ties somewhat to and also . You can look up those passages later on. What happens during the end of the Tribulation period, to wrap things up, there’s going to be this destruction of two-thirds of the Jewish people. Now in today’s context this is often brought up that Christian Zionists just want to get all the Jews back there because two-thirds of them are going to be killed. I’ve always wanted to raise this issue with the people who hold that. In the Old Testament there’s a prophecy in and 12 of the first destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C. and Ezekiel predicted that “you shall burn with fire one third in the midst of the city when the days of the siege are finished.” A third of the Jews were killed during that first destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C. “You shall take one third and strike around it with a sword and one third you will scatter into the wind and I will draw the sword after them.” In it says, “One third of you will die and be consumed with famine in your midst and one third shall fall all around you.” That’s two-thirds! So the statement that two-third of the Jews being killed during the Tribulation period is not an anti-Semitic statement. That’s the number that Ezekiel said. It was later said by Zechariah.
 
This isn’t New Testament Church stuff. This is Old Testament prophecy. says, “It shall come to pass that in all the land, declares the Lord, that two parts in it will be cut off and perish; but the third will be left in it. I will bring the one-third through the fire, refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are My people and they will say, The Lord is My God.’ ” So there is a return back to God that finally occurs at the end of this period.
 
One other comment on this. If we carefully read through the judgments in Revelation, the trumpet and the bowl judgments, what we discover is that one-quarter of mankind are killed during the seal judgment, a third of those who are left are killed during the trumpet judgment. That means that half of all humanity is killed during the first two series of judgments in the Tribulation period. That’s half of all humanity.
So Christians say and teach in terms of prophecy that the Jewish prophets said that two-thirds of the Jewish people will be killed, not by Christians and not by Jesus. They’re protected by Jesus when He comes. They’re killed by the armies of the Antichrist and Satan. What Christians are simply saying is that this is part of the overall destruction of humanity at this time. Nobody is singling out the Jewish people. This is not an example of anti-Semitism but that’s what it’s claimed to be.
 
We understand all of this fits together. It’s part of Satan’s plot in order to defeat God and destroy the Jewish people. Now next time we’ll come back and get back into the verse by verse exegesis of Romans, chapter 9 which emphasizes God’s future plan for Israel.

Romans 106b-The Messiah: God Incarnate

Romans 9:3 NASB95
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
Romans 106b-The Messiah: God Incarnate
 
We’re in and we’re going to look tonight at a major doctrine in verses 4 and 5 related to the deity of Christ. This is one of about five key verses that clearly and profoundly state the deity of Christ in the New Testament. We’ve gone through a series of background studies in the last few weeks to this chapter because often it’s important to understand issues before you get into a section. It helps you to understand and think about what you’re reading in relation to those particular issues.
 
If you’re reading an article in an editorial in a journal or you’re going to watch, let’s say, a documentary and you don’t know it’s controversial, you don’t know the background on the different sides, it’s very easy to miss a lot of what’s said. If you take time to become educated on the issues before you watch the film or read the book, then what you’re watching has a lot more significance for you. You can watch it with discernment. The same thing is true when you’re reading Scripture. A lot of people pick up the Bible to read it but they really have no framework. There’s no instruction, no comprehension of what the issues are.
 
Unfortunately they start with the first book. If it’s a New Testament they’ll start with Matthew and there’s this long genealogy in chapter one. They’ll start in Genesis and there are long genealogies in and and 11 and they don’t really understand what this all about. They decide it means nothing so they set the Bible down.
 
There needs to be guidance and direction and that is why pastors and Bible teachers are provided for church. But not all Bible teachers and pastors are cut from the same cloth. Not too many really know and understand the Bible. Even training and formal seminary training does not guarantee they’ll know very much. I’ve certainly seen men who haven’t had much Bible training fall by the wayside and get diverted into strange paths but I’ve also seen that with men with formal training. I’ve seen it more with those who don’t have training because they don’t know much about the issues. Some are somewhat slavishly dependent on someone else and they never learn to develop any level of critical thinking skills on their own. That’s important for all of us.
 
Everyone starts off in life becoming somewhat dependent on the people who guide them. They take every opinion that mentor has as if it’s handed down from Mount Sinai. Then as we grow and mature in understanding any time we read articles or books written by other people and learn other things, it helps us to be able to self-critique. That’s how we grow in our knowledge and understanding of anything.
 
are critical chapters today. Whether you realize it or not you are living and are players in one of the great conflicts of the angelic conflict. That is the battle over Israel and the role of ethnic Jews in history. That plays a part as I pointed out in the whole trajectory of anti-Semitism because part of the role and part of the objective and strategy of Satan since he lost at the cross is to try to prevent God from able to fulfill his promises to the Jewish people. So in much of Christian history, sadly, church historians got off track in the early part of the church age and bought into an allegorical form of interpretation and later they used, in the early Reformation, a historicist form of interpretation.
 
That means they thought they could see from the things going on in history the fulfillment of history in their lifetime. They misidentified a lot of things and caused a lot of problems just as allegory did. It wasn’t until the post-post Reformation period, so to speak, the late 1500’s to the 1600’s, that this whole issue of literal hermeneutics or literal interpretation began to be consistently developed and applied to every Scripture. It has taken many centuries for that to work itself out in a lot of areas and it’s very important.
 
Last week I mentioned I was reading a book by a man named Robert O. Smith. His book is More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism. He’s a co-moderator of a forum on the Palestinian issue in the World Council of Churches and he definitely and specifically states that he is out to defend the view that Christian Zionism is the polar opposite of Jewish Zionism and is very dangerous. He’s brilliant and that always makes him more dangerous. He’s done an incredible amount of research which means it’s a wealth of good information. You have to watch for all those little points where he slides his post-modern interpretive framework in. He uses words like “well that’s the construction of that view or history” or “we need to recognize how they constructed the narrative”. The term “construction” and “narrative” are buzzwords for modernism.
 
Every group has their own “narrative”. They say there’s no meta-narrative that’s absolute. We would say that the Bible gives us an absolute meta-narrative from God and that is what we use to inform us of everything. In post-modernism there’s no absolute objective narrative. You can’t know truth. There are no absolutes. Of course, that’s the core problem. When you make a statement like that you’re uttering an absolute. You’re saying, “There are no absolutes.” Is that an absolute? Yes. So, okay. We have one absolute so that negates that basic assumption. Nevertheless this is what governs a lot of history and his agenda, like the agenda of many others, is to discredit Bible-believing evangelicals who support Israel.
 
Ground zero for understanding God’s whole issue of God’s plan for Israel and the distinction between Israel and the Church is this passage, . Now we started off with Paul’s very peronal statement here, “I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit…” He’s saying these things to reinforce that this is his personal conviction and his personal view and that he has great sorrow in verse 2 and “continual sorrow in my heart.” He is definitely hurt and harmed by the Jewish rejection of the gospel message that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah prophesied and promised from the Old Testament.
 
Paul has been at the heart of this particular battle and he is one of a long list among Christian leaders who have been libeled and maligned, and his positions have been distorted by those even in the Jewish community, and in most cases in the Gentile community who have rejected Christianity. There is a passage in which describes part of the attack upon him. This is when he is on the way to Jerusalem and he receives a warning that there are many there who are going to be opposed to him. In verse 19 of we read, “And when he had greeted them [leaders of the church in Jerusalem] he began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. And when they heard it they glorified the Lord and they said to him, ‘You see, brother, how many thousands there are who have believed and they are all zealous for the Law.’ ”
 
Now that last phrase is very important because in the Jerusalem they are zealous for the Law but not as a way of salvation or of sanctification. This is their tradition. It’s their history. This is who they are as ethnic Jews. This is why they still worship in the Temple. It’s not because they were adding that to what Christ did but what Christ had done on the Cross made the sacrifices so much more meaningful for them. The Temple still stood and they were still under the Abrahamic covenant so this was important to them and they’re in this transition period.
 
That’s one of the things that hasn’t always been emphasized in church history. It’s usually that when we read, “they were zealous for the Law” there’s this knee-jerk wrong reaction saying, “Oh, they were legalists.” No. This is a positive statement by James and the leaders of the Jerusalem church affirming how many Jews had become regenerate Christians believing in Jesus as the Messiah. They had believed and they were zealous for the Law because they believe it’s still good.
 
Paul said in that the Law is still good and righteous and holy. He didn’t say the Law is evil and nasty and you should ignore it. He just says it’s not there for your justification or for your sanctification. Then they go on to say in verse 21, “And they have been told about you…” This is the propaganda machine, the big lie against Christianity that’s generating the slander against Paul. “And they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses.” Did Paul teach that? Not at all. Saying they ought not to circumcise their children.” No, he did not tell them that. They were still under the Abrahamic covenant.
 
Circumcision was a sign of the Abrahamic covenant and it’s still in effect today for the Jews. Just because they are in Christ doesn’t negate who they are as descendants of Abraham and if that covenant is still in effect, and we believe it is, then that’s why we believe it’s important for Christians to support Israel. Circumcision is still in effect in relation to that but it doesn’t do anything for you to make you more savable, a better Christian, or it doesn’t make you spiritual. It’s just a sign of the Abrahamic covenant.
 
So the big lie said that what Paul did was to tell them to forsake Moses, that they should not circumcise their children, nor “should they walk according to their customs.” Notice that’s an important word there. In understanding cultural differences, there are definite cultural differences. There are ways in which different cultures worship. There are ways in which different cultures do things and it is neither right nor wrong. That’s how groups in Africa conduct their worship services. It has nothing to do with a Biblical absolute. If you’re in a Chinese church, if you’re in a Hispanic church, often they do things differently. Some things may be right. Some things may be wrong, but generally speaking they are just cultural distinctives.
 
This is one of the things that was going on in the early church. Sometimes it takes place today in Messianic Christian congregations where their whole structure is much more like the synagogue than the church, but only because that’s their background. It doesn’t have anything to do with a Biblical absolute. So there’s nothing in Scripture that says you start church at a certain time, you sing two hymns, you pray, take up the offering, have the sermon, and then close in prayer. That’s not handed down from Mount Sinai, the Mount of Olives, or the Throne of God. That is just the cultural way in which English background American churches have developed their order of service. Paul was not going after their culture. He was not attacking their customs. This became a major issue and Paul has been much maligned.
 
Let’s go back to . So Paul has great sorrow because he has borne the brunt of this rejection and this hostility. We’ve traced this in our study in Acts on Tuesday nights where he’s gone to places like Pisidia, Antioch, Iconium, Derbe, and Lystra where crowds develop and where he is basically run out of town, in some places arrested, and other places like Philippi he’s beaten with rods. He’s thrown in jail. He’s run out of town. They chase him to the next town like they do in Thessalonica. These crowds persecute him.
 
In 2nd Corinthians he lists many of the things that went on. Many times he’s in prison, he’s jailed, he’s shipwrecked three times [we only know of one of these from Acts], all of these things happened. A lot of it is directed from the Jewish community to Paul and it breaks his heart because he understands that above all things God sent His son Christ Jesus to His people and His people rejected Him. That’s . contrasts it. It’s a well-known verse that says, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.”
 
So we see this emphasis of God first to the Jew. That was Paul’s first methodology, to take the gospel first to the Jewish community and then to the Gentiles. So it has broken his heart to watch the rejection of the Promise of God, the Messiah, and all the blessing that would come with it by his Jewish brethren. So he then states in a somewhat hyperbolic manner how seriously he takes this. He says, “For I could wish that I, myself, were accursed from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh…” This word translated accursed is the word anathema, the same word that he uses over in when he talks about if anyone preaches another gospel, that is, a gospel of a different kind, let them be accursed. Let them come under the judgment and condemnation of God.
 
So he says “I wish I, myself, were accursed…” This is not just an idiomatic statement. He is making a statement that is on the border of saying, “I would give up my personal salvation if my countrymen would only turn to the gospel and accept Jesus as their Messiah.” He says, “I wish I could be accursed from Christ—apo tou christou in the Greek. apo is the preposition of separation, similar to its synonym ek and it has to do with severing or separating someone from something so he says, “I wish I were anathema separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren.”
 
Here he’s talking about ethnic Israel. The point I made a couple of weeks ago is that in this chapter we’re talking about God’s plan for ethnic Israel. That includes national Israel but it’s a broader term because not all of the Jews returned to the land and make up the nation, even in the first century. Much more than two-thirds of the Jews were not living in the historic Jewish homeland. They were already into deep diaspora, which began first in 722 B.C. with the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians and then in 586 B.C. when the Southern Kingdom was destroyed by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. Here’s he’s stating very strongly that he wished he could be accursed in place of his brethren.
 
This is the same preposition we use when we talk about “Christ died for the ungodly.” He died in their place. Paul is using that same preposition for substitution. Then he says again, “my countrymen”. The brethren are defined as “my countrymen according to the flesh.” Now this type of expression of grief in relation to Jewish apostasy toward God is very similar to that we find among the prophets in the Old Testament. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel mention that two-thirds of the Jews living at the time of the destruction of the temple in 586 were killed. He says one-third and then later, one-third again and that’s a combined two-thirds. This is important because in Zechariah it talks about two-thirds of the Jews are going to be killed in the great tribulation, clearly a different context after the return of the exile. So here we’re going to have the same kind of thing expressed by Paul.
 
The reason I make this point is that in communicating with and reading issues related to Jews and Christians, one of the things that gets brought up is, “You Christians are really anti-Semitic because you just want Jesus to come back because so many Jews are going to be killed during the tribulation.” We need to be able to answer that by saying that, “That’s not a uniquely Christian belief. That actually comes out of an Old Testament prophecy. In fact the Old Testament prophets are usually not read by Jews at all so they’re very ignorant of the prophetic portion of the Old Testament. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel, Zachariah are all passages that make very harsh statements of condemnation against their fellow Jews because of their apostasy toward God.
 
Apostasy means to fall away from the truth of the Scripture and their idolatry. Because of that they come under condemnation and this is expressly stated as to why the Northern Kingdom was defeated by the Assyrians and the Southern Kingdom was defeated by the Babylonians.
 
says, “My soul, my soul! I am in anguish! Oh, my heart!” He just cries out in pain. The whole book of Lamentations is like this but I just picked a couple of examples out of Jeremiah who wrote Lamentations as well. “My heart is pounding in me. I cannot be silent because you have heard O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” So he is expressing his deep distress of grief because the Jewish people in his generation had rejected God. , “You will say this word to them, let my eyes flow down with tears night and day, and let them not cease, for the virgin daughter of my people has been crushed with a mighty blow, with a sorely infected wound.”
 
Then Daniel, after he’s counted up the time and realizes the seventy years of exile are near the end, says in , “I gave my attention to the Lord God to seek Him by prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth and ashes.” This is no different from the kind of sorrow and grief that Paul is expressing. Paul puts himself in the same place as the Old Testament prophets. as well as 51:11 mirror each other. “And the ransomed of the Lord will return…” This is the future plan of God, after they have been taken out of the land under discipline, they shall return and “come to Zion with singing and with everlasting joy upon their heads. They will find gladness and joy and sorrow and sighing will flee away.” It’s the promise that though there is a temporary discipline on Israel there is a future restoration of the nation, which has not occurred yet. It’s not this restoration that’s going on now. This is just a prelude to the one that is spoken of by the prophets because that’s a worldwide restoration where they have returned in acceptance of the Messiah.
 
Now we turn to where Paul identifies his people. Verse 4 continues the sentence that he’s speaking about his brethren, his countrymen according to the flesh and then Israelites, which makes it very clear they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. “To whom belong adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises.” These are all presents to the Jewish people. In verse 5 he says, “Whose are the fathers, [the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] and from whom is the Christ [Messiah] according to the flesh, who is over all. God blessed forever. Amen.”
 
Jesus is the name of His humanity. It is from the Hebrew word Yeshua. Joshua is from the same verb. It means to save or to deliver. Jesus, as Gabriel announced to Mary, came to save his people from their sins so he was to be called Jesus. His title is the Messiah. In the Hebrew that’s Mashiach and in the Greek it’s christos. That refers to his title as his role in history. The affirmation of his deity is expressed through the addition of the word Lord which is simply to identify that He is considered to be God. So here we have this statement that in verses 4 and 5, that the Israelites still possess the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the service of God.
 
Now in terms of the adoption this goes back to God’s rescue and deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. In God says, “Israel is My son, My firstborn.” In this is an expansion on 4:22 talking about the role of Israel, He says, “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words you shall speak to the children of Israel.” uses that same verbiage from that “I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn.” says, “When Israel was a child I loved him and out of Egypt I called My son.” This emphasizes the adoption.
Israel, as a nation, was adopted by God and had a unique role to play among all of the nations. They are to be a kingdom of priests, not just to have a tribe of priests but the nation of Israel is to the rest of the world what the Levites were to the other eleven tribes of Israel. The nation is to be a kingdom of priests. Then we look at the phrase “the glory” in . This is often the way in which you had a circumlocution, which just means another way of saying it, a reference to God’s personal presence in the tabernacle and later in the temple.
 
In we read, “Now it came about as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the sons of Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.” We often refer to this as the shekinah glory. The word shekinah does not appear in the Old Testament. The verb form shakan does, which means to dwell. The shekinah actually refers to the dwelling presence of God. Shakan is also the word that is used for the tabernacle, the dwelling place of God, and it comes across in Greek as SKENE and it actually has cognates in a number of other languages including Russian. All of these other languages that use this word have the same meaning that is a dwelling place. says, “And to the eyes of the sons of Israel the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the mountain top.” So the glory here is always a reference to the dwelling presence of God, and it relates to the service of God which took place in the tabernacle and later in the temple.
 
The next word we have in verse 4 is diatheke or the covenants. That’s plural, more than one covenants. So let’s have a little review here for everyone on the covenants. There are eight Biblical covenants. There are also two theological covenants that have been developed by what is covenant theology but they don’t really have anything to do with the Bible because they are never mentioned in the Bible. They are theological extrapolations that are not based on the text. They’re called the covenant of works and the covenants of grace. The other day as I was leaving from church on Sunday I turned on KHCB. Usually at noon I hear one of the Baptist preachers but some covenant theologian was on last Sunday and he was giving an explanation of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. I listened to him to find out what he was saying, but those aren’t Biblical covenants. Those are theological constructs that were developed in Reform Theology.
 
There are eight Biblical covenants and they are divided between the Gentile covenants and the Jewish covenants. The Gentile covenants all relate to one another. They grow out of the original creation covenant, which has often been called the Edenic Covenant because this is the agreement that God made with Adam in the Garden of Eden before there was ever any sin. This is embedded in and says that God was creating man in His image and likeness to rule over the face of the earth, to rule over the beasts of the field, and the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea. This covenant was broken at the fall. Now it’s never called a covenant in Scripture but later on in Hosea there’s a passage that talks about how all mankind broke the covenant with God.
 
Israel has broken the covenant with God just like Adam broke the covenant with God. That’s a clear indication that {whether it’s mankind or Adam there’s a lot of debate over how to translate that but doesn’t really matter in this debate} because mankind in Adam broke a covenant which means that even though never mentions the word covenant Hosea tells us that Adam’s sin was a breach of a covenant. So that breaks the covenant. We’ve studied this is in the past.
 
After Adam and Eve sinned God announces various consequences of their disobedience. That redefines the issues of the covenant because each of the things God says in relation to the serpent, to the woman, and to the man has something to do with modifying the commandments that God had originally issued to Adam, the woman, and to the animals as being subservient to man in .
 
The flood comes and again because it’s a different environment and different circumstances, there’s another modification of the covenant. The Noahic covenant is very similar and has similar verbiage, similar mandates, “man is to go forth, multiply, and fill the earth”. It is clearly spoken of as a covenant and we’re still under the Noahic covenant. The sign of the covenant with Noah is the rainbow. As long as we see a rainbow we’re to remember that God has promised that He will not ever again destroy the earth by flood. He will destroy it by fire but He won’t destroy it by flood. It also includes within the Noahic covenant, the mandate that whenever a human being sheds the blood of another human being, which means murder, that it is the responsibility of man to take the life of the murderer. So God Himself handed down the mandate to believers and unbelievers.
 
It is a creation ordinance for all human beings to execute certain forms of criminals. When the Supreme Court of the land comes in and says we shouldn’t execute murderers or do it in ways that delay it for fifteen, twenty, or thirty years, this is a violation of God’s covenant. It’s the covenant we should be reminded of whenever we see the rainbow. This is God’s mandate. The same thing is true when it comes to eating meat. In the Noahic covenant, God says that we should now eat meat. Before that, man was vegetarian, but after the flood man was to eat meat.
 
Many people have different reasons for limiting their intake of red meat but if you come up with any sort of philosophical or theological rationale for it, it violates the covenant. You may have health issues, digestive issues, whatever it might be to cause you not to eat very much meat, but if you come up with any kind of universal principle that vegetarianism is in and of itself superior to any other form of dietary philosophy, then you’re just dead wrong. You’re in violation of God. All of these are in the Noahic covenant so when you see a rainbow, you should go out and eat a steak and rejoice in the fact that murderers should be executed and God is not going to flood us out again. There may be local floods but no universal flood.
 
Then there are the Jewish covenants. The Jewish covenants are all grounded in the first one, which is the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis which emphasizes God’s promises of a certain piece of real estate in the Middle East known as Israel as the possession of the Jewish people for eternity. It’s an eternal covenant. It says that there would be a seed or descendants that would be more numerous than the stars of heaven or the sands of the seashore and that they would be a blessing to all people. The land promise is expanded on in the real estate covenant in and the seed promise in the Davidic covenant in and the blessing promise expanded in the New covenant in to 33.
 
Now there’s one temporary Jewish covenant in known as the Law. It was designed to be temporary. It was not permanent but the other covenants are all eternal. We’ve studied that the three elements of the Abrahamic covenant are land, seed, and blessing. The land promise is developed in and it’s very clear when God says, “This is a covenant other than the one I gave at Horeb/Sinai” which was the Mosaic Law. In this covenant God binds Himself, makes this unilateral agreement to give the land to Israel in perpetuity. It is theirs forever. Now they don’t get to enjoy it unless they’re obedient but it’s still there. Even when they’re out of the land in the Old Testament they can come back to it because it’s still theirs. Whether they’re gone seventy years, seven hundred years or fourteen or eighteen hundred years, that land is still theirs.
 
That applies today. That’s a Biblical argument that every Bible-believing Christian should affirm. No Bible-believing Christian should ever take the side of the Palestinians in terms of the major argument. They don’t have a right to the land biblically. Now there are other arguments that need to be developed because there are a lot of people who really don’t care about history or the Bible. The historical argument is that Jews have always lived in the land throughout all of the last three thousand years. Most were removed but there have been steady, stable Jewish populations within the Promised Land since the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70. They were never totally, completely removed from the land. The land is theirs.
 
They started to return in numbers by the end of the 19th century so that now it’s almost reached a point where it’s just below half of the Jews in the world live in Israel. It hasn’t quite reached the half-way point yet but it’s very, very close. So this land is theirs, historically and Biblically. Legally, it was granted to the Jewish people as a national homeland by the League of Nations when they affirmed the San Remo Resolutions which were an addendum to the Treaty of Paris at the end of World War I. This was agreed to by 55 member nations of the League of Nations and when the U.N. came into power to replace the League of Nations, part of the U.N. charter was that they were to uphold and enforce all treaties that were signed under the auspices of the League of Nations. They rapidly ignored and forgot San Remo. So the U.N. is in violation of international law and the PLO and the Hamas are all in violation of international law.
 
Most people in the world are willingly ignorant of international law and just ignore it. We claim to be people who are law-abiding and law-affirming and a people who live by the law and yet we ignore the law when it’s convenient. That is a major travesty. The Davidic covenant is stated in when God promises that the Messiah will come through the line of David, a royal line. He will become the King of Israel. Then the New covenant is a promise related to spiritual blessing for the Jewish people when they accept the Messiah, Jesus, as theirs and this goes into effect when the Messiah comes to establish His future Kingdom. So those are the basic covenants.
 
The Davidic covenant promises an eternal house, an eternal kingdom, and an eternal throne to the line of David. That culminated in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. So then in we have another statement related to the covenants and the giving of the Law, which took place in Mount Sinai and then the service of the temple, which relates back to the statement that we read earlier in verse 4. That took place in the temple and in the service of the priesthood in the tabernacle and in the temple.
 
Lastly, the phrase, the promises relates to these promises that were given in the covenants, the covenants that God made to Abraham, that the land would belong to his descendants forever. The Jewish people are then further defined in verse 5 as “Of whom are the fathers [Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] and from whom the Yeshua [Jesus, in the Greek]. That reflects the Hebrew term, the Messiah, Mashiach. “From whom according to the flesh.” I’ve retranslated this verse. The New King James reads, “Of whom are the fathers, according to the flesh, Christ came…” “Came” is in italics because there’s no verb for “come” here. A literal translation following the word order and the verbiage of the Greek would be “Of whom are the fathers and from whom the Messiah according to the flesh…” It’s emphasizing that the Messiah came according to His humanity, which came from Jewish ethnic stock.
 
And then we have this statement that, “The Messiah is over all and the eternally blessed God.” Actually the way this reads in the Greek is “the one who is over all, the blessed God, eternal.” The adjectives come after the noun so that would be accurately translated, “the eternally blessed God.” This is a very clear statement that the Messiah, Christ, is God. A lot of people don’t realize how many so-called Bible scholars today are really antagonistic to the Bible. A lot of times you’ll watch these shows on television about the Bible on the history channel, the Discovery channel, and some of the other channels and they quote a lot of so-called Bible scholars but they don’t believe in anything the Bible said. They’re always reconstructing the Biblical narrative. They often have people on there who aren’t even really sure if anyone named Jesus actually lived in spite of the evidence.
 
There’s a lot of evidence that Jesus of Nazareth lived and walked upon the earth but if you listen to these extreme liberal theologians what they claim is that these things called the gospels were really written one, two, or even three hundred years after the time of Christ. Now that was a view that was floated back in the 19th century and it gained ground and people still repeat it but modern scholarship doesn’t agree with that. In fact, there are a number of liberals and non-Christians, who just on the basis of historical evidence and archeology recognize that the gospels are what they claim to be. They were written within thirty or forty years of Christ’s death, and the events described in the New Testament took place historically.
 
There was a man by the name of A. T. Robinson who published a book called Honest to God back in the early 1960s. He was one of the first to promote the so-called death of God theology. In another book he wrote on the New Testament he stated that all of the books in the New Testament were written before 60 A.D. That’s earlier than most traditional Bible scholars would put them. But he says they’re from an earlier time.
 
There’s a deceased professor of New Testament at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem named David Flusser who is Jewish and he has written several books on the life of Christ. Although they are many things I disagree with him about he clearly states the gospels are accurate, historical records of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. You just can’t let people get away with saying, “Oh, you know those Gospels weren’t written when they claim to have been written. They were just legends that were written down many hundreds of years later.” Anyone who says that is just someone who’s repeating something they’ve heard or they have an anti-Bible agenda but they don’t know the facts. They may not believe the facts and there are many people who don’t believe the facts but there are many, objective anti-Christian scholars who do affirm that the New Testament was written in the 1st century. They just don’t want to believe it.
 
So the gospels were written very early and as a part of the claim of the gospels it’s that Jesus claimed to be God and was God. It’s not something that later church theologians imposed upon Jesus. In fact, if we go back and we look at the Old Testament that the prediction from the Old Testament was that the Messiah would not only be human would also be God. I think it’s important to have at your command from the Old Testament to be able to show that the expectation from the prophets of the Old Testament was that when the Messiah came, He was not just a man; He was the God-man. Now we see that in the Old Testament you have two streams of prophecy. One predicts a divine Messiah and another predicts a human Messiah and these two streams of prophecy come together in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
 
The Old Testament clearly articulates a position of a human and a divine Messiah. Let me walk you through two or three of these important passages. Let’s look first and foremost at . This is showing that the expectation of the Old Testament was that the Messiah, who is Jesus, would be fully God. There are two issues that go on in this verse. One is whether this is really a Messianic prophecy. There are some evangelical scholars today that say it’s not, that it’s actually a prophecy that was fulfilled by Isaiah’s son, and it was just applied to Jesus later on. Now I don’t believe that because they haven’t paid enough attention to their Hebrew text or they’d know it wasn’t accurate.
 
The other issue is the meaning of this word that’s translated “virgin”. Is it really talking about a virgin or is it just talking about a young lady? That got a lot of attention back in the 1950’s when the Revised Standard translation was first published. They didn’t translate as “a virgin will be with child.” They translated it “a young woman will be with child.” All of the evangelicals who got that version threw their RSV in the trash and it caused a great stink. Some of you might remember that. Many evangelicals for decades wouldn’t touch an RSV because it reflected this apostasy.
 
Let’s look at this passage. The context here has to be understood. It is at a time when Ahaz, the king of Judah which is the Southern Kingdom, was at war with the Northern Kingdom. The king of the Northern Kingdom was aligning himself with Syria and other traditional enemies with Israel. We read in the first verse, “Now it came about in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jothan, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Aram [Syria] and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel went up to Jerusalem to wage war against it.”
 
Now why is it that the Northern Kingdom is in alliance with the Syrians? Just think about today. This would be like everybody in the northern part of Israel saying they are going to ally themselves with Assad and attack Jerusalem. Why in the world would they do that? Well, they wanted to do that because the king in Jerusalem was a descendant of David and they wanted to destroy the house of David. They wanted to put a puppet king on the throne in Judah to do what they wanted them to do. They were hostile to the house of David.
 
This is very important to understand, that this is about maintaining a ruler from David on the throne. Remember what the Davidic covenant said? God promised an eternal throne, an eternal dynasty, an eternal house to David. So all of the kings on the throne of Judah were descendants of David. Now the king that’s there is Ahaz. The king in the north is Pekah. Verse 2 says, “When it was reported to the house of David…” You ought to underline that in your Bible. That’s what we’re talking about here. Not Ahaz, per se, but that Ahaz is the living representative of the house of David. “The Arameans [Syria’s forces] have camped in Ephraim…” Ephraim was originally one of Joseph’s sons but it’s one of the tribes and Ephraim is often used as another name for the Northern Kingdom of Israel. So what they’re saying is that Syria’s forces are deployed in the Northern Kingdom.
 
How far away was that? The Northern Kingdom, was like downtown would be to us here. See how close we are. The border wasn’t that far from Jerusalem. It was only ten or twelve miles away so this is an immediate, hostile threat. Serious forces are deployed that close so “the heart of the people shook as the trees of the forest shake with the wind.” Now you’ve been here during a hurricane and you’ve watched the trees as they’re blown. That’s means they’re shaking in their boots, to put it in a modern American idiom. They’re scared to death. In the midst of chaos, the only certainty we have is the Word of God.
“Then the Lord says to Isaiah, “Go out now to meet Ahaz.” Have a little meeting with the king. “And take Shear-jashub, your son with you. Meet at the end of the conduit [aqua-duct] from the upper pool on the highway to the fuller’s field.” All this detail tells us this isn’t just some nice little story. It’s talking about a specific incident, at a specific location. It’s like saying that you’re to meet someone at the intersection of Bunker Hill and I-10. It’s a specific, well-known location. Verse 4 says, “And say to him, Take care and be calm [be quiet]…” I’ve always loved that. God says to shut up and be quiet. “Do not fear or be fainthearted because of these two stubs of smoldering [smoking] firebrands…”
 
Now what’s a firebrand? A firebrand is like a torch. A torch has to flame up but when the torch is going out all that’s left is glowing embers. It’s on its way to being dead, useless, and irrelevant. So he calls them just smoking firebrands. They’ve already exerted all their power. They’re nothing to be afraid of. They’re just about out of gas, just about burned out. “On account of the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and the son of Remaliah, has planned evil against you.” See, because they’ve plotted evil against the house of David, then God’s going to take care of them.
 
In verse 6, the Syrians and the Northern Kingdom say, “Let us go up against Judah and terrorize it, and make for ourselves a breach in its walls and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it.” See they want to set their own king up. They want to destroy the house of David. This is all about the house of David and the ability of God to fulfill the promise of God to David to always have a son of David on the throne.
 
So this is how God responds in verse 7, “Thus says the Lord God, ‘It shall not stand nor shall it come to pass. For the head of Aram is Damascus and the head of Damascus is Rezin.” In other words the capital of Syria is Damascus and the chief power is Damascus, [which by the way still is the capital]. Within 65 years Ephraim will be shattered, so that it is no longer a people [722 A.D. they were destroyed by the invasion from Assyria] anymore.’” God’s going to wipe that nation off the face of the earth.
 
Then He says, “And the head of Samaria is Remaliah. If you will not believe you surely shall not last [be established].” That’s his point to Ahaz. You need to believe this. Then we come to the prophecy itself, verse 10, “Then the Lord spoke again to Ahaz saying, Ask a sign for yourself.” Ahaz is not asking for a sign like the Pharisees did later on out of their arrogance. God tells him to ask for a sign. He says it’s okay. But Ahaz gets a little self-righteous. He says he won’t ask or test the Lord. Well God just told him to ask for a sign so that’s real arrogance to refuse. God’s going to get a little irritated with him. The word “sign” here does not necessarily mean something miraculous. It means something that will signify the truth and demonstrate the truth of the prophecy that is about to be made.
 
Isaiah then in verse 13 says, “Here now, O house of David! [He’s speaking for the Lord] Is it too slight a thing for you [plural] to try the patience of men, that you will try the patience of my God as well? Therefore the Lord Himself will give you [plural] a sign.” You won’t ask for one but God’s going to give you one anyway. Now pay attention to this. In verse 13 the house of David refers to a group of people and the word “you” is plural. This is important. Then in verse 14, he says, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you [the house of David] a sign.” The sign’s important because what God’s going to show is that the house of David isn’t going to be snuffed out like the Northern Kingdom of Israel/Ephraim or Syria. He says, “Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and call His name Immanuel.”
 
This verse is always cited at Christmas in relation to the virgin conception and the virgin birth but what I’m pointing here that’s important is the name Immanuel. It means God with Us. El is the Hebrew word for God. Im at the beginning is the preposition “with”. Anu is the first person plural “us”. It means “God with us.” This is a clear indication that the One who is going to descend from the house of David [his humanity] is going to be fully God. God with us.
 
We’re about out of time. I want to review this briefly next time and I want to talk about this issue of the virgin. We’ll talk about that and then we’ll move through the other four or five verses related to the deity of Christ. This is so important! Why do we believe that Jesus is God? Because the Bible says so. It said so many times in the Old Testament and it reaffirms it many times in the New Testament. But the deity of the Messiah—notice I didn’t say the deity of Jesus—is an Old Testament prophecy. We believe that Jesus is the Messiah because He fulfilled many other prophecies. Therefore, based on the Old Testament prophecies, we believe Jesus is fully God. Now we believe he’s fully God because of many other reasons given in the New Testament as well as the way He lived and the things He did but the foundation isn’t a New Testament invention. It came out of the prophecies of the Old Testament. The Jewish prophets predicted a divine-human Messiah.

Romans 107c-The Divine Messiah

Romans 9:3 NASB95
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
Romans 107c-The Divine Messiah
 
Tonight we’re going to focus a little bit on the fact we do have freedom because it is Independence Day. We’re celebrating the fact we still have a large degree of freedom, although it is being attacked and assaulted. If the truth were known, most of us are not old enough to remember when there was a great deal of freedom and liberty in this country. It has so gradually eroded that it’s sad to recognize how much we have actually lost. Things are going on today in the courts, and things are going on today in our nation that our grandparents would have never, ever expected, much less approved of. So we’re going to spend a little bit of time this evening just celebrating the fact that this is our nation’s birthday and then we’ll focus on Romans, going back into our passage.
 
To start, we’ll have prayer and then I’m going to have four people form the congregation come up and read the Declaration of Independence. Think about the words. Think about what they went through. Think about the situation. One thing we should realize is that two months prior to their signing the declaration there was no sense at all in the Continental Congress that they were going to separate from England. They were loyalists. Think about that in terms of today’s situation. They were still loyal to the Crown, loyal to the King, but things were coming quickly to a head as we know from history. So here is the Declaration of Independence in full:
 
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
 
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America,
 
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government laying the foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they have become accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the same establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
 
He has refused to Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with the measures. He has dissolved representative Houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise, the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasions from without and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Approbations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws to establishing judiciary powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
 
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, For protecting them by a mock trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States. For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world. For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent. For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury. For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses. For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging the boundaries so as to render it at once an example and its instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies. For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our Governments. For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow Citizens, taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
 
In every stage of these Oppressions We have petitioned for Redress in the most horrible terms. Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity Which denounces our Separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
 
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in general Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies, are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
 
Actually Independence Day is not today. How many of y’all knew that? The actual signing and approval of the Declaration was on July 2 and John Adams made a very famous statement about that, that this day “will live on in celebration.” He said that in a letter to his wife, Abigail, the next day. It’s a little ambiguous as to which day he is describing whether it is the 2nd or the 3rd. It wasn’t the 4th. They were still doing minor revisions to the final form of the Declaration and on the 4th of July, the earliest draft of the Declaration was signed by only two individuals: John Hancock who was the President of the Continental Congress, and Charles Thompson, who was a secretary of the Congress.
 
Four days later on July 8 several members of Congress took the document, read it aloud from Independence Hall, proclaiming Liberty to the city of Philadelphia, after which the Liberty Bell was rung. The inscription on the Liberty Bell came right out of the Scripture. It came from , “Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.” The colonists were deeply immersed in Christian theology, and there were just a few Jews in the colonies at the time but they played a significant role during the War for Independence, some of whom raised significant amounts of money for the support of the Continental Army. Most, if not all, Americans were influenced by some form of Christianity, all were influenced by a Judeo-Christian worldview. Often today people overstate the case in trying to claim too many of the Founding Fathers as Christians. I’m not sure how many were actually born again. But it doesn’t matter whether they were actually regenerate or had a clear understanding of the gospel. What matters is that they thought in terms of a Biblical worldview.
 
That’s how the culture trained them, that’s how they grew, that’s how they were educated. There have been a number of statements made, some of which you’ve heard recently, I’m sure, that some very large percentage of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were ministers of the gospel. I think that’s stretching the meaning of the term. Many of the schools in America at that time were founded in order to train men for the gospel ministry. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Dartmouth. Columbia. Many others were also founded for that very purpose although by the time of the American War for Independence they had expanded their curriculum quite a bit. Nevertheless, if anyone attended those universities they were well trained in the Scripture.
 
Men such as James Madison studied under John Winthrop, a Presbyterian minister who was very much a part of the signing of the Constitution and was influential in the thinking of James Madison. That doesn’t mean all of these men were orthodox, Bible-believing Christians. They were not. Jefferson, notably, was not. Madison had some issues. John Adams was a border-line Unitarian. In fact, if you listen to David Barton, he will often recite a number of pastors in the 18th century who were influential in the development of the understanding of the concept of liberty. Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the pastors he mentions were some of the leading thinkers in the very early formative stage of the Unitarian Church. Barton doesn’t do a great job of distinguishing between different theologies. He uses the term Christian in a very broad sense.
 
It would do all of us much better if he would use the term Judeo-Christian as a worldview rather than trying to go so far as to make it sound like many of these Founders were orthodox, Bible-believing Christians. This is my point having studied this quite a bit since seminary, and after doing my doctoral work at Dallas Seminary in church history and having read quite a bit on both sides. There’s also another movement trying to minimize the influence of Christianity. The analogy I use is that the Founding Fathers were products of a Judeo-Christian culture and they thought Biblically whether they wanted to or not, just like too many of us think too much like a post-modern relativist because that’s the culture in which we grew up. We were infected by those ideas in ways we are not always willing to recognize.
 
Just a couple of comments about the Continental Congress. It first met on September 5, 1774 in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. It met for quite a while, at least for the next couple of years. Eventually it appointed a committee of five to write the Declaration. At late as April of 1776, a year after the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, there was a vast majority of the Continental Congress who were loyalists.
 
I think that’s really important because if you are at all like I am, and like many conservatives today, you’re becoming more and more conflicted, more and more concerned about the direction of our nation. As we watch what has happened in the courts and in the culture over the past fifty years, we see the beliefs that we held near and dear and were considered mainstream American values and ideals, are now being declared over and over again as being unconstitutional.
 
Just this last week the verdict handed down by the Supreme Court related to the Defense of Marriage Act showed that there’s a lack of understanding in the courts that marriage is between a man and a woman. Whatever issues may come up, you can’t go back and undo something that has been a standard since the creation. As far back as human civilization goes, no matter what your beliefs are, marriage has been between one man and one woman. No empire, no civilization, no culture has ever legitimized any form of homosexual marriage. It’s never been done. There is a reason for that. This is because we understand this is the essence of marriage.
 
Now there may be culture issues, business issues, legal issues related to same-sex partners, things like that, but you can’t call it marriage. These terms are not fluid, they’re not flexible, and they’re not up for grabs. That’s what happens when you come out of a post-modern environment. Words don’t mean anything anymore. You’re free to redefine your meanings however you see fit. Once you start changing things it has a domino effect and hundreds, if not thousands of unintended consequences ensue. Words don’t mean what they mean anymore. Once you start changing the meaning of words, you can’t count on anything. There’s no stability. It erodes the very foundation of law. What has happened that we have witnessed in our lifetime is such a degradation of vocabulary and meaning that we who are Christians, who believe in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as it was intended by the founders, we are being declared unconstitutional in our beliefs. So this puts us in a difficult situation.
 
One of the things we need to come to understand is that there really is a difference between being a patriot and being a loyal citizen. I think this is one of things we need to think about. In my thinking, a patriot is one who is a gung-ho advocate of their nation. They’re willing to go into the military. They’re willing to give their life for the freedom, for the policies, for the positions of their national government. I’m not willing to die for this nation anymore because of what they are espousing. I’m not sure I can encourage others to do that. If I were called upon to go fight in the military, I would. That’s the difference between being a gunRomans-107.htmg-ho patriot and being a loyal citizen. I see that as a distinction. A loyal citizen is someone who follows the principles of Romans, chapter 13. We’re obedient to our government but that doesn’t mean I’m a full-bore advocate of this government as it is being and has been redefined over the last twenty years.
 
I feel like I have been declared unconstitutional by the courts over the last thirty or forty years. My opinions and my beliefs are not wanted. Basically, it’s “Christians, keep off the grass.” That’s the mentality. Does that mean we should just fold our hands and fold up our tents and go home? No, it doesn’t. We have responsibilities as citizens of this nation to be involved. That’s what it means to be a Christian.
 
Whether you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, or any other religion, if you were born in this country as a citizen, you have a responsibility to be educated on the history of this nation, to be educated on the issues that face Congress, on the issues that face our state legislatures, on the issues that face our local governments. We have to be educated so that we can vote in an informed manner, to carry out our duties as citizens, and get in touch with political leaders to let them know what our views are. This is our responsibility as citizens. It’s not activism. It’s action. It’s responsibility. When you get in engaged in illegitimate action, where you’re involved in illegal action, that’s when it crosses the line.
 
I think there’s a comparison here with the Founding Fathers in that they were still loyal to England while they were at war with England and unwilling to separate. I’m not advocating war or any kind of rebellion or anything like that. I’m simply making the point that because of the actions of our government, we have been put at odds with the government. Without Christianity we would not have had the freedoms that we have so this is still our country. But as Christians we need to wake up. This isn’t the country of the 1920s. It’s not the nation of the 1940s or 1950s. It is a whole new world and we can’t have the same attitudes and values and blind patriotism we once had because it’s been redefined right out from under us. We need to be loyal, though. We need to continue to take a stand for our nation. There’s a certain dichotomy there.
 
Liberty and freedom come only from God but it can be taken from us because of our irresponsibility and our lack of positive volition. [Congregation sings “Our Country Tis of Thee”]
 
There are many enemies to freedom and liberty in our country today. There are enemies of Christianity as well and if these enemies had their way they would completely remove all Christians and influence of Christianity from every aspect of our culture. This is the furthest thing from the mind of our Founding Fathers. John Adams believed that the Fourth of July should become a religious holiday, remembering that God had a hand in our deliverance and that it should be a day filled with celebration of our freedom and also religious activities whereby citizens of the United States would give thanks to God and honor him because he is the author of liberty as we just sang.
 
His son, John Quincy Adams, later a president of the United States, was also very much involved in the activities of the American War for Independence. In 1837, when he was 69 years old, he was asked to give a speech about the founding of our nation and the Declaration of Independence at Newburyport, Massachusetts. He began that address with a question. He said, “Why is it friends and fellow citizens that you’re here assembled? Why is it that entering into the 62nd year of our national existence you’ve honored me with an invitation to address you?” Well the answer was obvious because he was one of the few left who was a witness to the events surrounding the birth of our nation.
 
He went on to say, “Why is it that next to the birthday of the Savior of the world your most joyous and venerated festival returns on this day?” So in the early decades of our nation, the Fourth of July, Independence Day, was venerated second only to when we celebrate the birth of our Savior. This shows that in the thinking of the Founding Fathers Christianity played a very large role in the recognition of freedom. Our Founding Fathers realized that freedom was built on individuals taking responsibilities for their lives and their actions. It wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of them or to give them a security blanket from cradle to grave. It was the responsibility of the government to make sure they were free and that their rights were recognized as we read in the opening of the declaration.
 
It states the rights were given by their Creator, which is a phrase that our President usually drops when he quotes from the opening of the Declaration of Independence. I’ve heard him several times when he ignores the fact that the Declaration says we were “endowed by our Creator” with these rights: the right to life, the right to liberty and the right to happiness. No, it doesn’t say that, does it? It says the right to the pursuit of happiness. The government’s job isn’t to make you happy. It is stay out of our way so we can pursue happiness. My favorite tee shirt is one I picked up at a gun show several years ago. On the back of it, it says, “Liberals evolve from monkeys. Constitutionalists were endowed by their Creator.” That says it all.
 
The Declaration is embedded within our Judeo-Christian worldview. The language that’s used there, even though it’s not the language that we read in theology books, it is a language which in their generation resonated with a belief in a creator God and a belief that our rights as human beings emanated from that God, were given by that God, because we were created in His image and likeness. This is one reason why there’s such a debate over creation versus evolution. If evolution wins as a worldview, which it is doing, then it eviscerates the meaning of the opening of the Declaration of Independence because there’s no creator to endow us with rights. All of these things are working together as an assault upon the nation.
 
According to John Quincy Adams, Christmas and the Fourth of July were intrinsically connected. The Founders understood that because they took the precepts of Jesus Christ who came into the world as a result of His incarnation and they incorporated those principles. These are principles from the Old Testament, from the Torah, like the passage I cited earlier that was written on the Liberty Bell from . They understood that liberty was ultimately founded in a recognition of the individual’s responsibility to God. If that was lost, they reasoned, then the nation would become immoral. A nation cannot preserve its liberty on the foundation of immorality.
 
Yet that is part of what we have seen over the last fifty years with the various court ruling that have taken any kind of influence of Christianity out of the schools with the removal of prayer. There are a lot of different things you can say about that court decision, which was that the prayer in question was actually written by the New York School Board so it wasn’t really the most orthodox prayer but there was a principle behind it. The principle was that God was at least recognized by the action mandating that all school children pray and that as creatures under the authority of God we were dependent upon God for everything. Now we are independent of God and everything is falling apart.
 
We find ourselves today under assault by the federal government. Our e-mails and everything we are doing on line is being observed by the National Security Agency. The IRS is targeting conservative groups who seek non-profit status and they’re not targeting liberal groups. It is clearly an invasion of our rights, an invasion of our privacy, and an assault on the First Amendment. We have a government that seems to no longer care about the Bill of Rights with assaults on almost every amendment going on today. So we need to really think about our role as believers in a culture that has written God out of their thinking. And that’s what they want to do.
 
We have to stand firm. We have to function in grace. We have to be even more devoted in prayer than we have ever been for this nation and we need to also be as involved as we possibly can in every level of government to the degree that we can so that our voice is heard. This is how we function as salt and light in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation. Now the reason we do that is because we worship a living God. Again and again in our study of Acts on Tuesday nights we’ve seen this emphasis on worshiping a living God. We worship a Savior who is not only a human being but is also Eternal God.
 
In our study of Romans on Thursday nights in , we’ve been emphasizing God’s plan and purpose for the Jewish nation, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to whom we’re told in , “belong the adoption as sons, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the temple service of God, and the promises whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ [the Messiah] according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” So this tells us here He is the eternally blessed God.
 
Last time I pointed out in the Old Testament you have two strains of prophecy, one indicating the Messiah would be God, the other pointing out that the Messiah would be human. Now if you’re talking with someone who is Jewish, they don’t believe that the Messiah was supposed to be God. It’s very easy to demonstrate this from the Old Testament and as I pointed out, we should all have three or four Old Testament verses, and three or four New Testament verses that we can go cite to demonstrate that Jesus Christ claimed to be God, that it was understood from Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah would be both human and divine. We started last time looking at one of my favorite passages, . Turn there and we’ll finish up. This passage takes place in a time of tremendous turmoil in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. King Ahaz, who is not one of the better kings but neither is he one of the worst. He is under assault by an alliance of the Northern Kingdom, who is ruled by Pekah, the son of Remaliah, and Rezin the King of Syria. King Ahaz is under assault from them because he is of the house of David. The physical, on-the-ground warfare was a result of the angelic conflict. What goes on on the ground, whether we see it or not, is real.
 
Today we don’t have a divine interpreter. We don’t have a prophet to tell us what’s going on in terms of the Middle East. Look at the changes. A few days ago we would never have anticipated that Morsi, the leader of Egypt, would be taken out by the military and that the Muslim Brotherhood would be under assault. The Egyptian military is sending out teams to arrest the more radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s in tremendous turmoil. The whole Middle East is under tremendous turmoil.
 
When I go on these various trips I’ve gone on the last several years, sponsored by different groups, going over to Israel, we’re given one lecture after another by different Middle East experts. Even from day to day on these trips the situation on the ground changes. It’s extremely fluid in Syria. Nobody knows what’s going on. Our government, to its eternal shame, is making available weapons to the rebels in Syria who are allied with Al Qaeda. Now remember we’re the country that was attacked by Al Qaeda on 9/11, just 12 years ago and now we’re giving weapons to an Al Qaeda alliance in Syria. We don’t have any business getting involved at all. It’s their problem. It’s a Syrian problem. There are no U.S. interests there. We have a president who backed Morsi and now he should be radically embarrassed because of the opposition of the Egyptian people.
 
I’ve seen various articles and pictures related to actions in Egypt where many Egyptians blame Obama and the United States. We have to take that with a grain of salt. Whenever anything happens, they’re going to blame the United States no matter what. They’re going to blame Bush, Obama, doesn’t matter who is in the White House. They’re going to blame the United States. Part of that is because we get involved in places where we shouldn’t. We’re trying to manipulate events and control events in places where we have no vested interest there. We’re too busy trying to pick a winner. We picked Morsi, and what a loser! Now he’s gone and we’re embarrassed. This is what happens when governments operate on the basis of arrogance.
 
At the time of Ahaz he has a problem because he is outnumbered and overwhelmed by this alliance between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Syrians. So there’re going to attack but the real issue, as I pointed out last time, is that they’re making an assault on the house of David. Remember the background here is that God has made a covenant with David that there will be a king that will sit forever on the throne of David. The house of David will not be taken away from Judah. So this is a direct assault.
 
We see this in verse 6 where Isaiah reveals the conversation between the king of Syria and the king of Israel. What they’re saying is, “Let us go up against Judah, and terrorize it, and make for ourselves a breach in the walls and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it.” They want to replace the house of David with someone they can control, someone not loyal to God. But God says in verse 7, “It shall not stand nor shall it come to pass.” This is a promise to Ahaz. He is under threat. He may lose his country, lose his throne. He would be something like Morsi but he’s not going to be. God tells him he’s not going to lose his throne, not going to lose the country. In fact, this is the beginning of the end for both Damascus and the Northern Kingdom. Within 65 years the Northern Kingdom will be destroyed by another country, as prophesied in verse 8.
 
So then we come down to the core prophecy starting in verse 10. “Then the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, “As a sign for yourself from the Lord your God, make it deep as Sheol to high as heaven.” Now Ahaz is operating on arrogance. This is a case of a person who is probably a believer but one who is ignorant of doctrine and in rebellion against God. He’s filled with arrogance and pride. So when God gives him a direct order to do something, he says, “No, Lord, I’m not going to do that. I’m too humble.” He says, “I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord.”
 
God had just said to do it so now Ahaz gets a reprimand in verse 13, where Isaiah says to him, “Listen now, O house of David.” This is very important to recognize what’s going on here as I pointed out. It’s significant because in the English you don’t get this. This is one of few times when it’s really necessary in an extremely important way to know Hebrew grammar. I try to not to make a point out of the fact you can’t understand Scripture unless you know the original languages. The original languages usually are necessary in order to expand and refine and tighten our understanding. But in passages like this, you don’t even get it in the English when it could have been handled by translators. We do have a plural second person pronoun. It is a very good word, y’all use it every day. But they don’t use it in the translation of the Scripture. That’s the word ‘y’all’, of course.
 
It would make it very clear because in verse 13, Isaiah begins to address the house of David, not Ahaz personally but the house of David. He says, “Is it a small thing for y’all [plural] to try the patience of men that y’all will try the patience of my God as well?” He’s addressing the house of David as a plural entity. We got about that far last time and then I didn’t have time to complete it.
 
The prophecy says, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign.” Now I want you to notice something here. The Lord is going to give them a sign. Two things there. This is coming from the Lord. It’s not just something that’s just going to happen culturally. It’s not something that’s going to happen down the street. It’s not something that’s going to happen to your neighbors or to somebody you know in college. This is a God-given sign.
 
Second, it’s a sign. That means it’s miraculous. That’s the idea behind a sign. It’s not just a coincidence that this occurs. It’s not just something that going to be a natural, normal course of events. It’s miraculous. The reason I say this is because we have to remember that God causes it to happen on the one hand, and it’s a miracle on the other hand. There’s a debate over the meaning of the key word here, the word “virgin.” “Therefore the Lord, Himself will give y’all a sign.” It’s not “you” for Ahaz but will give y’all, the house of David, a sign. The reason this is important is because we’re going to switch back to the singular later on and there’s something that’s going to be there as sort of a guarantee of this prophecy for Ahaz, in terms of what’s going to happen in his generation. But the sign is not going to happen in his generation.
 
It’s going to happen several hundred years later when it’s fulfilled in the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ so it’s not a dual-fulfillment. This used to really confuse me when I was in seminary because I just wasn’t clued in on this issue at that time. There are some people who talk about a dual-fulfillment, that a prophecy like this is fulfilled twice. They say it has a near-fulfillment in the birth of a child to Isaiah’s wife that is a sign to Ahaz. Then they say there’s a far-fulfillment and that would be the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. But the immediate prophecy is what matters, they believe. This is where you get people who say that there’s no Messianic prophecy because they would interpret this to be a near-fulfillment. It’s just an application sort of, they say, to Jesus. But they haven’t executed it fully.
 
“Therefore the Lord Himself will give y’all a sign, Behold the virgin will conceive.” This is why I emphasize that it’s a miracle. The virgin will conceive. There’s a couple of things we have to note here. First of all, it’s not a virgin, not a generic virgin with an indefinite noun here. It is the virgin. There is an assumption in Jewish thought that they were tracking a specific promise, a promise going back to that the “seed of the woman would crush the head of the seed of the serpent.” So there is an understanding already that they’re looking for a particular woman. Now this is indicated by the use of the definite article here in the Hebrew, “Behold the virgin will conceive.”
 
The Hebrew word here is almah. There’s a certain amount of debate over this particular word. In the Revised Standard Version which came out in the early 1950s they translated it “the young woman”. Now that’s a problem because the traditional way to translate this is as a virgin. The ancient Jewish rabbis who translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek some two hundred years before the birth of Christ translated it with the Greek word parthenos which means a virgin so they understood that’s what almah meant. Now almah is a word that refers to a young, unmarried woman but in their culture a young, unmarried woman was assumed to be a virgin. It was not the kind of promiscuous culture that we have today. So a young unmarried woman of just barely marriageable age was understood to be a virgin.
 
Now another word that is used is the Hebrew word betulah. Betulah can refer to a virgin of any age whether she’s an older woman or a young woman barely of marriageable age. In betulah refers to a young widow, obviously not a virgin so the word has a broader meaning than almah does. A third word that is used in Hebrew of a young woman is na’ardh. It refers to a young woman who is a virgin in and a young woman who is not a virgin in so the word almah is the word that is used here and it is used in six other passages in the Old Testament. In , , , and 6:8 and in it is used. In these passages it is not used of a married woman. It is always used of an unmarried woman and it was understood to refer to a virgin.
 
When it comes to the word almah, if you think about it logically it could refer to an unmarried woman who wasn’t a virgin. But then it’s nothing miraculous and it’s not a sign for an unmarried woman to become pregnant. Remember the whole idea here is that this is something that is a sign, a miracle. It’s not a miracle for an unmarried woman who is not a virgin to become pregnant. That happens every day. But it is a sign if the young, unmarried woman does become pregnant and she has not had any sexual intercourse. That’s what makes it a sign. We’re talking about something that is going to come to pass to confirm to the house of David that God has not forsaken His promise that there will be a descendant of the house of David upon the throne of Judah.
 
So what we see here, in summary, is that this prophecy relates to the house of David, not just to Ahaz personally. If you look at verse 15 and 16, you read, “He will eat curds and honey at the time he knows enough to refuse evil and choose good [physical maturation of this child]. For before the boy will know enough to refuse evil and choose good, the land whose two kings you [singular] dread will be forsaken.” Remember Isaiah was told to bring his son with him so in verse 16 this shift refers to Isaiah’s son that he has with him. Verse 17, “The Lord will bring on you [singular] and your people such days as have never come since the day that Ephraim separated from Judah.”
 
So you see you have two prophecies here. One to guarantee the security of the house of David which is indicated by the plural pronoun in verses 13 and 14. Then you have another prophecy relating to Ahaz and giving him a sign and that’s indicated by the singular pronouns in verses 16 and 17. So the context indicating this will be a sign requires it to be a miracle so it can’t refer to an illegitimate child so it must refer to the child of a miraculous virgin conception and virgin birth.
 
Then we understand from the last part of verse 14, “And she will call His name Immanuel.” Immanuel is a Hebrew name. The last syllable el means what? God. Im is the Hebrew preposition “with” and anu is the suffix or prefix to indicate a first person plural ending, so it means, “God with us.” This verse tells us first of all, this is going to be a human being born of a virgin, a human mother, but He’s going to be God because His name will be “God with us.” We see a very strong passage here indicating the deity of the Messiah.
 
Later on when Christianity developed through the Middle Ages by approximately 1000 A.D. you had the rise of a very well-known rabbi named Rashi who redefined it to refer only to Isaiah’s son and to have an immediate historical fulfillment and to take away from it any sense of a future Messianic fulfillment. Up until that time the interpretation I’ve given you was pretty much understood by rabbis. Sadly one of the things that happened in the history of Christianity is that early reformers under John Calvin, Luther, and others went to Jewish rabbis to learn Hebrew and a number of them picked up some of the non-Messianic interpretations and they entered into the flow of thought within a Protestant theology.
 
Throughout much of Protestant theology these passages are understood to be clearly Messianic with a singular fulfillment in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, but in recent decades this course has been reversed and we find that a number of evangelical scholars don’t really hold to Messianic interpretation but you’ve been taught better. This is a great passage for you to have under your belt so if you’re ever engaged in a conversation where someone says Jesus never claimed to be God you can always say that the Old Testament expectation was that the Messiah would be God. Next time we’ll look at several of these verses.

Romans 108b-Promises of a Divine Messiah – Part 2 ; , ;

Romans 9:3 NASB95
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
Romans 108b-Promises of a Divine Messiah – Part 2 ; , ; ; ; ;
 
We are in our study in Romans. We haven’t met since July 4th which has been about three weeks. Prior to that as we were going through Romans, chapter 9, looking specifically at verse 5. I’m focusing on Paul’s statement of the deity of Christ. As many times as I’ve read through Romans it reminds me that we all have a problem with reading things until they become familiar or we’re looking at other aspects, but in , Paul says that, related to the Israelites, “Of whom are the fathers, [referring to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and his brothers] and from whom according to the flesh [Jesus’ humanity] Christ came who is overall the Eternal Blessed God. Amen.” I pointed out that is better translated, “Christ, the eternally blessed God.” That phrase, “the eternally blessed God” is appositionally to Christ. Then add the relative clause “who is over all” at the end because that makes it come across as a very strong verse in support of the full deity of Jesus Christ. Christ, the eternally blessed God.
 
Now when Paul wrote that in outside of a few scriptures that had been penned already by the Apostle Paul most of the New Testament had not been written. James had been written before Paul wrote anything. Then Paul had written Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians and now Romans. But the gospels were probably just at this point being written but they had not had any circulation yet so most of the New Testament was not written. So how do we know that Christ, that is the Messiah of the Old Testament, is fully God? Well that comes from Old Testament passages.
 
There’s such a move always from liberal theology that claims that it was Paul and the New Testament that invented the deity of Christ. If you listen to those purveyors of sound theology, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and some of the other things you see on TV they always assert that the New Testament wasn’t written until one or two hundred years after the death of the last apostle. Now that has been disproven by much of modern scholarship, even numerous liberal theologians who don’t even believe in the infallibility or inspiration of Scripture have to admit, on the basis of evidence, that the New Testament was probably all written by the end of the 1st century. One has even gone so far as to claim that the New Testament was written even earlier than most conservative, orthodox Biblical theologians would put it. So the evidence is clearly there.
 
The deity of the Messiah as something I pointed out to you was in the Old Testament. Now last time I said that we ought to have at our fingertips to use in any kind of witnessing situation three Old Testament passages and three New Testament passages that support the deity of Christ. When you’re sitting there and talking to your next door neighbor or you’re talking to somebody you’ve struck up a conversation with at the grocery store or you’re talking to somebody that you’re sitting with in the waiting room at the doctor’s office or whomever it might be and they say, “Why do you Christians think that Jesus is God?” You can say, “Well, because my pastor said so.” Oh, wrong answer! “Jeff Phipps said so.” Equally wrong answer. That’s what so many people do. They say, “Oh well, I’ve got it in my notes at home. I heard it. It’s in Isaiah somewhere. It’s in the New Testament somewhere. The Bible says so.” That doesn’t work
 
See, the job of the pastor-teacher according to and 12 is to “equip the saints to do the work of the ministry.” Evangelism is part of your work of ministry and what I’m doing here is equipping or training you and giving you the information you need so that you have it in your mind. The only Bible doctrine that you know is what you know without your notebooks or your Bible. Always remember that. The only Bible doctrine you know is what’s just off the top of your head. That’s the only Bible doctrine you really know.
 
So we need to learn just three verses from the Old Testament. It’s simple because two of them are in Isaiah and one is in Micah. , , and . The nice thing to remember is that Isaiah and Micah lived at the same time. In fact, when we get to the Micah passage tonight we’ll see that there are a lot of similarities between Micah’s message and Isaiah’s message. I was really pleased to get the feedback I got when I announced that sometime, probably early October, I’m going to teach a Bible study methods course. In other words, how you can become a better Bible student and read your Bible more intelligently and come to dig some things out for yourself. We’ll probably start sometimes in early October and that will last until February or March. We’ll probably spend more than an hour in an early Sunday evening class. I think everybody will get a lot out of it. We did this some years ago. We had a young man who was working with us at the time who taught that. It was part of his training and he did a good job. People got a lot out of it. But I want to do this and get it on video and upgrade the teaching on it a good bit.
 
One of the things we do when we look at Bible study methods is to look at four methods. The first is observation. What does it say? It’s always amazing to me how little we observe verses. We’ll have a lot of fun with observation. The second thing is interpretation. What does it mean? Not just what it means to you. That would be an application question. The key question is what did the original authors, the human author and the divine author, mean and yes you can discern accurately and exactly what the original authors meant in most cases. We can get pretty precise because of the ways Scripture is constructed. Then the next thing is correlation. That’s comparing Scripture with Scripture. That’s part of interpretation because once you come to the meaning of a passage you want to correlate that with other passages.
 
Sometimes you’ll prepare scripture with scripture and you’ll go, “Oops. Maybe what I thought that passage meant isn’t right because it doesn’t fit with this passage or that passage.” That’s all part of the learning and study process. A lot of times when you take passages, especially Messianic passages, and your compare scripture with scripture, you not only discover that they help shed light on one another but as you look at them in the way they’re revealed you see there are certain threads that will run through the Scriptures and they get picked up again and again in these Messianic prophecies.
 
Now Isaiah is written at about the same time as Micah. Later on you have other prophecies such as the ones that are before Isaiah. The prophecy as revealed in Isaiah says, “The woman shall conceive…” That indicates there was already a belief there that there was something significant about a particular woman and that takes you all the way back to and the promise that the seed of the woman will defeat the seed of the serpent. That’s a little bit about what we’re doing here and we’re going to see some of that.
 
Last time we looked at and tonight I want to look at . Both of these verses are quoted in the gospel birth stories in Matthew and in Luke. Just so you get a little prevue of coming attractions, when I finish the Proverbs series which will be sometime in September, we’re going to have an early Christmas this year by starting the gospel of Matthew. I’m going to use Matthew as sort of a lens for looking at the life of Christ. Now this isn’t going to be an in-depth study of everything that Jesus taught and everything He said. I want to save that for later. I’ve looked at some things in depth and we’ll look at other things in depth but I find is a need for a more structured approach to the life of Christ.
 
For most of my life I’ve heard that most people know something about the life of Paul, about the life of Moses, something about the life of Daniel. They can give you the broad outline but they can’t do daddy on the life of Christ. He was born and He had a lot of problems with the Pharisees and Sadducees and they crucified Him. That’s it. So we need to have a little more structure in understanding that so I want to use the gospel of Matthew to do that.
 
After a period of about a year without drilling too deeply I want to teach the life of Christ. I’ve looked out on the internet and there are some doctrinal pastors who’ve done a great job and they have three or four or five or six hundred hours on the life of Christ. The problem with that is that they want to drill down in such detail that they don’t really have an overview of it anymore. They’ve lost the structure. We’ve got to have a good structure in our minds so we’re going to do that on Sunday mornings for about a year to a year and a half.
 
Then that will give me a framework to be able to come back at later times and drill down on other things, such as the Sermon on the Mount, The Upper Room Discourse, the Olivet Discourse, some of which I’ve taught before. For example I taught the Upper Room Discourse in the series I did years ago on the gospel of John. So we’ll be doing some of that. It’s just a little preview of coming attractions.
 
Okay, we’re going to look tonight at and to understand the deity of Christ. The contexts are important but they’re not as significant as the context of so we can hit those pretty quickly. If we have time I want to move into the three key passages in the New Testament. They’re easy to remember. They’re all in a first chapter. All you have to remember is John, Colossians, and Hebrews and if you remember they’re all in the first chapter, you’ve got it. When I was in seminary I remember Dr. Ryrie who was a real stickler for detail but when it came to knowing text for key points he would say, “If you just know the book and the chapter, you can find the verse.” That’s all he would require on examinations and I always thought that was good. If you can get the book and the chapter down you can find the verse 99% of the time. So if you can just remember , , and you can find them. As a matter of fact I’ve sat on a number of ordination councils over the years and one of the questions that was usually asked was to give three key passages on the deity of Christ. All that was required at those ordination councils was book and chapter. So if you just have John, Colossians, and Hebrews down you’ve got it.
 
Let’s look at this first verse for tonight. is a well-known verse at Christmas time. “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” Then the next verse goes on to read, “There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this.” Now what’s the most important thing we need to comprehend when we start to study a passage? Well, one of the most important things we need to comprehend is the context. Always remember that a text taken out of context leaves you with a con job. Many people get things completely distorted because they ignore the context.
 
The context here is really a broad context. I’m not just talking about Isaiah 9. I’m talking about what goes on from through . The background for this is what we talked about in chapter 7, that there is an alliance between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and Syria to attack the Southern Kingdom. This is at a time during the reign of Ahaz when the Northern Kingdom is just about in its final legs, not long before the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by the armies of the Syrian Empire. There’s a threat now coming from your friends, the Northern Kingdom, and your enemies, the Syrians. They united against the Southern Kingdom and as I pointed out in our study of , the focal point was to destroy the house of David.
 
They weren’t destroying the house of David simply because they didn’t like David or they didn’t like his descendants but because there was a spiritual dimension which they may or may not have been aware of and this is part of the angelic conflict, Satan’s attempt to destroy God’s plan for providing a Savior. The promise of a Savior had come to David in what’s known as the Davidic covenant in . God promised David that he would provide a descendant who would be eternal and that there would be an eternal dynasty and that a descendant of David who was eternal, indicating deity, would sit on his throne forever.
 
Now if this unholy alliance between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Syrians was effective then that would destroy that promise. It would render God’s ability to fulfill the promise through a descendant of David null and void. That’s the general attempt. Satan has had a number of these attempts, attacks on different lineages in the Old Testament to try to block the coming of the Messiah. So that’s the context. There’s prophecy in chapter 8, the prophecy, of course, of , is that God would give to the house of David a sign that the virgin would conceive and call a son whose name would be Immanuel, meaning God with us. This emphasizes that the child of the virgin would be God, would be fully divine, as I pointed out in the previous lessons.
Then there’s also a warning that this doesn’t mean that the house of David is going to survive without conflict or without difficulty. There’s warning that a day is going to come when God is going to raise up an empire that is going to destroy the Northern Kingdom and threaten the Southern Kingdom and this is the threat of the kingdom of Assyria, mentioned in and also mentioned in . But there’s hope and the hope is that God has provided a future solution. He’s not going to go back on His promise to the house of David and he’s going to establish the kingdom. So we have this continuous prophecy.
 
If you just look at briefly, starting in verse 5, we have another message from God through Isaiah. “Inasmuch as these people have rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah and rejoice in Rezin and the son of Remaliah.” Now who were Rezin and Remaliah? The king of Syria is Rezin and Pekah the son of Remaliah is the king of Israel. We studied that back in . And so these are the traitors who are rejoicing in the alliance with the Northern Kingdom to destroy the house of David. Then the promise of God comes in verse 7, “Now therefore, behold, the Lord is about to bring on them the strong and abundant waters of the Euphrates, even the king of Assyria and all his glory.” So Assyria is pictured as a river at flood stage that will rise up and destroy the Northern kingdom. “And it will rise up over all its channels and go over all its banks. Then it will sweep through Judah, it will overflow and pass through.”
Note that it doesn’t destroy Judah. “It will reach even to the neck, and the spread of its wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel.” Notice he doesn’t go over the head. There’s that term again. Immanuel, meaning God with us. So the one who owns the land is the one who is going to be born is called Immanuel. This promise continues to be reiterated down through the rest of that chapter that those who rest on the Lord will be delivered. So we come to look at this context and we see that there’s a promise of severe judgment on the Northern Kingdom and this is seen right before our context.
 
Remember there weren’t chapters or verses divisions in the original text but at the end of chapter 8 we read in verse 21, “They [Israel] will pass through the land hard-pressed and famished…” In verse 19 it refers to demonism, “When they say to you, consult the mediums and the spiritists who whisper and mutter, should not a people consult their God?” That’s the rebuke that they should seek God rather than mediums and wizards. “Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?” See they were going to all these other sources to find hope rather than the Word of God. In verse 20 Isaiah says, “To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to the word, it is because they have no dawn.” That is, the source of truth and the solution to problems is the Word of God, Bible doctrine.
 
“Dawn” here means light and it’s a key word we’re looking at here because there’s this interplay in the text between light, which indicates the holiness and righteousness of God, which illuminates the mind. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” the psalmist says in . The Psalmist also says, “In thy light we see light.” So it’s talking about the illumination of Scripture. In the Northern Kingdom scripture was rejected so there’s no light there, just darkness. When we get to verse 21 here it’s talking about this judgment time of darkness that comes. They’ll be hungry as they pass through this judgment because they have rejected the truth, “And it will turn out that when they are hungry, they will be enraged and curse their king and their God as they face upward.” They are going to curse God, curse their king as a result of being unrighteous.
 
and following says they’re suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. You know as well as I do that when someone is doing something wrong and they’re dead set on it and you tell them, in however nice a way you want to, that they need to straighten up, they won’t like your correction and they turn and they’re enraged at you. So this is what happens. God has brought discipline on them and all that does is confirm them in their judgment and they turn around and they shake their fist at God. What do they see? That’s verse 22, “Then they will look to the earth and behold, the trees and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and they will be driven away into darkness.”
 
See we have to pay attention in this lesson to the interplay between light and darkness. Darkness is the result of spiritual rejection of God and the truth. But there’s a contrast when we get into chapter 9, verse 1, “[Nevertheless] But there will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish, in earlier times. He treated the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali with contempt…” Now the land of Zebulun and Naphtali is in the north of Israel. When you see these geographical terms you take a look at where this is. Go to the back of your Bible. Look it up on a map.
 
Connie’s on vacation right now and there’s a couple of e-mails pending because she’s traveling and one of them is that there’s a new app that you can download for your iPad or iPhone called Biblemap app (http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/introducing-the-biblemap-app-a-must-have-for-everyday-bible-study/). Note: Android version coming in Fall 2013. You can download it and if you click on a place name, it takes you directly to Google maps and your location by live satellite and shows terrain features and everything. It’s a neat little thing so you can figure out where these locations are. Zebulun and Naphtali are territories given to those tribes and they’re in the north, in the area known as “the Galilee”. This is the area where Jesus spent most of His ministry.
 
So what’s being said here is that the gloom is going to diminish. “The gloom will not be upon her [Israel] who was distressed as when at first he lightly esteemed Zebulun and the land of Naphtali and later on [there’s a recognition that a light is going to come into this land which has gone through this severe judgment]. The Hebrew words that are used here indicate a state of darkness and severe darkness and distress upon the land. It’s a sign of judgment. The words correlate to each other. “And afterwards He shall make it glorious by the way of the sea on the other side of Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.” That particular statement there is later picked up and referenced in the New Testament in Matthews 4:16. “The people who walk in darkness will see a great light” is applied by Matthew to the light that is seen when the Messiah comes and proclaims the presence of the Kingdom of God in . This shows revelation of the truth, God’s grace to the area of the Northern Kingdom which is Galilee, and this is prophesied here.
 
Now in we read, “You shall multiply the nation. You shall increase their gladness. They will be glad in Your presence as with the gladness of harvest.” Now this jumps forward in time. That’s the trouble with reading some of these prophecies in Isaiah and Ezekiel, they switch back and forth from the present time of pronouncing judgment on the disobedient nation in the 7th or 8th century B.C. and then it jumps forward to the future blessed time of the Messianic Kingdom. And so verse 3 jumps forward, “You shall multiply the nation. You shall increase their gladness. They will be glad in Your presence as with the gladness of harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil for you have broken the yoke of his burden…” This is talking about when the Messiah comes and throws off the oppressors of Israel and re-establishes the nation.
 
Verse 5 says, “For every boot [sandal] of the booted warrior in the battle tumult, and cloak rolled in blood will be for burning, fuel for the fire.” All of that refers to when Jesus returns at the battle of Armageddon, destroys the enemies of Israel and then establishes the kingdom. Now we see the foundational basis for that which is in the Messianic prophecy of verse 6: “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us.” This whole prophecy from verse one all the way down to the end of this chapter into chapter 10, down to at least verse 24, is all written in poetry in Hebrew. You have the same principles we studied in Proverbs. You have parallelism to stress the different ideas. The first two lines of verse 6 are given in synonymous parallelism. Child is parallel to son, born is parallel to given. But there’s a difference. On the one hand there’s a child that is born, indicating normal human birth process and then we have a parallel but it’s contrastive and it’s actually antithetical even though it doesn’t say ‘but’ which you normally see but it’s not synonymous.
 
The ‘son’ is the ‘child’ but the son is given. The term son is always a reference in passages like this to the Son of God. So the Son of God isn’t born. He is eternal. He’s given so we have the humanity and the deity of the Messiah both mentioned here. This son that is given is going to be the Son of Man from who comes to rule the kingdoms with a rod of iron. That’s . “The government will rest on His shoulders” indicating He will rule. Then there are five titles that are given to Him. He’s called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father. There is a problem with that translation which I’ll point out in a minute, Prince of Peace.
 
Then we’re told that “There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace.” He’s going to sit on the throne of David. What was the issue back in ? It was whether the throne of David was going to survive, was the house of David going to survive? This is again reiterating the comfort of God’s promise that in spite of the fact they’re going to come under this severe judgment they’re going to have distress and darkness and anguish but the Messiah, the Son of David, will come and He will establish peace and order and judgment and justice forever. Not just for a couple of centuries. Not just for his lifetime but forever.
 
Now there are some problems here with the text. As I pointed out before, one of the problems we have in the text we use for the Hebrew Bible is that it was edited by a group of scribes over a period of centuries that standardized Hebrew language and standardized the text. They’re called the Masoretes. But during that period of time from roughly about A.D. 400 to A.D. 900 was also the rise and expansion of Christianity so a lot of things the Masoretes did with the text were designed to affect the text so it would not be Messianic. One of the things they do here is they added certain accents in the Hebrew to break up the flow of the text so it would not be translated as you see it in the New Kings James version and most of the versions you’re familiar with.
 
We’ll take the phrase “mighty God”. This child that was to be born was to be called “mighty God.” That would seem to be a major problem. How can God, mighty God, be born? So they wrestled with that. Next is “everlasting father”. Some people have questioned that term “Father” and said he’s not the Father, he’s the Son. But in Hebrew it’s ad ab. Ab at the beginning is the word for Father and ad is the term for eternity. It’s merely a designation that this child who is born is eternal. He’s the father of eternity. It’s an idiom for stating he is eternal without beginning or ending. It should be translated “father of eternity” and “prince of peace”. But in the Masoretic text it would read, “The wonderful counselor, the mighty God, calls his name.”
 
Notice how it shifts the meaning of the verb, the voice of the verb form will be called which is passive to active. They really twist it up in order to get their translation. “Calls his name Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” So instead of having one persona in the verse which is the child, the son, you now have two. You have the child and now God calling Him something. There’s no warrant for that. In fact, one of the better trained Hebrew scholars, Franz Delitzsch, who co-authored a ten volume commentary on the Old Testament, usually referred to as Keil and Delitzsch commentary, was from a Jewish background. I believe he trained for the rabbinate and he says, “There are four basic problems with what the Masaretic text does. First of all, contextually, it doesn’t make sense that two sets of names would appear. Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God would be one set. Eternal Father, Prince of Peace is another set. The first applying to God, the second applying to the Son. The text does not indicate anything directed toward God. The point of the text is the name of the child.” Second, he points out, “there’s no reason to expect such a long roundabout name for God.” Third he says, “A dual name construction as indicated by the accents has no precedent in Isaiah. It doesn’t fit Isaiah’s style at all. It’s extremely unusual.” And then fourth he says, “If it were to be indicating a difference between God and human who is called Eternal Father, Prince of Peace, then a further distinction would be made in the text to identify that and the first two titles would begin with a definite article to indicate that those apply to God to distinguish them from the second titles.” So it just doesn’t fit at all. The only reason you would try to come up with that second translation is the way the Masoretes inserted the accents.
 
If we go back to and just look at these titles: Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, we see that these are all terms that reinforce the deity of this child that was born. He’s not just a human child. The first name ‘wonderful’ is a Hebrew word pele. We use the word wonderful in English to translate it often but it really means incomprehensible, beyond our understanding, something that is beyond human capability, and something extraordinary. This word pele is only used of God in the Old Testament. We use the word wonderful to describe many different things. We say, “Oh, I’ve got a wonderful wife. I’ve got a wonderful husband. I’ve got wonderful dogs.” But in the Bible this word is only used of God. It’s never applied to human beings so this is talking about a specific divine attribute that never crosses into the human realm.
 
The term counselor is again a term that relates to God. It means that He is the One that is the source of advice and counsel and guidance. The next term mighty God is also a name that relates to God. It is gibbor. This refers to God as a powerful warrior. It is used many times in Scripture as in . The third name I’ve pointed out already is the Father of eternity and this is used in . Then the last title Prince of Peace does not in and of itself emphasize deity but it does when we understand the role of the Messiah in bringing peace to God and man as the God-Man. That is His role. So this verse emphasizes both the deity as well as the humanity of Christ.
 
So now we have two passages early on in Isaiah given within the context of national disintegration, indicating the promise of the faithfulness of God as the solution to man’s problems because only God can solve man’s problems. Man can’t solve his problems. He can’t solve them through education, through economics, through politics or any of these other things. Only God can ultimately solve the problem. The solution comes through Jesus Christ. He is the One alone because He solves the basic problem, which is sin, and so only when He comes to reign will He put an end to war.  
 
Now that’s important because if you’re looking at , there is a well-known prophecy related to the Millennial Kingdom. It reads, “Now it will come about that in the last [latter] days…” I’ve taught this before. I want to remind you that the term ‘latter days’ can apply to either the latter days of God’s plan for Israel or God’s plan for the Church so we have to pay attention to the context to see which latter days it is. People ask, “Are we in the last days?” Well Paul referred to his time as the latter days of the Church so we have the Church Age in and of itself always exhibits certain characteristics because we’re living in the cosmic system. Then there’s the latter days of the time of Israel and those latter days refer to what we also call Daniel’s seventieth week, that last period that is sometimes referred to as the Tribulation.
 
Sometimes it refers to the last days in Israel’s history which refers to the Messianic Kingdom. In this verse the latter days is referring to the Millennial Kingdom, “Now it will come about that in the last days the mountains of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains.” There’s going to be a massive earthquake in Jerusalem at the end of the tribulation period during the time of the battle of Armageddon and the whole temple mount area is going to become elevated and enlarged and this will be the site of the temple that is rebuilt during the Millennial Kingdom that is described in Ezekiel, chapter 40 and following.
 
Then we read, “And will be raised above the hills and all the nations will stream to it.” This is going to be the center of God’s worship in the Millennial Kingdom. “And many people will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…” There will only be one. You’re not going to have worship centers all over the world. You’re going to have one in Jerusalem. “…to the house of the God of Jacob that He may teach us concerning His ways and that we may walk in His paths. For the law will go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations and will render decisions for many people and they shall hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning forks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation and never again will they learn war.”
 
That is a verse related only to the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom as the time of peace, because He’s the Prince of Peace. Now that was co-opted by the United Nations back in 1945 and was chiseled into the wall over the entry way to the UN because they’re making a Messianic claim. The very existence of that UN building is an act of idolatry in opposition to God because they claim to do what only God can do, that is to bring peace. They claim to be the Messiah. Now that’s just totally false.
 
Now I want you to turn over to Micah. Micah’s in that part of your Bible where the pages aren’t discolored or turned because you really haven’t read much there. Micah is what is known as one of the twelve because they’re minor prophets. They’re minor not because they’re not significant; they’re minor because they’re small. They’re short little books that you can read easily, one a night, and in the next two weeks you can read all of the minor prophets. Micah is writing at the same time as Isaiah. There are many things that are said by Micah that are also said by Isaiah. They’re writing during the 8th century, roughly in the 700’s just prior to the defeat of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria. In fact, they both focus on warnings about what will happen to the Northern Kingdom and also predictions of what will happen to the Southern Kingdom by the king of Babylon. These are major themes in both books. Now if you look at Micah, chapter 4, I just want to pick up a little context. We’re actually going to be looking at . This is our third verse from the Old Testament. “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephratah, too little to be among the clans of Judah. From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.”
 
Now what’s the context here? The context again comes out of a section that deals with the future glories of Israel under the rule of the Messiah but also promise of future judgment. God is going to bring judgment upon Israel and they’re to go through a period of deep distress. We know from history that they were taken out of the land under the fifth cycle of discipline again and that they are going to eventually be returned. Now that hasn’t happened yet. I think we’re seeing a partial restoration in fulfillment of right now.
 
This is the initial regathering in unbelief. There are two worldwide re-gatherings. One in unbelief and one in belief. The re-gathering that occurred in 538 B.C. in the Old Testament period was partial. There were still more Jews living outside the land of Israel during the time of Jesus than in the land. It wasn’t a full restoration. Most of them just returned from a few countries. So there has never been a worldwide gathering. says there will be two. It indicates a second time and the second time is when they are in regeneration. So the first time is not going to be in regeneration. That’s the implication.
The first time is not specifically mentioned. It just says, “I will re-gather you a second time.” Well, when’s the first time? I believe the only time in history that marks that is right now when we’re very close. About 48 or 49% of Jews in the world now live in the state of Israel. It won’t be long now before over 50% live in the modern state of Israel. That’s not a sign of the time but it is an indication that this is massive, a first of its kind since 722 B.C. when God has restored a vast number, almost half of the Jews in the world to the historical land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
So let’s look at to get the context. “Now it will come about in the last days [latter days]…” What latter days?  Latter days of Israel. This would be related to either the tribulation period or the Millennial Messianic kingdom. “It will come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established in the chief of the mountains.” Have you read that somewhere before? Isn’t that amazing? Micah must have been reading Isaiah or they got it from the same person. “It will be raised above the hills and the people [Gentiles] will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, “Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His path. For from Zion will go forth the law, even the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” This is taken right out of Isaiah, chapter 2.
 
Whenever God repeats himself two or three times, you better pay attention because it’s really important. Then verse 3 says, “And He will judge between many peoples and render decisions for mighty, distant nations. They shall hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations will not lift up sword against nation and never again will they train for war.” It’s just the same statement that’s made in . The Messiah brings that about. So that’s our hope for the future world.
 
Verses 4 and 5 continue to emphasize that. How long does it last? “As for us we will walk in the name of the Lord, our God forever and ever.” I want you to pay attention to that clause because it’s the same verbiage we’re going to find later on. Forever and ever means never ending. Sometimes olam can just mean for a long time but when you have words compounded here in the Hebrew that means eternity. Verse 6 says, “In that day, declares the Lord, I will assemble the lame and gather the outcasts. Even those whom I have afflicted. I will make the lame a remnant and the outcasts a strong nation and the Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion from now on and forever and you, tower of the flock, hill of the daughter of Zion, to you it will come from the former dominion and will come the kingdom of the daughter of Jerusalem.” All of this reaffirming that God is indeed going to fulfill the promises to the house of David to re-establish the house of Israel so no matter how dark things get, no matter how distressing things get, God is still in control and He’s going to bring about His plan.
 
Now that doesn’t mean we don’t go through some hard times. That doesn’t mean we don’t go through a lot of personal adversity. It doesn’t mean we may not go under divine judgment as a nation. Israel certainly did. Now verse 9, “Now why do you cry out loudly? Is there no king among you?” They lacked a real leader; he was apostate, “Agony has gripped you like a woman in childbirth.” Israel’s pain and distress is being compared to that of a woman in labor. In verse 11 God says, “Writhe and labor to give birth, daughter of Zion, like a woman in childbirth. For now you will go out of the city, dwell in the field, and go to Babylon.” So this is a prophecy that God’s going to take you through all this distress and pain and misery and sorrow. You’re going to be taken out of the land and removed to Babylon in captivity. This is the story of Daniel and his three friends taken out of the land. “There you will be delivered. There the Lord will redeem you from the land of your enemies.” This was his promise that they would ultimately be restored from the hands of their enemies. Verse 11, “And now many nations have been assembled against you who say let her be defiled and let our eyes gloat over Zion but they do not know the thoughts of the Lord.” So there are going to be many nations that are hostile to Israel. We’re shifting here to a future forecast. See we’ve gone from future Millennial, then back to the present that they’re going to be taken out in judgment, then back to the future. So that’s where we go with the rest of chapter 4.
 
Then we come to chapter 5 which talks about that judgment. “Now muster yourselves in troops, daughter of troops because God has brought siege against us, with a rod they will smite the judge of Israel on the cheek.” Now so far we’ve talked about Jerusalem and the daughter of Zion which is another way of talking about Jerusalem and the Israelites and now we’re going to shift to another city in verse 2: “But as for you, Bethlehem, Ephratah…” Now Bethlehem was a small town meaning the house of bread. The etymology of Ephratah indicate that which is full but many people believe that it’s also an older name, a Canaanite name for Bethlehem. By using both names it makes it very clear where we’re talking about and it’s located just a few short miles south of Jerusalem. “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephratah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you One will go forth from Me to be ruler in Israel.”
There’s a contrast between the word here that is used for “ruler” and the word “judge” in verse 1. This term is mashal. It is emphasizing that it is a shift in terms of the person. This is referring to the Messiah. It says, “His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity [everlasting].” Now in the Hebrew these are two idioms joined together “from of old and from everlasting” it really refers to eternity past. That tells us right here that this one who is going to come forth from Bethlehem who is born in Bethlehem is also one who has come from eternity. The two lines of the humanity and the deity of the Messiah come together in this particular verse. He’s not only born in Bethlehem, just like the child is born, but He’s also eternal. He’s the Eternal Son of God. His goings forth are from everlasting.
 
So the three Old Testament passages that you should control in order to say “okay I can show you that the concept of the deity of Christ is not something just cooked up by Paul in the New Testament. It’s in , , and .” If you’re taking notes in your Bible you can write in the margin two of those references by each of those verses so anytime you go to right there in your margin it says and and so on. Then if you happen to have your Bible with you, you can find those verses. Hopefully you’ll learn them and if you get a chance to talk to someone it will be out of your soul and you’ll be able to share the gospel.
 
Here’s one other passage from the Old Testament not as central as those other three but just another one to re-emphasize the deity of the Messiah. In and 6, “Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David’s righteous branch and He will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land. In His days Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is His name by which He will be called, The Lord our righteousness.” So he’s raised up from David but he is called Yahweh, our righteousness. In other words how do you explain that a descendant of David is called by a personal name of God? This indicates He is full deity and is to be identified with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus Christ isn’t just a man. The New Testament is not unique in claiming that the Messiah of Israel would be fully God and that is why we can rely upon our salvation and we can understand eternal security.

Romans 111b-Election: Jacob and Esau

Romans 9:6 NASB95
But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel;
Romans 111b-Election: Jacob and Esau
 
Before we get started I had a nice e-mail that came in the other day. I get these every now and then but I particularly appreciated this one. It’s from a man up in Missouri. It says, “Pastor Dean, I don’t know if you get e-mails like this one but I want to thank you for your devotion to the Word of God for equipping God’s people. I hope you do get these e-mails but I know that you may not. I wanted to send this to encourage you in the work of your ministry that God has given you for your life’s work. It appears to me here in St. Joseph, Missouri that a famine of the word is sweeping over the planet and is growing more pronounced with every year that passes. Your internet ministry with its videos, audios, and transcripts are like an oasis for the teacher of God’s Word in a church desert stripped bare by the spirit of this age. I also want to acknowledge Barb Appel for all her help.”
 
As a side note here, Barb has done a lot to help this man and get videos and other things but there’s a whole team. I’m not reading this to pat myself on back. Barb does a tremendous job. She really does. Connie does a tremendous job. There are a number of other people who work behind the scenes, doing transcripts, working on the internet web site including the new one coming out any month now. It’s going to have a lot of features the other one didn’t have, a lot of ability to pull together transcripts and recordings, based upon topics you want to study, and a topic and verse index so you can just type in the verse you’re interested in and pull up where I taught that. So a lot of people are doing a lot of things. I do the teaching but it wouldn’t get out if it weren’t for a host of people who do the many, many other things. They are often unsung and they need to all be recognized at times for all the time they’re give in volunteering to help out with ministry.
 
Now back to the e-mail, “God is magnifying the teaching ministry he has given you to equip his people to change lives and the spiritual growth of believers. Your teaching has serious implications for the life of the believer, both here in time and for the believer’s inheritance at the BEMA seat. Along with the Apostle Paul, you will also say, ‘For I am already being poured out as a drink offering and the time of my departure has come. I have fought a good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. In the future there is laid up for me the crown resulting from righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me at that day. And not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing. You feed the flock which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint but willingly, not for filthy lucre but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God’s heritage but being examples to the flock. And when the Chief Shepherd shall appear you shall receive a crown of glory that fades not away. Thank you.”
 
I appreciate getting e-mails like that. It’s a great encouragement and it’s good that every now and then someone expresses that.
 
We’re going to get into an interesting section today, . Here the Apostle Paul is addressing an issue that is often taken to be personal salvation as a result of God’s specific, individual election of some to salvation and some to perdition, which is otherwise known as double predestination. But before I begin I want to go over a few things to give us a little bit of context for the book of Romans.
 
The last few weeks we’ve focused on dealing with the great statement about the deity of Christ. Let’s just go back and see our organization of the book of Romans. Under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit, Paul wrote this epistle. So it is from his personality, his background, his knowledge, but it is God the Holy Spirit who is overseeing and superintending what he is writing so that without overriding Paul’s personal style or his background or personality, the Holy Spirit makes sure that what he writes is without error. So he writes the epistle to the Romans as a vindication and explanation for the righteousness of God and how God treats sinful human beings by providing a redemption that is based on grace through faith alone in Christ alone.
 
The key verse in Romans is often cited as where Paul says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Then he goes on in the next verse to say, “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith…” The first faith is faith at salvation, I believe, and the second faith is the on-going faith-rest drill in terms of the spiritual life. So the righteousness of God is a critical phrase in understanding this book. That phrase “the righteousness of God” is somewhat under debate today. I want to address that in terms of that overview as we get ready to focus down on and also because it’s going to come up a lot, especially at the beginning of the next chapter.
 
In , Paul is relating Israel to the righteousness of God in justification. What he says about the righteousness and justification applies to all, Jew and Gentile alike. He’s not simply just zeroing in on Jews. He’s talking about both Gentiles and Jews but as he is dealing with this he’s focusing on how the righteousness of God relates to Israel in terms of justification. And by righteousness of God we must continue to understand that this is talking about God’s intrinsic character, His ethical purity and His rightness. And He is right, not because He conforms to some external standard of rightness. He is righteousness because He is the barometer. He is the ultimate measuring stick. He is the ultimate standard by which right and wrong are evaluating. So in 1:18 through 5:21 the focus is on God’s righteousness and how He justifies human beings by faith alone in Christ alone.
 
Then we saw in 6:1-8:17 how Paul relates Israel to God in sanctification. He talks about the believer but he deals with the Law and he deals with how the Law did not truly sanctify. The Law was good. It was from God but it did not provide for sanctification. Then in 8:18-39 Paul will relate Israel to the righteousness of God and glorification but as he concludes at the end of , Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
 
Someone who’s Jewish, ethnic Jewish, in his audience, Christian or not, might raise his hand and say, “Well, wait a minute. God seems to be setting aside Israel right now in favor of this new thing, the Church. Doesn’t that indicate that God is no longer going to be faithful to his promises?” So now what Paul is going to do is relate Israel’s place in God’s plan to His righteousness and His vindication.
 
What’s we’re going to see is that God’s faithfulness is God’s outworking of his character. His righteousness is not identical to His faithfulness. The reason I say that and I’ve pointed it out a few times because it’s a part of my responsibility as a pastor to warn you about certain things going on today. In Paul is on his way to Jerusalem at the end of his third missionary journey and he stops in Miletus. He has a meeting with the leaders in the church in Ephesus, the pastors in the area, and he says to them, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”
 
Three terms are used in this chapter for the leaders in the churches: elders, overseers, and shepherds. Overseers has to do with being in a position of authority and administration, elders is one word that is used to describe the role of pastors emphasizing their spiritual maturity, and then shepherds means pastoring the church of God.  Paul is saying that the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd or to guard or to lead the flock. In verse 29 Paul says, “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.”
 
So one of the roles of a pastor is not only to instruct but also to warn and to inform in terms of this kind of a warning. Now I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past. There’s a growing influential theologian in England. He’s an Anglican and used to be the bishop of Durham. Now he’s teaching theology. His name is N.T. Wright. Most people call him Tom but since we have our own dearly beloved Tom Wright we don’t want to confuse anyone by thinking I’m calling Tom a heretic. I’ll just refer to this man as N.T. Wright.
 
N.T. Wright is often N.T. wrong so we’re going to see that. It’s interesting how in the providence of God things come together. As most of you know on Friday mornings I have a group of pastors and we’ve gotten together off and on, mostly on, for the last 5 or 6 years. We’ve done Bible study methods together. We’ve studied Greek together. We’ve studied through various theological issues together. It’s a very good time of fellowship. Mike Brennan of Brenham comes in, Orlando comes. There’s usually two or three others from around here. Others get on line. We’ve now got a much more sophisticated program to use and we have pastors from Tucson and Preston City who get online. With this better program we have, we’ve had more participation. We’ve had as many as ten online during the summer.
 
Tomorrow I think we’re going to have even more because of the topic. We’ve been studying a book written by Joseph Dillow. Some of you are familiar with an earlier work of his called Reign of the Servant Kings. That earlier work was very good in many areas. There were some areas I didn’t agree with, some areas I was critical of because I don’t think Dillow is as consistent in his dispensational hermeneutics as he should be. That shows up even more in his latest books. I say that because there are a lot of pastors and young men who want to be pastors who listen to me and Servants of the Reigning Kings is part of my reading list. It’s still the best overall theology of the free grace gospel. Lots of tremendous information there but we always have to learn as we will in our Bible study methods class that we have to read anyone with discernment. Even Lewis Sperry Chafer! Even Robby Dean! I know I taught things ten, twenty years ago that I’m sure I don’t agree with any more. In fact, I know there’s some things I don’t agree with any more because there’s such a thing as growth and maturity that takes place on the part of a pastor. Any pastor who ten years later believes exactly the same thing that he taught before isn’t growing. Or he’s not honest. One or the other. So I have a reading list for guys to read and others who can get it off the internet. Dillow’s book is there. It’s very good the way he handles many problem passages. A lot of his work in Hebrews is very, very good. Some of his work in the Old Testament and on inheritance and rewards is just excellent. He is a good, critical thinker but he has some flaws.
 
I think that in this new book he’s got out which is a revision and an expansion of the original Reign of the Servant Kings has some real holes in it. It’s added to the original. It’s not just added. It’s expanded. Some of his views have modified and changed especially in a chapter that he calls, “Messianic Salvation” where he begins to deal with , , and 11. (“Oh,” you’re saying, “Now we know what this is all about.”) As he got into that he is going through his explanation of this section. He covers it in about three or four chapters but in the beginning he starts to deal with the term, the righteousness of God. As I’m reading through the fourth or fifth page last Friday morning—and I’d had a busy week. I’d had out-of-town guests and I really hadn’t had a chance to do this extra reading—I started a paragraph where he says that regarding the term righteousness of God and he’s basically following the teaching of N.T. Wright.
 
Now Wright has a lot of problems. First of all he’s not dispensational, second, he’s Anglican, third, he does not hold to a distinction between Israel and the Church, fourth, he has a distorted view of Judaism in the 1st century which causes him to want to redefine and reinterpret the entire book of Romans. Now a lot of time we look at people like this and we go “pish tosh”. We don’t want to pay any attention to them. We don’t want to listen to them. But we have one doctrinal pastor up in the northeast who about eight or ten years ago started reading N.T. Wright. He came completely under his sway and the whole church shifted over a period of four or five years. Now they hold to preterism which is the view that all prophecy was actually fulfilled before 70 A.D. and they no longer hold to any form of dispensationalism. They’ve gone into various other aspects of N.T. Wright’s views on justification which are somewhat erroneous if not heretical.
 
One of the young men trained by that pastor became pastor of a doctrinal congregation in Corpus. We have members in this congregation, one of whom is sitting here tonight and has relatives who are in one of the other of those congregations. We have several people who know people who are in those congregations as well as some others. So the camel’s nose is way under our tent. It may not be something scratching an itch you have but it is scratching an itch we all have. It is affecting us whether we recognize it or not. We need to be doctrinally perceptive. A lot of people just aren’t. They’re just too busy studying the truth, focusing on the spiritual life, and not hearing about the spasms that are going on in the broader stream of Christianity. But this is definitely one of them. So we have to understand them.
 
What N.T. Wright basically says is that the term righteousness for God is just a code word for God’s covenant faithfulness. Every time you read the righteousness of God what you ought to read is God’s faithfulness to the Abrahamic covenant. In reality, the righteousness of God is a term that refers first to God’s intrinsic character, who God is. God’s faithfulness, His actions, are a result of His character. What N.T. Wright and others are doing they’re trying to redefine a lot of things. They’re called the New Perspectives on Paul. They started back in the 80’s. It’s gained in momentum. They’re very influential.
 
I’ve heard N.T. Wright. Some of you remember that about two years ago I went to an ETS, Evangelical Theological Society, meeting in Atlanta simply because the focus was on justification and the righteousness of God and N.T. Wright was one of the speakers. I like to go hear people and read what they have to say. This guy is brilliant but he’s hard to follow. He has a wonderful deep voice with a rich, melodious British accent. Americans think that anyone who speaks with a British accent must be telling the truth. He is brilliant and he is a product of that incredible British educational system. This guy can quote from church fathers, all the rabbis, in the original languages off the top of his head. His education is fantastic. He forgot more about theological studies by the time he was twenty than most of our pastors ever learned. That’s a tragedy.
 
Back in the day before World War II, it was important for pastors to be well educated. In my first church down in LaMarque, Texas was a man, their former pastor, who had been there from 1933 to 1973. He sat in the third row back, almost where Jim is sitting tonight. Harry Burch was his name and he was about 83 or 84 years old. He had gone to Moody Bible Church and Austin Theological Seminary and he was ordained by the Southern Presbyterian denomination in the early 30s and his pre-ordination exams were incredible. He had to read and translate before the ordination committee a passage they would choose, one in Greek and one in Hebrew. He had to pass written theological exams. He had to demonstrate that he truly understood the Scriptures and that he wasn’t just depending on what others said but that he could open up the Word and at least read the original languages. Well we have people today who think they can get that kind of education by getting on the internet. There’s some things you can learn that way: survey courses, church history, things of that nature. But I don’t understand how you can truly learn most subjects.
 
Some things are changing a little bit with “Go To Meeting”, a software program, which has some real potential for people who are spread out. It’s in real time. There’s no lag in the audio and the video and so it’s almost like everybody is right there in the same room. That’s a real improvement. But language study and exegesis needs that interaction. After class the students in seminaries go to the campus coffee shop and they argue among them about the different points the professor just made. It helps sharpen their thinking. It helps them to understand what was lectured on better. They get a chance to truly dig into what they’ve learned and not just repeat it on an exam. Theological education is a training in how to read and how to think.
 
You can’t really learn how to read and how to think sitting at your desk and looking on the internet without someone telling you, “You read that wrong. It’s an “F”! Why didn’t you say this? Why didn’t you say that?” Someone is dripping red ink all over your papers and telling you that “You may love these ideas but you are in love with an adulterous woman. These ideas are all wrong.” It’s amazing how many people think that going to seminary or Bible college is like going to Sunday school. The first day when you were a student at Dallas Seminary you suddenly realized there’s a whole level of studying the Scripture that you never dreamed about. So there has to be this kind of teaching and training.
 
Monday night we had a conference call with the Board of Chafer Seminary. We were using this “Go To Meeting” technology. I just mentioned to them that we were using this on the Friday morning meeting. I also mentioned that we were reading Dillow’s book. That got Charlie Clough and Mark Musser and Clay Ward really interested. David Roseland found out later. So we’re going to have even more guys this week. It was an interesting observation and I’m not saying this to run down the guys who don’t have a full seminary training. I’m challenging whoever is listening out there that you’ve got to go for the gold, the platinum, and not just to get by.
 
What’s interesting is that we’ve had ongoing e-mail interchanges about the problem of N.T.Wright’s theology. Not all the seminary-trained guys have stepped in because a lot of them don’t know enough about him to say anything but I have noticed that only the seminary-trained guys are capable of doing the kind of work to critically evaluate N.T.Wright.
 
These are generalizations. One of the greatest critical thinkers I know is Jim Myers. Jim didn’t go to seminary. He did go to Moody Bible Institute. He didn’t learn critical thinking skills there. I don’t know where he learned them but that’s one of the things I love about going over to Kiev every year, the times we have together to really sharpen one another. Anyhow, we have to learn these things.
 
I have to protect you so we’re just going to kind of set this up real quick before we get into our study of Romans. In the last part of Romans, chapters12:1 through 16:27, Paul relates Israel to the righteousness of God and its practical application. Now in this outline I’m not giving you everything related to what Paul’s saying. I’m simply pointing out that in each section Paul relates the righteousness of God to Israel. In justification, in sanctification, in the glorification of God, and the vindication of God’s righteousness with reference to His plan and purposes for Israel since it appears that Israel is being set aside for the Gentiles, this new thing called the Church.
 
Now one last thing I want to point out about N.T. Wright before we move on is a paper. David Roseland knew about this, pulled it up, and sent it out this afternoon. The paper is by Dan Wallace. I don’t always agree with a lot of things Dan has to say. Dan was a classmate of mine. He’s gone on to stellar intellectual recognition as a textual critic and has done some good things there. His organization has discovered a lot of manuscripts in the old eastern Roman Empire that had been sitting hidden away for years. In fact, you can’t say anything about it, because of publishing contracts but he has a book that is going to be coming out, going to be published by T & T Clark which is a well-known Scottish imprint where he is going to be describing the fact that they have recently discovered, with all the evidence to support it, a fragment of the gospel of Mark that dates to the 1st century. That’s fabulous. That’s just incredible. So Dan’s done some good things.
 
I don’t agree with some things he teaches. He’s a progressive dispensationlist. He trends a little bit too much to lordship salvation but when he deals with N.T. Wright his conclusions were pretty good. In his conclusion he says something we should be aware of, “What Wright has done is to pick up on a minor theme that is necessary for Paul’s argument that all people are sinners and in need of salvation.” See what Wallace is saying is that the main point in Romans is that everybody’s a sinner and in need of salvation but the righteousness of God is not the main point, it’s a sub-point to prove that. Wright has turned that minor theme into the theme of Romans.
 
“His [N.T. Wright’s] language is strong, even full of hubris at points. [I do think righteousness of God is a major theme but Wright has misdefined it saying it’s God’s covenant relation with Israel.]” This pounding of the pulpit [by Wright] does not alleviate the problem that his vision of Paul’s doctrine of justification, as attractive and coherent as it is, does not adequately deal with the text.” Now that’s just a great insight. That critique can be made of a lot of pastors I know. They have great theological systems but they don’t adequately deal with the text. We have to be text-based in whatever we say.
 
Wallace goes on to say, “Coherent arguments are made all the time about this or that aspect of the Bible’s teaching.” That’s a brilliant observation. A lot of people think that something makes so much sense that the speaker must be right. No, just because someone’s argument is coherent and seems logically consistent doesn’t mean it comes from the text. Wallace says, “Coherent arguments are made all the time about this or that aspect of the Bible’s teaching but when they don’t match with the text they must be rejected. I would view Wright’s synthesis of Romans as a brilliant failure. Brilliant because of how coherent it is but a failure because it sits three feet above the text at all points.” I can’t tell you how many people on their theologies do that. They sound so good but they’re about two or three feet off the text. They’re not dealing with what the Scripture says. We’re going to see that a little bit tonight in our study on election and Jacob and Esau.
 
“It’s a failure because it sits three feet above the text and at all points where it would be inconvenient to wrestle with what the text actually says. In this respect, Wright’s views simply cannot handle the inconvenient truth, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore...” See Wright and his New Perspectives on Paul people come along and say that Christians have misunderstood Paul’s critique of the Jews. It wasn’t that they were trying to earn their way to heaven. It’s that they didn’t quite understand that the ritual had ended. As far as N.T. Wright and the others are concerned the moral ethical observance of the Law for Jews is adequate for salvation. He redefines the works of the Law, redefines the righteousness of God, and there are just hundreds of thousands of people who follow him. This guy is just really developing a cult following. We see that the N.T. Wright’s camel nose has gotten even under our tent.
 
Okay, let’s look at the immediate context in . “I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and incessant grief in my heart for I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises whose are the fathers and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all. God blessed forever.” I reordered the phrases there to “Christ came, the eternally blessed God, who is over all. Amen.” An extremely strong affirmation of the deity of Christ.
 
Now a couple of things to note. When Paul starts to talk about the Jews here in 9:3, “I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren”—Pop quiz time everybody—Is that a singular or a plural noun? Brethren is plural. My countrymen is singular or plural? Plural. According to the flesh who are Israelites. Is Israelites singular or plural? Plural. I’m making that point because Paul is emphasizing the Israelites, the Jews, as a corporate entity. This is difficult for some people from a democratic-oriented culture to understand the emphasis on the body of Christ or the corporate nature of the body of Israel. It’s an emphasis on both Israelites as individuals and individual salvation or justification, as well as the salvation and deliverance of the nation as an entity.
 
Now when we talk about the deliverance or salvation of the nation, we’re not talking about going to heaven. We’re talking about the nation finally conforming to God’s plan and purposes by the nation by accepting Christ as Savior. Now when Jesus came in the first Advent, and let’s think this through a little bit. This is going to be foundational to understanding the next two chapters. When Jesus came, there was an announcement to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That was the message of John the Baptist, the message of Jesus, and the message of his disciples. Many individuals responded to that.
 
We’re told in the gospels that people came from all over the country to go down to hear John preach and many thousands were baptized, which was an indication they believed in John’s message. Many thousands believed in Jesus as the Messiah. However, the leadership who are the corporate representatives of the nation rejected Jesus as Messiah. Because of that corporate rejection by the leadership of the nation, the nation was viewed as an entity as having rejected Him as Messiah. There were tens of thousands of Jews who were saved individually but the nation was destroyed and went out under discipline in A.D. 70.
 
Flip it to the end times. In the end times you’re going to have tens of thousands of Jews living in Israel who believe in Jesus as the Messiah and who respond to his warning in that “when you see these signs occur, flee to the mountains immediately.” Don’t go back home, don’t pack a bag, just leave immediately and go to the mountains and hide and God will protect you. So half way through the Tribulation when they see the Abomination of Desolation, when the Antichrist sets up his idol to be worshipped in the Temple, and declares himself to be God, then these people are going to say, “This is what Jesus was talking about. I’m going to do what Jesus said. I’m going to leave.”
 
Unsaved Jews aren’t going to do what Jesus said, they’re not going to know what Jesus said. So the Jews who are believers are already individually justified and they are going to hit the road and head to the hills. After this group leaves and go to hide themselves in an area across the Dead Sea and into the southwestern part of Jordan today, near probably Petra, Basra as indicated by the prophets, there, as an entity, as a corporate group they will call upon the Lord to save them.
 
This is where we’re going to end up at the end of and in this manner all Israel will be saved or delivered. It’s not talking about justification there. It’s talking about that corporate deliverance when Israel as a nation finally turns as a whole and says, “Jesus, come and save us.” Then the Lord returns right before the Battle of Armageddon and delivers them and they will go into the end of the Tribulation period. So this is the difference between corporate and individual salvation.
 
Paul’s talking about the corporate group here. He’s not talking about the individual. The reason I say this is because when we get to this next little section, starting in and it talks about the fact that it’s not talking about personal or individual justification when it gets to “Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated.” Jacob and Esau in context represent the nations that came from them. It’s corporate entities that we’re talking about here. This passage has nothing to do with individual justification. It has to do with God’s choice in selecting certain people groups for certain destinies in history, not their eternal destiny.
 
So when we get into , we read, “But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who descended from Israel, nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants.” We can diagram it this way. There is one large group, Israel, which is made up of everyone who is an ethnic descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s what makes someone Jewish as compared to someone who is not. If you are a descendant of Abraham, like Ishmael, but are not in the line of the seed, or like Esau who was not in the line of the seed, you’re still a descendant of Abraham. That doesn’t make you Jewish. The Jewish line ran from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
That’s what makes you Jewish, not one of the descendants of Ishmael or of Abraham’s second wife, Keturah who had other sons. It’s not those descendants. It’s only the line through Isaac Now when the text says that it’s not as though the word of God has no effect, that word there in my New King James is not capitalized. It’s not talking about the bible. It’s talking about the promise of God to Abraham. “In you, my seed will be named.” That’s the promise of God. The line of the seed is going to come through Abraham.
 
Remember back in God told the serpent that the serpent will be at enmity with the seed of the woman. Now the seed of the woman is a really strange term because the Greek word for seed is sperm. That’s associated with the male, not women, but the seed of the woman is emphasizing a male descendant from the woman, from Eve. In some of the older pre-Christian Jewish interpretations there seems to be an indication that there was something special about a particular woman and that’s why in the prophecy is “Behold the virgin…” There’s an assumption there that it’s a particular woman.
 
So you have this seed terminology that goes through Genesis that those genealogies are not there to put you to sleep at night or back to sleep in the morning when you’re trying to read your Bible. They’re there to trace the lineage of the Messiah all the way back. So you have the seed of the woman going through the third son of Adam and Eve, Seth, and going down to Noah, and through Shem and down through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and then through Jacob’s son, Judah, all the way down through Jesse and David, all the way down eventually to Jesus. You can trace that whole lineage of Jesus through these genealogies, all the way down to Matthew, chapter one. So the promise of God is what they are referring to here and there’s some Jews at the time Paul writes who have doubts about this. Has God breached his promises? Has he broken His word to us? And so Paul is saying no he’s hasn’t broken His word just because there is defection among ethnic Jews to the truth. Not all ethnic Israel is true Israel. True Israel are those who are not only ethnic Jews but also regenerate Jews. They have to be regenerate.
 
That’s the whole point Jesus is making to Nicodemus in John, chapter 3 that unless a person is born again they cannot see the kingdom of God. Jesus is emphasizing the importance of personal regeneration that comes when a person believes that Jesus died on the cross for their sin. It’s not a result of their performing certain moral, ethical acts in life, which is what the Jews, the Pharisees thought. They believed if you lived a good enough life and followed the rituals, the Mosaic Law, and the traditions then you would be good enough to see the Messianic kingdom. So Paul is saying that not all Israel is Israel and that means that there’s only a true regenerate group that is referred to sometimes as the remnant.
 
Paul says it’s not that the word of God has taken no effect. Notice in English there’s a double negative there that cancels each other out. He’s saying it that way for emphasis so it gets our attention because it’s unusual to see a double negative. The word of God has taken effect. That’s his emphasis. It has taken effect because it has had a powerful impact. He goes on to say in verse 7, “Nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants [the seed of Abraham which I mentioned a minute ago].” Ismael and Esau are from the line of Abraham but they’re not from the line of the seed. The sons of Keturah are not from the line of the seed. It’s the line of the seed which is important and this goes from Isaac on down through Jacob. 
 
He continues, “But through Isaac your descendants will be named.” God made a choice when he selected Abraham. He’s not selecting Abraham to be justified. says that Abraham was justified by faith, so God isn’t selecting Abraham to be justified. He’s selecting Abraham among other believers at that time. Probably Job lived at the same time, certainly Melchisedec was a believer who lived at the same time as Abraham and so there were other believers at the same time. God is choosing Abraham for a special purpose in human history. God is going to work in and through Abraham and his descendants to reveal Himself to the human race and to give them the privilege and custodianship of Scripture to record and preserve what God inspires the prophets to write so that that is preserved. Ultimately the seed is fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
So in Paul says “That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.” Physically ethnic Israelites are not the children of God. There’s a pernicious doctrine that came out of 19th century Protestant liberalism that we’re all children of God. It’s called the universal fatherhood of God. Let’s just all hold hands and sing “kum ba ya and go home. That’s the idea. It’s out of pure liberalism that we’re all just God’s children. We are all, as I pointed out in the other night, only children of God in one narrow sense. And that’s that we’re all the image of God; we’re all created in the image of God, and we are all created by God. “That’s it. We’re not born spiritually children of God. We’re born spiritually dead.
 
Jesus told the Pharisees in that they were of their father, the Devil, not regenerate. So among the Jews and Gentiles there are two groups; those who are children of the flesh ethnically but that doesn’t mean they are spiritually descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Verse 8 goes on to say, “But the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.” That’s those who believe the Messianic promise in the Old Testament, these are counted as the seed, the descendants of Abraham. There’s a whole important discussion of the meaning of the seed but I’m just going to leave it basic here that it’s a collective noun and in many cases it refers to the whole of the group of the descendants of Abraham but in some places it’s very clear it’s a singular idea and that’s because of certain pronouns and other terms that are associated with it.
 
Now he defines the promise in verse 9, “For this is the word of promise [the word of God in verse 6].” This is taken from and 14 where God told them “at this time I will come and Sarah will have a son.” He says nothing about Ishmael’s salvation or the lack of it in these passages. I want you to keep your place here by sticking something here and turn back to . We’re going to go back and forth a little bit tonight and we see here how God promised with specificity the coming of the seed. Now back in God gives a preview of coming attractions, just like a good movie where you go in and before the main movie, you get a preview of some other movies. In this case you’re getting a preview of the coming story, a little teaser.
 
In we have a summary of the covenant God is going to make with Abram. He tells him to get out of his country and from his relatives and go to the land which He will show him. He says in verse 2, “I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and so you shall be a blessing.” So blessing is another part of this covenant and also the idea of seed, although the term is not mentioned here the idea is present in the phrase, a great nation. At this point Abram and Sarai are childless. So we see all three elements of the covenant there: land, seed, and blessing.
 
This gets expanded in when God actually makes a covenant with Abraham and gives him specific promises related to his descendants and what will happen in the future. So God tells him in 15:9 to bring a sacrifice and he brings it and cut all the animals into pieces and laid them out for a sacrifice. Abraham is protecting the animals because vultures want to come and eat the dead flesh so he’s driving them away. This went on most of the afternoon and he was so tired he had to take a nap. God caused a deep sleep to come upon him and while Abraham is asleep, God alone passed between the parts of the sacrifice. That shows that God alone is binding Himself to the terms of this contract. Abraham didn’t have a clue. He’s taking a nap. God promised things to Abraham following that and that’s the actual cutting of the contract.
 
Then in chapter 17 there’s a sign given related to the covenant and that is circumcision and then in chapter 18 God has come to the terebinth trees at Mamre down near Hebron and there He tells them more specifics They’ve been waiting about twenty years at this point for the coming of this promised child. In verse 10 God says, “I will surely return to you at this time next years, and behold, Sarah, your wife will have a son.” Now Abraham and Sarah were old, well advanced in age and Sarah had passed the age of childbearing and it says Sarah laughed within herself which is a form of the word tsacjaq which is why the child is named Isaac and she scoffs at God saying this. They didn’t believe it could really happen.
God’s response is to ask why Sarah laughed. Verse 14, “Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you at this time next year and Sarah will have a son.” God specified that son would be born and the son will be called Isaac. Verse 10 of says, “And Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac, for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls.”
 
Now Rebekah is the wife of Isaac. So Sarah gives birth to Isaac. Isaac grows up. It’s time for Isaac to get married so Abraham sent his servant, Eleazer, to go back to the relatives in Haran to find someone who was a God-worshipper who would be worthy of Isaac. So he found Rebekah. Rebekah is like her mother-in-law, Sarah, barren for a while. All these matriarchs, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel all have a period of barrenness. This is to show it’s God who is working a miracle to bring forth birth.
 
I’ve taught through the doctrine of the barren woman before. There are only six women whose barrenness is made an issue of in the Scriptures and they all have to do with someone being born who is part of God’s plan. You have the three matriarchs. You have Hannah, the mother of Samuel. You have Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. There’s something being taught there, that only God can bring forth life where there is death. It’s teaching the principle of regeneration and the principle that Israel, especially with the three matriarchs, is a miraculous birth of God. Oh, the other one was the birth of Samson.
 
The one we’re looking at now and we’re going to deal with has to do with these two children that Rebekah’s going to have. She’s pregnant with twins and before they’re born, before they’ve done any good or evil, “that the purpose of God according to choice [election] might stand, not of works but of Him who calls.” The argument here is that God has the right to choose whom He will use to serve His purpose. He’s not selecting them for justification. He is deciding what the line of the seed will be through whom the Savior will come. It’s national.
 
In fact what we learn in the passage in is that what God tells Rebekah that there are two nations struggling inside her womb. Even there he’s not talking about them as individuals but as the representative of their descendants. Romans 19:12, “It was said to her [Rebekah] that the older shall serve the younger.” This was God’s plan that Esau would be the older by just a couple of minutes and he will serve the younger, Jacob.
 
Then verse 13 says, Just as it is written, Jacob I have loved but Esau I hated.” Now this passage has been distorted and misunderstood many, many times as if this is a personal selection process and God is deciding who’s going to be saved and who’s not. These are terms of acceptance and rejection. It’s not that God hated Esau. He didn’t select Esau for his plan. As we’ll see next time when we come back and go through the Old Testament stories, Esau was blessed by God. So was Ishmael. He was richly blessed by God. I believe both Ishmael and Esau were Old Testament believers. But God’s plan wasn’t for the seed to go through their line. It was to go through the line of Isaac and Jacob so for that reason Ishmael and Esau are said to be rejected. Love and hate here indicate acceptance and rejection for a plan. It’s like a coach saying, “Well I’ve got two good quarterbacks. I’m going to make this one sit on the bench for a while.” He’s not kicking the second stringer off the team. He’s just not the primary quarterback. That’s what God is doing here. He’s selecting Jacob for a purpose. We’ll come back and look at this next time.

Romans 109b-Promises of a Divine Messiah

Romans 9:3 NASB95
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
Romans 109b-Promises of a Divine Messiah , , , , ,
 
Open your Bibles to John, chapter 1. We’ve been studying in which says, “Whose are the fathers [patriarchs] and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” I would move the appositional phrase, “who is over all” after Christ. By putting it in its correct location, it clarifies the fact that this is one of the most profound statements in the New Testament on the deity of the Messiah. He doesn’t say Jesus, which is His human name. Jesus is emphasized when we’re talking about His role as Savior or about His humanity.
 
When christos is used, Christ, which is the Greek translation from the Hebrew Messiah, it should be understood that way. Paul’s talking from his Jewish background and he is saying the Messiah was the eternally blessed God. He’s making a profound claim that the Messiah was to be deity. We’ve been looking at these passages in the last couple of weeks. We’ve looked at and . Now I want to go back to a couple of the passages I briefly touched on because they point out major themes on the Messiah passages in the Old Testament.
 
In and 22, talking about the judgment God was going to bring on Israel and Judah because of their disobedience to God, he expresses in verse 22, “Then they will look to the earth and behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and they will be driven away into darkness.” Darkness is a depiction of the harsh judgment of God and removal from the land that God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and removal from that ongoing revelation that God provided via His presence in the temple.
 
 In Isaiah 9:1 a promise is given, “But there will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish.” This gloom and darkness was not permanent. It was temporary and would be replaced by seeing a “great light” in verse 2 and being restored to a position and blessing and recipients of the divine revelation and the divine presence. There’s a contrast here in verse 1 between being in gloom and then God making the land glorious.” Verse 2, “The people who walk in darkness [spiritual darkness at the time of the arrival of Jesus] have seen a great light.” This verse is quoted in Matthew. “Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them.” So this is a theme that we’re going to pick up in the New Testament in these three passages that we talked about last time.
 
You can’t fully comprehend everything going on in the New Testament unless you know the Old Testament. Not that you can’t understand a certain amount. But when you get into , , and they’re borrowing imagery, specifically imagery of light and darkness, and it comes right out of the Old Testament. You have to connect the dots. When we get into studying the Bible we remember the four basic principles: Observation: what does the text say? Interpretation: what does the text mean? Correlation: How does this fit with other passages of Scripture by comparing Scripture with Scripture or what some call the analogy of Scripture. Application: What does this mean to me?
 
What we see is that the context of which is where we’ll begin tonight, is . That’s the prologue to the gospel of John. The context of is the gospel as a whole. The gospel of John is in the context of four gospels. It fits a particular picture of the Lord Jesus Christ which is somewhat distinct from that of the other three. The four gospels are in a broader context of the New Testament. The New Testament is in the context of the whole Bible.
 
The New Testament is a continuing revelation from the Old Testament after a period of approximately 400 years when there was no new revelation. And so, when talking about context we don’t just talk about the narrow, immediate context but we broaden out until it relates to the whole Bible. Once we do that then things that are said in a particular verse or passage gains a certain greater level of significance because we’re tying it to the whole of Scripture. God didn’t just give us isolated verses. Now Proverbs is that way but the rest of the Bible is not. They’re not just isolated verses or clauses or paragraphs. They fit within a structure of thought.
 
So we have this light and darkness idea depicted in Isaiah as well as the other prophets in the Old Testament. As I said last time there are three passages central to understanding the deity of Christ in the New Testament. John1:1-5 and 14, , and . Now there are many other passages that emphasize the deity of Christ but if you can remember those three, then if you’re talking to someone and they raise this question, then you can go to this passage. Write these down in your margins so you can go to them quite easily.
 
Now , “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God and all things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” Notice, in light of the emphasis on the Creator-creature distinction in Paul’s presentation of the gospel in , John begins with creation... Most people will tell you that if you’re going to have one book in the Bible that will clarify the gospel, it ought to be John. John says in , “These things are written that you might believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and by believing you may have life in His name.”
 
Well, look where John starts. He starts with creation. Creation isn’t some ancillary, secondary doctrine of Scripture. I have heard people say sadly, “Why get into any discussion on creation when you’re trying to witness to someone? It’s a distraction.” Maybe the Apostle Paul should have been told that. Maybe John should have been told that. Maybe the Holy Spirit should have been told that. Oh, wait. They’re writing under the inspiration of Scripture. 
 
Verse 3-5 continue, “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life and the life was the Light of the men. The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it.” Where do you think John got the idea of light shining in darkness? He got it because he knew the Hebrew Old Testament. He’s writing this under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but he’s not inventing it. He’s not just a mindless robot with a tube going through his mind and the Holy Spirit pours the words and they go through his mind without being by his own knowledge, his own frame of reference, his own personality, his own background. John is writing this.
 
It’s just that the Holy Spirit is the hidden quality control agent that’s going to make sure that what John writes is without errors. “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” Connect that back to what we read in . So let’s look at what he says here. This is one of the most profound passages in Scripture. It’s sort of a truism in Greek studies, that the simplest Greek is the Greek of the Apostle John. It may be simple, basic vocabulary, it may be simple sentence structure, but it is some of the most profound, erudite reasoning and thought that’s ever been put to paper. It may not be difficult to translate it but it is certainly something that is challenging to fully comprehend and understand, especially when you get into the epistles of John. He has such an economy of language. Every phrase, every word counts. It’s simple but it’s profound.
 
 “In the beginning” is the first statement. This starts off with the Greek preposition en plus the word for beginning which is arche. What we see in , this phrase right here, en arche. It has the preposition en but it has no article. That’s important to understand but it’s correctly translated as a definite noun “in the beginning” Now I’ll show you why with this particular screen. I ran a search on the word arche which is a way to do a word study. I have a list of all 55 times that the noun arche is used in the New Testament.
 
 In a grammar study what we’re looking for is whether there’s some significance to the fact that there’s not an article there. Is it “in a beginning or “in the beginning”? Now there are some words like God that are inherently definite. There are also many other words in English that are definite and do not carry the definite article in English because we know English and we know that when that word is used, it’s a definite noun. In British English, it’s more common for them to talk about going to “hospital”, “when I was in “village” the other day”. They tend to leave out the definite article because it’s understood that certain nouns are inherently definite and the article does not need to be there. This is the same for Greek. We see that arche is always translated definite even if an article is not there.
 
The best place to see this is which says, “In the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ…” Now we wouldn’t translate that as “a beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” That would not make sense at all. The word arche is inherently definite and should always be translated, unless the context demands otherwise, as “the beginning”.
 
Another sort of idiosyncrasy related to Greek is that when you have an article and a noun, if you’re going to put a preposition in front of that noun, it replaces the article. There are some exceptions to that. If you go through all of the uses of the word arche in the New Testament, there is no place where whenever you have arche used as “beginning” it never has an article. So it shouldn’t be translated as “a beginning” at all. It should be translated “the beginning” just as it in the Hebrew of , re shyith. The article is replaced by the preposition. This is what is known also as a Semitism and John, being a native Israelite, understands exactly what he is doing when he says, en arche he means “in the beginning”. It is a specific point in time. In fact, the Greek text makes it very clear in the dictionary, that the word arche is inherently definite but that it refers to a point in time before which nothing had occurred. It’s talking about the beginning of time, the beginning of successive events, and the beginning of any kind of creation.
 
So we say, “At the point at which creation began”. At the point when we went from nothing to something. At the point of ex nihilo which is a Latin phrase for “out of nothing”. If you’re taking an observation of this particular passage, just paying attention to what’s there, you notice that three times we have the English word “was”. It is a translation of the Greek word eimi which is an imperfect active indicative. Now you often hear me talk about these parts of speech. Sometimes it’s not as significant in a passage as other times so I don’t always make a point of it. But many times it is significant to understand each element in the parsing of a verb, especially. An imperfect tense is one of the forms of the past tense. The imperfect tense looks at past action as being continuous, continually going on. Sometimes it can be a short time frame; sometimes it’s a long time frame; but it’s not looking at it as just a snapshot. It’s looking at it more like a movie. For those of you who are very young, it’s like looking at an AVI file or a .mod file or a YouTube video. It’s action in progress. Whereas the aorist tense is like looking at a snapshot. Now that snapshot is just summarizing something that happened without saying anything about the length or duration of the action. It’s very important that this is an imperfect tense because it’s talking about a point in time when time began and when that point in time occurred, the Word was continuously already in existence. Okay? So there was an existence before the beginning.
 
What existed continuously before that point in time of a beginning was something referred to here in the text as the logos. This term here can be and is translated a wide variety of ways depending on the context. We translate it “the word” because word has to do with revelation. Word has to do with communication of content. It has to do with that communication of God to man and this fits the context where we look down in where we read, “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father. He has explained [declared] Him.”
 
The Greek word for declared in that verse is exegeomai. Sound familiar? Like exegesis? That’s where we get our word to unpack something, like you unpack your suitcase after a trip. That’s the idea of exegeomai. Jesus Christ has unpacked for us who the Father is. So that has to do with revelation. When you have a word here that can mean a number of different things, how do we know what’s in the context? Well, you have to read and understand the context.
 
The idea that “word” as communication or revelation is important. Another idea in logos is reason. We use words like biology, zoology, the study of life. We have a word in Greek logizomai which we’ve studied a lot. logos is the root of it as a noun. As a verb it means to give an account for something. It’s an accounting term, to add something up to reckon it, or in some cases, to make an imputation of something. logos can refer to word, matter, or a thing. It can refer to something that is spoken. So in this verse, we see that in the beginning something was already in existence before that point in time and the Word continuously was existing with God and the Word was continuously God.
 
We have this second preposition in the text pros which indicates a relationship, a close proximity. Sometimes that’s been translated “face-to-face” but it’s not just face-to-face like two stones statues standing nose-to-nose, chest-to-chest, eyeball-to-eyeball. It emphasizes a relationship. It emphasizes fellowship -a husband being with his wife, a father being with his children. It indicates that kind of relationship between persons. So it’s emphasizing that the logos is a person and that God is a person. So that’s one of the implications here with that particular preposition, “The word was with [in relationship or proximity or fellowship] with God and the Word was God.”
 
Now this last phrase has brought up quite a bit of discussion in the sense of how in the world are we to understand this? In the Greek the word has the article as it does in the English, then you have the verb, then you have the word God without the article. At this point you have some people in history, called Arians, back in the early 4th century who didn’t believe that Jesus was eternal. They believed there was a point in time in eternity past when the second person of the Trinity was created. Today they’re known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. If they ever knock on your door and they present their little New World translation to have you read from it. It will read, “And the Word was a god.” The claim is that the Word just had deity but there is a Greek word that is perfectly good to use if you’re just going to simply express that idea that the Word was divine. That would be the Green word theos. That’s not the word that is used here.
 
So we have some really profound things going on in “In the beginning was the Word, the logos.” This was a key term for both Greeks and Jews. In rabbinical thought by this time, the saying of God in the Old Testament amar is the Hebrew word for God said, they used a participial form of that which was memra. So memra would also be translated as logos. So if you were Jewish and you were reading this you would be thinking in terms of the memra of God but John isn’t really writing this to a Jewish audience. It is known there are Jews around where John is writing. By the time he wrote the gospel of John, he was living in /Ephesus. He was far from the land of Israel. It’s late in his life. There’s debate even among conservatives over the timing of the writing of the gospel of John in relationship to the writing of Revelation. Some people think that Revelation was written last. Other people think the Gospel of John was written last. I’m not sure how to solve that or if we can solve that debate. We know, though, that this is late, after the fall of Jerusalem. The Apostle John is living as a pastor in Ephesus and so he is communicating to a Greek mind. Also, we know from our study in Acts, that there are a number of Jewish-background Christians who were present. So this is one of one of those words that is a double or triple entendre that has a loaded sense to it. For Jews it would remind them of the memra of God, the revelation of God, from the Old Testament.
 
To Greeks it would speak of communication. It had a rich history with them, the philosophical tradition. On Tuesday nights in our Acts study we’ve been looking at Paul’s presentation to the philosophers at the Aeropagus. This is composed of two different groups: the Stoics and the Epicureans. The Stoics believed in logos. For them it was a rational first principle by which everything existed. When they heard the word logos they’re thinking of it as something in the creation, not something distinct from creation. They violated that Creator/creature distinction. Stoics understood logos to be this principle of reason by which everything existed and which the essence of the rational, human soul is. So every human being participates in this logos.
 
On Tuesday night I started getting into this abstract doctrine a lot of people haven’t heard before. If you listen to Charlie Clough’s framework series, he talks about it and few others have talked about it but it’s really not talked about much. We have to understand that it’s that thing called the Chain of Being. Everything participates in logos, in reason, as the first principle according to Stoicism. Further down that chain you go where there’s less and less sentient life the less it participates in logos. logos is like that divine spark in modern thought that everybody has in them. So this is where these kinds of ideas come from.
 
Philo was a Jew who lived at that same time and he talked about the logos of God but he had a totally different meaning for it. For him the logos of God is almost like the Biblical idea of the image of God but not really. He’s using it to refer to the ideal man or the primal man. For him logos has no personhood or personality and can’t become incarnate. So this word logos took on different senses with different philosophical systems.
 
John gives it a whole new sense the way he uses it in the gospel of John. It describes a person as we’re going to see who is in close fellowship with God. He’s with God and He was God. In verse 2 we read, “And He was in the beginning with God.” So at that point in time when time begins, when creation begins, when we move from nothingness and the only thing that exists is God, the Word is present with God. Then in verse 3 we have a creation statement. Verses one and two clearly talk about a state prior to creation. Verse 3 talks about the act of creation. “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” Notice the emphasis on the word “being”.
 
Tuesday night, what have we been talking about? We’re talking about that Chain of Being, the chain of existence, the same word. Here what we see is Jesus and the Father are completely separate and distinct from being. Being is something they create. There is a wall between God and his creation, that Creator-creature distinction. This is a clear statement of deity because only God can create out of nothing.
 
Then the next two verses, “In Him was life and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.” Not only was He the source of all creation but He’s the source of life and His life is what illuminates mankind. I want you to notice something else. Look at verse 6. Here we shift. We saw act one, scene one in verses 1-5, now we see act one, scene two, in verses 6-13.
 
We have a new character on the stage and this is a man named John. In English we read, “There came a man sent from God, whose name was John.” In the English translation, the second word was is in italics in the New King James. The American Standard didn’t italicize it but it’s italicized because it’s not in the original Greek. “There was a man…” See you have the word was and you have it all the way through verses 1 through 5. This was sort of reminds you of whatever the meaning of “is” is. Was here in verse 6 isn’t the same was as you have in verses 1-5. That was the verb eimi in the imperfect tense. Now we have a different Greek word, ginomai. There are three words in Greek where you want to talk about something existing, something is. It’s called the existential verb. Something comes into existence. So is means is. The past tense is was. ginomai is the word to come into existence.
 
And so the contrast is that in the beginning the Word always existed but in contrast to what always existed or continuously existed in the past, there was a man named John who came into existence. Throughout this chapter there’s this contrast between the logos who continually exists, which means He’s God, and the human, John the Baptist. This passage goes on to talk about the role of John the Baptist as a witness in verse 7 and he’s there to bear witness of the Light. Notice that imagery for the purpose that all through him, John the Baptist, all might believe.
 
This is our first usage of 95 uses of belief in the gospel of John. Not believe and repent. Repent was his message but the issue was belief. Verse 8 says, He was not the Light but he came to testify about the Light.” Then verse 9, “There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.” What do you think we’re talking about? Light, Light, Light. This light coming in from darkness. Verse 11 says, “He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as did receive Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God even to those who believe in His name who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
 
We believe God regenerates. We cannot regenerate ourselves. We can only believe but God is the One Who regenerates us. Now verses 14 and 18 really tie it together for us. “And the Word became flesh…” That’s ginomai. The word eimi indicates continuously existing and that indicates His deity. But when it says the Word became flesh, that’s the same word that was used of John in verse 6. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
 
Often when the word glory is used in the New Testament it has that idea of the radiance of God’s essence, so often the word stands for the essence of God. So when it says we beheld His glory, it’s not talking about the shekinah glory, the brilliant light. That was only seen one time during the incarnation, during the Mount of Transfiguration. That was only seen by John and James. It wasn’t seen by everybody. So John isn’t talking about that glory. He’s talking about the essence of God as revealed through the Son. That’s that light shining in darkness.
 
In verse 15 we shift back to John, “John testified about Him and cried out saying, “This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.” In verse 18 we read, “No one has seen God at any time, the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” So the Word becomes flesh, that’s the incarnation. His pre-existence was the deity of Christ. He’s not just human; He is divine. He is one, therefore, who can explain God because He is one with God. So emphasizes the deity of Christ first, and then it’s joined with the humanity of Christ.
So to summarize it, number one, it teaches that Christ as the logos already was, continued existence in past time, in the beginning at that point of creation, emphasizing His pre-existence, His eternal pre-existence. Second, we saw that it states that He was with God, personal fellowship. It’s a distinct person but they’re having personal fellowship with one another, so God is personal, the logos is personal. It’s not an impersonal principle of reason which is how the Greeks understood it. Third, the text says that He was God, meaning that He is fully divine, which means He’s eternal. It doesn’t mean He came into existence sometime in eternity past and He’ll live forever but that He has always been and always will be.
 
 Fourth, we learn from this that He’s the ultimate revelation of God to man. Nothing can surpass Him. Fifth, He became flesh so that He is the God-Man. This fits with everything we saw in the Old Testament. In , and , that the Messiah would be fully human and fully divine. Sixth, we see also in this passage that He is the Creator of all things; therefore He is God. In verse 18, He’s called the only begotten Son. The word begotten is from monogenes which really means unique or one of a kind. It doesn’t emphasize birth or being born. It emphasizes uniqueness. mono meaning one, genes meaning genus or species. That word genes is a category or a type. So it’s a one of a kind, the unique Son of God.
 
A couple of other passages just so you relate to them. The first is . This is when Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees and he’s been talking about Abraham looking forward to seeing His day and they said to him, “Well Abraham has been in his grave. How can you talk about what Abraham wants?” He replied by saying, “Before Abraham was [there’s that past tense again], I am [present tense].” So the present tense there is emphasizing His continuous existence. Abraham had a temporary existence in the past.
 
The second verse is in . We’re coming to the conclusion of the first main part of the gospel of John. The gospel of John was written why? To show the signs that Jesus gave of His messiah ship. In it says, “These were written…” What are the “these”? Well you have to go back to the verse before. This is when Thomas was doubting whether or not Jesus had been raised from the dead and he doesn’t really believe it. He says he wants to put his hand on the nail prints in His hand and he wanted to feel the wound in His side and only then would he believe. Then suddenly Jesus appeared in the upper room there and Thomas fell down and said, “My Lord and my God.” John then says that this was a sign of His resurrection. That’s the eighth sign in the gospel of John. So in it says, “So these are written…” These refers back to the signs of the verse before. “These signs are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.”
 
 Seven of those signs were performed between chapter one and chapter twelve. There’s a clear break there before we get into the last sign, which is the resurrection, so begins with the upper room discourse, the night before He goes to the Cross, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. Now as John concludes this first section of the book he says that Jesus had done so many signs before. It wasn’t just the eight signs. He did many, many other signs but these eight are the ones that John emphasizes but the great one is the resurrection. In , John points out, “But though He had performed so many signs before them, yet they were not believing in Him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah, the prophet which he spoke: “Lord who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” For this reason they could not believe for Isaiah said again, “He has blinded their eyes and He hardened their heart…” Now that’s not saying that God just reached down and turned their volition to negative. See, they’ve already gone negative. God is just allowing them and strengthening the choice they’ve already made. “…lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart and be converted so that I should heal them. These things Isaiah said because he saw His glory and spoke of Him.”
 
Now when did Isaiah see the glory of Jesus? In Isaiah chapter 6, when he’s before the Throne of God and he saw the glory of God. He saw the seraphim singing, “Holy, holy, holy” before the Lord. This was when he saw the glory of God and there is the fullness of God. All three members of the Trinity are there so these things Isaiah said when he saw His glory. So again, emphasizing the eternality, the glory, and the essence of Jesus as fully God.
 
So John1:1 is our first New Testament passage emphasizing the deity of Christ. The second passage is a relatively short one in Colossians, chapter 1, verses 15-18. Verse 15 is the key verse, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” The first thing Paul says about Christ in this passages that first He’s the image of God, and then He created everything. Oh yeah, creation isn’t important. That’s just a distraction. It gets people all caught up in the wrong idea so let’s just not worry about creation and evolution. Let’s just concede ground here. Really?
 
I was really saddened recently because I read a book review on my recent trip on vacation. It was a book review written by the Institute of Biblical Research. It doesn’t matter the name of the book or the authors but one of the authors was a man I’d almost done my pastoral internship under in 1979 but he decided to resign from his church here in Houston at that time. He went on to be the president of Columbia Bible College. Later he came back to that church for a while. I had first met him and gotten to know him when he spoke several times at Camp Peniel. He had written an excellent little pamphlet on creation. He was a “young earth” creationist. Now he’s become an “old earth” creationist. He made a shift about fifteen years ago. About twenty years ago he also went sort of semi-charismatic. It just breaks my heart as I watch individual after individual begin to compromise with the thinking of the world. I’ve seen this with people in the pew. I’ve seen this with pastors in the pulpit and with theologians in the seminary and they just compromise the truth. I look back at the men who were the most instrumental in teaching me the truth of God’s word when I was a young man, both before I went to college as a teen-ager and later, and there were some from a certain generation who held their ground but many younger ones who came up after them in that intervening generation started off right and have shifted over the years.
 
This is one of the reason we see the visible church today in the mess that’s it in. These men have compromised their spiritual integrity with the thinking of the world. They no longer believe the things that I heard them teach me when I was a young man in my twenties. Creation is important! “For by Him all things were created both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things hold together.” These are referring to different divisions of angels. Jesus Christ is the Creator. Again and again we hear this clear statement of his full deity. He is before all things. Through Him all things consist.
 
In verse 18, “He is also head of the body, the church, and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.” So we see these phrases, “He is the image of the invisible God.” This is the word ikon. He is a representation of the invisible God. We’re going to see this same idea in . He is the flashing forth, the express image or radiance, effulgence of the essence of God. This is expressed in His glory. Notice which says “In whose case [unbelievers] the god of this world [Satan] has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” See, this isn’t just something that Paul throws in as a nice idea. It’s foundational to everything he says about Christ and about the Christian life and about salvation. It’s not secondary.
 
In Jesus prayed, “Now Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” This is the same glory that Jesus expresses to people in His ministry. “He is the image of the invisible God.” God the Father is unseen. No one has seen Him at any time. said, “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father. He has explained [declared] Him.” Then he’s called the firstborn. This is a term that can mean first in time but it is also used many times to refer to somebody who is first in rank, the preeminent one. That’s how it’s used here to describe Jesus. He’s not the first of those who were born but He is the preeminent One; He is the exalted One. He is the One who is set over everything else.
 
This comes again out of an Old Testament context. uses this term firstborn in relationship to the Messiah. This is a meditation on the Davidic covenant. In this Psalm written by David as he’s reflecting upon what God has done in giving this promise to him that one of his descendants would be eternally on his throne, he says in the words of God, the Father, “You will cry to Me, ‘You are My Father, My God, and the rock of my salvation. I also shall make him My firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” So this is talking about His position, part of which is His ranking because of His exaltation at the Ascension that He is set over all humanity as the One who is elevated to the right hand of God the Father.
 
Then it is explained further in Colossians that He is the One by whom all things were created, and for Him. So He is the One who will be the ruler of all things. I’m going to stop here because we’re about to run out of time, looking at verses 16 and 17 next time and then before we go back into our passage in and begin to deal with this. It just struck me as we’re looking at that Paul is talking about the significance of the Jews and the Jewish people and God’s continuous love for them even though they’re in rebellion and right there at the beginning he makes a non-compromising affirmation on the full deity of the Messiah. He never backs down on these important principles and neither should we.

Romans 110b-Jesus is Fully God

Romans 9:5 NASB95
whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
Romans 110b-Jesus is Fully God ; ;
 
We are in Romans, chapter 9 and in the last three or four lessons the focus has been on understanding what the Scripture says about the deity of Jesus. Those who are disbelievers of Christianity in the Bible focus on attacking the authority of Scripture and the deity of Christ. We live in a world today where you get these attacks more and more frequently and you hear them in a lot of different places. I was talking not long ago with some friends of mine who both love history and they pointed out that they watch almost everything that’s on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, all of these different things. That’s not unusual. A lot of people are that way and it would not surprise us how many people get their understanding of Christianity from these kinds of sources. But PBS, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel are not good sources because they interview popular theologians. Popular theologians are popular because they reject the absolutes of Scripture. You can’t count on them for truth.
 
My point is that these ideas have filtered down to everyday people and whether they know who teaches them or who they come from or not is not important. That’s what they believe. They say, “Well, the Bible doesn’t really make that claim. Someone else made that claim about Jesus some hundred or two hundred years later so how can you really believe Jesus is God? So how do you answer that question? People will ask that, not necessarily to just be attacking you when you’re witnessing to them but they’ve heard this and they want to know an answer. We don’t want to intellectually insult them by saying they just have to believe it because we said so. We have to be able to articulate our faith. Paul did it. Peter did it. Peter said we all have to do it in when he said to be “ready to give an answer for the hope that is in you.” We have to be able to explain why we believe these particular things.
 
Sometimes when we’re witnessing to people, such as a friend I’ve had a number of conversations with over many years, and he has a set of 10 or 12 reasons why you can’t believe the New Testament. He can machine-gun those things out of his mouth. About three years ago I just stopped him after the first one. I said, “STOP! I know you have a bunch of other reasons but let’s just talk about that one.” People put these objections out of there as part of their suppression of truth mechanism to prevent from really having a conversation because they don’t want to hear the truth and be challenged. My strategy has been that each time we have one of these conversations, I’m just going to stop him on one of these objections and say, “Let me show you why that’s not a valid objection.” As time goes by, I’m kind of picking apart this defensive mechanism that he has. That’s not just something I should do as a pastor. That’s something we’re all supposed to do. My responsibility as a pastor is to equip you to do the work of the ministry. That means it’s not really my job to do most of the evangelism around here. It’s your job. So we need to be prepared to do that.
 
Now is just a great verse and is one of the most significant verses for stating the deity of Christ in the New Testament. In modern theology, they have this interesting little mechanism they use by saying, “Well, Paul doesn’t really make a really clear, obvious or overt statement that Christ is God anywhere else in his writings.” That’s not exactly true but that’s what they say. “So this can’t really be Paul’s style.” That’s a common thing that is said today. But it’s really clear from the Scripture that he says Christ is God. In verse 5 he says, “Of whom are the Fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh Christ came.” In other words Christ came from the patriarchal father, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph and his brothers. Christ came and then I shifted the appositional phrase around and makes it even clearer, “Christ came, the Eternally Blessed God.” This is a really strong statement on the deity of Christ. And that He is “over all.”
 
Last time we looked at this in terms of three Old Testament promises you can put in the little arsenal of your Christian witnessing “magazine” so you can fire at least three bullets at them from the Old Testament and three from the New Testament. The three Old Testament promises are: , , . All of these chapters are odd numbers to help you remember. Three New Testament verses that clearly talk about the deity of Christ are and 14, , and .
 
Last time we looked at and saw that Christ was the Word, the logos, indicating a separate distinct personality and the Word was God. The important thing here is the verb “was” because it’s in the imperfect tense which indicates continual past tense existence. It’s very different from what we find in when it says, “There came a man, John…” It uses the verb ginomai meaning “coming into existence”, whereas the word eimi in verse 1 indicates a continual existence. It goes on to say that “the logos was in the beginning with God and all things were made through Him and without Him nothing was made that was made.” So once again, right up front Christ is said to be the creator. Creation is attributed to Him, which is an act of deity and we’re going to see the same thing in Colossians, chapter 1.
 
There’s no apology on the part of the writers of Scripture for believing in the ex nihilo creation, which is what we’ve been studying in our Acts passage on Tuesday nights. It’s interesting that in both the and the passages one of the first things the writers emphasize is on Jesus as Creator. says that He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. Then we have an explanation, “For by Him…” This explains why Paul can say He has the very essence of God. That’s the significance of that first sentence. It’s says He has all the essence of God and the first line of evidence for Him being fully God is that He created all things.
 
“For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities---all things have been created through Him and for Him.” Rulers or authorities usually refer to different ranks among the angels, whether they are fallen angels or whether they are elect angels. Somebody recently asked me if this ranking was affected in any way by the angelic rebellion. I think there probably was a reorganization of the fallen ranks under Satan but that’s as far as we can go. God created each individual angel as its own entity. They don’t have marriage among the angels. They don’t make baby angels so there’s no procreation that takes place. God created each angel in and of itself so they’re not related to one another.
 
We’re all related to one another. We may go back two hundred years, five hundred years and we may go back all the way to Noah in order to have a connection to Shem, Ham, and Japheth but we’re all basically cousins. There’s a pretty good chance that there’s at least one member or extended member of this congregation who has a common ancestor with me. I don’t know what that’s called but it’s a long way back and we’re all related. That’s why Christ could die for the entire human race because He became a human being, via the virgin conception and birth, so he’s genetically related to every one of us. But He couldn’t die for the angels because He wasn’t an angel.
 
Every now and then someone comes along and thinks that Jesus’ death has something to do with some sort of redemption solution for Satan or for the angels. But Jesus dies for human beings because He is a human. That’s what allows for the substitutionary death of Christ. He can’t die for the angels. He couldn’t come as an angel and die for all the other angels because the angels aren’t related to one another. There’s not an integrated unity there but there is with the human race. So He is also the image of the invisible God. He is God Himself and so He is the firstborn over all creation.
 
Now we look at this terminology, which describes who He is in verse 15 and describes actions that demonstrate His essence in verse 16. And in verse 17 states His eternality and also His sustaining work of the creation. Then verse 18 ties Him to His role in relationship to the Church. In verse 15 we read three key terms here: He’s the image of the invisible God; then the second term He’s the invisible God and we ask what does that mean and how is that significant and then the third term is the term firstborn.
 
As we look at this first word, image or eikon, a representation of God. It indicates the essence of the thing that the image reflects and shares in the essence of this thing. That’s why in Greek Orthodox culture they get into trouble with their so-called idolatry. It was called the iconoclastic controversy in the early church. They have these icons which they put up in Greek Orthodox churches. They’ll have an array of candles, flowers, and they pray to those icons. Some of them say that those are just sort of like training aids.
 
The problem is that in Greek thought there is this integral relationship between the essence of the thing and its image. They’re united. This goes all the way back to some of the thought of Plato and Aristotle. So two ideas are present with this word. One is that Jesus as the image possesses full deity. He has all of the attributes of God. To say Jesus is the image of God is not just saying Jesus is just a picture of God. It’s saying that Jesus shares in all of the essence and all of the attributes of God. The concept of image also indicates a representation. Just as you might have a picture or an icon on your screen on your computer, it represents something.
 
Both ideas are present here. Jesus is the very essence of God and He is the representative of God. This fits with what we saw last time in and 18 that no one has seen God at any time but the only begotten has explained Him. So He is the eternal Logos who became flesh and dwelt among us. He added humanity to His deity and He dwelt among us so He could be the one who reveals the Father to us. So how do we know what the Father looks like? Jesus said if you had seen Him you’ve seen the Father. The reverse would be true as well. If we had seen the Father, we would have seen Jesus. There is such a close unity in the Trinity. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen all three of them.
 
The theological term for this is called perichoresis which is the Greek term for a Latin word that was circumcision. They both describe the same thing which is that the Father is in the Son; the Son is in the Father and so on for the Spirit. So if you’ve seen one member of the Trinity, you’ve seen all three because there is an integral unity within the Trinity. So this is very important to understand because we’re finite and we have trouble understanding the concept of the Trinity, we go to the point of separating them so much that when we see something in Scripture, like in , where Isaiah goes before the Throne of God we tend to think that was God the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit. But no, it’s the triune God that He sees. It’s the Godhead that he sees sitting on the Throne.
 
That’s why in Jesus said that Isaiah beheld His glory. That is because if you’ve seen the glory of the Father, you’ve seen the glory of the Son because there’s a unity in the Godhead. This is the doctrine of perichoresis. So Jesus can be said to be the image or the representative of God. The image shares in the reality and the essence of what it represents. So the essence of the thing is portrayed and presented in the image.
 
This is a loaded term. You can’t use an English definition of image to catch all of the nuances and all of the significance of the Greek word that underlies that. This is stated again and again in the New Testament. You have passages like , “In whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers.” We’re going to get into some things related to Calvinism in the coming weeks as we get more into Romans 9. I just want to frontload you with this thing a little bit because in Calvinism there’s this idea of total depravity, which they usually refer to as total inability. They believe it is absolutely impossible for fallen man who is completely incapable of understanding the gospel or even expressing positive volition toward God. They believe it is impossible for the unsaved person to do this. Let me suggest that if it’s so impossible for the unsaved man to even express positive volition, then why does Satan need to blind their minds? Hadn’t thought of that? Why does Satan need to blind the mind of an unbeliever if he’s locked into negative volition and He can’t understand anything? So part of the role of Satan is that he blinds the minds of unbelievers as this verse says. This verse goes on to say why he blinds them, “So that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
 
We’re going to look at the term “the glory of Christ” a little more in-depth in this lesson. The use of glory is often a circumlocution. That’s a fancy way of saying you’re talking about something else. It’s another word for something. If we’re talking about the essence of something then essence can be a circumlocution for glory. So the gospel is related to Christ’s glory. Christ’s glory is related to His work on the Cross. Then we’re told that Christ is the image of God. So again, in Paul make this same statement. This is a profound statement that Christ shares in all of the attributes of God.
In Jesus is praying to the Father and He says, “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” Here it’s not talking about essence because Jesus didn’t give up His essence. This is talking about the manifestation of his divine nature. Jesus limited the manifestation of His divine nature when He was on the earth. The only time that Jesus revealed his divine nature was at the Mount of Transfiguration when His glory shone forth and James and John and Peter saw that glory. That was the radiance of His glory. That’s the effect of His essence. That effect was veiled during the incarnation. It was not taken away. He was still full deity but it was just veiled and that gets into the kenosis passage in .
 
So He’s the image of the invisible God. We don’t see God. No one has ever seen God the Father. Jesus represents it here. tells us that no one has seen God at any time. Isaiah saw His glory but He didn’t see beyond the glory as we’ll see in in talking about the effulgence of His radiance. He doesn’t see behind the light that emanates from God the Father. says He is the only begotten Son, that is the unique Son of God, the One of a kind Son of God from monogenes meaning only or one of a kind, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. The word for declare is the word exegeomai which is where we get our word exegesis. It means to explain or to expound upon something.
 
So tells us Jesus is the firstborn over all creation. Now in our culture we think of first born in terms of chronological order. The Greeks sometimes used the term as first in a sequence but it also can be first in terms of significance or preeminence or priority, the one who is first is the one who is elevated in authority over everything else. So that’s the idea here. It’s from the Greek word prototkos. Here we have the idea of first in rank. We see this in a number of different passages. The Old Testament uses it in reference to the Messiah in . This is a meditation on the Davidic covenant, a Psalm written by David. He’s reflecting upon the blessing of God in promising that through David and through his descendants there would be this eternal king who would rule on the throne in Jerusalem. “He will cry to Me [God], You are my Father, My God, and the rock of my salvation. I will also make Him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” So this term firstborn is also a term that has Messianic implications from the Old Testament.
 
 Now this word is used in several other passages in the New Testament. For example in it states, “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers.” We went through this not long ago in Romans, that predestined has to do with determining a destiny, an end game ahead of time. It doesn’t mean choosing who will be saved or who won’t. He is saying that those who are saved will have a destiny and that is to “be conformed to the image of His Son.” So we are to take on the character qualities and essence of God. That’s what’s being produced in us, character wide, as the fruit of the Spirit. We’re predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He [Christ] might be the firstborn, first in rank, among many brothers.
 
Also our current passage has this emphasis that Christ is the firstborn over all creation. Now there are several reasons why this can’t mean first in time. First, that would be inconsistent with the context because the context states that He [Jesus] created all things. Now He can’t be a creature if He’s created all things because He would not have created Himself. So all things is a universal term indicating that Christ created all things. It doesn’t say that Christ created everything except Himself. That’s the wrong idea that comes from Arianism which was a heresy developed in the late 3rd century and early 4th century in the early church. It says that somewhere in eternity past Christ was generated. There was a time when Christ was not. That was the little contemporary Christian chorus that Arius sang all around the Roman Empire. You know there are a lot of heresies communicated through a lot of different hymns. A lot of people get more of their theology from hymns they sang from the sermons they hear. That was a little ditty that Arius popularized, “There was a time when God was not.” In other words God the Father is the Eternal Father and Arius said that at some point in eternity past He generates the Son. So that would make the Son a creature so He couldn’t create all things if He himself is a creature. He could only create everything but Himself.
 
The statement that “He created all things” indicates that He is fully God. Second, it would contradict the rest of the New Testament which clearly states and emphasizes that Jesus Christ is eternal (], He’s the unique One, and He also created all things. We could say God the Father is the architect; God the Son is the project manager, and God the Holy Spirit was the one who was onsite overseeing everything. It works something like that. Each had a distinct role but they’re all can be said to be the Creator of all things. So it has this idea of being first in priority. He created all things.
 
In fact, in the New World translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses they insert a word like “other” in different places here in order to keep Jesus from being a unique firstborn creator of all things. We also know that in Jesus receives the worship of the angels. Only God can be worshipped. That indicates again that He has full deity. So this idea of firstborn indicates He is the preeminent one and rules over creation. goes on to say that it is by Him that all things were created that are in heaven.” It also says, “all things were created through [dia] Him which indicates secondary agency and the last one says all things were created for Him.
 
The first phrase that all things were created by Him probably has the idea that was eternally in His thinking that it was in His mind as a complete total package, a pattern that He knew forever and then it was through His agency that it was created. en plus the dative can indicate agency as well. The problem is that this would be a redundancy in the passage as well. You’ve already said it in the second phrase dia autou. That’s already states an agency so you wouldn’t say “by Him” and “by Him” again. So that first dia autou probably has the idea of “in His mind” and in His thinking, all things were created. It concludes by saying that all things were created through Him as the agency of creation and for Him. So He’s the architect, the builder, and He becomes the goal of the universe itself. The goal of the universe is towards Him.
 
Then Colossians1:17 emphasizes that He is the sustainer of the universe. Only God could do that in His omnipotence. Only God could sustain all of the creation. Now this doesn’t give us a right to be irresponsible in our stewardship or oversight of creation. We don’t want to foolishly abuse creation. But that’s not the prominent view of environmentalism. That may be true in some areas but that’s not what is happening politically or culturally in terms of the environmentalist movement. The movement we have today is built off of a pantheistic view of the universe. And they believe that the worst virus on the planet are we humans. The environmentalist ideology is that we should all go back to as close a view to nature as we can and that’s just a distortion of things.
 
God put man on the planet to oversee and utilize the natural resources and to develop them for the glory of God and for the benefit of mankind. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now we can do that in a rapacious manner and certainly human beings have done that from everyone from primitive tribes all the way up to modern corporations and industries. But really if people are wise, people know better than to foul their own nests. Usually what you find with environmentalists is some sort of ideal of the primitive native that they are somehow purer and they haven’t been sullied by civilization so you get this totally false view.
 
What you had in our own history like the Comanche Indians. I’ve been reading a great book called The Empire of the Summer Moon which is an extremely well written history of the rise of Quannah Parker and the fall of the Commanche nation. If you want to learn some really interesting things about Texas history, that’s a great book to read. I highly recommend it. The Commanches really overpopulated Commancheria in the period that they dominated from the 1700’s to the late 1800’s. They would go into an area with no understanding of principles of modern sanitation. They didn’t have garbage pickup. They didn’t have an understanding of separation of all the different things they were putting out. They would just go live in an area for a while until they trashed it and then they would go live in another area. They would continue to do that.
 
They were extremely violent. They pushed the Apaches and several other tribes out of the High Plains once they got horses. It just shows once again that one tribe pushed another tribe out. Then the Americans came in, the Anglos came in and we just did what the previous tribes had done; we just pushed that tribe out. Somebody will come along eventually and push us out. That’s how history has run its course so there’s no such thing as this innocent, pure native that was living in some sort of pristine paradise and then the evil Anglo westerner came in and drove everybody out. This is just used to beat up on any kind of modern technology, modern industry that makes life better for all of us.
 
Thank God we have discovered so many different things that make life so much easier for us and so much more comfortable. After a day like today when I think it hit 102 degrees here in Houston, we can thank God we have air conditioning. Can you imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have air conditioning? Some of you remember Houston before it got air conditioning. Houston was just a city that air conditioning made. It was just a bump on the Bayou before we got air conditioning, and now look what’s happened. Of course the other side of is that once we got air conditioning Congress can meet most of the year and so if we didn’t have air conditioning, we’d probably have a lot more freedoms that we’ve lost due to technology, but that’s a different issue.
 
Christ sustains everything. He has built into creation the mechanisms to cleanse out all the impurities that develop within all the ecological systems. For example, take volcanoes. Pick your favorite volcano whether its Pinatubo or Mt. St. Helens or Krakatoa or any one, and you measure the pollution that’s thrown into the air by these volcanoes over a period of just a few days and it would take decades and decades of industrial pollution to do as much damage to the environment as one volcano does in a couple of days.
 
That’s not to justify irresponsible industrial waste but it is pointing out that we just get so over bloated in our importance that we can somehow destroy the planet. We can’t destroy the planet. We may trash our neighborhood but we’re not going to destroy the planet because Jesus Christ has built systems into every system of the planet to cleanse the air, to cleanse the water, to cleanse different things and it all runs along according to his plan and purpose. But see, if you remove God you’re left to the only real causative agent in the universe. Man is left as the bad one. All of these things fit together so Christ is the one who is the sustainer of everything. says, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” So He is the one who sustains everything in the universe.
 
The next major passage we are going to look at for understanding the deity of Christ is . Hebrews chapter 1 is another tremendous passage on the Son as being divine. Verse 3 says, “And He [Jesus Christ] is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” This takes us back to the statement made at the beginning of the chapter. We read in verse 1, “God [referring to God the Father] after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days has spoken to us by His Son whom He appointed heir of all things.” He’s talking about God’s revelation to us by His Son who He’s appointed heir of all things through whom also He made the world.
 
 Right there in the second verse the writer of Hebrews does the same thing that Paul does in Colossians and that John did in 1:1. He takes us right to the doctrine of creation. I’ve heard so many Christians say they didn’t even want to talk about creation because it might be a distraction to the gospel. Well, none of the writers of Scripture knew that. They understood that the doctrine of creation is crucial to understanding who this God is who sent Jesus and who Jesus is. Through Jesus God the Father made the world.
 
 Then we come to verse 3 still talking about His Son, “And He is the radiance [brightness] of His glory and the exact representation [express image] of His nature [person] and upholding all things by the word of His power when He had made purification [by Himself purged} our sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” That is a well-packed verse. We’re just focusing on the deity of Christ here, that He is the brightness of His glory. There’s several different ways to express this but the idea we have here in the Greek is that He is the express image of God the Father.
 
This is the same idea we have in . It starts off with that relative pronoun, who, referring to Jesus Christ, “Who being [eimi which is ongoing existence, not ginomai which would be to become] the radiance [brightness] of His glory.” Glory is the Greek word apaugasma which means radiance, effulgence. In the passive voice it can mean reflection. This is the result of His eternal light. This is what’s expressed. It’s the out working of His glory. The expression of His glory. We see various other passages that talk about this. The core idea is that this relates to a brightness, a brilliance of light that emanates from the core of the glory of God.
 
When we talk about that we have to bring in a discussion of the Shekinah glory of God and this brightness is the visible radiation of His glory, of His invisible essence. We have passages that talk about this. For example, , we read, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory.” Now this is an interesting passage because you’ll have some people who’ll go to this verse and say, “Well, John was one of the three guys who saw Jesus revealing His glory on the Mount of Transfiguration.” The trouble is when we get into where Jesus changes the water into wine, John says that this is the first manifestation of His glory, so He’s not talking about his visible expression of light indicating His essence but His character, what He does.
 
That’s one of the evidences of how glory is used in the Scripture to refer to the essence or character of Christ. So, “We beheld His glory…” That really means that what John is saying here is not that we saw the brightness of His glory at the Mount of Transfiguration but every day in every way the essence of God was manifested to us. We learned who God was because we hung out with Jesus every day. That’s how we saw the glory of God. We saw His essence in Jesus so that’s the thrust of the verse.
 
In , “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father; He has revealed Him.” Now also states this, “For God, who said, Light shall shine out of darkness, is the one who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” This is talking about something God does internally in our soul. Heart here is used as a synonym for the soul, referring to our immaterial makeup. Here light is used to refer to revelation, the unveiling of truth. So God is the one who reveals to us Jesus and that revelation of Jesus gives us the knowledge of the glory or essence of God and it’s seen in the face of Jesus in His humanity, in his incarnation.
 
Now this is what is seen in the early creeds of the church. One of the foundational creeds is the Nicene Creed which was written in a church council called by the first Christian emperor, Constantine, in 325 A.D. They met in a suburb of Constantinople or Byzantium, now called Istanbul in Nice and they had representatives from all over the Roman Empire. These bishops came together and the real issue was that they were to hammer out was what’s the relationship of Jesus as the Son of God to the Father. This had become a major divisive element within the early church. Arius, I mentioned him earlier, was a presbyter down in Alexandria, Egypt and he was teaching that there was a time when Christ was not. In other words, he was saying Christ isn’t eternal.
Athanasius comes along and he’s a theologian and leader of the church also in Alexandria and he is taking a stand saying you can’t have Jesus as a creature. If Jesus is a creature in any form, even if He’s given derivative deity, He can’t do what Jesus needed to do on the Cross. Only God could die on the cross for our sins as a man, so Athanasius is the great defender of what we now refer to as the hypostatic union and the eternal deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Like most church arguments and most theological controversies, most people don’t know diddly about what’s really going on. So you have about 90% of the people who go to a conference don’t know anything. 3% are deceived on the wrong side and maybe 3% know what’s going on and they are on the right side. Everybody else is clueless. They just want to go for all the fellowship. It’s still that way today. It doesn’t change.
 
Most people don’t understand the intricacies of theological issues. Out of that it finally became clear that Athanasius was right and there was no foundation for saying Jesus was created and generated by God but that Jesus had to be eternal.
 
And so we have the opening two paragraphs here of the Nicene Creed. The first paragraph relates to the person of God the Father, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God…”
 
Now that’s just a reiteration of what Scripture says but what does it mean? Just because someone comes along and says something, does it mean anything? We have politicians who says all kinds of good things all the time but it’s just words, words, words. It’s meaningless. What do they mean by these things?
So the Creed defines what begotten mean.
 
“And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten /Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds.” Begotten doesn’t mean made. That’s the key idea. Begotten has to do with the relationship between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. It goes on to say referring to the Lord Jesus Christ, “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance the Father, by whom all things were made.” You can’t say He’s fully God more clearly than that but in case you don’t get it it’s reiterates that He’s light of light, which is what we were talking about as the glory of God, the effulgence, the flashing forth of the character of God here in verse 3. This is light from light. This is one of the basis for saying that.
 
Today we would say, “True God of true God.” What’s here doesn’t communicate as well today. In other words He’s full, undiminished deity. He’s begotten but not made. That’s the definition of made. Begotten describes an eternal relationship. It doesn’t mean that He’s made. It doesn’t mean he’s given birth to. It doesn’t mean to be born. “Being of one substance with the Father.” This refers to the one essence that both the Father and Son have. “By whom all things were made.” In the first paragraph it called the Father “maker of heaven and earth”. Now Jesus is the one by whom all things were made.
 
Now later on Athanasius in one of his encyclical letters to the bishops of Egypt and Libya says some other things are significant. He says, “Who does not see that the brightness cannot be separated from the light?” He’s talking about this effulgence or brightness of His glory. He’s saying you can’t separate the brightness from the light source itself. These are inter-connected. One demands the other. The brightness cannot be separated from the light. It is by nature proper to it and co-existent with it.” So Jesus is the revelation of the Father. He is proper to the Father, connected to the Father, and co-existent with the Father. You can’t separate the expression from the original. That’s his argument there.
 
He goes on to say, “For where there is light, there is radiance and where there is radiance there is also light. Thus we cannot have a light without radiance nor radiance without light because both the light is in the radiance and the radiance is in the light.” Now I want you to memorize that before you go home and I want you to think about that because that is some really heavy stuff right there. That is profound material to reflect upon that inner relationship between the light and the radiance and the Father and the Son. That is extremely well said.
 
You just don’t find anyone today thinking or writing as profoundly as those early church fathers were. This is in A.D. 325. It was in A.D. 317 that Constantine set forth the edict of tolerance which meant that Christianity was now legal. So most of the bishops that were there had suffered and had known other bishops who had suffered martyrdom for their faith in their lifetime. They’re only ten years away from Christianity being illegal. Listen to how profound and complex their thoughts are on theology. They are thinking deeply because if they were going to give their lives for this they wanted to make sure it was true and make sure they really understood it. As one person once said, “On a good day, I’m going to die for the book of Romans but I want to make sure that I’m not dying for something that’s not really the Word of God.” So they really thought these issues through at a profound level because they were in the furnace of persecution for years over what they really believed.
 
Now what we’re talking about here in terms of glory is what is usually referred to in modern English as the Shekinah glory. Let’s just have a couple of points on understanding this term, Shekinah Glory.
 
The Shekinah Glory usually refers to the luminescent aspect of the glory of God in the tabernacle or temple in the Old Testament. So, first of all, the commonly used term is Shekinah glory, which we must break down into the two terms. Shekinah and Glory. Shekinah comes from the Hebrew word shekan which means to dwell, the verb. Shekinah is really a rabbinic term that’s developed after the Old Testament was written. You don’t find Shekinah in the Hebrew Old Testament. But you do find its root verb, shekan, meaning to dwell. Glory is from the Hebrew word kavod which means something that is heavy, weighty, something that has seriousness to it, something that is sobering.
 
So Shekinah has to do with the dwelling presence of God and the glory is something in addition to that, indicating something that is serious and weight that is present there. The priests in the Old Testament designated the tent of the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum, as the tent of meeting, the mchikan. Hebrew doesn’t have vowels in writing so you can hear the “ch” as one letter in Hebrew. The k is the second letter, the n is the third letter. Those are the three consonants. That’s your root word. They stick an m in front of the word making it a noun so that’s the same root. It’s the tent of dwelling so that’s the idea there. The term shekan came to be used for Yahweh’s presence or dwelling upon the earth. [, ]. So the shekan, the dwelling presence is in the mchikan is in the tabernacle.  It’s also related to the phrase “house of God” which is a second term that’s used for the tabernacle.
 
Second point, glory was a common Biblical word used to describe the theophany, that is the manifestation of God’s presence upon the earth in the Old Testament [, , , which are just a few references]. Passages such as , “It came about as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the sons of Israel that they looked toward the wilderness and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.” So they’re seeing this physical manifestation of His presence on the earth. In we read, “But all the congregation said to stone them with stones. Then the glory of the Lord appeared in the tent of meeting to all the sons of Israel.” The glory of the Lord is His visible presence in the tabernacle. Again we have it in , “Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting. When they came out and blessed the people, the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people.” So it’s this brilliant light that is the manifestation of an internal reality within the mchikan itself.
 
The third point is that we see that God’s glory was associated with a pillar of cloud in the day time and the fire at night. This pillar is manifested on Mount Sinai where they see that as God giving them the law or going to give them the law. It’s manifested at the dedication of the tabernacle where it rested between the cherubim on the cover of the Ark and you also see the Shekinah glory present when entering Solomon’s temple. It also left later on in Ezekiel’s vision. It goes out the gate, goes out the front of the temple, goes across the Kidron Valley up to the Mount of Olive and ascends to heaven before the destruction of the temple in 586 B.C. and then when Jesus leaves, he takes the same route and then ascends to heaven from the Mount of Olives. So there’s something significant about that.
 
The fourth point is that the Shekinah glory emphasizes the unique presence of God among His covenant people, Israel. It’s His visible presence to confirm His blessing and to provide guidance. So the omnipresent God is limiting Himself spatially and temporal but He’s still eternal and infinite. I don’t know how that works. Neither do you, and you won’t! Don’t try.
 
The fifth point is that the Shekinah was not the shining or the glory in the crowd but it’s the cause of it. It’s not that brilliant light; it’s the cause of the brilliant light. That’s the dwelling place of God. The sixth point is that the Shekinah represented the positional place of blessing the Jews had under the Abrahamic Covenant, that God blessed them unconditionally because of that covenant and it wasn’t due to their obedience or disobedience. This same glory is manifested by Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration in , “And His garments became radiant and exceedingly white as no launderer on earth can whiten them.” I don’t care if you use White Bright or Clorox. You can’t get them that white. That’s the only time that brilliance is seen during the Incarnation.
 
Then in we read that in the future this is what will illuminate the earth. “The city [the New Jerusalem] had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it and its lamp is the Lamb.” There will not be a sun or moon created or present in the new heavens and new earth. So when Jesus says things like, “I am the light of the world” this ties in to this whole doctrine of the brilliance of His essence. He is the brightness or the effulgence of the expression of His glory, of the essence of God. Then we read, “He is the express image…” This is the word character which is where we get our word. It is an exact representation or identical essence of His person. It doesn’t get any clearer than that in terms of making a statement on the deity of Christ. So this is the expression of Christ.
 
How do we know Jesus is God? , , and in the New Testament passages. Old Testament passages are , , . Six passages you should have handy and be able to explain. Memorize those six verses. These verses are going to come up when we have Christmas. You can memorize those verses now and recite them when you’re talking to your friends and family around the Christmas table. You’ll be all prepared to share the gospel.

Romans 112b-Children: Esau, Jacob and Election

Romans 9:6 NASB95
But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel;
Romans 112b-Children: Esau, Jacob and Election
 
We’re studying in so turn with me there and we’ll start at verse 5 just to remind ourselves of a little bit of the context. We started by getting into this last week. I began by pointing out how Romans is a book about the righteousness of God. The response might be from Jews at the time and Paul is answering this as though there were an objector who presented this question: “How can you say God is righteous and faithful if God seems to have left the Jews behind and he’s shifting to a plan for the church?”
 
The answer is that God is only temporarily setting aside His plan for Israel. It is not a permanent setting aside but God still has a plan for the Jewish people, still has a plan for Israel and this will come to completion at some future point in history. Paul is going to point out the fact that within Israel there is a distinction between those who are merely ethnic Jews, those who are merely physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and those who are both physical Jews as well as regenerate Jews. The regenerate Jews are believers in the Messiah. In the Old Testament the term Ha-Mashiach means anointed one and is translated as Messiah. In Greek it’s translated as christos from the Greek word chrio, which means anointed one. So when we say Jesus Christ in Hebrew that’s Yeshua Ha-Mashiach. Yeshua is the Hebrew for Jesus. It’s the same name as Joshua. Ha-Mashiach is the Messiah, so Yeshua Ha-Mashiach, and iesous christos in the Greek, is saying the same thing: Jesus, the Messiah.
 
We looked at where Paul says, “Whose are the fathers and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” According to the flesh here means according to physical human descent. Paul uses flesh many times to describe the seat of the sin nature which is in the physical human body, the genetic structure, the genetic coding of the human race according to Adam’s genetic sin. But in other cases the word flesh simply talks about our physical, mortal body and that’s what it’s talking about here. So Christ according to the flesh was Jewish. He was in that line of descent.
 
Then Paul gets to the heart of his focus in verse 6: “But it is not as though the word of God has failed [taken no effect] For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” It’s not that God has been ignored or that His plan has been rejected or nullified. This is Paul’s first explanation of the principle. So last time I showed you a circle that represented all of ethnic Israel. Ethnic Israel refers to those who have physical descent through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
If you have a descent from Abraham alone, then you may not be Jewish. Abraham had a son, Ishmael, through Hagar the Egyptian slave girl. That’s not the line of the seed. So if you’re a descendant from Ishmael (Ishmaelites in the Old Testament) then you’re not part of the seed. They kind of blended in with the various Arab tribes and so the Ishmaelites and many of the Edomites have all been absorbed into the various Arab groups now. They are descendants of Abraham and some of Abraham and Isaac but they’re not descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s what defines an Israelite by the flesh. He has to be descended through all three patriarchs.
 
But that’s not enough to get into heaven. See in the 1st century, toward the end of the second temple period, the emphasis of the Pharisees who were the biblicists of the day, if you would was that was all you needed to get the heaven. They were the conservatives. They weren’t accurate in their interpretation of Scripture. They’d become excessively legalistic. They had the basic assumption that if you were a physical descendant of Abraham that gave you special spiritual status before God. As long as you were a Jew, a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you would get into heaven. They taught basically that all Jews are saved on the basis of Abraham.
 
Because there were different groups who emphasized different things and they weren’t a “one size fits all” theology, they might add that you had to have personal righteousness. That’s why they emphasized the overt ritual so much. As Jesus continually pointed out, it was all on the surface. He called them whitewashed sepulchers, in other words, they’re beautiful like a whitewashed tomb. In Israel you go to the graveyards and you have the above-ground sepulchers made out of that white Jerusalem limestone, and they looked so white and clean. But inside, it’s just corruption; it’s just dead men’s bones. That’s the point of the imagery that Jesus uses when he says they’re just like whitewashed sepulchers. They’re very clean on the outside and filthy on the inside. There’s no internal regeneration of cleansing by the Holy Spirit so they’re spiritually dead on the inside even though they look good on the outside.
 
Their emphasis was on works but the works produced by someone who’s spiritually dead are dead works. They have no value whatsoever. It may be moral or ethical righteousness but it has no value before God. It’s relative righteousness. It doesn’t measure up to God’s standards. Some Pharisees also excluded completely Gentiles from salvation. In fact, even the idea of taking the gospel to the Gentiles was such that in which we haven’t gotten to in our Acts study, when Paul returns to Jerusalem and begins to tell them what God is doing, they are outraged. He’s speaking to the crowd because they’re gathered around him. They’ve heard these rumors that Paul is telling the Jews around the empire where he goes that they don’t have to obey the Law of Moses and they don’t have to show respect for their traditions or any of these other things so when Paul gets to the point where he says God told him to take the gospel to the Gentiles, they just exploded in a riot. What set them off was taking the gospel to the Gentiles.
 
They had this exclusionary viewpoint when it comes to God’s blessing upon them. They really believed that just being a Jew was all that was needed to order to have merit before God. But as Peter points out to Cornelius in God is no respecter of persons. This was not something that the Pharisees had come to understand. So there’s a distinction. Just because you were Jewish didn’t mean you got into heaven. The blessing of God meant that God was choosing Abraham and his descendants through whom He would provide revelation. In terms of the Scriptures, they would be custodians to preserve it and to pass it on and it was through the line of the seed that God’s promised Messiah would come. It didn’t guarantee them salvation but it guaranteed that they would be through whom salvation would come.
 
So Paul says in “But it is not as though the word of God has failed [taken no effect] for they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” Remember Israel got his name when he’s contending with God and perseveres in the wrestling match with God at Peniel. The Angel of the Lord ends up slapping him on the hip and makes him a partial cripple for a while. He’s given a new name, Israel, which means one who contends or perseveres with God. So Paul is saying here they’re not all Israel. That is, they’re not all contenders of God who are from the one who contended with God, the alternate name for Jacob.
 
Then he says in verse 7, “Nor are they all children…” When you read this I can understand why some people would get confused in the English. When you read “For they are not all Israel who are Israel nor are they all children,” you find a number of commentators as if verse 7 is a further explanation of what it means that they are not Israel who are of Israel. That’s not what’s going on here. His initial statement here is to explain this distinction: that there are some who are ethnic Israel, some who are Israel and regenerate which are the true Israel of God.
 
Now he’s going to go in and take some time to explain first of all the significance of being ethnic Israel and why that’s important. The reason that’s important is because of the Abrahamic covenant and that everlasting promise God made to Abraham. That’s the first thing. The second thing he doesn’t get into until he starts getting into chapter 10 but he’s going to deal with the aspect of those who are true Israel of Israel. What’s coming up in the next few verses is just defining who ethnic Israel is. Defining a true physical ethnic Jew and why that’s important.
 
So he says in verse 7, “Nor are they all children…” He adds something, an ascending argumentation. He starts with one principle. They’re not all Israel who are Israel. Then he goes on to something that explains that further but that is stated in addition to that, “Neither are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants.” We have to carefully understand this. What does he mean by children? If you look at these verses in your Bible, you ought to circle the word “children” as you go through these verses. Verse 7 says “Nor are they all children because they’re the seed of Abraham but in Isaac your seed shall be called.” Verse 8 leads to an explanation, “That is, it is not the children of flesh who are children of God.” Circle those two children’s.
 
What does he mean by that? He goes on: “But the children of the promise are regarded as descendants [the seed].” So you have about four important terms. What does he mean by just the statement “children” alone in verse 7? What does this concept of the “seed” in verse 7 and at the end of verse 8 mean? Verse 9 says, “For this is the word of promise. At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.” So we have the children of the promise equal the children of the seed and the promise of the seed when you connect the dots at the end of verse 8 and the beginning of verse 9.
 
In 9:7 when Paul says, “Nor are they all children…” he defines that simply as being of the seed of Abraham. So he talks about a broad concept. All of the seed of Abraham refers to all of his physical descendants. The descendants through Ishmael, the descendants through the sons of Keturah, the Midianites and others, and the descendants of Isaac which is the line of the seed. So he’s saying that you’re not considered a child, and here he’s really referring to a child of the promise, which is the full term he uses in the verse. But you’re not really talking about a child of the promise just because you’re a physical descendant of Abraham because he quotes from in verse 7, “In Isaac your seed shall be called” so it’s very specific from that the line of the seed goes from Abraham through Isaac.
 
So you have this distinction here. There are non-children who are physical descendants and the children of the promise who are the physical descendants through Isaac. In verse 8 he says: “That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.” Now we have two other terms coming up here, children of the flesh and they are not the children of God. Now as we read this at our first glance, it appears that the children of God would be a term related to how it’s used in some other places where it’s related to those who are saved, regenerate, but that doesn’t fit the context because he’s not talking about saved versus unsaved. He’s talking about identifying the true physical line of Abraham. What is the line of the seed?
 
So you have the children of the flesh are equivalent to the non-seed descendants of Abraham. Okay? So the children of the flesh are the children that come through his humanity with Ishmael or Keturah’s children. Remember Abraham had two wives. Sarah first and when she died he married Keturah and had other sons and daughters with Keturah. Hagar was not a wife. She’s a concubine. There was a legal distinction between a wife and a concubine. Abraham is not a polygamist. He may be a fool. He may have listened to his wife when he shouldn’t have. He may have created a huge problem by doing so but he wasn’t a polygamist. Sometimes in the polygamy argument people say that the patriarchs of the Bible were polygamous and God allowed it. Jacob was the only patriarch that had multiple wives and that was due to the carnality of Laban and his own complicity. It wasn’t a good thing. Even though there were some in the Old Testament who had multiple wives it’s never portrayed as a positive thing. It’s always portrayed as a reflection of the influence of pagan culture.
 
So we have the children of the flesh. This refers to the physical descendants of Abraham, through Ishmael and the children of Keturah or later Esau’s children. Then who are the children of the promise? This goes back to the doctrine I taught in the past called the doctrine of the barren woman. There were six barren women in Scripture. The first three are the ones we’re concerned with here and that’s Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel. Those three were all barren. It’s not because of any sort of divine discipline or punishment but it’s to demonstrate the power of God to bring life where there was death. The birth of the Jewish people was a miracle. God regenerated the physical womb of Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel in order to give birth to their children. It was God who made it possible for them to have children so they are called children of God because of that supernatural miracle that was a part of their birth.
 
So those who are the children of the flesh are just the physical descendants, not the line of the seed. These are not the children of God, because the children of God refers to those who are the result of a divine miracle. Then he says: “But the children of the promise are counted as the seed.” The children of the promise is a specific term that relates to the Abrahamic promise in and 14 where God specified that a son would be born to Sarah, that the seed He had promised Abraham would come through Abraham and Sarah. It would not come through a surrogate through his servant back in and not through Hagar but would come through Abraham and Sarah. The children of God, therefore, is not a term for regeneration but for those born through divine intervention through the barren mothers.
 
Then this is further clarified in the next verse, where Paul says, "For this is the word of promise. At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.” This is from and 14. So that’s the promise. The children of the promise are Isaac, first of all, and then Jacob when Rebekah gives birth to the twins, Esau and Jacob. Jacob is the one designated to be the one who will carry the line of the seed because the elder, Esau, would serve the younger, which is Jacob. We’ll get into that in this study. So we see this in several different passages.
 
So what I want to do now is take us back to Genesis to pick up this thread and see how all of this sort of fits together. Turn with me to Genesis chapter 12. Again this is one of those passages where you should be writing references in your margins so when we go from verse to verse we are taken to the next verse to follow along. If you are talking to someone and you have your Bible you can go to all the passages. In God makes a shift in the way He has worked with the human race. Up to this point he’s worked through all the human race. There’s no significant racial distinction. All are Gentiles but now God is going to call out one particular human being and it is through him that there’s going to be a special blessing for the entire human race. He makes certain promises to him and this is not a covenant in but it’s a summary of the covenant that will come and it’s God’s initial promise to Abraham.
 
Abraham at this time is known simply as Abram and he lives in Ur of the Chaldees. God comes to him. Abram is already a believer. He already understands the gospel of God. God is not just coming to him and saying that if you do this you’ll be saved. He’s already justified. Now God is giving him a special blessing because of Abraham’s love for God and spiritual maturity and God’s own sovereign choice. It’s not something Abraham has earned. It’s that God has chosen him out of His sovereignty and omniscience. In God says: “Go forth from your country, and from your relatives, and from your father’s house to the land which I will show you.” This land is a key component of the promise.
 
“I will make you a great nation…” That indicates the descendants, the seeds. “I will bless you and make your name great.” God promises personal blessing to Abraham and that he will become famous and his name will be known and he says as a command, “And you shall be a blessing.” Verse 3 is the key verse, “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” That’s the core of the Abrahamic covenant: a promise of land, a promise of seed [descendants], and a promise to be a worldwide blessing.
 
The land part is reaffirmed in verse 7: “The Lord appeared to Abraham and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” By this time Abraham and Sarah have moved to Shechem near the oak tree of Mora and that where God appears to him to tell him He will give this land to his descendants. Abraham builds an altar to the Lord at that particular point. Then he moves on down further south into the land. Later on we see he leaves to go to Egypt during a time of famine and then he returns and there’s a conflict between Lot’s cattlemen and Abraham’s cattlemen. The Lord separates them and then in verse 14 the Lord appears to Abram in 13:14: “The Lord said to Abram after Lot had separated from him, “Now lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land which you see, I will give it to you and to your descendants [seed in the Hebrew] forever. All through Genesis we’re tracing the seed. That’s why you have the genealogies. You’re tracing the seed of the woman from down through the genealogies of and 11 and all this is so that when the Messiah comes His lineage can be traced all the way back from one generation to the next to Adam. This is what Luke does in his genealogy in .
 
So we see the covenant for the land reiterated in . Now let’s skip over to . This is the key covenant passage. God comes in and says not to be afraid in verse one. He assures him that He’s his shield, and an exceedingly great reward and Abraham is puzzled and asks if the heir should come through his servant, Eliezer of Damascus. See, this is his first operation in the flesh and there’s a contrast here. He’s saying he‘s going to do God’s work his way, in the power of the flesh using his own ability without relying upon God. Abraham’s first option is to do it through Eliezer, his servant. But God says to him in verse 4: “This man will not be your heir, but one who will come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir.” Then God reiterates that his descendants, his seed will be like the stars of the heavens. At the end of verse 5, “If you are able to count them, so shall your descendants be.”
 
Then in verse 9 through the end of the chapter is where we have the actual covenant cutting ceremony itself. After all this conversation with God, which must have been pretty intense, it’s time for Abraham to take a little nap. So after he goes out and gathers up the animals for the sacrifice and kills them and then splits them in two, he’s really tired. That’s a lot of work. If any of you have ever been hunting and you’ve shot a deer or a wild pig or anything like that, to eviscerate, clean the animals and then to split them in two is a lot of work so Abraham needs a little nap. God causes him to go to sleep. Then God alone passes between the two halves of the sacrifice. That’s what’s so important. Normally if you’re going to cut a covenant with someone and it’s an extremely significant contract and you want to bind both parties to the contract then in those days you would split the sacrifice and both parties signing the contract would walk between the sacrifices. But God puts Abraham to sleep and God alone passes between the halves of the sacrifices, showing that this is a unilateral, one-sided covenant. God is binding Himself to the covenant regardless of what Abraham does. It’s a one-sided covenant and it’s an eternal covenant.
 
Usually we use terms like conditional and unconditional but there were conditions attached to every covenant but it doesn’t have to do with the ultimate fulfillment. To enjoy the blessings of the land, the Jews had to be obedient. That was a condition. But if they were disobedient, it didn’t negate the Abrahamic covenant. Better terms we use are eternal or permanent versus temporary. That’s what the writer of Hebrews emphasizes when he talks about the new covenant. He says that the old covenant was temporary and designed to be temporary. That’s the Mosaic covenant, and that’s why the new covenant is called the new covenant because it indicates the old covenant wasn’t supposed to be permanent. So this is really a better Biblical category for understanding these covenants. Permanent versus temporary and the only temporary covenant in Scripture was the Mosaic covenant.
 
So God cuts the covenant with Abraham in chapter 15. In chapter 16 we get “operation flesh, paragraph 2”. This is when Sarah thinks she has a better idea and she suggests that Abraham take her servant as a substitute and that through Hagar he will have a child. Some years have gone by and she’s getting impatient. She wants to have a surrogate pregnancy through Hagar. Ten years have gone by since the previous revelation from God so Abraham goes into Hagar and she conceives and gives birth to a son, Ishmael.
 
If you take the time to look at to 31, Paul develops this as a picture of Abraham in terms of the works of the flesh. There Paul is now adding a layer of interpretation to it in terms of Abraham trying to complete God’s plan on the basis of his own works and not waiting upon the miraculous grace of God to supply a son as God had promised. So this is a work of the flesh and according to we now add a layer of meaning to “the flesh”. Not just according to the physical descent but also the idea of human works. That doesn’t sit well with the Pharisaical inclination of the Jews because what Paul is now saying is that physical descent from Abraham isn’t good enough, and it didn’t apply to Ishmael at all. That was a mistake and a sin on the part of Abraham because he wasn’t trusting in God.
 
So we come to chapter 17. Another thirteen years go by. That’s a long time. You think about when West Houston Bible Church started, about nine years ago. I moved back not quite eight years ago. We haven’t come close to 13 years. In chapter 17 we have the sign of the covenant given which is circumcision. Abraham is 99 years old. Ishmael is 13 and this is when Abraham and Ishmael are circumcised, a sign of the covenant which God has established with them.
 
In God announces to Abraham and Sarah that Sarah will bear a son and they are to call his name Isaac. God says: “I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him.” This is an eternal covenant that won’t ever be abrogated and with his seed after him. So this is what Paul is talking about in when he says that the children of the promise are counted as the seed. The children of the promise refers to Isaac and that line. It will go from Isaac and then to Jacob. So this is God’s sovereign choice as He takes them through their blessing.
says that this blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ. Abraham was called so that all the nations would be blessed in him. This flew in the face of rabbinic theology in the Second Temple period. They thought they were excluding the Gentiles completely. They looked down on the Gentiles but Paul says the blessing might come upon the Gentiles that we “Might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” A couple of verses later in Paul says, “For this is to say that the law which was 430 years later [after the Abrahamic covenant] cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ. So the Mosaic covenant cannot nullify the eternal covenant of Abraham.
 
Now let’s go back to . We’re going to be moving around from Romans to these Old Testament passages. So focuses on the promise of the seed through Isaac and not through Ishmael. Then in verse 10 we read, “And not only this but there was Rebekah who, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac…” Isaac is Yitsak in the Hebrew which means laughter and Sarah hears this and laughs to herself saying, “I’m an old woman. There’s no way.” But God found a way. So now we have the word of promise continuing through Rebekah and not only this but when Rebekah conceived she has twins.
 
Verse 10 continues: “For though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice [election] would stand, not of works but of Him who calls.” There are two things we need to recognize here. Number one, this is not talking about the individuals, Jacob and Esau. It’s not focusing on them as individuals. It’s focusing on them as nations. We’ll see that in a minute when we go back to Genesis. The second thing we need to know is that Paul makes it a point by saying that the children haven’t been born yet, nor have they done any good or evil.
 
There are two ways people can handle this. One is by trying to argue that at some level of prescience, God is choosing them because of foreknowledge. When Paul adds this idea that they haven’t done evil yet, he’s precluding the idea that somehow this is based on anything they do or might do. It’s based on God’s choice. God’s choice is not random. God’s choice is not arbitrary just because we’re not told what God’s choice is it doesn’t mean that it’s without basis or reason. It doesn’t have anything to do with their personal salvation or their individual salvation. It has to do with God’s oversight of history and how He is working out His plan of salvation through the descendants of Abraham. So the issue here has nothing to do with salvation but it has to do with the purpose of God in His redemption plan for mankind and it’s according to His election or His choice.
 
God has the right to raise up nations and to bring down nations, to raise up leaders and to bring down leaders, and to choose different people for different functions or purposes. This isn’t a violation of their volition at all. It certainly doesn’t violate their volition in terms of salvation, as I pointed out last time. I believe that both Ishmael and Esau were believers. The evidence is real shoddy that they weren’t. In both cases God promises to richly bless both Ishmael and Esau, and they were richly blessed by God. This promise that the older shall serve the younger never worked itself out in the lives of the two individuals, Esau and Jacob. It didn’t work out that way at all because the older is Esau and Esau personally never served Jacob.
 
In fact it was Jacob, when he returns from his extended stay in the north in Haran where he is working for his father-in-law, Laban, who is afraid because Esau was breathing threats of murder when he left. He’s afraid Esau still wants to kill him. God has so richly blessed Esau while Jacob is gone that Esau doesn’t care what Jacob has. Esau is very happy. He’s thrilled to see Jacob when he returns. He treats him with much grace and it is Jacob who bows at the feet of Esau and it is Jacob who is concerned that maybe Esau will harm him. If anyone is serving anybody, it’s Jacob who is serving Esau. He puts himself in that role of subservience when he returns home and returns to the land.
 
The reason I’m pointing this out is that this shows that it’s not talking about the persons or the individuals and this is often distorted and abused within Calvinist theology. In verse 13 it says in the NKJ version, “Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.” This is a verse that has caused great confusion to a lot of people. “God hated somebody. How can God hate Esau?” See, this is part of the problem that we as westerners often have. It’s a problem of western civilization being different from a Jewish Middle Eastern culture. It’s also a language issue because we don’t understand the metaphors and the imagery that is often used in Hebrew. So if we read this as an English speaker, we might read this as one person who is loved and the other person as one who is despised.
 
That’s not how the Hebrew idioms work. It’s not how the people spoke. I’m going to give you an example of this. In and 31, after working for fourteen years Jacob finally gets the love of his life, Rachel. He marries Rachel and we’re told that he loved Rachel more than Leah. That’s what hate means. To be loved less than someone else. Look at the context. It says when the Lord says that Leah was “unloved”—in the Hebrew it’s hate. See Jacob didn’t hate Leah. He didn’t love her as much as he loved Rachel. That’s how the idiom works. If someone is not loved as much in that language, then they’re hated. That’s the language. It doesn’t mean they’re despised or found to be obnoxious or any of those things, it simply means they’re not loved as much. It’s an idiom for expressing acceptance and approval above someone else. So someone gets an A+, the next person gets an A. That would be in their language that the one getting the A+ is loved, the one getting the A is hated. Okay? So this shows from the text that how this concept of hate and love works.
 
Now let’s turn back to Genesis. We’re going to look at two passages in the Old Testament. We have to understand these stories. It’s so important for people to read through their Bibles and know the stories and understand these episodes. Just get the main characters down. is talking about when Rebekah becomes pregnant. Verse 20, “Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife.” All of that data you read you just want to snore your way through the genealogy but God is telling us that He can trace the line from Adam to Jesus and prove that this is My Messiah. All of these little details are put into the text for that reason.
 
In verse 21, “Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was barren, and the Lord answered him and Rebekah his wife conceived.” See once again you’ve got to have a miracle, a divine intervention for Rebekah to get pregnant. Verse 22, “But the children struggled together within her, and she said, If it is so, why then am I this way?” So she went to inquire of the Lord.” She’s saying, “Lord, I’m having this rough pregnancy and these two babies in here are fighting with each all the time. I’ve got a wrestling match going on in my stomach.” She wants to know what is wrong. In verse 23 we read that the Lord said to her: “Two nations are in your womb.” Right there we know that the Divine pronouncement for these two people is not focusing on the individuals. It says: “Two nations are in your womb. Two peoples shall be separated from your body. One people shall be stronger than the others; and the older [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob}.” So this is what happened.
 
Now a lot of people get the idea that Esau was just a bad, bad guy because of one negative episode that occurs in . This is when Esau who’s a hunter and an outdoorsman and he goes out to hunt and camp. He would have been a great advocate of the 2nd Amendment! Jacob is more of a mama’s boy. He’s a deceiver, a manipulator. He’s always got to figure out his own angle in order to get what’s coming to him. See, from the very beginning, God promised that the older would serve the younger. Jacob wants to be the one to make that happen. He’s not going to trust God. He’s got the “operation flesh” going on, just like Abraham did so rather than letting God handle the things in terms of the inheritance he follows the advice of his mother.
 
His mother decides that while Esau is out hunting they were going to disguise Jacob, put on a lambskin and goat skin over him. Then when Isaac, who can’t see very well anymore feels him, Jacob will be hairy like Esau and Rebekah says she’ll fix his favorite food and Jacob can take it into him. Then when he does that, he is to ask him for the blessing to get the inheritance. So Jacob goes through all of that. He gets the blessing from Isaac.
 
As soon as this finished, Esau comes in. He’s been out and killed a game animal. He makes dinner for his father and brings it in. Now he asks his
father to bless him. In verse 32, “Let my father arise and eat of his son’s game, that you may bless me.” Isaac asks who he is and Esau tells him he’s his firstborn son, Esau. Isaac is agitated and wants to know who just came in and brought him food. “I gave him the blessing,” he says. This was an irreversible thing in their culture. So Esau cried out with a loud voice and calls out for a blessing. He gets a blessing but not the double blessing of the firstborn.
 
There’s an earlier episode where Esau’s come in from the field and he sold his birthright for just a mess of red lentil stew. He treats his birthright as if it’s not significant, not important. As a result of this he becomes a picture of someone who treats his inheritance and birthright in a cavalier or disrespectful manner. There’s a warning because of that in . It says, “Looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God.” That doesn’t mean you lose your salvation. It means you’re not operating on the basis of God’s grace and depending upon Him. It goes on to say, “Lest any root of bitterness spring up and cause trouble.” Now this is what happens when Esau realizes how he’s been tricked, that he’s given up his birthright for a mess of pottage or the lentil soup.
 
Then he becomes very angry and bitter toward Jacob in . “So Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing whereby his father had blessed him and Esau said that the days of mourning for my father are at hand [his father was going to die soon], then I will kill my brother, Jacob. This is the bitterness in his heart. This has an impact on others. How does it have an impact on others? Well, Rebekah is fearful for Jacob and she makes a plan for him to flee to her brother Laban in Haran and that’s what he does.
 
For the next twenty years he’s going to be working for Laban before he can return home. By then his mother’s died, his father’s died, and it has had a terrible impact because of this sin of Esau’s. Verse 16: “Lest there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau.” It’s not saying Esau is a fornicator. It’s giving examples, fornicator, immoral person, or a profane person, which is someone who treats the grace of God with disrespect. Esau is the example of someone who treated the grace of God with disrespect who for one morsel of food, the bowl of lentil stew, sold his birthright.
 
Verse 17: “For you know that afterwards when he wanted to inherit the blessing he was rejected for he found no place for repentance though he sought it diligently with tears.” In other words he repented and there was emotion along with it but it was too late. There were consequences to his bad choice and to his sin so he reaped the consequences of that. But none of this indicates that he wasn’t a believer or wasn’t blessed by God, because he certainly was blessed by God in many ways over the coming years.
 
So when we look at Paul is developing this argument that the line of the seed goes from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob. Then we have this statement of “Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated.” That comes from . When was Malachi written? It’s the last book of the Old Testament to be written. It’s written after the return of the Jews to the land. They come back in the post-exilic period because it’s after the exile. The exile began in 586 B.C. with the destruction of the first temple, the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Jews are removed from the land. Not every single one of them but most of them.
 
There were actually three deportations by Nebuchadnezzar, in 605, 596, and 586 B.C. And then at the end of the exile they’re returned by Cyrus in 538 B.C. The first return was under Zerubabel to build the temple. There’s just only about a handful, 40,000 who returned at this particular time. They began to rebuild the temple. It’s much smaller than what they had under Solomon. Finally they completed it in about 515. This is the time f Haggai and Zachariah.  These are called the post-exilic prophets. They’re the last three prophets in the Old Testament. They’re real easy to remember. The last three are after the exile.
 
Now turn to Malachi. It’s one of those places easy to find because it’s at the end of the Old Testament. The pages are white because you haven’t been there very much. Malachi, chapter 1. It starts off, “The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi.” This is a time when God is sending a rebuke to the nation because of their assimilation to paganism. All through this time period of the various Persian Kings, the current one Artaxeres is about the time of the third return under Nehemiah, Malachi is trying to straighten them up because they’ve been compromising and assimilating with the pagans and they need to stand firm. So the date is roughly around 440 to 450 B.C.
 
God says: “I have loved you says the Lord. But you say how have you loved us?” There’s a whole series of rhetorical questions in this book. This one sort of reminds me of a line I heard in a movie where the Jews are asking why God doesn’t choose somebody else. This is often expressed by a lot of Jews today. You know, they’ve suffered so much so they want God to go choose someone else. That’s what’s expressed here. They’ve gone through all these horrors in their history, so how could God say He loves us. Is this love? They want God to love someone else.
 
They’re asking God in what way He has loved them. God’s response is, “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? Declares the Lord. Yet I have loved Jacob but I have hated Esau and I have made his mountains a desolation and appointed his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness.” The point that God is making in this verse is that he brought judgment on Esau and the descendants of Esau who lived in the southern part of Judah. God brought judgment upon them. As a result, the Edomites became eventually sort of absorbed into Judea. Remember Herod was the greatest of the Edomites. The Edomites basically became subservient to the Jews in the Old Testament.
 
God is pointing out in these verses how he’s brought judgment on Edom but he’s restored the Jews to the land after their judgment. In verse 4 he says, “Though Edom says, We have been beaten down but we will return and build up the ruins Thus says the Lord of hosts, They may build but I will tear down and they will call them the wicked territory and the people toward whom the Lord is indignant forever. Your eyes will see this and you will say, The Lord be magnified beyond the border of Israel.” So the point that God is making here is that this is historical evidence that He is the one who chose Jacob and that even though there are times of discipline and there have been times of hardship, still God has been faithful to this covenant and his promises to Jacob and even when he took them out of the land the first time, he’s going to bring them back into the land and Paul is using this as an analogy of what’s going on in his time, the 1st century.
 
He’s saying that even though God is bringing discipline again upon the Jews He is not going to forget his covenant and He will once again restore them to a place of blessing. This is a great illustration of the principle of God’s faithfulness to His promise to salvation. If God were to have forgotten the Jews and have made a promise to Abraham and reneged on it, then how would we ever have the doctrine of eternal security? But because God is faithful to His promises even though we may go through periods of disobedience and we may ignore Him completely, God is always faithful to that promise and He will fulfill the promise to us to bring us to salvation, just as He will never completely turn back on his promise to Israel and He will eventually fulfill that.
 
Now next time we’ll come back and look at the next important objection that comes up. He’s going to deal with this by going to Moses and the Exodus and He’s going to deal with the key passage in verse 17 where the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up to demonstrate my power to you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth. So then He has mercy on whom He desires and He hardens whom He desires.” This is used by Calvinists to show that God just raises up those who will be saved and condemns to perdition those whom He rejects. And this is how they use this to confirm their doctrine of election and predestination. We’ll continue to see that this has nothing to do with individual salvation or justification but once again has to do with God’s faithfulness to His promises to Israel and it has to do with His corporate blessing to Israel and nothing whatsoever to do with individual selection for salvation. We’ll get to that next time.

Romans 113b-God’s Sovereign Plan and Moses

Romans 9:14 NASB95
What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be!
Romans 113b-God’s Sovereign Plan and Moses
 
We are in Romans, chapter 9, looking at God’s sovereign plan. Now is one of those gritty little passages in the New Testament that we often misunderstand. We go to passages like this often with some sort of preconceived notion because we think, and this has been true of Christians down through the ages, that everything God talks about in the Bible has to do with salvation. That’s just not true. Many passages that are in the Scriptures sometimes are talking about the spiritual life. Sometimes they’re talking about God’s plan for Israel or God’s plan for the church. They’re not focused on individual salvation or justification. They’re focused on maybe a corporate plan.
 
That’s what is addressing, God’s corporate plan for the nation Israel. Nothing in Romans, chapters 9 to 11 with the exception of a couple of things in talk about individual justification or personal salvation. What we see is a tremendous discourse in these three chapters related to comforting believers about God’s plan for Israel. It’s reassurance that God hasn’t gone back on His word. God hasn’t forgotten His promise. That no matter how things may look in life in regard to Israel, how chaotic things might be, God is true to His word, true to His promise. We just don’t always see how that’s working out at any particular moment. That’s the context.
 
I want to review a little bit about what we’re reading here. If we lose context here it’s real easy to start taking things out of the context and misinterpreting some of these passages. starts talking about God’s promise. That’s what the word of God means here. It’s not talking about the Bible but it’s talking about the promise of God that He made to Abraham. “But it is not as though the word of God has failed [taken no effect]. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel nor are they all children…” That’s a key word that we looked at last time. The difference between children and seed is discussed here. “Children” refers to a special subgroup referring to those who are children of the promise, the promise God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
So it’s not enough to be a physical descendant of Abraham because he had descendants through Ishmael, grandsons through Esau, and six sons through Keturah. These are physical descendants, the seed of Abraham, but they’re not the children of promise. So he’s talking about two groups. One has to do with a spiritual distinction between ethnic Israel and those who are true Israel in that they are regenerate. They have believed in the promise of Jesus as the Messiah. That’s verse 6 and 7a. Verse 7b is talking about defining who are the physical line of blessing, who does that describe?
 
 Now let’s just summarize this in eight points. First of all, he’s saying that the word of God, the promise of God to Abraham, has not failed. God is true to His word. He promised unconditionally by binding only Himself to the covenant with Abraham certain blessings to Abraham. He promised that Abraham’s descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the heavens and that through his descendants all the nations would be blessed. That ultimately is fulfilled in Jesus Christ with salvation to all the nations. Not just to Israel.
 
Second, why can he say this? The reason he can say that God hasn’t broken His promise is because not all who have descended from Israel, that is from Jacob, are necessarily spiritually regenerated. Paul is working at a time when there’s a massive rejection of Jesus as the Messiah by the Jews. So the question is whether God is just going to sort of throw the Jews on the rubbish pile of history because they’ve rejected Jesus and Paul is saying, “No!” There’s going to be a shift, a change, there’s going to be some divine discipline but God is not permanently setting Israel aside. He will fulfill His promises.
 
Third, what Paul is saying is that in addition to the fact that not all Israel is regenerate, not all Israel is spiritually saved, and also not all who are physical descendants of Abraham are Abraham’s children. The word for physical descendants is the Greek word SPERMA and that covers all of his descendants, Ishmael, Esau, and six sons of Keturah. But there’s a special term for those who are the children of the promise and that’s TEKNA in 9:7 which reads, “Nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants.”
 
Fourth, children of the flesh [i.e., Ishmael, the 6 sons of Keturah] are children of Abraham, but were not of the promised or selected line through the “seed,” Isaac. Fifth, the phrase “children of God” is not the same as regenerate. “Children of God” are those born through divine intervention in that the matriarchs of Israel were barren (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel).This is really important. We have to work our way carefully here because almost every commentator I read with a few exceptions assume this is about salvation or justification so they immediately assume that the children of God equals the regenerate but that doesn’t make sense in the context. Sixth, we see that to be simply a physical descendant of Abraham doesn’t qualify for the line of blessing. One had to be a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s the foundation.
 
Seventh, the second illustration is that God’s sovereign plan for the covenant of Abraham is determined by God who knows best. This is not personal regeneration but that sovereign God has the right to direct history and bestow blessings on whom He will bestow blessings. Not salvation. He’s not picking who’s going to be saved, who’s not going to be saved. That’s often what people read into this. The second illustration is the selection of the line of Jacob over Esau [] which is not based on their works, or regeneration, but divine planning.
 
This brings in two aspects of God’s character. So often when you read the Calvinists line, the Reform line, this is all about God’s sovereign choice. They ignore other aspects of God’s character. But what we see in the Scripture, all of God’s essence is involved in His planning. He elects according to foreknowledge. His knowledge of things ahead of time according to and so His omniscience comes into play. The issue here in is God’s righteousness so God’s righteousness and His justice comes into play. All of God’s character comes into play in His determining the course of history.
 
This second illustration that Paul uses here about the selection of Jacob over Esau is based not on their works or regeneration but it’s based on God’s decision on some basis, and we know that must be His knowledge of how things will work out, He planned and executed a course of action. It doesn’t determine who is going to be saved or who’s not going to be saved. Eighth, thus God’s plan for the nations is based on His grace and His decision, not on the individual or their works. 
 
The focus here is on nations as we saw with Esau. When God spoke to Rebekah. Rebekah is pregnant with twins and they’re fighting in the womb and she asks what’s going on. God says there are two nations fighting within you. The perspective there is not on individuals but on their descendants. He says the older will serve the younger. Well, that didn’t happen in the life of Jacob or Esau but it happened in terms of the historical development and outworking of those two nations. So one of the things we understand here as Paul introduces these illustrations is that he uses these illustrations to help us understand that God has the right to determine how and when and who He blesses, because He understands all the data. He knows everything there is to know. There’s nothing that he’s going to miss so he has the right and authority over whom He will choose to bless and when He will bless them and how He will bless them. This is the focus on this illustration.
 
It’s a reminder to us of the principle stated in , “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” God’s thinking, His knowledge, is based on infinite knowledge. He never learns anything. He knows everything. He never acquires knowledge. He’s never surprised by anything. He’s always known everything. His knowledge is immediate, intuitive, and direct. It’s never added to or subtracted from. We can’t comprehend any of that. Our knowledge is a finite representation of His knowledge in that we come to learn things. We don’t know things comprehensively but we can know things truly, accurately. So God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.
 
There’s an analogy between our thinking and God’s thinking but they’re different, but not so different that we can’t comprehend the idea of God’s knowledge at all. There’s a point of analogy. This is one of the problems in the whole Calvinist approach to election and God’s sovereignty in history. They’re taking our empirical understanding of causation within our experience and extrapolating that to causation in terms of God’s causation in human history. The terms are analogous but not equivalent.
 
So the way God causes things to happen is not the way we perceive causation to work in our experience. If I wanted to cause you to do something I would have to overcome your will. I would have to somehow control your will and I would have to impose my will upon you. So we extrapolate that that’s what God does in His sovereign choice. We think He imposes His will upon human beings but that runs counter to the way the Scripture continuously emphasize individual human responsibility or volition. Volition is just a larger word for will and it has a broader range of meaning. It emphasizes individual accountability and yet, when we read this passage in and look at the context there’s an emphasis on human volition.
 
Just go back two verses and there’s a command to “Seek the Lord while He may be found.” Israel’s commanded even in the midst of their disobedience, even in the midst of their rebellion, even in the midst of their rejection of God and their idolatry. God comes to them and offers them a way to turn back. He tells them to seek the Lord. That’s an imperative addressed to the individual volition of each person. They have the responsibility and they’re responsible for responding to that command. “Seek the Lord while He may be found, Call upon Him while He is near.” Notice the synonymous parallelism there. Seeking and calling are comparable, synonymous terms. They are both directed at the individual will of each person so that God is not overpowering people and saying that He’s selected one group for salvation and another group for condemnation. Each person has a responsibility to respond to the message and we’re accountable for that.
 
The seventh verse says, “Let the wicked forsake his way.” It’s a real option that people have. They can seek God or they can reject God. They can forsake their rebelliousness and they can turn to the Lord. At the end of that verse what happens?’ “And He [God] will have compassion [mercy] on him and to our God for He will abundantly pardon.” So there’s a real offer of grace to those who turn to God.
 
Keep that in mind because we’re getting ready to get into one of those really difficult passages. We won’t get there tonight but it’s the passage dealing with God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. That’s one of those great passages that people distort a lot. If you read it a certain way, I understand how you can do that. It makes it sound as if God is just reaching down and tweaking Pharaoh’s volition so that he’s can’t and won’t respond to God’s call for repentance. Yet nothing in the Exodus account that is dealing with the Pharaoh is related to his repentance to God for salvation. That’s not what it’s talking about at all. We have to work our way through this because we have to learn how to read Exodus correctly and not superimpose a theological framework on the text that isn’t there. That’s not the point.
 
So emphasizes the reality of personal volition and personal responsibility for each individual. Now in Paul is going to shift and transition to two more illustrations related to God’s sovereignty. We’ve already seen two, one related to the children of the promise and the children of the flesh in verses 7 and 8, and the second had to do with Esau and Jacob. The third one is going to have to do with Moses. What’s interesting is that if you read through a lot of the commentaries and a lot of the discussions they kind of ignore what’s going on with Moses here. But this is an important part of understanding the structure here. Moses is set over against Pharaoh as the recipient of God’s blessing, God’s sovereign choice to bless Moses. Not in salvation because Moses is already individually saved or justified, but in terms of how God is going to use Moses in God’s plan and purposes. Then, in contrast to that we see the opposite way in which God takes someone who has already chosen to reject God and is already set in negative volition and God is just going to sort of give him the courage of his convictions not to wimp out and to hang in there. That’s what the hardening of the heart refers to in a nutshell. 
 
Now we have to understand something about God. God is not a God who rejoices in the death of the wicked or the punishment of the unbeliever. It’s God’s desire that all are saved. We have an Old Testament passage that talks about this and a New Testament passage that talks about this. God is not a God who says, “Eeny, meeny, minee, mo. I’m going to take this one to heaven and that one to hell,” and then goes to the next group to pick who’s going to be saved and who He’s going to send to hell. That’s not the picture in Scripture. The picture in Scripture is not just an arbitrary selection process but that God has created a plan of salvation that provides an opportunity for each person to make a choice in relationship to God. Then they’re held accountable for that.
 
In God says, “Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, rather than that he should turn from his ways and live?” God takes no pleasure at all in the death of the wicked. God has a plan offering to the wicked, the unbeliever, a grace-based solution based on faith in God’s promise of salvation. In the Old Testament it was a promise that was yet to be fulfilled so they’re anticipating a future deliverer, known in the Old Testament as the Messiah, the Mashiach. Once Jesus paid the penalty for sin, that’s accomplished, the promise is fulfilled so from that point on the fourteenth of Nissan on the Hebrew calendar from that point to the present we look back. The promise has specificity that only in the name of Jesus is there salvation. For there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. That’s clear now. In the New Testament the same principle is stated of God’s desire to save the lost. and 4, “This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” God is offering salvation to one and all. The issue is whether or not the individual will accept that and put their trust in Jesus Christ as Savior.
 
Now let’s go back to and read, “What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be!” Now the way Paul sets up that question the answer is no. In fact, he answers it. It’s a rhetorical question. Is God unrighteous because He chooses one instead of another? Remember, I pointed out that when the text says, “Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated”. That’s not a statement to be taken at face value. It’s a Hebrew idiom meaning that Jacob is the one God selected for His plan. Hating Esau just means he wasn’t selected. God blessed Esau in many ways but He didn’t select Esau to be the one through whom the main line of the promise to Abraham would go. It’s very similar to the passage in when Jacob had married Leah and then he discovers that his new father-in-law had deceived him and sent the wrong sister in. Leah was veiled so Jacob was tricked into thinking that he was getting the love of his life, Rachel, and instead he had Leah and then he has to work another seven years to get Rachel for his wife. So the text says that he loved Rachel but he hated Leah. In the English they usually translate that as Leah was unloved but the Hebrew word there means to be hated. He loved Leah but he didn’t love her like he did Rachel. Rachel was the love of his life. It just means that Leah wasn’t the one he wanted or desired. He wanted to marry Rachel. So this Hebrew idiom expresses acceptance of one and rejection of another or one who is loved and the other loved not quite as much.
 
So when Paul says, “What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God?” the answer is no. This is all according to God’s righteous standard. He answers the question by saying, “Certainly not!” It’s the strongest way you can say that in Greek. “No, not at all. Never. Absolutely not! God is not unrighteous.” In he gives us an explanation, “For He says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
 
This takes us back to an Old Testament passage and to understand this quote we need to understand the context. This is kind of a fun and interesting thing and it really opens up the whole thing. If you just read this quote from at face value it sounds as if God is just arbitrarily choosing who he’s going to bless and who He’s not going to bless. It sounds like He’s saying, “Oh, I’m going to be gracious to you, but I’m not going to be gracious to you.” That’s as if God is just playing some kind of game in the heavens and just arbitrarily making these decisions on no basis whatsoever. So here’s the quote, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.” This is simply an assertion of God’s right to show mercy and grace in terms of His plan the best way that it should be shown. It’s saying He has the right to determine who, when, and how He is going to bestow His favors. He has the right to do that because He’s God.
It’s not a statement even in the context that has anything whatsoever to do with salvation or justification.
 
Let’s go back and look at the original statement. It’s part of a verse, , “And He said, ‘I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you…” So He’s talking to Moses. God is saying to Moses, “I’m going to pass in front of you.” “And I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you…” Now here’s God saying that He’s going to proclaim the name of the Lord to him. What in the world does that mean? It means God is going to display His character, His essence before Moses. What a privilege Moses had. Not everybody got that. He’s not talking about getting saved. He’s talking about demonstrating who He is, His essence to Moses.
 
God continues, “And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” In other words, God is saying that He’s made a decision at this point in time to reveal Himself to Moses in this way but He doesn’t have to reveal Himself in this way to everybody. And He’s choosing who He will reveal himself to at this point and who He won’t. He has that right. That’s the context of what He means by being gracious and showing compassion.
 
But to truly understand this we need to go back to the beginning of . Let’s just kind of walk our way through this whole episode. What’s going on here in the book of Exodus and the story of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt is that they’ve come to Mount Sinai. Now Mount Sinai here probably isn’t where most people think it is today at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. It’s probably located much further north. There are two or three other options for where it might be but the traditional site doesn’t fit for a variety of reasons. That’s a totally different issue. They’re there at Mount Sinai and three and half million people are camping out there for a year. God provides for them. You can just think of all the logistical issues out there in the desert. You’ve got water issues, sanitation issues, food issues, all kinds of clothing issues and other things to deal with.
 
At the beginning God speaks to them from the mountain. The people say, “Wait a minute. We can’t stand the voice of God. It’s too much for us. Moses, you go up and talk to God on your own.” So Moses goes up to talk to God on his own and God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. This is what the movie Ten Commandments portrays in quite a graphic, dramatic way. Moses is up there getting the Ten Commandments which is only the beginning of the Law. He’s getting the whole Law and while he’s up there all of a sudden he hears the noise of revelry and partying and orgies down below the mountain. This is the scene here. Moses has been up there quite a while. He’s up there for forty days and the people get restless. They think, “Well, God’s killed him. He’s never coming back.” Think about that. Today is August 29. Forty days from now would be October 8. That’s a long time. They don’t know he’s going to come back. See, we know he came back. After a while, they’re thinking, “He’s gone. He got lost, fell down a hole. God consumed him. How do we know he’s ever coming back?” So they get restless.
 
We read in 32:1, “Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” They think he’s gone so they say, “He’s gone. Make us a new god. We followed His god for a while and he did some great things. He got us out of Egypt but now we need a new god. His god destroyed him so now we need a new god. So make us an idol.”
 
Aaron just succumbs to the pressure and in verses 2 through 5 we get the description where he tells people to bring all their gold jewelry to him and he fashions a golden calf. Then we get one of the historic revisionism in verse 4. Politicians are always good at historical revisionism. Were you watching the events yesterday in Washington, D.C. or even here in Houston, over the 50th anniversary of the speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.? It was a great speech. Martin Luther King, Jr. had some fabulous establishment principles and a lot of support from Republicans in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 60s. But to hear the revisionism today you would think that Republicans are racists, all are a bunch of Ku Klux Klansmen and guess what? It was the Democrats who were the author of Jim Crow Laws. It was the Democrats who were in the KKK. It was the Democrats who were for slavery. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was a Republican. But you listen to the talk today you’d never know it. Evidently at the last minute yesterday someone invited some Republicans but it was pretty obvious. No Republican president spoke yesterday. It was just three Democrats. The one senator who’s black, Tim Scott from South Carolina, is a Republican so he obviously wasn’t allowed to speak. You see their historical revisionism.
 
This is so typical of people in power and Aaron does the same thing. He points to this golden calf and he says, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” So he’s rewriting history. It’s always important to understand the truth of history so you’re not duped by the media, duped by politicians, duped by anyone in power who tries to give you a redefined narrative so that you can follow their agenda instead of the truth. So Aaron changes the narrative and in verse 6 they make a proclamation that they’re going to have a feast. They have burnt offerings and peace offerings to the golden calf and they have a party. They have an orgy.
 
God says to Moses while they’re up on the mountain, “Go down at once, for your people, whom you brought up from the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.” They had just rejected the truth, rejected God, and just giving themselves over to every lust pattern of their sin nature. Verse 8 continues, “They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.’
 
And the Lord told Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate [stiff-necked] people.” This word for stiff-necked or stubborn people is one of the words we’ll see next time. It is translated in a couple of places as heart. In English you keep running into the phrases, ‘God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.’  They hardened their hearts.” Actually there are three different words used in Hebrew. One of them is the word used here. In it says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. says, “It came to pass when Pharaoh was stubborn [hardened his heart] about letting the Israelites go. The word here is qasheh which means to be hard, stubborn, or obstinate. It’s not the idea that God is freezing his will in place so he won’t do anything other than what God is making him do.
 
So in here we read that God is now going to bring judgment against Israel. Verse 9, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people and behold they are an obstinate people.’” The people had hardened their hearts. They’re resisting God. They’re resisting truth. Verse 10 continues, “Now then let Me alone, that My anger may turn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation.”
 
What do you think about the statement that God told Moses just to get out of the way to let him destroy all of them and then make a great nation out of Moses? We have two options. Option one is that God is serious about this and He wants to destroy every single Israelite except for Moses and from Moses He’s going to raise up a new people. Is God serious about that or is it a test? It’s a test because if God did that He would be breaking all of His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophecies that He gave to Jacob about the twelve sons of Jacob in Genesis, chapter 49 and everything that would come to pass. So it’s option two, He’s testing Moses just like he tested Abraham.
 
In Genesis, chapter 22, remember, God told Abraham to take his son, the promised seed, and to go sacrifice him. It was a test to see if Abraham really trusted God. Now we know from Hebrews that Abraham finally understood that God was truly going to give him a line of descendants through Isaac. Abraham knew that even if God killed Isaac, God would just raise him up from the dead. So it was a test to see if Abraham really trusted God. God was not going to change His plan. It was a test for Abraham to see if he really trusted God and finally come to trust God to fulfill His promises as He had planned.
 
All of this in is about God fulfilling His plan and promise to Abraham. It’s not about individual salvation or individual justification.
 
There’s another episode in Genesis, chapter 18, verses 20 and 21 when God comes with two angels to visit Abraham. He tells Abraham he’s going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. In verse 20, “And the Lord said, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is indeed great and their sin is exceedingly grave. I will go down now and see if they have done entirely according to its outcry, which has come to Me; and if not, I will know.” Like God in His Omniscience needs to go see if this really happened? God already knows what’s going on. That’s another test for Abraham. God knows there’s only one righteous man in Sodom and that’s Lot. But the test is whether Abraham is going to be a blessing and intercede on behalf of Lot. So Abraham passes both of these episodes, the one with Sodom and Gomorrah, and the one with Isaac. Abraham shows that he understands God’s grace. He understands God’s righteousness and He knows God is not going to take pleasure in the death of the wicked but in the turning back of the wicked. He understands God’s grace.
 
This is the same kind of going on in . God is testing Moses to see if Moses has understood the righteousness of God and His grace. Is Moses going to say, “Oh yeah. Great. I’ll just be the leader and take that on”? Moses responds in true humility and he stands as an intercessor for the people. So Moses in verse 11 begins to plead with God. Notice how he does this. He first of all appeals to God’s reputation in verse 11. “Then Moses entreated the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does Your anger burn against your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians speak and say, ‘With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth.?’” So the first thing Moses says to God that if He does this it’ll be a bad testimony. Everybody’s going to think God is just a willful arbitrary God and no one will trust God.
 
Secondly, he goes to the Abrahamic covenant and he says in verse 13, “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself and said to them ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.” Israel is the other name for Jacob. Moses reminds God that if he does this He’ll violate His covenant. So the Lord relented. He’s testing Moses to see if Moses is grace-oriented and has the humility and integrity to handle the leadership.
 
Verse 14, “So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.” But there’s still an issue because they have violated God’s command so there has to be divine discipline. Verse 12, “Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets which were written on both sides; they were written on one side and the other.” These were probably two copies. That was standard in the ancient world. When a covenant was cut, you made two copies. One for the person and the other gets deposited in the Temple. In this case both would be deposited in the Tabernacle, in the Ark of the Covenant.
 
 So he goes down with Joshua and they think they hear the sound of war but it’s the sound of partying. As they came near the camp, Moses’ anger became hot and he throws down the tablets and they break. He takes the calf and he melts it in the fire, grinds it into powder, scatters it in the water and makes the children of Israel drink it. Moses is executing divine judgment here. He’s angry but he’s not rebuked for this. He is executing as a leader of the people judgment for their disobedience. Moses then accuses Aaron in verse 21, “Then Moses said to Aaron, What did this people do to you, that you have brought such great sin upon them?” Verse 22, “Aaron said, Do not let the anger of my lord burn; you know the people yourself, that they are prone to evil.” Aaron is reminding Moses that these people are bad to the bone and you know you can’t trust them. Moses was gone for 40 days. The subtext here is that Aaron is telling Moses it’s really his fault for being gone so long. He tells Moses that the people came along and pressured him into making the calf.
 
Verse 25. “Now when Moses saw that the people were out of control…” Then in verse 26, “Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me! And all the sons of Levi gathered together to him.” Then Moses gives them orders. This is divine judgment for the people. Moses tells the Levites, “Every man of you put his sword upon his thigh, and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother, and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor.” The Levis obeyed and killed about three thousand men. They were executed because of their sinful rebellion against God.
 
Verse 29, “Then Moses said, “Dedicate yourselves today to the Lord—for every man has been against his son and against his brother—in order that He may bestow a blessing upon you today.” He’s saying that “you guys stood up for the truth and God is going to bless you. But first you have to sanctify yourself.” In verse 30, “On the next day Moses said to the people, You yourselves have committed a great sin, so now I will go up to the Lord, perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” Okay, so there’s been this great sin and then there’s been this execution of Divine judgment which led to the execution of three thousand people.
 
Then Moses has the nation, all the people, sanctify themselves, and he’s going to go intercede for them before God. Verse 32, “But now, if You will forgive their sin—and if not, please blot me out from Your book which You have written.” He’s saying don’t destroy them as a nation but take me in their place. That’s Moses’ humility. In verse 33, “The Lord said to Moses, Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot him out of My book. Now therefore go lead the people to the place which I have told you. Behold, My angel shall go before you; nevertheless in the day when I punish, I will punish them for their sin. So the Lord smote the people, because of what they did with the calf which Aaron had made.”
 
Okay, what’s the point of all this? God is saying that part of the punishment is that He is not going to personally go with Israel when they go to the land. He’s going to instead send His angel to lead them but God’s not going. They’re going to miss out on part of the blessing they could have had in terms of this personal fellowship with God. Because of their sin, sin has damaged their relationship with God.
 
Now it’s important to understand that God has really brought down the judgment upon Israel and is removing Himself from fellowship with Israel because of their sin. They’re going to go to Plan B where His angel is going to lead them. Then the Lord says to Moses in 33:1, “Depart, go up from here, you and the people whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” So that’s still there no matter what they did. They still get the promise. The promise of the land isn’t conditioned upon their obedience or disobedience. “I’ll send an angel before you and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite. Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey for I will not go up in your midst, because you are an obstinate people, for I might destroy you on the way.”
 
This is the key thought. God’s point is that because you sinned this sin you’re going to get less blessing, less fellowship with me. I’m not going to travel with you because if I do I’m going to have to consume all of you because you violated my righteousness so badly. When the people heard that bad news they mourned and no one put on his ornaments. They’re sad. They’re not going to dress up. They’re just wearing their mourning clothes. Verse 5, “For the Lord had said to Moses, Say to the sons of Israel, You are an obstinate [stiff-necked] people, should I go up in your midst for one moment, I would destroy you.”
 
We’re repeating this main idea. They had violated God’s standards so much that if God came as He had intended, now because of their sin, He would just consume all of them. “Now therefore, put off your ornaments from you, that I may know what I shall do with you. So the children of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments, from Mount Horeb onward.” In verse 7, Moses meets with the Lord. All of this is just to get us to verse 13. You can’t understand the statement God says about having mercy on whom He will have mercy unless you understand the context in which He’s saying it. He’s not talking about getting them justified or saved. They’re already justified and saved. That’s already through. Moses is already justified. Aaron is already justified. The issue isn’t getting into heaven as their eternal destiny.
 
The issue is their personal walk with God. Verse 7, “Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, a good distance from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting. [Tabernacle of meeting] And it came to pass that everyone who sought the Lord came out to the tabernacle of meeting so it was whenever Moses went out to the Tabernacle that all the people rose and each man stood at his tent door and watched Moses until he had gone into this tabernacle.” This is where he’s going to meet with God. ”Whenever Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses.” Everybody is watching Moses go out five, six, seven hundred yards away from the camp and they see the pillar of fire and the cloud. Everybody stands there solemnly and respectfully and prayerfully while Moses is in there talking with God.
 
Verse 11, “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend.” This phrase, “face to face” is important because it indicates an intimacy, a friendship, a fellowship level that God had with Moses and Moses had with God that is beyond anything we’ve seen in Scripture outside of maybe Enoch in Genesis. “When Moses returned to the camp, his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart form the tent.” So this shows the devotion of Joshua. Joshua would stay out there by the tabernacle.
 
Then in verse 12, “Then Moses said to the Lord, “See, You say to me, Bring up this people” but You Yourself have not let me know whom you will send with me. Moreover You have said, “I have known you by name and you have also found favor in My sight.” So what’s going on here is that Moses is reminding God of His past promise to guide and direct Israel and His love and grace to the people. Moses is arguing that the Lord will reveal Himself to all the people. What’s interesting when you go through this section Moses seems to be saying that God needs to come into the presence of the people.  Moses is talking about God’s presence with all the people. But God keeps talking about just His appearance to Moses individually.
 
Verse 13 continues, “Now therefore, I pray you, if I have found favor in Your sight consider too that this nation is Your people.” Demonstrate your love to this people that You’re going to be faithful to Your word. What chutzpah. Moses is arguing that God will give evidence that He is going to bless the nation and fulfill His promise. God says in verse 14, “My presence shall go with you [the people], and I will give you [Moses] rest.” Then verse 15, “Then he [Moses] said to Him, If your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here. For how then can it be known that I have found favor in Your sight, I and Your people? Is it not by Your going with us, so that we, I and Your people, may be distinguished from all the other people who are upon the face of the earth?” Moses is trying to argue God into going with all of the people. In verse 18 Moses asks God to show Him His glory. God’s response in verse 19 is “I will make all My goodness pass before You [singular, not before the whole nation, but just Moses] and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you [I will demonstrate my character before You].
 
He’s saying, “You may think the way to blessing for this nation is for me to go back to Plan A and travel with the people but if I do that, I’m going to consume them. I’m the sovereign God who understands all the facts. I know all the details. You can trust me to make the right decision and I’m not going to go with them because I reserve the right to bless whom I will bless. I’m going to choose to bless you by revealing this much of Myself to you. I have the right to have compassion on whom I will have compassion. You can’t dictate to me what the best way for My plan to work itself out is. I have the right to do that because I’m the sovereign God who knows all the facts. So God is going to restrict how He comes into the presence of His people. There’s going to be a compromise here because in a sense He’s going with the people but He’s going to remain in the confines of the tabernacle and the Holy of Holies and He’s not going to be present with the people as a whole.
 
What God means by all of this is that because of His righteousness and justice, because He’s a holy God, He can’t do what He initially intended to do which was to have a greater presence within all the people but He’s going to restrict it. He has the right to do this because He knows all the facts. He’s the one who determines the best way to fulfill His plan and to answer Moses’ prayer. So what we see here is that because only God knows the overall strategy and the overall goal, He has the right to determine how He’s going to work out His plan and His purpose.
 
Though individuals are involved in this episode, the issue is not their eternal salvation or justification but how and when and under what circumstances God is going to bless people in time. Nothing in the passage, either here or with Pharaoh, relates to the eternal destiny of Moses or the eternal destiny of Pharaoh. The issue in both of these illustrations is God has a plan for Israel and they are God’s chosen nation and He’s the one who has the right to determine how He’s going to bless them and under what circumstances.
 
So the conclusion from all of this is in , “So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.” It’s not dependent on Israel or Moses or Pharaoh but it’s dependent on God who oversees history and will bring about the conclusion that He has intended. So that helps us work our way through this first part of up through verse 16.
 
Then we’re going to see the next explanation in verse 17 which is the second illustration. This idea that when God says,” I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion,” don’t rip this out of context and say that God is going to arbitrarily choose who’s going to get saved and who’s not. He’s not even talking about that. He’s talking about the fact that He’s the one who chooses the outworking of blessing in history and He reserves the right to be able to choose how and when and under what circumstances He’s going to work out His plan.
 
For application for us, it means that when we come to the Lord in prayer God is the one who determines how he’s going to answer it, when He’s going to answer it, and in what circumstances He’s going to answer it, and He knows all the facts, all the details. He has all the data under control and He’s going to work out the plan and bless us at the right time in the right way because He’s trustworthy. So we can trust Him to work out things the right way because of His character.

Romans 114b-Hardening Pharaoh’s Heart

Romans 9:17 NASB95
For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.”
Romans 114b-Hardening Pharaoh’s Heart
 
We are in Romans, chapter 9.Tonight we get into one of those great little tough conundrums on the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. So hopefully tonight I will be able to shed a little light and not too much darkness on understanding how God’s sovereignty works in terms of human history. We’ll specifically be looking at but we’ll start with a little review because it’s important to understand the context.
 
Context is one of the most important aspects of Biblical interpretation. It’s often easy when we walk up into a conversation and interrupt in the middle or we just overhear a conversation to misunderstand what someone might be saying simply because we haven’t heard the whole conversation. We don’t know precisely what they’re discussing or what they’re saying. I’ve had situations where I was quoting somebody and I had someone walk up and think that what I was saying was expressing my opinion instead of that I was quoting someone else. So context is very important in order to understand anything we hear or that we read. It’s the literary version of the real estate adage, location, location, location.
 
We have to understand what the context is. Context affects words a lot. What a word means is often more determined by its context than just simply going to the dictionary. Often we think of certain words having certain set meanings but those meanings can change or vary according to the context. In a broad sense you have some words that are used in poetry and they have a broader use, more a figure of speech use than if they’re used in technical, legal, or historical literature. So context is important and one way that we often misinterpret scripture is that we don’t understand the audience so we think what is being said has something to do with justification and salvation rather than sanctification.
 
Many times in the Gospels when Jesus gives various commands related to sanctification, such as “take up your cross daily and follow me” people have taken that to refer to something related to salvation rather than sanctification. It’s very clear from passages in scripture like that we’re not saved by works or by doing these thing. Mandates in the Word relating to discipleship are not related to becoming saved. Becoming a disciple wasn’t the same thing as becoming saved. So says we’re saved “through grace, by faith, and not of ourselves [not of works] lest any man should boast.” says “It’s not by works of righteousness we have done but according to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit.” So when we look at passages like that we see that salvation is by grace, through faith, and works are completely excluded in those passages.
 
Another thing we see is that “saved” in used in those passages to relate to phase one salvation. The word “saved” or “salvation” in those contexts relates to getting or acquiring eternal life. However when you get into Romans the technical term that Paul uses for phase one is justification. When we acquire eternal life then that is justification. When we receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness then that is justification. In Romans most of the time salvation and the word group related to the Greek word SOZO has to do with either sanctification or in certain cases, physical deliverance. But there’s no place in Romans where the word group for SOZO relates to justification so you have to pay attention to context. If you take that word group in Romans for “saved” and try to assign to it the same meaning you have in then you’re going to go off track in terms of interpreting the particular passage.
 
In a similar way it’s easy to not only impose a word meaning from one passage to another passage but it’s wrong to take a theological system and read it into the text. This often happens in , as I’ve pointed out. When we first started with I spent quite a bit of time talking about replacement theology and covenant theology because they come with an assumption, a presupposition, that Israel has been totally set aside by God and His plan and if they’re really into full Covenant theology they’re either amillennial or post-millennial so they don’t believe in a future, literal Messianic kingdom. This influences their interpretation of so to them is not something that is talking about God’s plan for Israel as a nation.
 
They often interpret the term “Israel” as referring to a spiritual Israel saying that the church is now spiritual Israel. Ultimately everything gets reduced to covenant theology, to something related to soteriology. This is part of their scope for how they interpret history, that history is the history of redemption and the working out of God’s covenant of grace. So everything is organized around this principle of salvation so they’re reading salvation into the context. As I pointed out last week as we get into the context of it’s not a defense of God’s sovereignty in electing or choosing some people for salvation and sending other people to eternal condemnation. Justification salvation isn’t anywhere in this context. It’s talking about God’s choice of Israel and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for a specific purpose in history. And that it’s through Abraham, on the basis of the Abrahamic covenant that God’s going to bless all of the nations. The focus is not on individuals or individual salvation as you saw in the passage dealing with Esau and Jacob in verse 13. “Jacob I have loved but Esau I’ve hated.” We saw that’s not talking about individuals but they represented nations just as God had indicated in the original passage in Genesis.
 
With that in mind we got into the next section dealing with this question that is raised, as we talked about the sovereignty of God and His decisions in human history, that someone might object to it and say, “Well, is there unrighteousness in God?” Paul’s response at the end of verse 14 is a very strong denial in the Greek, ME GENOITO, which means no, not at all, absolutely not!
 
Then he gives two illustrations of God’s right to choose how He will oversee history. That’s the focal point here, how God’s going to work out His plan for Israel within history. That’s been the context up through verse 13 and it’s still the context. It doesn’t change. So when we get down into some of these more difficult passages such as the reference to the potter and the clay in verse 21 again it’s not discussing God’s choice or selection of some people for salvation and some people for eternal condemnation. That’s not in the passage anywhere. It doesn’t fit the context.
 
Now last time we looked at where Paul illustrates with his first example from history in Exodus and the birth of the Jewish nation. The birth begins with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Genesis, chapter 12. The birth of the Jewish people begins in the Exodus event as He redeems them from slavery in Egypt. In Paul said, “For He [God] says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” Now if we just take that out of context it looks like Paul is saying that God can just willy nilly, arbitrarily select whomever He’s going to be good to and who He’s going to have judgment on and that just depends on God’s arbitrary will.
 
 I showed that if we look at the context of that statement back in Exodus, because it’s a quote of the second half of , we discovered that it’s a very important context. I just wanted to remind you of that because this is not the easy stuff of Scripture. This is the steak, the really meatier parts of Scripture. It’s harder for some people to understand and comprehend. Often the way words are translated into English causes us problems. The English words chosen have been used traditionally since the time of the Reformation and they sort of frontloaded our theology a little bit. They might not be the best words to use so we have to work our way through this.
 
In where we saw the context was where Moses was up on the mountain getting the tablets of the Law and they hear the sound of a party going on down below and what’s happened is that the people have talked Aaron into making an idol, a golden calf. They’re worshipping the golden calf and basically having an orgy. God threatens to completely destroy and wipe out all of the Israelites except for Moses and raise up a new nation through Moses. 
 
This is really a test of Moses, just as God has tested Abraham and God has tested Job, to see if Moses is truly humble and really understands God’s plan. Moses does. He passes the test with flying colors and he intercedes for the nation. He intercedes by arguing a couple of different ways as we saw last time. One of those ways is that he argues to God that it is bad for His reputation, and number two, it’s violating the covenant he made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So on that basis Moses asks God not to destroy the people. God relents. He’s not going to destroy the people but as a result of their disobedience, God is still going to bring divine discipline. There has to be consequences for sin in this situation so there’s judgment upon those rebels in the camp that is brought about by Moses and the Levites.
 
Another part of the consequences of that, though, is that God is going to come along and He is going to remove Himself from their midst as we saw in , “For the Lord had said to Moses, “Say to the sons of Israel, You are an obstinate people; should I go up in your midst for one moment, I would destroy you.” God in His righteousness would bring judgment upon the whole nation so God says that He’s going to remove Himself from their presence and not lead them.
 
Well at this point Moses continues to intercede with Him. Moses is concerned about the people, this is seen in the plural pronouns which Moses uses when he talks to God, and God, on the other hand, is speaking to how He’s going to bless Moses. Moses asks God in verse 13,”Now therefore I pray You, if I have found favor in Your sight, let me know Your ways that I may know You so that I may find favor in Your sight. Consider too, that this nation is Your people.” In other words he’s asking God to relent even of this complete removal from the people to demonstrate by His presence that these people are indeed God’s chosen people and God has selected them for His purpose in history.
 
God answers Moses, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.”  But God tells Moses that there are consequences for the people’s actions so He’s going to scale back in His presence. Now he’ll just be in the tabernacle and leading them through the cloud and the pillar of fire. God is making it plain that He is going to give Moses blessing, an additional grace blessing that shows favor to Moses, and the response is that “If Your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here.”
 
Moses is continuing to plead that God’s presence needs to be with the people. His reason is given in verse 16, “For how then can it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and Your people? Is it not by Your going with us, so that we, I and Your people, may be distinguished from all the other people who are upon the face of the earth?” In verse 18 he pleads with God to show him His glory. God’s response is, “I will make all My goodness pass before you…” God is going to give this special blessing where God as an individual is showing Himself to Moses. He is showing His glory to Moses alone. He’s going to pass by. This is a blessing that is restricted only to Moses so the statement that God makes at the end of the verse, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.”
This is basically a statement where God is saying to Moses, “I have a plan. That plan will be executed the way I want to execute it, at the time I want to execute it, and in the manner I want to execute it. Your idea of how it should be executed isn’t going to work. I’m going to do it My way. I have the right to reserve that and how I will do that. I choose how I am going to display Myself and how I am going to choose to be gracious to you and pass before you and reveal myself to you, not to all the people in this particular way.”
 
So the point we see here is that God is the One who reserves the right to determine what He does and how He does it and the right to display His grace when, where, and how he sees fit. So he reserves that right. But he’s not talking about individual salvation. Moses is already saved. This has nothing to do with salvation but how God is going to display His grace in terms of His plan for Israel.
 
Here is a summary of what we see here: First of all, the issue did not involve individuals but the role of the nation. No one’s eternal salvation was at stake. It’s not talking about individual justification. The second thing, what was at stake was the destiny of Israel and God’s plan and purpose for the nation and how God was going to manifest His blessing for the nation. Third, what we see Paul doing is that he’s arguing that God’s plan for Israel would not be shaped by what Moses wanted but by God’s omniscient will. In Calvinism everything gets washed in the grid of God’s sovereignty but we know from passages like that we’re “elect according to the foreknowledge of God.” God’s omniscience plays a role in the decisions that He makes and part of His omniscience involves an understanding of our volition and the fact that He knows all the knowable and all that could take place and He makes His plan accordingly.
 
Fourth, in the same way Paul uses the example of Pharaoh to show that God’s plan for Israel was not to be shaped by the opposition of Pharaoh but by God’s plan. So on the one hand, he’s showing Moses who’s good, who walks with the Lord, who gets this intimate blessing from the Lord but that doesn’t shape God’s plan. It’s not based on his decision and his will. Neither is it on the basis of the negative side like Pharaoh.
 
So we’re going to look at this illustration from Pharaoh. Paul is not saying in this passage, as some suggest, that God can do whatever He likes: whether it’s going to be saving some and condemning others since everyone deserves hell anyway. That’s sort of a Calvinistic, deterministic interpretation of this passage that God just has the right to do whatever He wants to. Paul is saying something like this. Let me sort of paraphrase this whole discussion. Certainly there is no unrighteousness with God. Moses found it difficult to see why the Lord was acting to judge Israel the way He did and he pleaded with God to show grace to Israel. The Lord’s response was that only He knew the best way to distribute His grace to Israel. Moses’ ideas were not the issue. Moses’ behavior was not the issue because Moses didn’t know all the details. Only God knew all the details and facts and what the overall strategy needed to be.
 
Paul is saying that if one objects to the way God is dealing with Israel in history in terms of their rejection of the Messiah, this only shows a misunderstanding of the principles on which God works. God’s dealings with Israel at the time of the exodus were not determined by Israel’s merits or holiness because they were quite disobedient. God blessed them according to His own plan and His own character. Even Moses’ own righteousness did not enable him to direct God’s plan. God worked out His plan on the basis of His own omniscience, His own righteousness, His own justice, and His sovereign authority. So this is why we read in , “For He [God] says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” That relates to the demonstration of God’s grace in terms of His plan and purposes for Israel. Then in he says, “So it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.”
 
When we get into this next section starting in verse 17 the focus is going to be on Pharaoh: “For the scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I raised you up to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” Now it’s easy to see why people would read into this some sort of salvation determination, that God is predetermining what Pharaoh’s salvation will be but salvation isn’t entering into the passage at all. There are a couple of things we have to remember as we start in on this. First of all, Pharaoh is already immersed in idolatry. He has already chosen to believe completely and immerse himself in the entire idolatrous system of Egypt.
How does Paul describe this whole mechanic of getting involved in idolatry? We go back to Romans, chapter 1. Think about this in terms of the Pharaoh. Verse 20, “Since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they’re without excuse.” The Pharaoh has clearly seen God’s invisible attributes so he is without excuse. In verse 21 let’s just put the Pharaoh in here, “For even though the Pharaoh knew God, he did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but he became futile in his speculations, and his foolish heart was darkened.” See that’s what’s happening with unbelievers. He’s darkening his heart. It’s getting locked into negative volition because he’s rejected God and in the place of God he’s worshipping the creation, rather than the creator.
 
goes on to say, “Professing to be wise, he became a fool and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” This description in describes the introduction of idolatry in human history and specifically can be applied in terms of Pharaoh’s own personal relationship to God. He’s rejected God. He’s worshipping the creation. “Therefore, God gave him over in the lusts of his hearts to impurity.” God allows them to follow the determination of his own volition. He and others have chosen to reject God and to follow the path of idolatry so God releases them to continue to go in that direction.
 
So when we get to the passage related to Pharaoh, we see that this is just an expression that God is intensifying a decision and he’s sort of strengthening Pharaoh in his conviction on that decision but it’s a decision that Pharaoh has already come to on his own. God is not making him reject God. God is not forcing his will against God. God is just strengthening a decision that Pharaoh has already made on his own. So we look at the passage in . We see that it is a quotation from which states where God is speaking to Pharaoh, “But indeed, for this reason I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth.”
 
This isn’t a statement related to his individual soteriological decision. The context of that is the seventh plague. One of the problems we have is the word that is chosen traditionally, probably going back to William Tyndale. So much of the language that’s used even in the King James Version was originally words chosen by William Tyndale in his translation of the Old Testament and New Testament earlier on in the 16th century. Some of these words have become very much solidified in English translations so that despite later developments in our understanding of language it’s difficult to change the translations.
 
Unfortunately translations have become a business. I had a professor at Dallas Seminary, a Hebrew professor, who was very much involved in the New International Version. It’s not one I’m real fond of and often I refer to it as more of a commentary than it is a translation. He used to comment several times that they would meet in committee and that each person was assigned a text to translate. Then they would come back and argue and debate their translations until finally it would go to a couple of committees. Then a final reading would be determined. He would often say, “You know, this translation is the word of God by a vote of five to four.” Many times that ought to go in the margins.
 
Unfortunately, because there’s a tradition to translate these passages as “hardening Pharaoh’s heart” that’s the translation that stuck. That’s how we find it. It’s become the traditional way but that’s not the best way to translate it. If God had subverted Pharaoh’s individual volition and God is making him do it, then how could God turn around and say it was Pharaoh’s fault, that he was the one who refuses to let my people go? The fact that God says this is a big insight in the fact that it is ultimately Pharaoh that is making this decision. He is hostile to God’s people, to Israel. So as we look at all of the hardening of the heart verses in Exodus, it’s easy to see how the Calvinists or the determinists’ interpretation of the “hardening of the heart” is arrived at. But we need to observe other passages of Scripture. First, they indicate that Pharaoh has already set his volition in a direction hostile to God and to God’s people, Israel. Pharaoh has already made that decision before God does anything. Second, in God’s commission to Moses in God states that He knows Pharaoh will not let His people go. In , God says to Moses, “But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion.” So God in His omniscience knows that Pharaoh has already made a decision and that he had already set his heart and he’s not going to let his entire workforce, basically, leave the country.
 
Third, the issue in the Romans argument when we look at the context is that neither Moses in his righteousness or Pharaoh in his obstinacy have the right to set God’s agenda for how He’s going to deal with His people. God’s plan for Israel is determined by God’s sovereignty. It’s not a plan related to individual justification. The fourth point we see is that Pharaoh’s hardened heart is related to his own animosity and hostility toward the Israelites. It’s based on his own volition.
 
Now the fifth point, I want to look into the fact that there are actually three different words that are used in Hebrew that are translated as “hardened.” It’s important to look at these words. The first word and the most common word that is used is the Hebrew word “chazaq”. Without the vowel points it’s just “chzq”. It’s in the piel, which is an intensified stem. It means to be strong, to become strong, to strengthen, to prevail, to harden, to be courageous, and to be severe or sore from the Old King James. Other than the hardening passages where chazaq is almost always translated as hardening.
 
Other than that the most common translation for this word has to do with strengthening or encouraging or urging someone. Look at and I’ll show you an example of this. In we have a similar use of the word chazaq. We’ll start reading in verse 31, “Then he called for Moses and Aaron at night and said, ‘Rise up, get out from among my people, with you and the sons of Israel and go, worship the Lord as you have said. Take both your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and go, and bless me also.’” This is after the death of the firstborn when Pharaoh is finally saying, “Just leave. Get out of the kingdom. Leave Egypt.” Not only does Pharaoh tell them to go, look at verse 33, “The Egyptians urged the people to send them out of the land in haste, for they said, ‘We will all be dead.’”
 
“Urged” here is chazaq which is translated urged or encouraged the people to go. Not hardened them. It means to encourage. If you were to take all of these passages where God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” and translate it “God encouraged or urged Pharaoh’s heart”. You get a totally different sense here. It’s not as though God is fixing or locking in Pharaoh’s volition. He is strengthening it, something that’s already been decided. He’s urging, encouraging him to continue in a course of action he’s already set his heart on.
 
So gives us a good look at that word in a similar context right where we are in Exodus. That makes a lot of sense. We can look at a lot of other passages like , “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘When you go back to Egypt see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders which I have put in your power but I will strengthen [not harden] his heart so that he will not let the people go.’” And then , “Yet Pharaoh’s heart was strengthened or became stubborn or became obstinate or did not heed…” This is the idea we have as we go through these verses. There are thirteen times this word is used as hardening, or strengthening, or encouraging Pharaoh’s heart.
 
Now the next word that is used is kaved which literally means to be heavy or to be severe. It is a word in another noun form, which means glory, such as the glory of God. This has to do with the seriousness, the significance, the heaviness, the weightiness of something. Its literal meaning is something that is heavy, something that is harsh, and something that is difficult. It’s used one time as a noun related to Pharaoh’s heart and six times as a verb. In , “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is stubborn, he refuses to let the people go.” You could say his heart was focused in a negative way. It’s used six times where it’s translated as the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, such as in , and three or four other verses.
 
The third word is qashh in the hipiel stem which is a causative stem in the Hebrew. It means to make something hard. It’s used two times in relation to this. In God says “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.” In it’s translated stubborn there. So that’s interesting in one passage it’s translated as stubborn indicating that it’s his volition. So what’s the bottom line in all of this? When we look at the passage and the overall view of Scripture we see that Pharaoh, as an idolater, had already made a decision against God. At the point of God consciousness he had rejected God and he had become more and more immersed in the idolatry of the Egyptian religious system. He made a decision against God not to release the Israelites. That was his decision but God strengthened him because in doing so God could bring about several objectives that He wanted to use as a teaching illustration and as evidence of His own glory.
 
Number one, God wanted to demonstrate that Israel should clearly understand who it was who delivered them. This is seen in , , . God wanted Israel to clearly see that this wasn’t just something that happened by chance, that this wasn’t something where they were involved or made possible but that God brought about a tremendous miracle. They needed to understand that it was God, and God alone, who delivered them from slavery in Egypt.
 
The second reason God did it this way was because it brought about a spoiling of the Egyptians. The Israelites had been slaves for almost four hundred years and so what happens when the Egyptians finally release them, the Egyptians want to give them all of their treasured possessions, gold, silver, and jewels. They give them all this and it was payback essentially for all the years of their labor. All of this wealth that was transferred to the Jews would help sustain them and establish them in the future but it would also provide for all the gold and silver needed for the tabernacle.
 
Third, God did it in this way in order to demonstrate who He was to the Egyptians. He wanted to demonstrate His omnipotence. He wanted to show that the Egyptian system of idolatry was completely false and that God was superior to all the gods and goddesses in the Egyptian pantheon. This is seen in , , and . To recap, the first reason was that Israel would clearly understand that God was the one who had delivered them in , , -15. Make sure you have those passages. Second, that they would have these valuable possessions to take away from Egypt in and that God would multiply His signs and third, demonstrate His power and His ability to the Egyptians, and fourth, that God’s name would be declared not only in Egypt but also in the whole earth. That this would be a testimony and it was.
 
Remember, later on when we get to Joshua and the two spies go into Jericho? They are hidden by Rahab because Rahab has heard all the stories about the exodus and how God brought the Jews out of Egypt. That testimony of what God did had spread all throughout the world so God’s reputation impacted the whole world. So the conclusion in this is, that therefore God has mercy on whom He wills, which was the illustration from Moses, and whom He wills, He hardens, which is Pharaoh.
 
So God is doing this relation to His plan and purpose for Israel. The word for “hardened” translated in is just a word that either means to be hardened or to make stubborn or obstinate. So God is just intensifying that that was already there. Back in Paul goes back to the objector. He knows this sounds like this is just an arbitrary God. So he says, “Indeed who are you, O man who answers back to God?” Remember he’s talking here about God’s purposes for Israel in history. “The thing molded will not say to the molder ‘Why did you make me like this?” Does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?”
 
This is an illusion to the Old Testament in and this has to do again with God’s shaping the nation’s destiny. It does not have to do with individual volition in relation to individual salvation. So he uses the illustration in about the potter shaping the clay. He states that as God has the authority over creation to set His plan and purposes in motion and to select one nation for one purpose and another nation for another purpose, just as the potter has the right to shape a lump of clay for one purpose or another.
 
So he then raises the question in verse 22, “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience [long suffering] the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?” The endurance with much patience, or long suffering indicates that God is giving them time individually to respond to the non-verbal or general revelation in creation and whatever special revelation they might have, even though they might be within a nation that is doomed to judgment. And that ultimately all of this is designed for God to make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy which He had prepared beforehand for glory.
 
Here, he’s again not talking about individuals or salvation but about God’s plan now shifting from Israel to the gentiles in terms of the church. He says in verse 24, “Even us whom He also called, not from among Jews, but also from among gentiles.” Who are the “called”? Well, that takes us back to our study from , “We know that things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” This is a term that is used to refer to those who had responded to the gospel message, who had believed on Christ. Those who had believed on Christ, not only the Jews but also the gentiles, were blending together to form a new people of God, not to replace Israel, but because Israel had rejected their Messiah. Now at this point we get into a couple of different verses in and and then starting in verses 17 and 28 we have a quotation from and Isaiah 28. I want to get into the original context of both of these passages so I want to wait until next time. I kind of went into that part on the hardening of the heart a little faster than I thought I would. I will deal with these passages next week when we can take some time and go back and investigate them more fully.

Romans 115b-Hardening, the Potter, and the Stumbling Stone

Romans 9:20 NASB95
On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it?
Romans 115b-Hardening, the Potter, and the Stumbling Stone
 
We’re in where God is dealing with His plan for Israel. The most important thing to understand here, as I explained last time, is context. Context, context, context. The context so far is God dealing with a nation, with a corporate entity of Israel, God’s plan for Israel. The reason I stress that is because just today as I’ve been reading through some additional commentaries, I’m reading through one by a Dallas Seminary professor who’s younger than me. He’s a guy who has a reputation as being a free grace guy but I’ve had some problems with some things he’s written in his commentary on Romans and I disagree here.
 
He quotes several commentators, Cranfield, Leon Morris, and two or three others who are reform but recognize that is not dealing with individuals at all. It’s dealing with corporate entities. Then he disagrees with them, as many scholars do, by saying, “Well when you start getting down into chapter 9, how can you talk about God’s grace and mercy to a corporate entity because they’re made up of individuals so it’s got to apply to both?” The fuzzy thinking that goes with that is that God deals with Israel as a corporate entity, even though there are many individuals within that corporate entity that go a different way. And he always does that so there’s an individual plan of salvation and justification for individuals within Israel and then there is God’s plan for the national entity, the ethnic Israel. That’s the important distinction.
 
The only time we’re dealing with individual, personal salvation in Romans is when Paul uses the term “justification”. When the Paul uses the term “salvation” in he’s not talking about individual personal salvation or personal justification. He’s talking about the deliverance of Israel corporately because they came under divine judgment in A.D. 70 and in terms of God’s future plan, there has to be a restoration to the land when the kingdom is set up. That’s what we’re talking about here. That God has not forgone, forgotten his promises to Israel: that He is still going to fulfill the promises He made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David, Daniel, Jeremiah, all the way through. So what’s he’s illustrating here is not personal. It’s not personal salvation or decision making. Its national entities and God’s sovereignty over the direction of history.
 
So as we went through this we saw from Moses that was exactly what was happening and the quote we looked at there in verse 15 which came from . The conclusion was that God said to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy…” The context had nothing to do with justification. It has to do with how God is choosing to demonstrate His mercy upon nations in terms of God’s plan. And that He has chosen to show additional mercy to Moses which He did not show to all of the Israelites.
 
On the other hand He’s going to also show a measure of what is called “hardening”. This is not a good translation but it refers to God’s judgment on Pharaoh. It’s really upon the nation of Egypt and God’s plan for Egypt. It’s not this choice of who God will bless as a nation in terms of His choice of Israel versus His not choosing for special blessings other nations. It’s a matter of God’s will, not human will or human ideas as in verse 16, “It’s not of him who wills…”
 
Moses had a different plan. He argued, “God You need to do this with the Israelites. You need to walk with them and be close to them as in the original plan.” God said, “No, we’re going to Plan B. You don’t understand all the issues and My justice and righteousness.” So, “It’s not of him who wills or him who runs but of God who shows mercy.” God is God and as the Sovereign creator has the right to oversee human history. In doing so God has also determined that man will have his own volition.
 
Now there’s a great illustration of this that is difficult for people to understand. It’s not an illustration of this that’s easy. It’s not one you and I can fully comprehend but you and I can understand it. Every time we talk about inspiration we are thinking about this. How does God inspire the Scripture? God so superintends the writers of scripture that without violating their individual personality, writing styles, background, or culture, God guarantees that they write what He wants them to write but it’s written from their personality. It’s not dictation. See, if it was just God’s sovereignty saying what He wanted written then God would dictate it to them. But it’s not.
 
Peter and Paul and John all write very, very differently. The writer of Hebrews uses a very high form of Greek whereas Peter’s is a little more rudimentary. John’s is very simple. Paul’s is much more complex but this shows that their individual volition and personality style, all those different factors are not overridden by God. He is using that so that is God, as a sovereign, causing things to happen in history. I tried to explain this at the end last time, that’s cause and effect. We think of cause and effect only in terms of our frame of reference within creation. But this is God outside of creation causing things in such a way that it doesn’t violate individual volition and responsibility. We can’t comprehend that. We don’t have a frame of reference for Creator causation. We only have a frame of reference for creaturely causation and so we have to understand that God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. There’s an analogy. That’s why our knowledge of God is referred to as analogical. It is not univocal. Univocal means one and the same. It’s not identical so we always have to understand that.
 
Now the next illustration that God used from Exodus had to do with Moses. In , it says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” Everyone goes, “Oh no, God violated Pharaoh’s volition.” Well if we think about it logically, if God violated his volition, then how can Pharaoh be held accountable for the decisions he makes? And as I pointed out last time, even within the text God is pointing out that Pharaoh made those decisions on his own, apart from God.
 
The problem that we have is this word that English translators have chosen to use, “hardening”. It makes it sound as if God just reaches down and says, “There. I’m pushing you on negative volition and I’m going to make you stay there and be hostile and you don’t have anything to say about it.” But this word, especially the primary word that’s used to translate it is chzq. It’s not translated that way anywhere else in the Old Testament and that’s significant. I’ll show you some other examples for that.
 
And another way in which one of the other words is translated is stubborn. It’s this idea of strengthening the will. So the first thing we have to understand is that there’s this dynamic. We went to , which is where you have to start. It says that at the point of God-consciousness every Egyptian including the Pharaoh understood that God existed. They understood from general revelation that God existed and they went, “No, I’d rather worship Ra, Eptah, and all the other deities in our pantheon and I’m going to substitute these creaturely inventions for God rather than try to find out about the true Creator God.” So they start on negative volition and they’ve made that decision. They continued down that track for 20, 30, 40, 60, 70, 80 years and then along comes Moses and God is working out His purposes in history.
 
So God, instead of tweaking their volition, it’s already there. God is strengthening it. Some people say, “Well I don’t understand how that works.” Well, I don’t think there’s one of us who hasn’t said, “Lord, I really need to be stronger. I need to make this decision and I want you to just strengthen my will. Enable me to do this.” The Holy Spirit enables us and He influences us but He never overrides our volition. He strengthens us and there are scriptures that use similar terminology but it’s in a positive direction so everybody says that’s okay. See when you’re positive you just want God to help you maintain that positive volition and to strengthen you through the Holy Spirit.
 
Pharaoh’s the flip side. He’s negative and God is just helping him to stay negative to carry it out to the end result. This doesn’t have to do with his salvation. It has to do with the full demonstration of the might and the power of the throne of heaven over Egypt and Egyptian religion so that it will be clear to the Israelites and clear to the Egyptians and clear to the whole world that God is the one who has miraculously delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
 
What happens in is we get this foundational understanding about religion. says, “Although they knew God they did not glorify Him as God nor were they thankful but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” I want you to notice that their foolish heart “was darkened” is a passive voice. It doesn’t mean that God darkened their heart. It means that as a result of their negative volition to God their souls, their minds, their mentality became dark. They shut out the light of revelation so when we have these passive forms like “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened” where God’s not even in the passage, it doesn’t mean that God is the one performing the action of hardening. That’s expressing the result of Pharaoh’s own negative volition already.
 
What they did is standard in paganism. They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man.” So God does what? He gives them over which is, He sort of takes them, using a small engine metaphor, He takes the governor off so that if you want to go in that direction, He takes the restraints off and you’re going to be able to go that way fast and furiously so that My purposes will be taken care of. You’ve made the decision, not God. So in we read, “For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.’ ” This is God’s purpose in taking and pushing Pharaoh to the limits of his own volition. It’s a quote from as I pointed out last week. Now God had announced this to Moses long before it ever says anything about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. In ,”But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion.” This is the role of God’s omniscience. It’s not just His will. The problem with Calvinism and the deterministic, fatalistic flaw in Calvinism is that they look at this and say, “See it’s all God’s will.” They exclude His omniscience but says that we are predestined according to foreknowledge. Foreknowledge precedes God’s choice of destiny there. All that’s review.
 
Get your mind back into that hard grind where we were last time. Of the three words that are used in the Hebrew that are translated “hardened” or express that concept, the most important is chzq and is usually translated to be strong or to strengthen, to prevail, or to harden only in these contexts in Exodus. Now the conclusion, as we saw last time, is that God has mercy on whom He wills. This is not a blanket statement that every act of God’s mercy is based on His sovereign will in terms of justification or in terms of sanctification. This has to do with the context of what God is doing with the destiny of Egypt and the destiny of Israel as a nation. Now the New Testament word that is translated here is SKLERUNO which means to harden or to make stubborn. It’s only used a couple of times and it has basically that idea of just intensifying something in its current state.
 
Now we’re going to get into some new material. I want you to look at this word chzq where it’s not used as hardened. I think if we think about how it’s used in these other passages, it gives us an understanding that this is not a word about overriding someone’s volition. In and 4, God says, “Encourage the exhausted, and strengthen the feeble. Say to those with anxious heart, ‘Take courage, fear not. Behold your God will come with vengeance. The recompense of God will come but He will save you.’ ”  Encourage in this verse is parallel to strengthen, which is chzq.
 
So what does chzq mean in this passage? It is a synonym for encourage. The “anxious heart” in the verse is someone who’s given over to worry. That describes the person who’s exhausted and feeble. The idea in this verse of strengthening those who are exhausted is to “take courage”. It doesn’t mean that their will or volition is being overridden. is talking about an analogy here with a craftsman. It says, “So the craftsman encourages the smelter.” That’s chzq. The craftsman isn’t taking over the will and volition of the one who’s doing the smelting. There’s a parallel in the next line. “And he who smooths metal with the hammer encourages him who beats the anvil.” The verb is not there a second time. It’s assumed from the first line. It’s probably in italics in your translation. So the craftsman encourages the smelter and he who smooths metal with the hammer encourages him who beats the anvil. So again you don’t see this idea of God or one person overriding the volition of another. It’s strengthening them.
 
is a condemnation of apostate Israel in a time of going out under the 5th cycle of discipline in 586 B.C. It says, “Because you disheartened the righteous with falsehood when I did not cause him grief but have encouraged the wicked to turn from his wicked way and preserve his life.” This is what God was doing, encouraging the wicked to turn from their wicked way and preserve life. It’s not a sense of overriding their volition and forcing them to go in another direction.
 
, “Can your heart endure or can you be strong in the days that I will deal with you? I, the Lord, have spoken and will scatter you…” There’s that idea of being strong. , is about the idea of strengthening. Here’s this big battle between Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish in 605. God says, “I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylon and put My sword in his hand, and I will break the arms of Pharaoh so that he will groan before him with the groanings of a wounded man.” God’s going to intervene in the battle so that Pharaoh Necho loses and Nebuchadnezzar wins. Anyone have a problem with that? God has the right to do that. He’s not violating their volition. He’s directing the course of history. , “But now, take courage Zerubbabel, declares the Lord, take courage also Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest and all you people of the land take courage, declares the Lord and work for I am with you.” Again, it’s that idea of strengthening their will to complete the task.
 
Now I saved the best for last. This is four verses from and this has the closest parallel. Daniel is getting a vision. He is being visited by an angel and he says in verse16, “And behold, one who resembled a human being was touching my lips; then I opened my mouth and spoke and said to him who was standing before me, ‘O my lord, as a result of the vision anguish has come upon me and I have retained no strength. For how can such a servant of my Lord talk with such as my Lord? As for me there remains just now no strength in me nor has any breath been left in me.’”
 
Daniel is saying, “I’m just speechless. I’m overcome and overwhelmed. I cannot deal with what I’ve just been shown.” Verse 18, “Then this one with human appearance touched me again and strengthened me.” It’s the same verb in the same piel stem. It doesn’t mean he touched me and hardened me! That wouldn’t even make sense. This isn’t about overriding someone’s will. It’s about strengthening someone and encouraging them in the same way we pray that God would strengthen us so we do the right thing at the right time. It’s sort of like being on performance enhancing drugs. It gives you a little more ability. You’ve already made a choice to go in one direction. That may not be the best illustration but it’s one that came to mind.
 
, “Behold you have admonished many, and you have strengthened weak hands.” We are weak and God strengthens us. This isn’t a violation of volition. All right. I hope that brings you a little more clarity to what that word group means and how it’s translated. It’s not talking about overriding someone’s volition but simply enhancing it to accomplish what they want to do already so God can use that for a greater and higher purpose. Now it’s going to become clearer as we continue that the whole context here is still dealing with nations and not individuals.
 
Let’s go back to . This is where we’re going to get into that wonderful little illustration related to the potters’ wheel. Those of you going to take the Bible Study Methods class, this is one of those great examples of people who can read something and not see what they’re reading. We read into things we read what we’ve been told are there. We don’t even take the time and see that it’s not there. We’ve just heard so many say that’s what it’s talking about for so long that we just look at it that way. That’s one of the tough things with Bible study methods.
 
I’ve talked to other guys who come out of strong teaching churches and went through Dallas Seminary. We had Bible Study Methods our first year and we had to take our blinders off and think what does this text really say, not what have I been told is there? We had to ask, what am I reading here? What do I see? It’s a great lesson for anyone who likes Sherlock Holmes. What is the Bible actually saying? Not what I’ve been told is there but what’s there and what’s not there?
 
The second question that the objector comes up with in is where Paul puts these words in the mouth of the objector and says, “You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault?’” How can God find fault if He’s running history? So even though He is running history, He doesn’t override individual volition but Paul’s going to take the answer to another level. In one sense he’s answering the objector like God answered Job. “I’m not going to answer it because number one, I can’t understand it. Number two, if I were capable of explaining it, you’re not capable of understanding it.” That’s just about what God said to Job when Job asked why he had to suffer like he did. God told him that he’d just have to trust him because he couldn’t understand it if God told him. It’s beyond our comprehension.
 
 So the answer in verse 20 is a very strong answer, “On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God?” Who are you to reply against God in your limited, finite brain to ask God to justify how he’s ruling the universe because you don’t even have a clue in relation to the vast amount of knowledge that goes into God’s omniscience that leads to all the decisions that He makes in His providential care of creation. Paul uses an illustration from the potter that he gets out of Jeremiah. It’s really important to look at the context of these quotes. Paul says, “The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this, will it?’’
 
Now this quote comes out of . There are numerous passages in the scripture that uses this potter metaphor when talking about the creature and the creator. Now here’s the question. If you just had in front of you, would you say that he’s talking about an individual or a national entity? It’s real easy if you’re preset this way to think he’s talking about individuals. A vast number of people read it that way. Paul then says, “Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?” He’s asking if the Sovereign Creator has the right to make things the way He wants to. That’s his whole point.
 
God makes one for honor and one for dishonor. Now that’s not talking about heaven or hell. Don’t read that into it. God can raise up Israel for blessing and He can bring judgment upon Egypt but that doesn’t mean that no Egyptian can be saved or only Jews can be saved and none of them will go to the Lake of Fire. It doesn’t say that. It’s still talking about nations. “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience [longsuffering] vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?” Wrath refers to God’s right to judge within history. God allows the wicked to continue their wickedness for a purpose.
 
What we want to know is, what are the vessels? What are the vessels for honor and for dishonor? What is the vessel for wrath? Are those people or national entities? Let’s go to , “Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was making something on the wheel. And the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.” So that’s our analogy. The potter has the right to make the clay, to mold the clay for the purposes that he has in mind. “Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does?’ Declares the Lord.” He’s not talking to Jeremiah as an individual. He’s talking to Israel as a national entity. Can I not do with you as this potter?
 
“Behold like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel.” It’s just like we were talking about the first illustration dealing with Jacob and Esau and they were nations going back to Israel, going back to the womb of their mother. He never deals with them as personal individuals but in terms of the nations that came from them. The same thing we’re dealing with them here, the nation. ”At one moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot, to pull down, or to destroy it, if that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it.” It’s talking about nations and kingdoms. How many people can see individual salvation here, so far? It’s not there. God is talking about His choice of nations or kingdoms in history.
 
But wait a minute. Right in the middle of this, that nation has the right to say, “Wait a minute. I’m going to turn to God.” Volition is right in the center of the passage. Just because God says He’s going to do one thing to a nation, it doesn’t mean their volition is null and void. Right in the middle of the analogy of the potter, the nation can choose to turn to God. Incidentally this is one of the best verses to use for a nation turning to God and God relenting of judgment. Not the passage over in which everybody quotes because they don’t know hermeneutics. That’s from Solomon’s dedicatory prayer and God’s answer to it. “If my people who are called by My name turn back to Me, repent and humble themselves, then I will restore them to their land.” You can’t make that apply to anyone else. You know why? Because it’s for Israel. You don’t understand the word “application’ if you think it can apply to anyone else.
 
That verse, actually, is an application of this principle in Jeremiah. That verse in 2 Chronicles is an application to Israel. The principle here is that if any nation, against whom God has spoken, turns from its evil…” Nineveh is an example when Jonah went there. The principle is here in nd Chronicle 7:14 is an application of that divine principle to Israel and God’s answer is within covenant terms so you can’t apply it to anybody else. But you can apply this verse in Jeremiah to any nation. This is a key verse for that.
 
Verse 9 continues, “Or at another moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to build up or to plant it; if it does evil in my sight, then I will think better of the good with which I had promised to bless it.” This is the picture. What is the potter analogy a picture of? God’s sovereignty over national destinies, not individual destinies in terms of the Lake of Fire or heaven. You can substitute nations for vessels in these verses.
 
So we go back to and it goes on to say, “And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He also called, not from among Jews only but also from among Gentiles.” Does it say anything about making one individual for honor and another for dishonor? Does it say anything about an individual here? It means one nation for honor and another for dishonor. It’s a choice that one nation is preferred over another.
 
It doesn’t really mean that God despises the second one as we saw from Genesis. I used the quote dealing with Jacob, that Jacob loved Rachel and hated Leah. It doesn’t mean he really hated Leah. He just preferred Rachel over Leah. He liked Leah and had a bunch of children by Leah. Now Paul’s going to make application why God has the sovereign right to do this. , “As He says also in Hosea…” So it’s sword drill time. We were just in so now let’s go to .
 
Hosea is the first of the Minor Prophets. They’re not minor because they’re in a different key. They’re not minor because they’re not as significant. They’re minor because they’re smaller. Actually all twelve minor prophets are included as one book in the Hebrew canon, just simply referred to as The Twelve. In Paul quotes just the last part of . Now it’s a little different from your English because Paul is quoting from the Septuagint translation, “I will call them My people who are not My people and her beloved who is not My beloved.”
 
Now he’s just talked about the Gentiles so in the context of , Paul is applying this to now calling and including Gentiles as part of His people but that wasn’t what Hosea was talking about. says, “I will sow her for Myself in the land. I will also have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion. And I will say to those who were not My people. You are My people. And they will say, You are my God.”
 
So let’s talk about a little bit. This second chapter of Hosea reiterates the charges, indictments against Israel at the time of their destruction in 586 B.C. going out under the fifth stage of divine discipline. The charges are listed and reiterated from verses 2 down through 13 on why God is removing them from the land. If you read through that they are indicted for their unfaithfulness to God, for their spiritual adultery with the idols of the land, specifically the Baalim and following all of the different rituals related to the Baalim. In verse 13 it concludes, “I will punish her for the days of the Baals, when she used to offer sacrifices to them and adorn herself with her earrings and jewelry and follow her lovers, so she forget Me, declares the Lord.” She was having a hot dating life going out after all these other lovers.
 
Verse 14, “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, Bring her into the wilderness, and speak kindly to her.” This is God winning Israel back to Himself. “I will give her vineyards from there and the valley of Achor as a door of hope. She shall sing there as in the days of her youth, As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.” God is talking about this future time when He will restore Israel to the land.
 
 So Hosea jumps from the destruction of 586 to the future restoration which occurs in the future Messianic Age. Verse 16, “In that day I will also make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds of the sky, and the creeping things of the ground.” When you read “that day” in scripture it’s usually talking about that future day of Israel’s redemption. “In that day” which is a future time, the Second Advent, the beginning of the Millennium Kingdom, God is going to make a covenant with them. What is that covenant? It’s the New Covenant that is put into effect with the house of Judah, the house of David when Jesus returns at the Second Coming.
 
Verse 19, “I will betroth you to Me forever. Yes I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in loving-kindness and in compassion, And I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness. Then you will know the Lord. It will come to pass in that day that I will respond, declares the Lord. I will respond to the heavens, and they will respond to the earth, And the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine, and to the oil, and they will respond to Jezreel.“ That’s the Valley of Jezreel. Now this is God saying that there will finally be the consummation of this marriage between Yahweh in the Millennial Kingdom.
 
Then he says in verse 23 which is the context, “I will sow her for Myself in the land. I will also have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion, and I will say to those who were not the people.” Who is God talking about here? Who was the one who had not had mercy? That was Israel in disobedience. It wasn’t another country. It was Israel during the time they were out during the 5th Cycle of discipline and had not obtained mercy. “And I will say to those who were not my people,” Who are the ones who were not His people? Those rebellious, obstinate Jews who had rejected Jesus and who are out under the 5th cycle of discipline. “I will say to those who are not My people, You are My people, and they will say, You are my God.” They have repented and they are God’s people at a future date.
 
 So remember many times I’ve mentioned but some of you are new and haven’t heard this, there are four ways in which the Old Testament is quoted and applied in the New Testament. Number one was literal prophecy and literal fulfillment. An example of this is which says that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. It’s a prophecy which has been literally fulfilled. Then there is a second use which is more of a type, such as “Out of Egypt I called my people.” It’s quoted as an historical event and at times it’s a picture of Israel coming out of Egypt which is fulfilled in Christ.
 
Then you have a third use of Old Testament prophecy when is by way of application. It’s not a typology. It’s just something similar happened and they’re drawing a connection by way of a pattern. We studied this when we went through when Peter said that this is what the prophet Joel spoke of. He didn’t mean this was the fulfillment of what Joel said because everything that was prophesied in was not fulfilled in but what did happen in which was speaking in tongues. Although it wasn’t what is prophesied in , it’s similar, though. It showed a parallel. So this is the third use and says “this is like that”. It’s simply drawing an analogy which is parallel to something in the Old Testament and that’s what’s going on in this verse is that Paul is going back here and taking this verse and saying, that those who weren’t God’s people were now His people. In the same way, even those he’s talking about Gentiles, those who were not God’s people are being brought into the family of God. So all he’s doing is making that kind of analogy with that third use.
 
, “And it shall come to pass that in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people’s, then they shall be called sons of the living God.” That’s a quote from so just turn back one page. The first part of Hosea is the condemnation stated against Israel and because of their apostasy the wife of Hosea, Gomer, was supposed to have two children. One was called Lo-ruhamah mentioned in verse 6, which means “no mercy” and the second Loammi meaning “not my people”. Verse 9 says, “Call his name Loammi because you are not My people and I am not your God.” This is an announcement of divine judgment. Then verse 10, “Yet the number of the sons of Israel will be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured and it shall come to pass.” What does that sound like? The Abrahamic covenant. So what God is doing here is reiterating the promise to Abraham that he will have descendants that will be as numerous as the sands of the seashore and God will not forsake them. Nevertheless the people are going to go out under divine judgment.
 
He then says in the second half of verse 10, “And in that place where it is said to them, ‘You are not my people. Then they shall be called sons of the living God.” That’s the part that’s being quoted in . Israel will be restored to a position of blessing but first they’re going to go through a time of divine discipline and divine judgment so and 26 include quotes from and and these quotes are dealing with God’s plan for Israel as a nation, the judgment that came upon the nation, and the future blessing of restoration that will come upon the nation. So we’re continuing to see that Paul is dealing with Israel as a national entity, not in terms of individual justification.
 
Then we come to verse 27 where we go to Isaiah10: 22 and 23. Hosea and Isaiah lived about the same time and their names almost sound the same. , “For though your people, O Israel, may be like the sand of the sea…” What’s that terminology from? That’s from the Abrahamic Covenant. Just a reminder that God’s promise is solid bedrock. Israel’s not going to be saved from discipline. “Only a remnant within them will return.”
 
Remember earlier in , Paul said that not all Israel is of Israel. He’s focusing on many who are apostate but there’s a subset that are true Israel. That’s the remnant. : “For though Your people, O Israel, may be like the sand of the sea, Only a remnant within them will return.” Promised blessing. God has a future for Israel. That’s Paul’s theme in . God has not permanently forsaken His people, Israel.
 
is quoted in , “For a complete destruction, one that is decreed, the Lord God of hosts will execute in the midst of the whole land. This judgment will come during the tribulation period. So what’s the point here? Again Paul is dealing with Israel as a nation in terms of their future destiny, showing from these quotations that God did promise a period of judgment when the nation will be out of the land. He also promised He would fulfill His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and to David and He would restore the nation to the land and they would have great blessing.
 
In we again have a quote from Isaiah. This is from which is a chapter which is an indictment against Israel for their apostasy. In Paul says, “And just as Isaiah foretold, Unless the Lord of Sabaoth [Lord of Armies] had left to us a posterity [a seed] we would have become like Sodom and would have resembled Gomorrah.” What Paul is saying is that God left a remnant and that remnant will be restored to a place of blessing and that remnant will be the ones who receive the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant.
 
This is a quote from where there is a description of all of the judgments which will come upon Judah because of their apostasy. Verse 7, “Your country’s desolate and your cities burned with fire. Your fields-strangers are devouring them in your presence. It is desolation, as overthrown by strangers. The daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard. Like a watchman’s hut in a cucumber field, like a besieged city. Unless the Lord of hosts had left us a few survivors, we would be like Sodom, we would be like Gomorrah.” Again, national destiny is the issue.
 
That ends this section for Paul. He’s going to segue into another section starting in verse 30. So let me summarize the argument to this point. By referring back to ideas he’s already talked about in and talking as well in relation to language that goes back to “Jacob I loved and Esau I hated” it’s clear that Paul is dealing with God’s plan for Israel, that He’s not going to go back on it and that He has chosen Israel for a specific destiny and He has not chosen other nations for that kind of a destiny. Even though Israel is currently apostate, they will eventually accept Jesus as the Messiah.
 
Now as a result of having established this from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Scriptures, it’s clear that God has predicted judgment and restoration. What are we then going to say about what’s going on now with the inclusion of Gentiles into the Church? Verse 30, “What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith.” See Gentiles were pagans. They weren’t concerned about righteousness. But now they responded to the gospel and they have become righteous because when they trusted in Christ as their Savior, they received the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. So they’ve attained to righteousness, that is the righteousness from faith, the righteousness that comes from faith. Justification is by faith alone. Abraham was the pattern in . In , “But Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness [the Mosaic Law and specifically the Pharisaical interpretation of that Law] did not arrive at that law.” They can’t meet that righteousness. No one has ever perfectly obeyed the Mosaic Law outside of Jesus Christ.
 
Verse 32, “Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works.” They weren’t trying to gain righteousness as a result of faith which was the pattern from the Old Testament but they were trying to gain righteousness by the works of the Law. They thought that by obeying the Law that would make them righteousness. Now he ties it to Christ, “For they stumbled at the stumbling stone, just as it is written, “Behold I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. And He who believes in Him will not be disappointed [put to shame].” [Quote from ] If you believe on Him He will fulfill all of His promises.
 
So the point that Paul has made so far in is that God has a future plan for Israel. Right now they have rejected Christ and they are being “hardened” just like Pharaoh was hardened. God’s not making them reject Christ. They’ve already chosen to reject Him. He’s just encouraging them in that for a time. He doesn’t lock them into negative volition. They can respond. There are an incredible number of Jews down through the centuries who have trusted in Jesus Christ as their Messiah. There are many who do today. And there will be hundreds of thousands who will during the Tribulation.
 
So God has a plan. That plan is His plan because He’s the one who knows all the variables. He knows all the information in perfect omniscience. So He knows the best plan and is working it out in history We can’t determine or influence that plan by our behavior one way or the other because it’s not based on who or what we are but on what God is and His plan and His understanding of history. So far we’re not talking about individual eternal destiny. We’re talking about historical destinies for nations, for the Gentiles and the Jews and God’s plan within history.
 
So that, I hope, helps us understand the “hardening” of Pharaoh’s heart as we talk about this passage and the potter and the potter’s wheel that this has nothing at all to do with individual justification and eternal destiny. Okay? I hope it’s a little clearer now. It’s clearer for me now. This is the first time I’ve taught through the “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” There’s always something to learn, something you avoid as a pastor saying to yourself, “Lord, I just hope I don’t get there or when I do get there I hope I’ll figure something out and it’s close to being right.”

Romans 116b-Salvation, Not Justification

Romans 10:1 NASB95
Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.
Romans 116b-Salvation, Not Justification Romans 10:1-4
 
I was reminded today of an e-mail I got today about a film that is coming out. It’s a Christian film and it has a title like “Alone, Yet Not Alone”. It is a true story. I saw the trailer on it and it’s really good. It’s the story of two sisters who were captured by the Delaware Indians in 1755 in the French and Indian War. The family was comprised of strong believers so there’s a good lead-in before that emphasizing the role of the Word of God in the family. There’s this Indian raid and the girls are kidnapped and taken about 300 miles away to Ohio. It’s the story of how they learned to trust God to never leave or forsake them during that time until, I assume, they eventually got away. The original story was written by one of their descendants so it should be good. I never heard about it before but I looked at the trailer and it looked very interesting. Sometimes the trailer is all that’s good about a movie so you never know. I’m just going to put that out there and someone can see it and tell me about it.
 
Okay, we’re in Romans 10 but what I want to do before we get into Romans 10 is to review. Last week I was not here and you saw a lesson in 1 Thessalonians and two and three lessons back, we went through the end of Romans 9, dealing with the issues related to the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart and then repeating that in terms of understanding the importance of free will.
 
Free will is so significant in history. God has placed it within the structure of history as God oversees the flow of history, He allows human beings to have free will. He oversees history in such a way that no matter what decisions humans may make, no matter what chaos their free will decisions bring into history, God nevertheless is so great in His sovereignty that He still works things out in terms of the direction of His plan. His plan is never put into jeopardy by human decisions. Nevertheless He’s able to allow human beings to have that freedom to make those decisions even within the structure of the outworking of His plan.
 
 This is one of the things which we see with Israel. We see this again and again and will see it many times in Matthew and in Acts where there is an offer of the Kingdom. What makes it a legitimate offer is that they could have responded and if they had, things would have been different. That’s what makes it legitimate. But they didn’t. Their turning back was not God’s sovereign will but it was His revealed will. If they had turned back, then of course, history would have been different. We only know that in hindsight. We only know God’s sovereign will in hindsight as we look back.
 
It’s interesting that we have this intersection between Matthew, Acts, and Romans in focusing on God’s plan for Israel. So I want to go through a little review because it’s important to understand how this section of Romans, Romans 9, 10, and 11, fits within the structure of Paul’s discourse on the righteousness of God in Romans. Now one thing I want to direct your attention to is a problem which we’re going to have to address in a problem passage in Romans 10, verses 9 and 10. This is often used as a witnessing verse and it’s totally ripped out of context. You can’t understand it if you don’t understand the context.
 
When we get into the Bible Study class on Sunday night, one of the things we’ll get to especially in interpretation and it’s also important in observation, is to understand context. Context, context, context.  It changes how we understand certain things. There’s a number of different contexts that we look at. We look at the context surrounding a verse, we look at the context surrounding the chapter or the division within the book and we also look at the context of the recipients of the epistle. Where are they coming from? Who are they? What are the issues they’re facing?
 
We also look at the context of the writer. Who is writing the epistle? That would be Paul or Peter or John. So all of those are different contexts that are important for properly interpreting and understanding a passage. We come to Romans 10:9-10 and we read, “That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Now there are a lot of people who think that what that means is that if I want to be saved I need to one, believe Jesus died for my sins, and two, I have to have a public profession of faith or at least tell somebody.
So that’s two things, believe with my heart and confess with my mouth but that runs contrary to all of the expressions of the Gospel of John which states over 96 times that the issue is believe and believe alone. So how do we reconcile that? What is Paul talking about? Is he talking about justification in Romans 10: 9-10 or is he talking about something else? What does he mean when he uses the phrase, ‘you will be saved’? That is why I entitled this lesson: Salvation, Not Justification because too often they are different things, especially when we live in our culture.
 
Not only do you have the Biblical contest but when someone is teaching they have to understand the context of the audience. Our audience has a context and your context is early 21st century American evangelicalism which has a history going back two or three hundred years. Within that history you and I have been taught that the word “saved” is always equivalent to the word “justified” and it’s not. The word “saved” has different meanings and different nuances in Scripture and you have to understand what is being said. Just because you read that “you will be saved” doesn’t mean that Paul has justification in mind. But that’s how most American evangelicals read it. When they read that they say, “Oh well, if you want to get to heaven, you have to confess with your mouth as well as believe in your heart.” But that’s not what that is saying.
 
We need to set this up because that word “saved” is crucial for understanding Romans 10, especially because Paul uses that in the very first verse, “Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.” Is Paul talking about justification there or is he talking about something else? So let’s investigate that. To do that we have to spend a little time on context and review since it’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve thought about Romans.
 
 A brief outline of Romans is that the first 17 verses in chapter 1 contain the introduction where Paul brings into focus the issue related to the righteousness of God. This is seen especially in the gospel statement of verses 16 and 17 where Paul says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation…” There’s that key word again. “… to everyone who believes…” Notice he doesn’t say anything here about making a public confession. “… to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek…” Here’s that principle of taking the gospel first to Israel during that introductory period or that transitional period of the 1st century. Verse 17, “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, “but the righteous [the just] shall live by faith.’” So the issue introduced there for the epistle to the Romans has to do with righteousness.
 
Then in Romans 1:18 to 3:20, we saw that there is a logically developed rationale for why all are under condemnation, for why all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There’s a condemnation of Gentiles in 1:18-32, the condemnation of the moral person who thinks that somehow he has standing with God because he is moral or religious. There’s a condemnation of unfaithful Jews in 2:17-3:8 and then the conclusion is that all are condemned. In Romans 3:21 to 5:21 the focus is on justification and there’s a transition there in the last part of Romans 5 leading into or preparing the groundwork for the next section, Romans 6:1 to 8:39 dealing with sanctification.
 
What’s important to understand here is that when things sound like Paul is talking about justification, for example the “wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life” think about how many times we’ve all used that as a gospel verse. We say that this is how you get saved except that verse is not in the justification section of Romans. It’s in the sanctification section of Romans. What Paul’s talking about in Romans 6 has nothing to do with how to get eternal life. It’s talking about how to experience eternal life in this life.
 
If we don’t walk with God, then we’re walking by the sin nature and the wages of sin in the believer’s life is death, not eternal condemnation but temporal death, carnal death, in this life. That verse ends, “…but the free gift of God is eternal life.” This is a reminder that God has given us eternal life and we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin. That’s the whole argument we saw in Romans 6. So Romans 6 through Romans 8 is a section on the spiritual life,
Then there’s a shift to Israel in Romans 9, 10, and 11. Why does Paul suddenly start talking about Israel? The last five chapters, 12-16 deal with application. Now as we relate this to righteousness, break it down this way. In Romans 1:18 to 5:21, Paul is relating Israel to the righteousness of God and justification. He shows that the Gentiles are not saved, the moral person isn’t saved, and guess what? Israel isn’t saved either because they’re failing in the realm of righteousness.
 
In Romans 6:1 to 8:17 he relates Israel to the righteousness of God and to sanctification as he’s contrasting grace and law. This is really seen especially in Romans, chapter 8. Now the whole section is not about Israel. I’m just pointing out that within these sections he relates his basic theme to Israel as well. In Romans 8:18-39 he relates Israel to the righteousness of God in glorification and in Romans 9:11-36 he relates Israel to the righteousness of God and His vindication.
 
This is because the question coming out of the Jewish community is, “Why has God done this? Why has God brought this discipline or judgment upon Israel, if He’s righteous? How can we rely upon God after He’s made these promises to us and now it looks like He’s turning to the Gentiles and He’s forgotten about us. So how can we trust Him? How can He be a righteous God if what you Christians are saying is true?” Then in Romans 12:1-16:27 as he’s dealing with application. Paul relates Israel to the righteousness of God and its practical applications. So Israel is part of every section in Romans, not just Romans 9-11.
 
What we see in terms of background here is that Paul is viewing Israel as an entity, not as individual Jews, but as a corporate entity. There are two issues at stake with Israel, one is individual justification, and the other is the national destiny of Israel so that as a corporate entity as a nation, they turn to God then God will fulfill the covenants, the Abrahamic, the Land, the Davidic, and the New Covenant. This is what I covered on Tuesday night. And Israel could at any time because of free will, could corporately turn and call upon the Messiah to deliver them. They won’t but they could and if they did, that would trigger a series of events prophesied in the Old Testament leading to the restoration of Israel as a regenerate people to the land.
 
There are going to be two returns, clearly seen and prophesied in the Old Testament. One is a return of Jews to the land as unregenerate. A lot of people think there’s only one return and it’s regenerate. In Isaiah 11:11 it talks about the second worldwide return. The second worldwide return is a return in regeneration, a spiritual return. The first return is a return in apostasy. I believe that’s what we’ve been witnessing for the last hundred years or so. Part of the reason for that is that there’s never been this large of a percentage of return of Jews to the land. We’re just within one or two percentage points of half of the Jews in the world living in the land of Israel. That kind of percentage has never happened. It didn’t happen at the time of Christ. It never happened under Zerubbabel or Nehemiah. They just had a small group that return.
 
At the time of Christ the vast number of Jews lived outside of the land. They were in Egypt. They were in Babylon. They were scattered throughout the Roman Empire and in Turkey, Cappadocia, Pontus, places we’ve been studying in Acts. So God has a plan for Israel and even though in one sense it is still on pause, in another sense it’s being ramped up as we see this return to Israel.
 
Think about when the Tribulation will begin. A lot of people haven’t thought it out very well and they think the Rapture begins the Tribulation but that’s not what begins it. The Tribulation is a term used to describe the seventieth week of Daniel in the prophecy in Daniel, chapter 9, verses 24 and following. It’s a seven-year period. What begins that seven-year period, what starts the stopwatch, is this peace treaty that is signed between the Antichrist and Israel. Therefore, in order for that to start there has to be a political entity of Jews in the land that are qualified to sign a peace treaty with the Antichrist.
 
That means there has to be return to Jews to the land to establish that kind of corporate entity. Well, that’s happened now. A hundred or so years ago when Clarence Larkin was writing his classic book on dispensational truth, in his commentaries on Revelation and Daniel, he opined that if the Rapture were to occur in his day, it would probably be another forty or fifty years before the Tribulation could begin because so much would have to happen to have the scenario in place that we see in Revelation 5 and 6 at the beginning of Daniel’s seventieth week. Now a hundred years later we’ve seen all these things take place, the return of the Jews to the land to establish a nation and to grow to the size, the population size, that it is today. That was barely imaginable a hundred years ago and yet Israel has grown to great strength today.
 
So we go back and we understand that there’s a plan for the nation as a corporate entity as the seed, the descendants, of Abraham. So God chooses Abraham and his descendants, as a corporate group, through which God’s going to do four things. First of all, God’s going to bless all the nations through the coming of the Savior “seed” as promised originally through Eve and then traced through those genealogies which everyone skips in Genesis 5, 10, and 11. That seed line that’s traced all the way down form Abraham, all the way to Christ, as we’ve seen in Luke 3 showing that Jesus is the seed of Abraham, also the seed of David and therefore qualifies to be the Messiah.
 
Romans 9: 4-5 showed us that Israel as a whole is the recipient of God’s covenants and promises but because of disobedience they’re not experiencing the blessings of those covenants and promises today. Third we see that the Messiah would enter the human race through Israel and would come initially to Israel as a nation. In John 1 it says “He came unto His own and His own received Him not but as many as received Him to them He gave the power to be called the sons of God.”
 
Fourth, we see in Romans 9 that all of Israel is not Israel. True Israel are the regenerate, ethnic descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s the remnant which is the term used in the Old Testament. So not all of Israel is true Israel but only those who believe in God and His promised Messiah are true Israel. That’s in Romans 9:6. As we looked at this we seek to understand how Romans 9, 10, and 11 fit. We have to see this in relationship to the theme of Romans in terms of the righteousness of God. We have to understand how that has impacted Israel. Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in His rejection of national Israel. Why did God reject national Israel? Because they were offered the Messiah and they rejected the Messiah so now they’re under Divine judgment but it’s not permanent. Romans 10 then demonstrates that that rejection is based on Israel’s corporate neglect of the revelation given to them.
 
This is seen in the quotation of certain verses, for example in verse 8 where it says “The Word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”. The Word of God has presented the case for the Messiah but they have neglected the revelation that was given to them and they substituted the viewpoints and the opinions of the rabbis in the 2nd Temple period rather than holding to a view of Scripture alone. They added the tradition of the rabbis so that when the Messiah shows up they don’t recognize it.
 
In Romans 11 we see the answer to the question of whether God has [permanently, implied] cast away His people. No, Paul says. God still has a plan for national, ethnic Israel. He has not gone back on His promises. There is a future restoration of Israel. There’s a future regeneration of Israel and ultimately all Israel will be saved. So we not only have Romans 10:9 and 10 talking about the future salvation of Israel but three verses later we read another quote from Joel 2, “For whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” That has to fit with the context of Romans 11, which emphasizes at the end that all Israel will be saved.
 
They’re all quoting from the same Old Testament prophecies. So Paul is connecting what the righteousness of God is doing in relation to Israel to what God has stated in the Old Testament. Looking at an overview of Romans 9-11 we see that this begins with a vindication of God’s righteousness in light of Israel’s rejection of the righteousness of God by faith. That’s the issue.
 
It’s so important to look at the word “righteousness” if you’re having any communication with someone Jewish and you’re starting to get into any kind of expression of the gospel. Righteousness is a key concept. The Hebrew word is tzedek. That’s a word you’re familiar with and you understand it as righteousness. By the 2nd Temple period of Judaism the word began to be interpreted and understood as good works and charitable deeds. That’s going to come out a lot when we get into the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. They thought within rabbinical tradition that righteousness came from works. This is the problem. They’re not seeing righteousness as a gift from God, as it was with Abraham, but they’re seeing righteousness as something that is the result of what we do.
 
So God rejects Israel and the question that comes up as Paul’s statement in Romans 8:38-39 that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. A Jewish listener would say, “Well, if nothing can separate us from the love of God, how come Israel has now been separated from the love of God? Has God abandoned us? God’s not really righteous, is He?” So Romans 9-11 fits into that explanation that focuses on God’s dealing with Israel as a whole which is God’s plan for ethnic, corporate Israel. It’s important to understand that.
 
There are so many varying contradictory views that would all be resolved if we just understood that in this whole three chapter section Paul is dealing with corporate Israel. That is, God’s plan for Israel in history. Not individual Jews but His corporate plan that will be fulfilled and will demonstrate the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant and the other covenants related to it.
 
We need to remember three things. First of all, God promised to send a savior to Israel and He fulfilled that promise. The promised savior came first to Israel. In the early part of Jesus’ ministry, remember He sends the disciples two by two and tells them not to go to the Gentiles. He tells them to go to the house of Judah and the house of Israel. Don’t go to the Gentiles at all. Now does that verse have an application for today? No! There’s no application there. It’s a statement that is related directly to those twelve individuals and what they were to do at a specific point in time. There’s no application.
People get real fuzzy thinking about this concept of application that everything in the Bible ought to apply. It doesn’t. There are some things that don’t apply. There are some things that are already applications and other things that are stated principles and do apply. The promised savior comes first to Israel and the message is only for Israel. This is why you have that really strange scene where the Phoenician woman, the Canaanite woman, comes up and she touches the hem of Jesus’ garment. He turns around and says, “Who touched me?” He felt her presence and then He praises her. Up to this point His ministry was just to the Jews and she says, “Even the dogs get the crumbs off the table.” Dogs was a derogatory term used to describe Gentiles by the Jews and she just wants the overflow of grace, the crumbs that come off the table.
 
The point is He came first to Israel. The third thing we need to remember is that Israel as a whole, as a corporate entity, as represented by their leaders makes a decision to reject Jesus. That’s it. They’re represented by their leaders. It’s a corporate decision. In the end, we see very clearly that in the future you have Jews who listen to what Jesus said when they see the abomination of desolation and they see the other signs at the mid-point of the Tribulation, Jesus told them when they see those things happening, they’re to head to the mountains. “Don’t go back home. Woe to the woman who is with child. Go to the mountains.” So they do. Only the ones who leave and head to the hills are saved. They’re ultimately delivered.
 
They’re the ones who are already justified when they get into the wilderness as a corporate entity then they will call upon the name of the Lord as a nation. That’s when Jesus returns. When they call upon the name of the Lord at the end of the Tribulation when they’re in Basra, over near Petra, they’re already justified. Now they want the Lord to return to physically deliver them and establish the Kingdom.
 
So God’s rejection of Israel, Paul says in chapter 9, is not inconsistent with His justice. That’s Paul’s whole point we’ve been covering in Romans 9. It’s not inconsistent with God’s justice and His righteousness because Israel has rejected God’s righteousness “by faith alone”. Because Israel has rejected God’s free offer of righteousness, God is righteous in bringing them under condemnation.
 
From chapter 9:30 through 10:13 the focus is on Israel itself being worthy of blame because it rejected God’s righteousness through faith and replaced it with righteousness through or from the source of works. That’s why Israel is rejected, because they rejected a righteousness by faith. Then in 10:14-21 Israel’s unbelief is not excused on the basis of a lack of opportunity. That’s what Paul develops in those verses, that they’ve had plenty of opportunity. Then in Romans 11: 1-10 Israel’s rejection is neither complete nor final. That brings us to the end of the section.
 
 It’s important sometimes to read the last verse of a section, or the conclusion, so you know where the author is taking you. What you see in Romans 11:26 and 27 is that when Paul wraps up this discussion in Romans 9-11, he says, “And so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob. This is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.” When we look at these verses we see that this is a citation from the Old Testament from Isaiah 59: 20 and 21. So Paul is applying that and showing when it will be fulfilled.
 
What we see there for the word “so” is the Greek word houto which means “in this manner” which he’s about to describe. It’s the same word that used in John 3:16. “For God so loved the world…” People get the idea that it says God so loved the world. It should be translated, “God loved the world in this way that He gave His unique son that whosoever believes on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
 
 
The word that’s translated remove or turned away is apostrepho which means to take something by force, to remove it or to cut it off or to cause a state or condition to cease. So God is going to remove this ungodliness from Jacob. It’s going to be the end of the blindness on Israel during this dispensation and this is going to be removed because this time Israel is going to accept the Messiah and turn to God. This word apostrepho is the same word used in Hebrews 10:4 for taking away sins, for removing something.
 
Okay, that’s our introduction. Now in Romans 10:1 Paul says, “Brethren my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them [Israel] is for their salvation.” This expresses Paul’s love for Israel. There’s no hint of anti-Semitism in Paul. Paul is Jewish. He doesn’t hate his own people and he expresses his love for them several times in Romans 9-11. In Romans 9:3 he said, “For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Here he expresses that it’s his heart’s desire and his continual prayer to God that Israel be saved. But what does that mean? Is he saying that they may be justified or is he saying something else? Here’s the phrase. It’s the preposition eis which indicates a direction toward something, an ultimate goal, and the word is soteria in the accusative. It’s the noun soteria in the accusative and it’s just translated salvation. It’s really important to understand how Paul uses salvation. I don’t think Paul ever uses the word group from sozo, the verb or soteria, the noun, to ever refer to justification.
 
We need to remind ourselves that there are three stages of salvation spoken of in the scripture and the word for saved is used for all three together in some places or for each phase individually. In phase one we talk about justification. So one way to make this clear is to talk about justification salvation. Paul doesn’t use the word salvation or saved as a synonym for justification anywhere in Romans. He’s very technical. When he’s talking about how to get right with God, he uses the word justify. What he does in Romans 10:9 and 10, after the verse that I read to you earlier in verse 9 which talks about confessing with your mouth and believing in your heart, Paul then explains that by saying, “For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness…” That’s justification language. And then he says, “For with the mouth confession is made unto salvation…”
 
It’s as if it’s a second step. He’s talking about something different form justification. The spiritual life or phase two is sanctification salvation. It’s talking about how we are saved in this life from the consequences of sin and the third phase we talk about is glorification. So in phase one we talk about being saved from the penalty of sin, that we were saved in the past. In phase two we talk about being saved from the power of sin, that you are being saved continuously, every day, every time we go through spiritual life we are being saved. Earl Radmacher used to try to shock people by saving, “I was saved yesterday. I was saved the day before. I was saved this morning. I was saved this afternoon. I’m saved now and I’ll be saved tomorrow.” He was using the term saved in this sense, in terms of sanctification, because it’s our moment-by-moment spiritual growth. Final salvation is when we’re saved from the presence of sin. Paul talks about that in the future tense, “you will be saved”.
 
So the word salvation has to be understood in terms of these different tenses. Now in Romans 1:16 and 17 we see the first mention of the word salvation. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation…” Now one of the first things that happens is you read that and you see the word gospel so you think it’s referring to how you get to heaven. But there’s a narrow use of the word gospel and a broad use of the word gospel. Romans is all about the gospel but Romans is telling us a lot more than just how to get to heaven. Romans is telling us not only how to get to heaven, how to get justified, but how a justified person is supposed to live. How you and I are supposed to live on an everyday basis and what that means. That’s salvation in the full sense.
 
So gospel has a narrow sense of the good news that we need to hear in order to be justified and have eternal life and go to heaven when we die and secondly, gospel has a broad sense to include the whole realm of Christian doctrine because everything in the New Testament is good news. It teaches us how to live, how to have the joy of our salvation, how to have peace, and how to live for God. That is all part of the gospel so we have to address this issue when we’re looking at passages and not interpret every verse because our 19th century American evangelicalism has restricted the meaning of gospel of just how to get to heaven. The Bible doesn’t use it in that narrow sense.
 
We talk about the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John but all four of those gospels tell us a lot about how to live the spiritual life. They’re not just telling us how to get the spiritual life. We have to understand that gospel has a narrow use and a broad use. We see this connection in Romans 1:16 and 17 between the gospel that is the power of salvation to everyone who believes. This is emphasizing that our broad salvation from spiritual birth to the time we’re taken to be with the Lord is based on the faith-rest drill. We’re trusting God and mixing our faith with the promises of God so that as we walk step-by-step, we’re depending upon Him and resting in His care. “Casting all your care upon Him because He cares for you.” For those who are disobedient there’s the wrath of God in time. So Romans is talking about time in history, time in our lives, not talking about some sort of future, eschatological event but realizing that real time salvation or deliverance from the power of sin in this life.
 
Now when we get into Romans 10 we see the next time the word salvation used in Romans 10:10 and 1l. We find it used three times in Romans 10. The first verse uses the word saved. If you just looked at that verse you might walk away and say, “Well he’s talking about justification there.” But you have to look at the whole context of how the word is used throughout the entire context. He could be talking about justification there but he doesn’t use the word that way in the rest of the chapter so that argues against just reading this justification idea into the text. “And believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” This clearly distinguishes justification by faith alone, the first part, to something in addition. Confessing with the mouth isn’t getting you justified. It has to do with phase 2 or phase 2 salvation.
 
Romans 11:11 talks about salvation coming to the Gentiles. Romans 13:11 says, “Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep, for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.” They’re already justified and Paul is again using salvation in a very different sense here than just justification. Now let’s see how this works in terms of just the verb say. Romans 5:9, “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.” He’s using the past tense. He says that now we’ve already been justified but we shall be saved, future tense. You can be justified but not saved. Now if you want to interpret saved the way evangelicals use it all the time you’re confused right now. How can we be justified and not saved? Because the words aren’t synonyms. In some cases they are but in many cases they’re not.
 
Verse 10, “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” Jesus’ life is not the basis of justification. The basis for justification was His death on the Cross. His life was the pattern, the precedent for our spiritual life of walking by the Holy Spirit. Romans 8:24, “For in hope we have been saved but hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he already sees?” Now that’s all within the context of the spiritual life. It’s not in the context of justification any more. Saved, there, is talking about our realization of our new life in Christ, walking by the Spirit.
 
Then we come to Romans 10:9 and 10 and it becomes clear that when Paul is talking about being saved here he’s not talking about justification. He’s talking about something in addition to justification. If you look at the original context of Joel 2 about whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved, it’s not talking about spiritual justification. It’s talking about physical deliverance when Israel is on the edge of being totally annihilated. So having said all that, when we look at Romans 10:1 it’s not legitimate to think that he’s talking here about individual Jews getting justified.
 
Number one, he’s not talking about individual Jews. He’s talking about God’s plan for corporate Israel. And number two, he’s talking about their future deliverance because that word saved there is restated in Romans 10:9-10, the principle is there in Romans 10:13, and then it’s restated again when you get to Romans 11; 25 and 26. So his desire is for Israel to be saved and for that fullness to come where the Jews, as a nation, turn back and accept the Messiah at which time He will deliver them and establish His Kingdom.
 
But there’s a problem. That problem is stated in verses two and three. It says, “For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God…” They are passionate about God. We see a lot of secular Jews in our world. There are a lot of Jews in the U.S., and most Israelis, are completely non-religious. They’re not observant at all. In many cases they’re just agnostic. They’re not any different from anybody else you meet that’s just an agnostic secularist. But there are those who do have a tremendous passion for God. I’m just impressed by their passion and their works. I’ve been to several Shabbat services and you just see them wearing their prayer shawls. They’ve memorized all of their prayers. I wish my congregation had memorized half the verses they’ve memorized.
 
They have a passion for God but there’s something missing. That’s what Paul says here, “It’s not in accordance with knowledge.” Knowledge in the Greek is epignosis, not just gnosis which is an awareness of academic knowledge or facts but it’s a full knowledge, an applicable knowledge. They don’t have a full knowledge or full understanding of the scripture. Why? That’s the next verse. It begins with “for” which in the Greek is the Greek word gar which indicates he’s now explaining what he just said. “For not knowing about God’s righteousness…” Now that’s the theme of Romans, the righteousness of God. And they’re ignorant of God’s righteousness.
 
Righteousness is a key issue in rabbinic Judaism. But it’s tzedakah which is the doing of good works and charitable deeds. In fact, one of the major ideas in modern Judaism is the idea that the role of the Jew is to repair the world. In Hebrew it’s tikkun olam. Their job is to repair the world, to right the wrongs, to take care of people. We would say it’s a little bit of a perversion of the blessing command that God gave to Abraham that they were to be a blessing to the whole world. And so, this is why you see things like when they had the earthquake in the Dominican Republic, the very first emergency responders on the scene were from Israel. What they’re doing in Africa and going to the impoverished nations and teaching them principles of agriculture and how to farm and what to do about water, solving the water problems. It’s just incredible. Many times their teams go in but under some sort of non-government organization title because the people or the government is hostile to Israel but they go in anyway just sort of as a non-government organization and they help teach the people things.
 
This is in contrast to Americans, we throw billions of dollars at impoverished countries and we send in tractors and all kinds of things they can use. But you know what? We don’t teach them how to read so they can’t fix anything we send because they can’t read the manuals. What the Israelis do is they send educators in to teach the people how to read, how to read the manuals and how to use the manuals. You know, it’s like such a blinding flash of the obvious but Americans think that if we can just dump a load of cash on people then we can go away and our conscience is now clear. We haven’t done anything but create an enormous problem.
 
So this is all part of the Jewish idea that they are doing tzedakah, they’re doing works. These works, they believe, accumulate for righteousness. But this is not what the Old Testament teaches. In Isaiah 64:5, Isaiah who is a mature believer says, “And all [including himself] have become like one who is unclean…” Everyone of us Judean Jews in approximately 670 B.C. he’s including. “And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment…” In the Old King James it’s, “All of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” This is not our unrighteounesses but all our righteousnesses, our good deeds, our tzedakah, all of our charitable works are as filthy rags in the sight of
God.” That’s God’s opinion of the best we have to offer.
 
Righteousness is a key theme in the Old Testament. Even if you go along and say, “Okay, let’s just call it charitable deeds to understand the concept.” How did you get righteousness in the Old Testament? You have to go back to Abraham. Abraham in Genesis 15:6, “Then he [Abraham] believed in the Lord and He [God] reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Abraham had already believed God and it was reckoned or accounted to him as righteousness. Not because of what Abraham did but because Abraham trusted God for his salvation. So how do you get righteousness? Not by doing the Law because the Law wasn’t even in existence in Abraham’s time. That’s Paul’s whole argument in Romans 3 and 4.
 
But how do you get righteousness? How did Abraham get righteousness? By believing in God. And God imputed or credited righteousness to him. That’s our doctrine of justification by faith alone. And then what you can do is show how righteousness is a key element of Isaiah 53. In describing the suffering servant, the Messiah, in Isaiah 53 we read in verse 3, “He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief…”
 
Jesus didn’t fit the pre-conceived notion in 2nd Temple Judaism of what the Messiah would be like. They thought the Messiah would be a victorious king and not a suffering Messiah. “So he was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised and we did not esteem Him. Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried…” Some people get the idea that this is talking about Jesus died for our physical healing but in the poetry of Isaiah 53 that healing and sickness if you read through the verses is parallel to sin and bearing our sins. We have substitutionary atonement here that the Messiah bore in His body on the tree our sins. He endured our suffering in our place. We accounted Him plagued, smitten and afflicted by God but He was wounded because of our sins He was wounded because of our sins, crushed because of our iniquities.
 
That explains what the sickness in verse 4 was about. Sickness is another way of talking about sin. Verse 6, “He was crushed for our iniquities, He bore the chastisement that made us whole.” I have quoted all of this out of the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh from 1918 so we’re seeing how the Jewish Bible is translated. We usually translate this, “He bore the chastisement of our peace.” They translate, “He bore the chastisement that made us whole.” See that’s a great way to explain the gospel. Jesus Christ, the Messiah, as a substitute paid the penalty so that we could be made whole, so we could have shalom or peace with God. “And by His bruises we were healed.” Healed of what? Healed of sin that brought about spiritual death.
 
Verse 6, “We all went astray like sheep.” In Judaism there’s no doctrine of original sin. There’s no doctrine of total depravity. And yet it’s evident on the pages, such as “all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” It’s obvious. Here “we’re all astray like sheep”. Even Isaiah has gone astray like sheep. Everyone has the same problem. “Each goes his own way and the Lord visited upon Him, that is upon the suffering servant, the Messiah, the guilt of us all.” That is substitutionary atonement. Isaiah 53:7-8, “He was maltreated yet He was submissive. He did not open His mouth. Like a sheep being led to slaughter, like a ewe, dumb before those who shear her, He did not open His mouth.” That was fulfilled with Jesus.
 
 He did not open His mouth, or utter a sound, until God poured out our sins upon Him upon the Cross. They whipped him, they beat him almost to death and yet He did not cry out until our sins were imputed to Him. Verse 8, “By oppressive judgment He was taken away. Who could describe His abode? For He was cut off from the land of the living [killed] through the sin of my people who deserved the punishment. Once again the idea of substitutionary atonement. And then in verse 9 and 10 we read, “His grave was set among the wicked…” That talks about his grave was a rich man’s grave, Joseph of Aramathea’s grave. Then look at verse 10, “But the Lord chose to crush Him by disease that if He made Himself an offering for guilt.” A guilt offering. Again that’s a picture of substitution. “He might see offspring and have long life.” Then we go to verse 12, “Assuredly, I will give Him the many as His fortune. He shall receive the multitude as His spoil for He exposed Himself to death and was numbered among the sinners whereas He bore the guilt of the many and made intercession for sinners.”
 
Now when we get into this what we see is that in the Hebrew, it talks about justification. That He is the One who became the One who justified. That doesn’t come across in the Hebrew translation. In verse 12 it expresses the fact in the Hebrew that when He was numbered among the sinners and He bears the guilt of the many that He is the One who brings justification. Now in the New Testament we read that it’s not by works of righteousness which we have done…” This is the concept out of Judaism. “…But according to His mercies He saves us by the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
 
This is why Paul then goes into the 4th verse of chapter 10, “For Christ is the end of law for righteousness, to everyone who believes.” Christ has fulfilled the Law in His life because He is perfectly righteous so then we can receive righteousness by believing in Him. We’ll come back next time and start looking at that particular passage.
 
I see I got a verse out of context. Verse 11 in Isaiah 53,”As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied; By His knowledge the Righteous One, My servant will justify the many.” Christ is the Righteous One and He makes the many righteous. That’s justification. So this idea of righteousness runs its thread through so many of these key passages in the Old Testament.  It’s not a righteousness that comes from the Law. This is what Romans 10:4 says, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” The Jews in verse 3 sought to establish their own righteousness by not submitting to the righteousness of God so we’ll look at how this righteousness plays out in understanding the rest of Romans 10 and the future deliverance of Israel next week.

Romans 117b-Righteousness and LifeRomans 10:4-8

Romans 10:4 NASB95
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
Romans 117b-Righteousness and Life Romans 10:4-8
 
We’re in Romans 10 and I’m going to start off with a little review. I covered a lot last time and had a couple of comments. Someone said, “You went so fast.” I’m trying to figure out when I went slow. It’s been 20 years or so. I don’t go slow. Let’s review the outline we went over. Romans begins in the first chapter with an introduction. Then in 1:18-3:20 the focus is on the condemnation of unbelievers. First there’s the condemnation of Gentiles, reprobate, pagan Gentiles who are immersed in immorality. Immorality isn’t the only expression of the sin nature. There’s also the moral person. This is the person who thinks they can achieve righteousness on their own.
 
Now that theme comes back in Romans 10 because this is the problem specifically related to the Jews who were under the Law. They thought they could through moral obedience measure up to the righteous standard of God. That has two aspects to it. One is measuring up to the righteousness of God in terms of God’s character, in terms of justification. Then living out a life that measures up and reflects the righteousness of God in terms of what we call experiential righteousness or the righteousness related to the Christian life.
 
Paul shows that unfaithful Jews are condemned because they’re not truly faithful to the Law though they claim to be but they can’t be 100% faithful. So the conclusion that he reaches is that all are condemned. He states it succinctly at the beginning of the next section, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” As we studied that we saw that the phrase “glory of God” was often used as a synonym to express the entire essence of God. We fall short of God’s character, His righteousness. So the great need for man is to be justified and justification means to be declared righteous.
 
One of the sad things that we are experiencing in terms of the dumbing down of our culture due to problems in education is that the newer translations that are coming out often do not use time-honored, theologically significant words in their translations. Words like justification, reconciliation, propitiation, and redemption. I remember one time when I was in a class in seminary in the 80’s. I was in the doctoral program but I was sitting in on a ThM class and the professor asked the class of about 150 students when was the last time they heard a sermon on Sunday morning on redemption or any other of the key elements of a primarily doctrinal sermon. No one raised their hand. No one could think of the last time. It’s impoverishes the soul of the church and so we have modern translations that in order to write at a 5th, 6th, or 7th grade reading level change the vocabulary so we lose these great words like justification and sanctification. If you use them in everyday conversation, people just look at you like you’ve just grown a third eye, right between the two you have. They think you’re some strange person.
 
Justification does not mean “just as if I’d never sinned”, which is a little trite saying that a lot of people came up with to remember it. Justification means that God declares us judicially not guilty. It’s a judicial declaration because we are clothed, as it were, with the righteousness of Christ. God declares us not guilty. It’s not that we haven’t sinned and it’s not as if we hadn’t sinned. It’s that what we’re wearing is like a cloak of righteousness that’s covering all of our sins and guilt. That means it’s not an issue any more. Our fallen nature changes because of what happens in the baptism by the Holy Spirit but we are still fallen sinners.
 
We have a new life in Christ. We are declared righteous. After that we have to learn to live like a righteous person. That’s called sanctification which is our spiritual growth. So justification is the focus of Romans 3:21-5:21. Then Paul begins to talk about the spiritual life. Now this is important because if you want to understand the tough passage we’re getting into tonight, you have to think in terms of how Paul is very logically developing his argument in relation to the righteousness of God as we go through Romans.
 
What happens is Paul stops talking about justification in 5:21 and he starts talking about the spiritual life. Then he starts talking about Israel in chapters 9, 10, and 11 and there’s one mention of justification in one of the verses we’re going to look at tonight in Romans 5:9. The issue that confuses people is that he’s not giving that as a salvation verse or a verse to get justified. So Romans 9-11 focuses on God’s righteousness in dealing with the corporate entity of Israel. Then the last four chapters relate to applications of God’s righteousness to our everyday life.
 
I pointed out last time that in Romans 9:1 to 11:36 Paul relates Israel to the righteousness of God. Israel is important all the way through Romans. That’s the purpose of looking at it this way. This isn’t saying these section are all about Israel and righteousness but in every section, Paul says something about Israel and its relationship to the righteousness of God. In Romans 9-11 he demonstrates the righteousness of God in His rejection of national Israel because Israel has rejected God’s prescription for how you achieve righteousness. Righteousness is by faith and not from works.
 
That’s how righteousness is clear in the Old Testament. Romans 10 demonstrates that what happened is that Israel, as a corporate entity, as a national entity, as an ethnic entity, basically rejected divine revelation in the Old Testament. That’s what Romans 10 is about. Israel rejected divine revelation and if they’re going to be delivered by God historically they’re going to have to turn back to God’s revelation. Romans 11 then answers the question, “Has God permanently cast away His people?” The answer is no, He still has a plan and there will be a future restoration of Israel to the land.
 
So we started with this last time, beginning with Romans 10:1, “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.” We did a study on the word group for salvation, SOZO. Here’s it’s the noun SOTERIA, translated salvation. The verb is SOZO which means to be saved and also to be delivered, to be healed. It has a range of meanings. It means to be rescued from a predicament. So you have to read the context to determine what you’re being rescued from. If you’re being rescued from physical illness then it has more the idea of healing. If you’re being rescued from national destruction, then it has to do with physical deliverance. If you’re being rescued from the penalty of sin, then it has to do with salvation in the sense that we normally think of it, that is gaining eternal life so that we don’t have to go to the Lake of Fire.
 
There are three stages of salvation as the word is used in scripture. And this is one of those great little tools that I learned probably in junior high. It’s been laid out in the writings of numerous people like Lewis Sperry Chafer and a number of others. It really helps to understand what the scripture is teaching, especially as it comes to this word. There are three stages or phases in the Christian life. The first stage takes place in an instant in time. It’s called justification. At the instant we put our faith in Jesus Christ God imputes to us His righteousness and then because He now sees that we’re covered with the righteousness of Christ He declares us to be righteous.
 
It doesn’t change who we are. We’re not transformed into a sinless person. It doesn’t minimize our sin nature. It does, though, take out the dominion of the sin nature. But that sin nature is just as nasty as it ever was, if we let it. So this is a problem. Some people think, “Oh, so-and-so can’t be a Christian. Look at what they did.” Some of the worst people I’ve ever met are Christians because they don’t understand anything about the spiritual life and they’ve turned their back on God and they’re just letting their sin nature run itself out.
 
I had a conversation the other day with someone and we were talking about a sad situation we knew of where some folks who had been married for some time were going through a divorce. And I said, “The sad thing is they’re two wonderful people but they’ve just given up on Christianity.” No one ever teaches people that when you’re falling in love with each other and you’re focused on the Lord, you’re one kind of person but when you start letting the sin nature control your life you become another kind of person. It’s not good enough to make sure you’re compatible when you’re walking with the Lord. You better make sure you’re compatible when your sin nature is in control. Everybody always looks at me real weird at that but that’s one of the most important principles in dating. Find out if your sin nature is compatible with the other person because if you both get out of fellowship, it’s going to be horrible and you have to be able to survive that. If your sin nature can’t put up with their sin nature you’re not going to last very long. That’s just reality.
 
Justification doesn’t mean we’re less of a sinner. It means that it’s Christ’s righteousness that is the basis for our salvation, not what we do. Then we have a spiritual life. We’re born again at the instance of salvation. That’s distinct from justification. Justification declares us to be righteous and at the same time God imparts to us a new life. We’re born again. We have a new spiritual life, a new spiritual capacity that wasn’t there but we’re just like an undisciplined bratty baby and all we want to do is scream and dirty our diapers. We have to grow up and mature and learn how to take care of our own dirty diapers.
That’s the whole principle of the confession of sin. We have to grow up. We have to learn the basic principles. That comes from 1 Peter 2:2 where we are commanded to “earnestly desire or long for the sincere milk of the Word, like a newborn babe, that we may grow by it.” That’s the spiritual life. We need to learn how to grow. And then the third stage also takes place somewhat as a surprise to us when we’re separated from this physical body and we’re absent from the body and face to face with the Lord. Then, and only then, are we free from our sin nature. This is glorification when we are face to face with the Lord.
 
Now the Scripture uses the word saved to describe each of these stages and you can’t confuse them. If you confuse them then you will have problems. First of all, justification is sometimes referred to as being saved. Ephesians 2:8 and 9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith…” Simple term. Faith alone in Christ alone. In Romans 3:4 and 5 saved isn’t used that way. Justification is used that way. Justification is the more precise word than salvation. In American evangelicalism we always want to talk about “saved.” We ask, “When did you get saved?” I pointed out this last time that Earl Radmacher used to always say, “I was saved yesterday, I was saved this morning. I was saved at lunch, I’m going to be saved all afternoon, and I’m going to be saved tomorrow.” He’s using saved in this second sense of being saved from the power of sin related to our spiritual life. We are working out salvation with fear and trembling, according to Philippians 4:2.
 
So there’s one sense in which saved means justification and it takes place in an instant in time. There’s another sense in which salvation is related to our spiritual life and we’re being saved from the power of sin. Phase 1, we’re saved from the penalty of sin. So now our destiny is heaven. Phase 2, we’re being saved from the power of sin so we can experience real life and phase 3, we’re saved from the presence of sin when we are “absent from the body, face to face with the Lord”. It’s important to understand those things.
 
Romans 10:1says, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved…” Now which one of these three is he talking about? Is he talking about that they will be justified? Is he talking that they’ll be sanctified, that they’ll have a spiritual life? Or is he talking about phase 3? Or is he talking about all three? He’s talking more about the end game but you can’t have the end game unless you have phase one and phase two. That’s something that’s not always emphasized in teaching this. The main idea here and the way he uses “saved” for Israel is that he’s not just using it as a synonym for justification. SOZO or SOTERIA, as I pointed out last time in our lengthy study of that word is never used in Romans as a synonym for justification. It’s used primarily for the spiritual life or the end result of glorification but you can’t be saved, phase 2, if you haven’t been justified, phase 1. That’s the precondition. You don’t have a spiritual life to be sanctified if you haven’t been justified and regenerated to begin with. So that’s the focus on the last part, the completion of these stages of the spiritual life.
 
His prayer ultimately is for Israel to be saved as we’re going to see in the context, which is so important here. If you take the text out of context, you’re just left with a con job. That’s what most people get. Salvation, all through here, is related to the physical deliverance of Israel at the end of the Tribulation period. When Jesus Christ returns at the Second Coming to rescue or deliver Israel from certain destruction at the hands of Satan and the Antichrist and the False Prophet, Christ restores them as a nation and establishes the Kingdom. That is their salvation. That’s what Romans 10 is all about.
 
It fits into the theme of Romans 9, 10, and 11 which is whether God has forgotten about Israel, has given up and gone back on His promises to Abraham. No, He hasn’t. In Romans 10:2, Paul presents the problem again. It’s the same problem he presented back in chapter 2 that the Israelites focused on works. He says, “For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God…” They are extremely religious, especially the observant ones that are in synagogues five times a day, praying seven times a day, debating, sitting around and studying and debating the minutiae of the Torah and the Talmud, day in and day out, not working.
 
This is true of the Haredim, which is a term for the ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel. They don’t work. This is a big problem in modern Israel today. They don’t work. They don’t serve in the army. They don’t really support the government of Israel because they don’t think there should be an Israeli state until the Messiah comes back. They live off of the welfare state in Israel. You have a number of different varieties of Haredim and so that’s what they do. The men sit around all day long and they just party and debate the fine points of the Torah. They put Christians to shame in terms of their deep, deep knowledge, not of the Word but of the Talmud. They’ve memorized a certain amount of Old Testament scripture, especially from the Torah but they do what a lot of Christians are starting to do. They can just tell you what everybody says about it but they can’t really tell you what the text means.
 
We’ve gotten that way. I saw that when I was in seminary. People sit around and talk about what Calvin said, what Luther said, what John MacArthur said, what Chuck Swindoll said, what so-and-so said, what J. Vernon McGee said, what Ryrie said, what Chafer said and they go on and on and on. But can they tell you what the Bible says? I was talking with Tommy Ice today and he said, “It’s so different in seminary today because when we were students there you’d go around and you’d ask what they wanted to do when they got out of seminary. The answer was that they wanted to teach the Bible. Nowadays you don’t get that answer.” You get a variety of other answers but that’s not their prime purpose for going to seminary any more.
 
What you have in the Jewish community is a zeal for and a passion for the Torah, a passion for the Talmud but it’s not according to knowledge. The Greek word for knowledge here is EPIGNOSIS which means a full knowledge. GNOSIS means you know the facts, like Jack Webb in the old Dragnet series, “Just the facts, man. Just the facts.” You know data but EPIGNOSIS is where you’ve assimilated that data into your soul because you understand it spiritually and you believe it as the Word of God. Now their passion for God is not according to a true, full knowledge of the Scripture.
 
Those of you coming on Sunday night or watching the Bible Study Methods class you’re learning that some of the most important words we have in Bible study are those little connective particles, we call them in grammar, which begin each sentence. So what we have in verse one is the statement that Paul makes that his heart’s desire and prayer for Israel is that they be saved. Then the first word in verse 2 is “for”. This is an explanation. He’s explaining why he’s praying that they might be saved. Why does he need to pray that the Jews will be saved? The Jews think they’re automatically going to go to heaven because of either a) they’re the descendants of Abraham so they get there on Abraham’s coattail or b) because they’re more righteous than the Gentiles because they have Torah, they’ve studied Torah, they’ve observed the Shabbat and all these other things.
 
Verse 2 is an explanation of why he’s praying for their salvation, because they need it. They have a zeal for God but don’t be confused by this passion that’s not according to knowledge. Then he has an additional explanation in verse 3. Again it begins with that word “for”, “For not knowing about God’s righteousness…” They don’t understand the dynamics of God’s righteousness. If you ask them if God is righteous, they’ll say yes. But they’ve rejected what the Old Testament taught about righteousness.
 
Now this gets into something else. I had a conversation today with a professor at Dallas Seminary who’s a free grace guy, for the most part, but it was interesting to listen. I kept my mouth shut because I was trying to probe him for some information on some other things and so I was just letting him talk. It was interesting because he’s part of this group that wonders how much the people in the Old Testament really understand. Now he’s better than most. He thinks they understood a whole lot. In fact, one comment he made had me thinking, “You know, I hadn’t really thought about that before.” His comment was about the whole statement about when Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness.
 
In the New Testament in John 8, Jesus said that Abraham longed to see My day. Now think about that. There are a lot of people who get very concerned about just how much the Jews needed to understand to believe in Old Testament days in order to be saved. The answer some people give is that they just need to believe in God. Others make it a little more precise and say that they need to believe in God’s promise of a Messiah. If you go back and look at the text, as I’ve stated many times, the promise is of a “seed” which is the Messiah who will be the Deliverer of the people from their sin so there’s a clear gospel there. Abraham longed to see Jesus’ day, that’s what Jesus says.
 
Hebrews 11 also talks about the fact that some of these Old Testament saints seemed to know a lot more about God’s future plan than we would get just from reading in Genesis, Exodus, or Samuel. They seemed to have a greater level of revelation than is indicated in the text. So they had a clear understanding of righteousness. Then this professor said that the Old Testament believers didn’t really understand righteousness or the deity of the Messiah. I’m sure they did. I hit this last time and I had at least one person say that they needed me to sort of go over that again.
 
It’s so important to understand this concept of righteousness from the Old Testament. Number one, Isaiah made it very clear that human righteousness is worthless. He uses very graphic imagery here to portray how polluted and how disgusting our righteousness is, not our unrighteousness, but our righteousness, which is the best that we can do. All our righteousness is like an unclean garment, Isaiah 64:5. So if our righteousness is worthless, then where do we get righteousness? We can’t produce it on our own. Genesis 15:6, Abraham believed God and it was reckoned or imputed to him as righteousness. It’s based on faith.
 
Now I believe that the tense of the verb in the Hebrew here for believe indicates something that had already happened in the past. It’s a verb shift in the Hebrew from the verses preceding it. It’s almost a parenthetical statement. Moses constantly in his narrative will tell you that his happened, this happened, this happened, and then he inserts a divinely inspired point of application or editorial. You have to read the text carefully to get that. Otherwise you think that it’s a straight flow of the story. That’s how some people read Genesis 15:6 but it’s just the writer, Moses, informing the readers not to forget this point as we go on with the story. The point is that Abraham had already believed God, long before Genesis 12. He’s not just now getting around to believing God and being declared righteous. He’s already been declared righteous before Genesis 12. Moses is reminding his readers that Abraham had already believed God and God had imputed that or reckoned that or credited that to his account as righteousness before God ever called him to leave Ur of the Chaldees and to go to this new land that God was going to give him. It’s interesting that Ur of the Chaldees was excavated just after World War I by a man named Sir Charles Woolsey. He had another claim to fame and that is that he had excavated Carchemish. We’ve spoken about the Battle of Carchemish. It was on a river in northern Syria and today that site of Carchemish is right on the border of Syria and Turkey. Anyone want to go work there? That is a hotspot and it’s been a hotspot.
 
Literally one third of the site of ancient Carchemish is located in Syria, two/thirds is located in Turkey. It was excavated by Woolsey before World War I and his assistant was a guy named T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. That was his number one assistant. Woolsey was like 35 and Lawrence was 28. That was just before World War I. Most people don’t realize that Lawrence was a noted archeologist prior to his claim to fame from the period of World War I.
 
Carchemish never got worked again because of all the fighting going on since the end of World War I all the way up to 2011. A team went in at that time and worked for six months and then, of course, all of this rebellion of Syria broke out and it hasn’t been worked since. So for ninety years, basically it hasn’t been worked since Lawrence worked it. Carchemish up there on the Euphrates River was not far from Haran which is where Abraham stops on his way. He left Ur where Woolsey later excavated and then Abraham goes north and he’s trusting God along the way but that’s not his justification. That’s part of his spiritual life.
 
How did Abraham get righteousness? It was credited to him because he believed God, not because of what he did. This is Paul’s whole argument in Romans 4 and Galatians 3. Abraham couldn’t get righteousness from the Law because the Law is not given for another 400 years. So the Law was not the basis for becoming or getting righteousness. It’s faith in God and that’s it. It’s not based on works.
 
Now where righteousness comes back in play is again in Isaiah 53. I pointed this out last time. You read through that and it’s the story of the suffering servant who’s going to come and He will die as a substitute, pay the penalty for His people. Isaiah 53:4, “He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He’s wounded because of our sins. He’s crushed because of our iniquities. We’re all sinners.
 
This is a problem in Judaism. You don’t need righteousness if you’re not born totally depraved. In modern Judaism and rabbinic Judaism, they don’t think you’re born totally depraved. You may sin but there’s not a doctrine of total depravity or original sin in modern Judaism. As a result of that, if you’re not inherently bad, then you can be reformed and you can do good. But the Bible says clearly, “All of our works of righteousness are as filthy rags and we all went astray.” Isaiah is talking about himself and he’s one of the greatest prophets of the Old Testament. He says “we all went astray like sheep, each going his own way, and the Lord visited upon Him the guilt of all of us.” A clear doctrine of universal human guilt in Isaiah 53:6.
 
It goes on later in Isaiah 53:6, “But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.” It goes on to say in Isaiah 53:12, “And was numbered with the transgressors; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors.” Again, a substitutionary death is described here. In Isaiah 53:11, it says, “By His knowledge, the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many.” Only the Servant is righteous. He’s righteous because He’s inherently righteous. The Servant is the incarnate Son of God, the child from back in Isaiah 7:14, “Emmanuel, born of a virgin.” In Isaiah 9:6, the one who is called “Mighty God.” The One who is called “The Father of eternity.” The One who is called “Wonderful Counselor.” All these terms apply to deity.
 
He is the One who was born as a human so what does the Righteous Servant do in Isaiah 53:11, “He makes the many righteous.” They can’t do it themselves. They have to be given that righteousness. Now all of this is important to understand the next verse in our passage. Righteousness in the Old Testament comes from believing a promise of God, the promise of the Seed. The promise of God is that the “seed of the woman will defeat the seed of the serpent.” That’s the first indication in Genesis 3:15. Then we go through all those Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament that tell us that He’s going to be a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and He’s going to be from the tribe of Judah. He’s going to be born in Bethlehem. He’s going to be born of a virgin. He’s going to suffer. He’s going to die. He’s going to be the One through whom God makes His people righteous.
 
Paul says in Romans 10:4, “For Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Now this is a much more difficult verse to understand than what meets the eye. I would guess that most of us would look at that and at first blush we would say the predominant view in modern commentaries. I don’t think it’s right but it’s the predominant view. Some of you are going to be aghast and think, “I can’t believe you said that.” No, I don’t think this is right. We read it as “Christ ended the Law.” But it’s not a verb. It doesn’t say that Christ ended the Law. Other passages say Christ ended the Law but that’s not what this verse is talking about. It’s saying that Christ is the end of the Law.
 
The word in the Greek that’s translated end is the word TELOS. It’ interesting how in the last few weeks I’ve had to do a lot of work on this particular word because a form of this word TELEIOS with an “ei” in there between the “l” and the “o” is the one that’s translated “perfect” in 1Corinthians 13:10, “When the perfect comes that which is partial shall be done away with.” So there’s a lot of discussion on this particular word and a lot of research. Every few years I go back and reevaluate and rethink and read a lot of new stuff on this. So this is the word TELOS and the reason it’s debated is because it has a wide range of meanings.
 
If a word can be one of ten things it doesn’t mean you can go “eeni, meeni, miny mo” and you can find one you like. What it means is that you’ve got to pay a lot more attention to context and the development of the writer’s argument so that you don’t assign the wrong meaning and misunderstand the passage. It commonly happens in a lot of things, not to mention politics in Washington, D.C. and understanding the scripture that Christ is the end of the Law.
 
Now there’s basically three major senses to this word TELOS. Fulfillment is one. Christ is the fulfillment of the Law. He fulfills the Law. Second, He’s the goal of the Law. The Law points to Christ. Lot of people say, “Well, it’s both of those together that’s the main sense here.” The one that’s probably the meaning many of you have heard before is that Christ is the termination of the Law, and that’s true. Christ certainly, indeed, does terminate the Law. That’s stated in any number of passages but that’s not the thrust here. The thrust here has to do more with this idea of Christ being either the fulfillment or the goal of the Law.
 
Galatians says the Law was a pedagogue, a tutor, to lead us to Christ. So that makes a little more sense. I’ll show you a couple more verses on that in just a second. First of all, let’s look at this context. Look back at verse 3, “For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.” What do you think is the main concept in verse 3? It’s the Law of repetition. You see one word used three times and that’s the word righteousness. The problem is that one group is ignorant of God’s righteousness, they don’t understand the integrity of God and the high standard or God’s righteousness and that’s a reference to the Jewish thought, 2nd Temple period, and rabbinical theology.
 
One of the things I’ve always noticed in theological systems is that the less of a sinner people are, the less grace God has to give and the less righteous God is. There’s a correlation there. It’s just like if you think you can do something to lose your salvation somewhere, buried in your thinking, is the idea that you do something to get your salvation. But if you don’t do anything to gain your salvation, you can’t do anything to lose it because it was a free gift. The same thing here, if you have a low regard of the righteousness of God, that somehow it’s diluted, then man becomes a little bit better.
 
If God’s standard isn’t an unreachable standard that’s a hundred miles up, and I can’t ever jump up and touch it, then that means that the only way I’ll get there is if someone takes me there. But if God’s standard is seven feet off the ground then I just might be able to jump high enough to get there. So the lower that standard is, the easier it is for unbelievers to reach it. So if you minimize the righteousness of God and change that meaning like in 2nd Temple Judaism the term righteousness or begins to shift from the main idea of a righteous absolute standard to the idea of doing works of charity. That really changes things.
 
One example that I ran into years ago when I first started going over to Russian-speaking areas in the former Soviet Union, everybody over there was using an old Russian translation like a King James translation of the Bible, called the Russian Synovial Text. In the New Testament, the word DIKAIOSUNE, the word for righteousness, is consistently translated with the Russian word Pravda. You’ve heard Pravda before that’s the Russian word for the main newspaper in Moscow. It means truth. But if you read a passage like this instead of they being ignorant of God’s truth and seeking to establish their own truth they have not submitted to the truth of God, it totally changes what the sentence is saying.
 
So if you have a misconception of what righteousness is and you’re defining it as works of charity, then that’s going to ping-pong all the way through your theology and change everything so it doesn’t conform to the text anymore. You basically go way off-kilter. So they’re ignorant of God’s righteousness. They’re seeking to establish their own righteousness. When you deny the absolute standard of God and you’re seeking your own standard, what have you done? You’re substituting your standard for God’s standard. It’s the standard of God’s character. So they’re seeking to establish their own standard instead of following God’s standard. They’re thinking that since they can’t live up to perfection they just change it and bring it down to something they can do.
So by seeking to establish their own standard, what have they done? They’ve rebelled and rejected what God has said in the Scriptures. That’s why Paul says they haven’t submitted to the righteousness of God. They’re in rebellion. They’re in spiritual rebellion. They have rejected what God has said and they’re manufacturing their own religious system as a substitute. In Judaism it’s a profound system because they’re spending all this time talking about the Old Testament but they come up with some of the most unusual ways to interpret the scripture. You get into numerology. You get into all kinds of hidden codes, mystical codes, and that kind of thing. It changes up how you interpret the Scripture.
 
So on the one hand we have the Jews who are ignorant of God’s righteousness and they’ve rebelled against God’s righteousness and then Paul gives another explanation in verse 4 for Christ is “the end of the Law”. See, he’s not saying that Christ ended the Law. He says that other places but what he is saying here is that Christ is the focal point of the Law and as we’ll see from the verses he’s quoting from the Law, these verses are all talking about the post-salvation life of the believer in Israel. They’re not talking about how the Jews are to get saved.
 
These passages are coming out of Deuteronomy and they’re talking about how the redeemed nation is to live to experience the full blessing of God. In other words, these passages aren’t talking about phase one experience in Israel. They’re talking about a phase two experience in Israel, the spiritual life. This fits the context of Romans because this part of Romans has left the phase one justification stage behind at the end of chapter five. We went on to the spiritual life and from there we’re talking about the righteousness of God and Paul’s prayer for the Jews that they be “saved”. It’s not talking just about being justified; it includes that but it’s talking about them experiencing the fullness of their salvation.
 
Jesus said that He didn’t come to “steal and destroy”. He said He came to “give them life [phase one] and to give life abundantly [phase two]”. That’s the spiritual life. It’s two separate issues. One is how to get to heaven and the other is how to live now that you’re a citizen of heaven. So Christ is “the end of the Law”. The Law points to Christ and His life because in His life He set the precedent for the spiritual life for the church age. He’s the model. He’s the paradigm. He’s the rubric for how to live the Christian life in this age. He’s the end of the Law for righteousness.
 
This phrase “unto righteousness” is the same preposition construction we’re going to see when we get into Romans 10:9-10. That’s the goal. Jesus is the goal. The Law points to Him. He is the end or the fulfillment of the Law to righteousness to everyone who believes.” Are we talking about justification belief here or are we talking about sanctification belief here? Just think a little bit. That’s why I spent so much time going through Phase 1. Phase 2. Phase 3. Some of your eyes were glazing over because you’re heard it so many times but now is the pop quiz. That’s why it’s important.
 
Paul is not talking about how to get righteousness. He’s talking about how to live now that you’re righteous. Now that they have the experiential righteousness that’s supposed to characterize our lives after salvation, not the forensic or justified righteousness that we got at salvation. When it says Christ is the end of the Law, this is clear from a number of passages of scripture. Like Matthew 5:17 where Jesus said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the prophets. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.” That fits the idea that He is the focal point, the end game in terms of what the Old Testament is pointing to. Romans 13:10, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore, love is the fulfillment of the Law.” 1 Timothy 1:5, “But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”
 
Now we’re going to the next verse. We’re going show that it’s not a verse on how to be justified because I would guess that so many of you are confused on Romans 10:9 and 10 and think that if we “believe in our heart and confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, we’ll be saved.” You think that’s talking about how to get to Heaven. What I’m very carefully pointing out to you is that this verse has nothing to do with how to get to Heaven. If it did it’s teaching a works salvation: that you have to believe and then do something with your mouth. But that’s not what it’s talking about. It doesn’t fit anything in Romans at all.
 
Okay, Romans 10:5, “For Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on Law…” Interesting verse. Paul is going to quote from Leviticus 18:5 which says, “You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, by which a man may live if he does them; I am the Lord.” Let’s turn in our Bibles there. We’re going to float around in Leviticus and Deuteronomy a little bit so it’s not going to hurt you to leave Romans and see if you can get those pages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy to separate.
 
Who is speaking in Leviticus 18:5? Yahweh the Covenant God of Israel. He’s speaking to Moses, the greatest prophet of the Old Testament. In verse 1 He says, “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, I am the Lord your God.” They are already in a covenant relationship with God. They’re already for the most part, as reprobate as the Exodus generation became, they are viewed as a “saved” generation. They believed God again and again and again. Of course, they turned around the next day, unlike you and me, and forgot everything and disobeyed God. But in this passage God is telling them to remember that He is the Lord, their God.
 
Then He reminds them where they came from, “According to what is done in the land of Egypt”. He might say, “Remember before you were a Christian and you just lived like all the reprobates and pagans around you.” That would be the comparison to today. In other words he’s telling them not to live like the pagans who lived around them when they were living in Egypt. He also told them that He was taking them to Canaan and He didn’t want them to live like them either. It may have been a new neighborhood with a different way of living but it’s just as pagan so He warned them not to follow their practices either. “Nor shall you walk in their statutes.” Don’t follow their customs. Don’t follow their Laws. I’m giving you a separate and distinct set of standards for how you should live.
 
In verse 4, “You are to perform My judgments and keep My statues, to live in accord with them” Whenever you see the word “walk”, take note. “Walk” is a process. Walk isn’t how to get saved. Walk is what you do after you’re saved. You walk by means of the Spirit. You walk in the light. You abide in Christ. You abide in the truth. These are all descriptions of the Christian life, phase two. Then we come to verse 5, the verse Paul is quoting in Romans 10, “So you shall keep My statutes and My judgments, by which a man may live if he does them, I am the Lord.”
 
Now, some people take verse 5 in Romans 10 that Paul is talking sort of hypothetically, that if a man could do these things, he would live by them. That’s not what the original context is saying. God is saying “Okay, I’ve saved you and redeemed you out from slavery in Egypt and I’m bringing you to a new land and I’m giving you a new set of standards on how you’re to live your life. If you live like the pagans around you, you’re going to destroy your life and you’re going to self-destruct. But if you live according to My standards and My principles, you’re going to experience blessing and riches in life.” He’s talking about their life after salvation. He’s not talking about how they should get justified and go to heaven. He’s talking about how that now that “you’re My people, this is how you should live.”
 
The Mosaic Law and the Ten Commandments didn’t have anything to do with how you became the people of God. It had to do with how the people of God are supposed to live once they become the people of God. So Leviticus 18 isn’t talking about getting justified because you can’t get justified by the Law. Galatians 3:21 says, “Is the Law then against the promise of God? Certainly not. For if there had been a Law given which could have given life truly righteousness [justification] would have been by the source of the Law if the Law could have given life.” But no Law can give justification so you’re born into a new life.
 
Philippians 3:9 “And be found in Him not having my own righteousness which is from the Law.” You can be moral or immoral. That’s not the issue in salvation. The issue in salvation isn’t what kind of righteousness do you have but have you received the imputation of Christ’s righteousness? Do you have your righteousness, good, bad, or indifferent, or do you have Christ’s righteousness? If you have Christ’s righteousness, then you’re going into heaven because the righteousness is by Christ.
 
Philippians 3:9 continues, “But that which is from Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.” So in Romans 10:6, Paul says, “But the righteousness based on faith speaks as follow,” I don’t have time to go there. We’re going to have to stop here. We’re going to get into a quote from Deuteronomy 30:12-14 and we have to build a chart and show what is going on here.
 
Where am I going with this? You need to understand a little bit about what the conclusion is going to be. The conclusion is in verses 6, 7, 8 “ that the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, Do not say in your heart, Who will ascend into Heaven?” You know, don’t say I need to go to heaven to find God or go into the abyss to find God’s Word. But what does Deuteronomy say? It says the Word is near you. As Jews God revealed His word. The Jewish people have been the custodians of God from the time of Abraham on. Every book but possibly the book of Job in the Old Testament was written by a Jew. The Jews were the custodians of the revelation of God. It was available to them. They didn’t have to go to Heaven or to the Abyss to get it. It was near them. It was in their word and in their heart. So they need to be obedient to the Word.
 
Then in verse 9 “If you confess with your mouth… (admit or acknowledge the Lord Jesus is the Messiah).” This is not about justification here. It’s talking about phase two and phase three which is the spiritual life and have fully realized all the blessings of justification, then this verse is not telling you what you need to be saved. It’s telling you how to live after you’re saved.
 
It has some specific Jewish applications. Verse 10 is the explanation. It says, “With the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.” The first part is justification and the second part is sanctification. There’s another quote from Joel saying, “Whoever calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved.” This is parallel in context with confession. The issue with the Jews is that they had rejected Jesus. Now they have to call upon Jesus.
 
He had said at the end of Matthew 23, “I am not coming back until you call upon the name of the Lord.” So until the Jewish nation calls upon the name of the Lord, Jesus isn’t going to return as their Messiah. That’s what Paul is talking about. God still has a plan but they have to quit rejecting the revelation He had been giving them and they not only have to believe Jesus died on the Cross for their sins but they have to have personal righteousness before men and they have to call on Him to come deliver them, then He will rescue them.
 
That’s what verse 13 is talking about and that’s the same thing he will use in chapter 11 when he says, “all Israel will be saved.” So it all ties together in a nice, neat little package. So we’ll come back next time because we have to look at these verses, Romans 10:7 and 8 and then we have to put them together. We need to compare Old Testament and New Testament passages so we can properly understand what Paul is saying and what he’s not saying.

Romans 118b-Confession Unto Salvation: The Deliverance of Israel and Gentiles, Too

Romans 10:6 NASB95
But the righteousness based on faith speaks as follows: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down),
Romans 118b-Confession Unto Salvation: The Deliverance of Israel and Gentiles, Too Romans 10:6-13
 
We’re in Romans 10. Last week I had several people comment that it seemed like I ran out of time. There is no way to teach through this whole section and really hit the key points in an hour. Because of some of the complexities in this passage with some of the exegesis in the passage, it’s important to take some time, maybe two or three weeks just to lead up to it so people have time to let it soak into their thinking. What appears to be on the surface, especially in Romans 10: 9-10, is what you’ve heard, what has sort of been programmed into your tiny little brain over the last years of your life makes it sound like Romans 10: 9-10 is all about how to get into heaven. That’s how it’s used by so many people, and if you come from certain backgrounds that’s what you’ve heard again and again and again. But it doesn’t have anything to do with how to get into heaven or a guarantee of heaven or how to have eternal life. It’s much different.
 
In fact, the message in Romans 10, as in Romans 9 and 11, is about Israel. So tonight we’re going to finally get through these verses. What does it mean to confess with the mouth, that confession is made unto salvation in Romans 10:10? What this means is that the ultimate deliverance to Israel and Gentiles, too, is to turn back to God. This isn’t just about God’s deliverance of Jews. It’s not just about individual salvation. It’s about how God has provided a way for Gentiles to be delivered as well.
 
Just a reminder of the context. Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in His rejection of Israel because Israel has rejected God’s grace provision. That’s the focal point. He’s not arbitrarily rejecting them because they’re “not elect”. He’s rejecting them because they have rejected Him. In Romans 10 the demonstration is that this rejection is based on Israel’s corporate rejection of God’s Word. God’s Word has been near to them. It has been close to them, throughout their history. Yet they have rejected it generationally. From generation to generation they have rejected the prophets. They have killed the prophets. Because they have neglected and rejected the revelation God gave them they’re going to come under national judgment. Indeed, for today and for the last 2000 years, we have seen them under national judgment.
 
Then Romans 11 answers the question whether God has permanently cast away His people? The answer is no, He still has a plan for national, ethnic Israel. Just some things to bring our minds back to where we are this week. We’ve had a lot of things going on the last seven days. We’ve got some people here who weren’t here last week. We always have to have a little review to make sure we’re back on target.
 
The first point is that the key point in Romans for receiving eternal life is not getting “saved”. That’s American, western evangelicalism, reducing everything to the concept of getting saved and that that equals justification.  For Paul, in Romans, justification is how you gain eternal life. It’s what happens at that moment you trust in Christ when you receive redemption, you’re regenerate, and you receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. At that point you’re declared righteous. That’s justification.
 
The second point is that salvation is used for either the entire concept or the end result. It’s not a synonym for justification in Romans. Justification is covered in Romans 3:21 to 5:11. Then Paul moves on to sanctification and the spiritual life. In Romans 3:21-5:11, there are some shorter treatises of justification and in Galatians 2. But in Romans and Galatians where he focuses on justification he never mentions confessing Jesus as Lord. Belief is the only condition for salvation. Our justification is based on faith in Christ alone.
 
 The third point we’ve seen is that nowhere else in all of Paul’s epistles does he mention confession of anything as a condition for justification, not to mention Jesus as Lord. He never mentions that anywhere else so why do we think that somehow public confession or telling your neighbor or telling your friend or telling somebody that you believed in Jesus, is necessary for salvation?
 
Fourth point is that Paul reiterates that justification is by faith alone in the first part of Romans 10:10. He says, “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness.” How do you gain righteousness? You believe with your heart. The heart there stands for the mind, the thinking part of the soul. The fifth point of review is what salvation means. In Romans it’s distinct from justification as we’ve seen in Romans 5: 10-11 it’s often future to justification, “having already been justified, we shall be saved.” See two different concepts in time. Justification is over with and completed in the past and because of that, we shall be saved in the future.
 
Romans 13:11 says the same thing, “Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.” It’s nearer, but it’s not here. It’s just nearer. What happened when we first believed? We were justified. Every day we get closer to salvation so he’s clearly not using the term salvation for gaining eternal life. The reason you have that confused look on your face or that “deer in the headlight look” is because you’ve just heard that idiom in American Christianity so much that salvation equals as phase one. As we pointed out last time in Romans 10:1, “Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.” Paul is saying something that is a lot more than I want all my Jewish friends and everybody else I’m related to that’s Jewish to go to heaven. He’s saying a lot more than that. To reduce it to justification for the Jews is to basically eviscerate or gut the passage of its real significance. He’s not just talking about wanting all the Jews he knew to go to heaven. That’s not what he’s taking about when he’s talking about salvation.
 
There are three ways salvation or being saved is used. Sometimes people call this the three tenses of salvation. That’s a common way today to refer to this. Others call it the three stages or the three phases of salvation. Phase one is justification. It takes place in an instant in time when a person believes that Jesus died on the cross for their sins. When they realize that Jesus is the solution and that by trusting in Him they have forgiveness of sins. There are different aspects to the salvation offer. Believing any of those related to Christ gets you justified in an instant by faith alone. We’re saved from the penalty of sin. There’s that word saved.
 
After that if we grow and mature as believers the technical term for that is sanctification. It’s a term related to our spiritual life, our experiential sanctification where we are saved from the power of sin. So when you see the word saved in Scripture you have to say, “Are we talking about getting saved from the penalty of sin or are we talking about being saved from the power of sin?”
 
In some places, like Romans 13 it’s saved from the presence of sin. It’s that we will be saved in the future. So it’s important to distinguish those but always remember this point that I don’t think has always been made clear. You can’t be saved from the power of sin and you can’t be saved from the presence of sin if you haven’t first been saved from the penalty of sin. You have to be justified before phase two or phase three can develop.
 
Now continuing the review, the sixth point is that only Romans 11:11 mentions the salvation of the Gentiles. If you read that passage as you read some of these passages you might say, “Well, I can see that that might mean justification.” Sure you can read anything into a passage but if you’re doing appropriate, correct exegesis, you don’t ever just ask if that meaning could work here. The question is how is the word used? How are words used by this author within this context in order to get the meaning out of the passage, not to read it into the passage?  
 
Now if everywhere else the word salvation refers to some kind of deliverance, then what kind of deliverance belong to the Gentiles. In verses 18 to 22 there’s the discussion of what happens throughout human history as people have gone negative to God’s revelation of Himself and as a result God has brought a series of judgments upon the human race. Those are outlined there. Those are judgments upon Gentiles. That is the wrath of God that is being revealed against the human race. So by trusting in God and calling upon Him we Gentiles can be delivered from this judgment. This is brought out even in our passage in Romans 10:12 where after Paul talks about and quotes from Joel 2:32, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame”, he then explains that. Listen very carefully. He says, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek…” At that point he’s talking what he has said and he’s making an application that takes it to both Jews and Gentiles. Up to that point he’s been focusing on the Jews but in verse 12 he says that this doesn’t just apply to Jews or just apply to eschatological deliverance of Israel at the end times, it also applies to Gentiles. Gentiles can be delivered from the present judgment of God, not end time judgment, but present time judgment if they turn to God for deliverance.
 
So point six emphasizes that it’s consistent to see all these passages in the same way. So when we put all of this together, Romans 10:1 is not a limited expression of Paul’s desire that Jews get justified because that ignores everything else he’s been saying about the remnant. In Romans 9 his quote from Isaiah 28:16 and part of that verse is quoted again in verse 11, all of this connects. Sometimes when I read this passage and I get into it more and more each time I study it I just wonder if other pastors take as much time to go back to these original quotes.
 
Paul has an illusion or a quotation from Old Testament passages in every other verse just about. If you don’t go back to see what those original contexts are discussing, how in the world can you figure what’s going on in this particular passage? I say that because I remember that for years having discussions with other close friends as we were wrestling with trying to figure out the interpretation of Romans 10: 9-10, it took us years before we were going back and digging through and really coming to grips with all these Old Testament quotations. It’s not something you’re necessarily taught in seminary and it’s not something you get very easily. But it is very important.
 
So when we come to 10:1 the salvation we’re talking about is the same salvation Paul is talking about in 1:16 and it ultimately talks about the total package of what God provides for us in terms of deliverance from the wrath of God today and from eternal judgment in the future. So Romans 10:1 prayer of Paul that Israel is that they be saved but not simply justified. In verse 2-3 we saw that the problem with Israel is that they’re ignorant of God’s righteousness. They think they can get there on their own ignoring the Old Testament teaching in Isaiah 64 that all of our works of righteousness are as filthy rags.
 
Then we move on to Romans 10:4 where he talks about the fact that Christ is the end of the Law. We saw this is the important word TELOS indicating the fulfillment or the goal of the Law. Because Jesus is the goal of the Law the Law has come to an end as stated in numerous other passages as a basis for experiential righteousness. He’s not talking about justification righteousness at this point. This is all about what saved can be more than justification. It’s talking about phase two deliverance salvation. That’s critical to understanding this passage. We’re not talking about how to get eternal life. We’re talking about the present time experience of the richness of God’s grace in delivering us from living in the fallen world. That’s being applied not only to Israel but also to Gentiles. So the Law is no longer related to sanctification but it has been replaced.
 
Now this is where we stopped last time. This is really interesting and one of those fun little passages to study because there’s a series of quotes taken out of the Old Testament from Deuteronomy 30: 12-14. If you’re really interested you will turn to Deuteronomy 30 so that there can be a comparison. I know, that’s hard to do when you’re sitting there and you have to slip back and forth in your Bible. But let’s do it. Let’s look at these verses in context.
He doesn’t quote directly from what we now know as the Masoretic Text. His quotes are coming out of the Septuagint, the Greek translation [LXX] of the Hebrew Old Testament. That’s why you see some differences. The other reason you see some differences is because he is sort of cherry picking the phrases and sentences he wants to focus on because he’s not saying this is a fulfillment one to one of the Deuteronomy 30 passage. He is making an application that the principle of Deuteronomy 30: 11-14 is the same today as it was then. That is that divine revelation is as available to you right now as it was to the Jews in the wilderness.
 
In fact, maybe even more so because you have the internet. You’re sitting there with your computer or smart phone or iPad or whatever and you can pull anything up just like that. So we have more Bible truth available to us today than in any other period of Biblical history. We also have more biblical falsehood or false teaching about the Bible than we’ve ever had before in human history. You can go out to all kinds of websites on the internet with all kinds of Christian teaching that will just confuse you more than anything else. But part of learning involves confusion sometimes. It’s out of confusion that we can gain clarity after a while.
 
Romans 10:6 says, “But the righteousness based on faith speaks as follows: Do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven?” He’s quoting from Isaiah 30 and then he’s making an application. So the point that Deuteronomy 30 is making is about revelation. The ultimate way in which God has revealed Himself to us is not through the written word but the Living Word, the Logos, the Eternal Second Person of the Trinity. So he’s making an application that the real word that is so close to the Jews in the wilderness is the Living Word, which is Christ. He’s saying that they don’t need to say that the Word needs to come down from heaven because it’s already here.
 
“Or who will descend into the abyss, that is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The Word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.” Now pause that thought a minute. Romans 10: 9-10 says that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved. What are the two body parts that he talks about there? Mouth and heart. Go back to verse 8. He says, “The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart.” This is the message related to faith which we preach.
 
The point that he’s making here is very simple. He goes back to the Old Testament illustration that here were the Jews in the wilderness. The Exodus generation has died off. Moses is talking to the conquest generation and he’s warning them that at some future time there is going to be judgment on Israel because they’re going to go apostate. And they’re going to be so apostate that God is going to remove them from the land completely because they reject God’s Word. That’s the point of verse 14 in Deuteronomy 30 and verse 8 here. The Word was near them but they rejected it. That’s why Israel again finds itself under judgment in Paul’s time because they rejected the revelation that God has given them which he’s already applying in the context to Christ who is the ultimate revelation of God.
 
Now we’ll compare Romans 10:6-9 with Deuteronomy 30:11-14. Deuteronomy 30:11 is stating what Moses said as he goes to the Jews and tells them what is necessary for God to return them to the land and for that discipline to be removed. The focal point of Deuteronomy 30 is on a future restoration of the Jews to the land. This is expressed very clearly as the beginning in verse 1, “So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the Lord your God has banished you.” He’s reminding them of all the things they were to avoid in chapter 29 which would lead to their being banished from the land unto all the nations like they are now.
 
Look now at verse 2, “And you return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, then the Lord will restore you from captivity.” When does this occur? It occurs at the end of the Tribulation period. This is talking about when the Jews are brought back to the land as a regenerate people and the land is restored to them. Now in Isaiah 11:11 God says, “Then it will happen on that day that the Lord will again recover the second time with His hand the remnant of His people.”
 
When’s the first time? Well in the context of Isaiah 11:11 it says I will bring you back from all the earth a second time.” When did the first time occur? Well, some people think it occurred when they returned from the Babylonian Captivity in 538 but they didn’t come back from Egypt or Rome or Turkey or primarily any place but Babylon and only about 45 to 48, 000 came back with Zerubbabel the first time. There wasn’t a large return back to the land during the 2nd Temple period. There was still a huge number of Jews living in the Diaspora. But there had to be a return under God’s plan so there would be a nation in the land to whom the Messiah could come. There had to be an authority structure in the land so that they could choose to accept or reject the Messiah. But most of the Jews at the time Jesus came lived in the Diaspora.
 
There are about 50%, probably about 48% of Jews in the world today live in the world today. The greatest percentage of Jews in the world today live in Israel for the first time. We’re within two percentage points of having 50% of the Jews in the world living in the land God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That hasn’t happened since 722 B.C. That’s significant, I think. Very significant. It doesn’t mean that the Rapture is tomorrow but it doesn’t mean it’s not.
 
Okay, so what is Paul saying? He quotes in verse 6, “Do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven.” This is from Deuteronomy 30:12 where Moses says not to be looking off into heaven for something. You’ve got it right here. No one needs to go to heaven and bring it to us that we may hear it and do it. In Romans 10:7 Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 30. He asks who will descend into the abyss. That’s the word from the Septuagint. In Deuteronomy 30:14 it says that the Word of God is not beyond the sea that you should say, “Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?” That’s looking for God’s revelation in some distant location.
 
Romans 10:8 quotes from Deuteronomy 30:13 and states, “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.” You don’t have to go looking for it. You don’t have to say that maybe if you could have gone to heaven I could find it or if I’d gone into the abyss I’d find it. Paul is quoting Moses and saying that you don’t have to look for it. For God’s revelation is at hand. It’s right there. It’s right next to you. It’s available in your mouth and in your heart. All you have to do is accept it and do it. So that’s the background to understanding that mouth and heart come out of Deuteronomy 30:14 and its related to the Jews turning to God.
 
When? For individual justification? No. For national or corporate deliverance at the end of the Tribulation period. The point I’m making is that when you study the context of Romans 10 and the context of the quotes you know right away that neither Moses nor Paul were talking about how to get into heaven. All these contexts are talking about how Israel will ultimately be delivered by God and restored to the land and realize all the promises of the Abrahamic covenant.
 
Now we are at Romans 10:9 and 10 which begins, “That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Now if you think salvation here means getting into heaven, then two conditions are presented. You have to believe in your heart that Jesus has been raised from the dead and you have to confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. So if you haven’t confessed with your mouth out loud that Jesus is Lord then you’re not going to get to heaven. What about someone who is a deaf mute? That’s not politically correct but I’m never been accused of being politically correct. Anyway, these are not conditions for getting justified. This is talking about something completely different.
 
It’s explained further in verse 10 which starts with the word “for” indicating an explanation. “For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”  Belief is a matter of thought. It’s not a matter of feeling. It’s a matter of accepting something as true. The result is that when you believe or trust in Christ as Savior you receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and God declares you to be justified. With the mouth you confess, resulting in something different. Salvation.
 
So let’s tear it apart a little bit. It starts off with what is a third class condition in the Greek. Greek talks about “if” clauses and expresses them grammatically four different ways. The first indicates “if” and we’re going to assume the condition is true. The second is “if” and we assume the condition isn’t true. The third is that it could be either way, maybe you will and maybe you won’t, but the idea is that more likely you will but there’s still a chance of pure contingency there. So that’s how it’s used here. It’s a third class condition. “If you confess” but you might not. So it you don’t, you don’t get the results.
 
Now we get to get to look at that word “confess”. It’s a familiar word to everyone in this congregation. HOMOLOGEO. It doesn’t mean “to say the same thing as”. It is used to indicate confession in a courtroom setting but it doesn’t always mean confession. See, according to Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich there are other English words that could be used to translate confession, depending on the context. Two are “admit” or “acknowledge”. I like to use those two words as synonyms for confession because confession is one of those holy words that people use all the time. It loses its meaning because it’s too familiar. When you say that you just have to admit your sin to God, all of a sudden that seems to clarify things a little bit but it also means to declare something. Sometimes it’s used with a sense of praising God in the sense that we’re praising what He has done or admitting or acknowledging what He has done. So you see how the word groups works together.
 
If you do a simple word substitution here and you use the word “declare” and you translate it “if you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved.” It is a public declaration that Jesus is God. He’s divine. The word “lord” there doesn’t simply mean master. It goes back to the fact that the Lord Jesus is God. Lord represents His deity. Jesus is His humanity. Christ is His role as the Messiah.
 
Now look at that confessing parallel to a phrase that’s found in verse 14 where we read, “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Calling on the name of the Lord represents the same idea as “confessing or declaring with your mouth” the Lord Jesus in verse 9. It’s the same thing. Calling upon the name of the Lord is a declaration. And so all of this fits together.
 
Now the next thing we ought to do in terms of analysis is to recognize that Romans 10:9-10 is structured according to a chiasm. (Pastor Dean showed a chart here showing the verse) The “chi” in that word represents an “x”. So if you just look at one side of an X, you see a line going in and then going out. This is how you structure that in an argument. Sometimes you can have 8, 10, 12 points. I’ve seen chiastic diagrams of two or three chapters in the Scripture. In a time when we didn’t have bold-faced type and italics or underlining and all these other things to visually emphasize different things then you did it with your literary organization. In a chiasm the focal point is on the two parallel things that are at the center of the chiasm.
 
So in this diagram, the A line says, “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus”. The fourth line which is parallel to it we call A prime is “and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation”. So these two lines mirror another. The B line is “and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” The mirror to that says, “for with the heart one believes unto righteousness.” Now let’s look at those two concepts. “You will be saved” is parallel to “believing unto righteousness”. Now it’s real easy to think that believing unto righteousness might be justification. Sometimes I’ve said that and I’ve really misspoken. That’s what I’ve heard a lot but when I got back into this the other day I thought that it’s easy to slip on this.
 
This chiastic diagram is so critical. In the B statement, “if you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you will be saved.” Is that phase one or phase two salvation? That’s phase two, sanctification. If that’s phase two then believing in your heart unto righteousness has to be what? Phase two. Which means we’re talking about experiential righteousness here, not justification righteousness. This fits the context of Romans. Paul quit talking about justification righteousness in Romans 5:11. How many times have I said that? That means everything after Romans 5:11 is talking about something related to the spiritual life, phase two, sanctification and even glorification, phase three. Now when we break down this parallel here which is, “you will be saved” and “unto righteousness” are parallel concepts. They’re synonymous. If “saved” never means phase one in Paul’s terminology in Romans, then it has to refer to phase two. Therefore the righteousness of the second parallel clause must also be referring to Phase two. It’s real easy to do that.
 
Those of you doing the Bible Study Methods course on Sunday nights will see that this is where detailed, structural diagrams really help us see what’s going on in the text. It’s real easy when you’re familiar with something in English just to read past it. I do it. You do it. We all do it. That’s the conclusion that since “saved” here is phase two, “righteousness” must also be phase two. Now I’m not the only one who’s made this observation. There are a number of people who have arrived at this conclusion but we tend not to be in the majority. But we all tend to be people who hold to a free grace salvation. This is a common view but it is not a majority view. It fits the text very well.
 
So in Romans 10:9-10 what Paul is talking about is the same kind of thing that is being talked about in Deuteronomy 30. The people being talked about there are people who at the end of the Tribulation period are about to call upon the name of the Lord. They’re already justified. They’re already believers. So the context is talking about believers who are growing in spiritual maturity, seeking continually to obey God, and realizing that in their spiritual life. So Romans 10:11 is a further explanation. Paul says, “For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed. [or put to shame].” Why won’t you be put to shame? Because you realize that ultimate deliverance eschatologically. Because we’re justified we will be saved.
 
When I talk about saved I don’t want you to think there’s a total dichotomy between being saved, phase two or phase three. What did I say? You can’t get phase two and phase three unless you have phase one. Saved is used in a full-orbed sense but the emphasis in these passages is not on getting justified. Romans 10:11 is quoting from the last part of Isaiah 28:16. It’s what Paul quotes in Romans 9:33. So this is important to connect all of these dots.  
 
What Paul was talking about at the very end of Romans 9:33 he connects the dots for us. It seems like how did he go through what he is saying in Romans 10:1-10 when verse 11 he pulls us right back to where he was at the end of chapter 9, verse 33. Now in Isaiah 28:16 it reads in the Masoretic text, “Whoever believes will not act hastily.” The word there in the Hebrew is chush and it should be translated “agitated”. You won’t be upset. Your stability is in God. He’s the one who’s going to deliver you. The Septuagint translated it, “Whoever believes will not be ashamed.”
 
So there’s a textual problem there and many people believe the Septuagint has the correct reading, and I agree. Perhaps the Masoretic text was corrupted at this point and used a word which is very similar. The first letter could easily be mistaken if it was misread or two letters were too close together, it might resemble the other. The Septuagint probably represents a better reading there and it should be translated “whoever believes, whoever trusts in God, won’t be ashamed. He will deliver us.”
 
Then he goes on to say, “For there is no distinction.” This is where he applies the principle to both Jew and to Gentile. Up to this point the application has been only in the direction of the Jews and their future deliverance corporately which has to do not with their individual justification but their corporate deliverance. So that takes us back to where we have to say that whatever else we have to say, whatever is going on here, nothing in this passage is really focusing on how to get eternal life.
 
So he goes on to say in Romans 10:13, “For whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Why is that important? It’s important because in Matthew 23, just before the Upper Room Discourse, Jesus comes and He weeps over Jerusalem and He says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem. The one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather you children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings but you were not willing.” Then after that He tells them He will not return until they call upon the name of the Lord. So what has to happen before Jesus returns as Israel’s Messiah to deliver Israel from oppression? Israel has to call upon the name of the Lord.
 
Now that’s a whole other interesting story, which we might do one day but calling upon the name of the Lord is not synonymous to getting justified. It is the action in Scripture if you go all the way through the Old Testament and New Testament passages, calling upon the name of the Lord is what believers do in order to be delivered from their present circumstances of adversity. It’s calling upon God to come and rescue them from whatever it is they are going through. You find that term many times in the Psalms. Now what Israel has to do at the end times is they have to confess or declare their sin before God. Leviticus 26:40-42, which is at the end of the discussion of the five cycles of discipline when the Jews are taken out of the land, God is going to state the conditions for the return of the Jews to the land. God said to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against me and also in their acting with hostility against Me and that I also have acted with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies—if their uncircumcised hearts are humbled so that they then make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant with Jacob and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, I will remember, I will remember the land.” So there’s the condition.
 
They have to admit their guilt before God and they have to turn to God. This is the same terminology that’s used in Deuteronomy 30. Now that is expressed in Romans 10:13 corporately when they call on the name of the Lord. Here Paul quotes from Joel 2:32, “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Let’s turn to Joel 2. If you were with me through the Revelations series or Daniel series and you listened to those you will recognize this. Joel 2:32 is one of those great passages describing the end times.
 
In Joel 2:32 we have the end of the Tribulation period and the time is the Day of the Lord. The time when Jesus Christ returns to rescue Israel from possible destruction, potential destruction from the Antichrist. This section is also quoted by Peter on the Day of Pentecost simply to show that the kinds of events that happened afterwards represent the actions of the Spirit just as the actions on the Day of Pentecost. Joel 2 talks about the Day of the Lord and the judgment that’s coming and what God will do to restore the land to Israel. There’s also a quote at the end of verse 27 that says, “My people will never be put to shame.”
 
Paul may be adding that idea that those who believe in Him will not be put to shame. In verse 28, he says, “It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind and your sons and daughters will prophesy and your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions.” This is in the Millennial Kingdom. “Even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days and I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, blood, fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord.” That’s describing the calamity of the whole end time of the Tribulation and the Battle of Armageddon.
 
Then verse 32, “And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered.” This is at the time of the blood and fire and columns of smoke and the sun turned into darkness and the moon into blood. That’s when it will come to pass at that time that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered [saved]. So Joel 2:32 is talking about what happens at the end of the Tribulation period, at the end of Daniel’s Seventieth Week, as Christ is going to come to deliver Israel and He’s going to deliver the remnant. Now this happens in the Campaign of Armageddon.
 
Now Armageddon is not a battle. It’s a campaign. There are actually eight stages to the Battle of Armageddon. It happens in the Valley of Har Megiddo. Har is the Hebrew word for mountain. There’s a huge tell or mountain built over the ancient city of Megiddo. So far they’ve discovered about twenty-seven or eight layers of civilization at Megiddo. During the time of Solomon it was one of his great cities where he had a major fortress and where he stored his chariots and soldiers. It overlooks this huge valley. That valley goes from the southeast to the southwest and the northwest end of that valley ends right at the modern city of Haifa which is the only deep water port in the eastern Mediterranean.
 
When you’re standing up there on the escarpment of Mount Carmel, the same Mount Carmel where Elijah called down fire, and you look down on Haifa, you see the ocean. This is where the U.S. fleet comes in to refuel. It’s the only deep water port there. You can just see that this is where the naval ships of the Antichrist come in to offload troops and equipment and using this huge valley that extends all down through this area to the southeast as his logistical base in his fight against Babylon and against Israel. So that’s stage one which is gathering the armies of the Antichrist for this great battle.
 
The second thing that happens chronologically is that he’s going to destroy the seat of power in Babylon. The third thing that happens is he’s going to attack Jerusalem and Jerusalem will fall. The believing Jews have already evacuated. There’s a remnant of Jews that didn’t listen to Jesus and didn’t leave but they’re still saved. They’re now under siege in Jerusalem. The majority though have left and they headed south across the Judean Desert, across south of the Dead Sea into what is now the modern Hashemite kingdom of Jordan in the area of Petra and Bozra.
 
Under the fourth thing that happens the armies of the Antichrist then trap them down in that canyon-type mountainous territory at Petra and they’re surrounded. At this point the remnant calls upon the Messiah to deliver them. They call upon the name of the Lord. They’re already believers. They’re already justified. Now they’re coming together as a nation and they call on the name of the Lord. They recognize corporately, nationally that Jesus is their Messiah. They call upon Him to deliver them.
 
This is when Jesus returns and rescues them from the surrounding armies of the Antichrist. Then they head back north with the tribe of Judah and Dan leading the way with the Messiah heading back to Jerusalem to rescue those trapped in Jerusalem. They end up in the final battle in the Valley of Jehoshaphat which is the Kidron Valley which runs between the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Lord Jesus Christ is going to rescue them, defeat the Antichrist and the False Prophet. Then they’re going to have a victory ascent up the Mount of Olives.
 
(At this point Pastor Dean shows photos of the area, describing each of them. Visit www.deanbible.org to view the slides/photos associated with this Bible study or click on the link below.) How do we know this? In Jeremiah 49:13-14 we read, “For I have sworn to Myself, declares the Lord, That Bozrah will become an object of horror, a reproach, a ruin, and a curse and all its cities will become perpetual ruins I have heard a message from the Lord, and an envoy is sent among the nations saying “gather yourselves together and come against her, and rise up for battle!”
Then the Lord Jesus Christ is going to return. This is stated in Isaiah 63:1-3, “Who is this who comes from Edom, with garments of glowing colors from Bozrah, This One who is majestic in His apparel, Marching in the greatness of His strength? It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.’ ‘Why is Your apparel red and your garments like the one who treads in the wine press?’ ‘I have trodden the wine trough alone, and from the peoples there was no man with Me. I also trod them in My anger and trampled them in My wrath, and their lifeblood is sprinkled on My garments, and I stained all My raiment’.”
 
This passage is written from the perspective of the Lord Jesus Christ having won the battle and He’s bringing the Jews that he’s rescued back into the land.
In Isaiah 34:6 we read “The sword of the Lord is filled with blood. It is sated with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.” That hasn’t occurred historically. This is all a description of what happens during the times of this last Armageddon Campaign.
 
(Pastor Dean shows more photos). These show you the lovely, lovely territory coming south out of Bethlehem across the Judean desert. I remember the first time we took a trip to Israel we’d gone over to Petra. We drove south about two hours to come back at Eilat and to cross over at Aqaba. It was about the 26th or 27th of June and there was a sirocco wind blowing across the Judean desert right in our face. You have to walk between two cyclone fences maybe about thirty yards apart. You have to walk about a hundred yards from the Jordanian side to the Israeli side, dragging your baggage behind you, walking into this 15, 20 or 25 miles an hour wind. The temperature was 117 and it was like walking into a hairdryer. That’s 117 with a heat index of 135. Lovely territory that they’re going to have to escape through. But it’s also very difficult terrain to follow someone and to attack them. Just think about that, what it’s going to be like. Lovely terrain as you head down into Petra. So this is the scenario is when we look at the passage in Romans 10. Romans 10 is talking about this future deliverance when they call upon the name of the Lord.
 
Next time we’re going to come back and we’re going to wrap up the rest of the chapter as we go forward. Here there’s going to be an application why Israel has rejected the gospel. We’ll get into those passage in the last part before we get over to chapter 11.

Romans 119b-Faith, Healing, Calling

Romans 10:12 NASB95
For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him;
Romans 119b-Faith, Healing, Calling Romans 10:12-21
 
Open your Bibles to Romans, chapter 10. We’re really going to start at verse 10 with some new content but I want to give you some review because this isn’t the easiest material to think through. After you hear me teach you go back and try to work your way through. You’re wondering why I said certain things so I want to review this again because I think it’s really important. It’s not the normal way people approach this passage. The way most people approach it, especially verses 9 and 10, is that this is talking in some sense about justification and in some other sense about sanctification.
There are a lot of Christians who look at Romans 10:9 and 10 as being part of the formula for salvation. You believe in your heart but then if you truly believe, if you genuinely believe, if you are truly elect, then your works will show it and you will talk about it. You will tell someone that you believe in Jesus. That’s pretty much how probably 98% of Christendom has interpreted this passage. As I pointed out and again and again, part of the problem is that we have this preset mindset that when you see the word “saved” it’s talking about getting eternal life and going to heaven. That’s not how the word is used either in the Hebrew in the Old Testament or in Greek in the New Testament. It has a range of meanings and I’ve gone through that.
 
The core meaning of the word SOZO as well as its Hebrew term, yasha, means to deliver from a predicament. That might mean deliverance from illness, in which case we would translate it healing. It might be deliverance from one’s enemies in a battle and we would translate it as deliverance. What we do in Romans is look at this word SOZO and realize Paul does not use it as a synonym for justification. It’s used primarily to talk about phase 2 salvation which is the spiritual life and deliverance which in a sense is the whole complete package of phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3 together. You can’t get to phase 2 or phase 3 if you’re not justified but it’s not used as a synonym where you can just do a word substitution. It’s really talking about the results or consequences of justification.
 
The other thing we need to be reminded about in terms of the context is that Paul is now talking about Israel and the relation of God’s plan to Israel and to His righteousness. The point is that God is righteous in His dealings with Israel and that He eventually will fulfill all His promises to Israel as stated in the first part of Romans 9. That says that all the promises and all the covenants still belong to Israel and God will eventually fulfill all His promises. Most of those promises in the Old Testament come back to the fact that Israel will be restored to the land as a unified people with a heart for God and living in obedience. That’s spelled out again and again from the Torah, especially in passages in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
 
Leviticus 26 is after the 5th cycle of discipline, Israel will be restored to the land. That’s also found in Deuteronomy 30.  That’s the context for these quotations that we have in chapter 10. So to just remind us again, even though we’ve seen this so many times, Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in His rejection of national Israel. Now this isn’t a total rejection. It’s a setting aside of Israel in His plan. It’s temporary so that some have said that we’re living in the period of the Great Parentheses. The Church Age was not announced in the Old Testament. It was not predicted or prophesied in the Old Testament. It was not foreseen. It’s a parenthesis. It’s the insertion of something new in God’s plan between the arrival of the Messiah the first time and His coming the second time.
 
Romans 10 will demonstrate that that rejection by God is based on Israel’s corporate neglect of the revelation God had given them. That’s the whole point of these passages quoted in verses 6, 7, and 8 that the “Word is near to them.” Romans 11 then answers the question of whether God had then permanently cast them away and the answer is no, God still has a plan for national ethnic Israel. So we looked last time at this same passage which I’m just reviewing which quotes from Deuteronomy 30:11-14.
 
Now in Romans 10:6-8 we read about the righteousness of faith. That’s a genitive of source which says a righteousness which is produced by faith. Now the question which we need to answer is whether this is faith salvation or justification faith when a person receives eternal life and receives the imputation of righteousness and is declared righteous or is this faith related to the ongoing walk of a believer after justification? A lot of people think it’s justification faith but Paul quit talking about justification back in chapter 5, verse 21. He’s talking about a different kind of righteousness. He’s not talking about justification righteousness. He’s talking about the experiential righteousness in the life of a believer.
 
Now he’s going to quote from these verses in Deuteronomy 30:11-14. For those of you who’ve been coming to the Sunday night Bible Study Methods class, we’ve been talking about the importance of observation in the text and answering basic questions about who wrote something, when did they write it, to whom did they write it, what were the circumstances surrounding the writing and what was the purpose. That means understanding the argument of a book. In Deuteronomy 30 we first ask the question of who is speaking. The answer is Moses. Deuteronomy is a message that Moses taught as a parting Bible class before he went to be with the Lord. He goes through the history of how God had dwelt graciously with Israel, how God had brought them through the wilderness, and now God has brought them to a significant point in His plan for them. What point is that? They are on the edge of going into the land. So we’re talking to the conquest generation.
 
The Exodus generation was made up of a lot of believers but they were spiritual failures. They were characterized by rebellion and disobedience and as a result God let them spend forty years in the wilderness and did not allow them to enter into the land of Israel. Now that picture of entering into the land of Israel is not a picture of entering into heaven. It’s a picture of entering into the fullness of the promise that God has for the believer. So the Exodus generation is a picture of the disobedient believer who doesn’t get his rewards and doesn’t experience the full blessing that God promised him. But they’re still believers.
 
Now we have the conquest generation, the children of the Exodus generation. They are a superior generation spiritually because they are obedient. That is why they’re going to be able to go into the land and conquer the inhabitants of the land. They’re going to be successful at it because they trust God. They trust God at Jericho. They have a little blip, a little speed bump outside of Ai but they eventually get their act together and they go into the northern and southern areas and defeat most of the Canaanites, at least in their major strongholds. They are successful because they’re spiritually obedient. They are a believing generation.
 
Moses is addressing them as they are about to cross the Jordan River and go into the land that God promised them. He’s not talking to them about how to get righteousness to go to heaven. He’s talking to them about how they as believers should live for God and have experiential righteousness so they could experience the blessings that God has for them in the land. They’re warned in Deuteronomy 28 and 29 that they’re going to be disobedient. There’s going to be a time when their descendants will be disobedient. If it continues and intensifies to the point of complete idolatry and rebellion against God then God is going to pull them out of the land and scatter them among all the nations. They’re believers. They’re obedient and so Moses is telling them that if they want to stay in the land then they must walk with the Lord.
 
This is seen in the next couple of verses beyond the ones that Paul is quoting. In Deuteronomy 30:15, Moses drives his sermon home when he says, “See I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity, in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it.” He is saying you have two options. You have a volition. Your generation needs to decide as believers if you’re going to walk with God and experience life and good or are you going to be like your parents and walk in disobedience and experience death and evil. It’s up to you what you’re going to make of your generation and in your life.
 
He promised they could live and multiply. Now living and multiplying are seen as two related ideas. That’s not going to be going on in heaven. This is not talking about that you may live eternally and go to heaven. We’re not Mormons. We don’t believe we’re going to die and go to heaven and make babies for the next ten millennia. This is talking about life in the land. If you’re obedient, you will live in the land. God will bless you and you will have a rich, glorious, abundant life. If you’re not, then you won’t have that. So the promise is that you will live on earth, in the land, and be blessed by God.
 
Then verse 17 is in contrast, “But if your heart turns away and you will not obey, but are drawn away and worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You will not prolong your days in the land where you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess it.” This is all in this life. Perish does not mean eternal perishing here. At least half the time we see the word perish used in the Scripture it doesn’t have to do with eternal condemnation. It has to do with temporal condemnation or defeat in battle.
 
Paul uses the comparable Greek word to talk about what might have happened to him in a shipwreck, that he might have perished or died. So we’re talking here about physical death and physical loss of property and possessions in the land as a result of divine judgment. So we’re talking about how to richly enjoy life today so this would come under the category of how to get eternal life which would be justification. It’s not in the passage. He’s talking here about how to live a life that brings blessing where you experience the blessing of God and the richness and fullness that God has for you. So in the preceding section it tells us that Moses is talking to believers about how to experience the richness of God’s blessing in this life.
 
In the verses 11-14 he’s focusing on the fact that this is dependent upon how you respond to the Word of God. In Deuteronomy 30:11, Moses says, “For this commandment which I command you today is not too difficult for you, nor is it out of reach. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it.? Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ But the word is very near you in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it.” He is saying the commandment is right here. God has revealed them to you in the Torah, in the Law. It’s not in heaven so no one has to go there to find it. It’s not beyond the sea that you have to go over the sea to find it. “The Word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart that you may do it.”
 
We see those two terms, mouth and heart emphasized in the Romans 10 passage. So the point here is that Moses is telling his hearers in the original context that the word is here before you. You don’t have to go searching for it. You don’t have to send someone for it. It’s not mystical. It’s not mysterious. It’s not hard to find. The issue is whether you want to respond to what God tells you or not.
 
The way he applies it in Romans 10 is that Paul takes those same principles that the Word of God, the revelation of God is available to you right now, right where you are and he applies that to Christ which is what Moses is talking about but in John chapter one we’re told that the second Person of the Trinity is Logos. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Jesus Christ is the Living Word. In John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh [the incarnation] and dwelt among us.” What we have is the Living Word in Jesus Christ who is the greatest expression of God.
 
John goes on to say that “No one has seen the Father at any time but the only begotten has revealed Him.” So Jesus is the highest and greatest expression of God’s disclosure of Himself to everyone. So when Paul takes these passages he paraphrases them and applies them to Christ and the revelation of God we have in Christ. He says in verse 6, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into Heaven? [that is to bring Christ down], and Who will descend into the abyss? [that is to bring Christ up from the dead].” Paul is viewing Christ here as that expression of revelation.
 
Verse 8, “But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, in your heart, that is, the word of faith which we are preaching.” You don’t need to make up excuses. It’s right there. It’s present. So the point that I’m making is that as we study Scripture, we ask who is being addressed. Years ago I learned a basic principle in seminary, that every passage is either talking to the unrighteous, the unsaved, the unjustified telling them how to be justified or it’s talking to the saved telling them how to live the spiritual life. Every passage in Scripture is doing one or the other. It’s either talking to the unbeliever telling them how to get heaven or it’s talking to the believer and telling them how they should live as a believer. One or the other.
 
We’re going to see this a lot in Matthew and Matthew does the same thing that Paul is doing in this chapter. The whole Sermon on the Mount is not addressed to unbelievers. Jesus is talking to his disciples. Now everybody else comes in and sits down around him and they listen in but Jesus is not talking to the multitudes. He’s talking to His disciples. He’s giving a spiritual-life lesson to His disciples. Otherwise you end up with a works-based salvation which a lot of people have done because they don’t understand the context. Jesus isn’t talking about how to get eternal life in the Sermon on the Mount. He’s just doing the same thing Paul is doing here. He’s going to the Mosaic Law and interpreting it according to God’s standards to show that if you want to “live in the land” and enjoy the blessing of God, these are God’s standards. This is how you live them if you are going to experience the blessing of God “in the land.” It’s Jesus’ interpretation of the Mosaic Law.
 
Most of what is in the Sermon on the Mount is in the Old Testament and Jesus is just giving it the correct spin. He’s not giving it the legalistic spin of the Pharisees. This is what Paul is doing here. So Paul follows the same principle. Moses is speaking to believers. Paul in Romans 10 is talking about the importance of righteousness in the Christian life. He quit talking about justification back in chapter 5, verse 21. So he’s consistent. He’s taking a spiritual life context in Deuteronomy and he’s applying it in a spiritual life context in Romans 10. So just as the issue in Deuteronomy is not gaining legal righteousness for salvation but having experiential righteousness to enjoy the blessing of God, the same is true in the Romans 10 context.
 
Now going on to Romans 10:13. As I told you last time the fulfillment of this verse is at the end of the Tribulation when the regenerate Jews in Israel who have followed the Lord’s command in Matthew 24 that says “When you see these signs appearing…” The signs are the Abomination of Desolation in the Temple, the Antichrist, and the judgments coming there in the second half of the Tribulation. He told them not to go back home, just leave, head through the wilderness, and get out of Jerusalem. Jews who leave Jerusalem at that point in the Tribulation are already believers. They’re already individually justified. That’s why they’re listening to Jesus and getting “out of Dodge.” But there are others who are left behind and will still come to salvation during that time. They don’t leave.
 
But the group that leaves represents the nation of Israel at that time in the future. They will flee across the desolate wastelands of the Judean desert, over across into what is now Jordan, in the area of Petra and Bozrah. There they will be protected by the Lord and when the armies of the Antichrist come to destroy them and to wipe out all the Jews then they will turn to the Lord Jesus Christ and call upon Him to save them. This is a quote from Joel 2:32. The context of Joel 2 is at this time at the Day of the Lord at the end of the Tribulation period.
 
Joel 2:32 says, “And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered.” Is that talking about justification? No, for two reasons. Reason number one is that the Jews that end up there in Bozrah or Petra got there because they already believed Jesus and they’re fleeing in response to and obedience to His command. Second, the word there that’s translated “to be saved [delivered]” isn’t even the normal or predominant word for salvation. It’s the word malat which means to save or deliver in a physical sense. Then Joel goes on to explain in Joel 2:32, “For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape [deliverance].” So you say, “You’re talking about Bozrah.” Yes but after Jesus returns at Bozrah, after they call on the name of the Lord, He’s going to destroy the armies of the Antichrist that are there and then lead them in a victorious battle march back to Jerusalem to rescue those who are still trapped in Jerusalem.
 
So in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be deliverance, physical deliverance and escape, and it’s in parallelism to “shall be saved” So Joel is not talking about justification salvation, getting into heaven but about physical deliverance at the end of the Tribulation when the total destruction and annihilation of the Jewish people is a very real immediate threat.
 
Now this goes back to Matthew 23:37 which we looked at last week. Jesus is talking to the disciples and he predicts judgment for Jerusalem. Jesus say, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord.” This is a quotation from Psalm 118:26 and this speaks of what the Israelites will do. They will call on the Name of the Lord [which always refers to a character quality] that He will come and rescue Israel.”
 
This occurs at the end of the tribulation period. Jesus is prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred in A.D. 70 and they’re still out under divine discipline until God brings them back. The condition for coming back is spelled out in Leviticus 26:40, “If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers…” Now I believe that “iniquity of their fathers” is going to go back to the national sin of Israel which is the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. So they are going to acknowledge as a corporate entity their sin. This isn’t unusual.
 
Daniel says the same thing at the beginning of Daniel 9. He’s reading in Jeremiah and he reads that God said they would be out of the land for seventy years. When Daniel read that he got out his abacus or his TI calculator and started adding it up and realized they were at seventy years. So Daniel prayed as an intercessor for the nation Israel and confessed their sin of idolatry and rebellion against God and prayed that God would restore them to the land. At the end of that prayer God sent the angel Gabriel to tell him and give him the vision of the seventy weeks and the timetable for Israel. It was not long after that that the Babylonians were defeated by the Medes and the Persians and Cyrus then authorized the Jews to return to the land at the end of the seventy year captivity. So Daniel confessed their sin. God forgave them and restored them to the land.
 
That is a partial restoration that occurred there. It is a picture of the full restoration that will occur at the end of the period. So Leviticus tells us that God will remember His covenant. Just in conclusion. This is where we get some application. First point, what God promises, God fulfills. It doesn’t matter if you’re Israel out of the land or if you’re a believer facing adversity on a day-to-day basis, God fulfills His promises. He won’t go back on His promises to Israel and He won’t go back on His promises to you. Remember, that’s the context here. Paul has just said at the end of Romans 8 that we can’t get out of the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Some Jew might say, “Well, wait a minute. It seems like God is turning his back on Israel.” No, God is going to be faithful to His promises to Israel but it’s on His timetable, not your timetable.
 
Second point of application, God promised Israel a worldwide scattering in the 5th cycle of discipline in Leviticus 26:27-39 and in Deuteronomy 29. That is where they are today. The disapora where we get our English word “dispersion”. The diaspora is the name for the scattering of Israel among the nations. The disapora came in several stages. The first stage occurred in 722 B.C. when the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes, were defeated by the Assyrians. They were taken as captives and scattered by the Assyrians throughout the Assyrian Empire. Then some 140 years later when the Babylonians defeated the southern Kingdom of Judah, then those inhabitants were taken as captives back to Babylon. There were some that when they saw Nebuchadnezzzar coming, they had fled to Egypt and other places to avoid the defeat.
 
That was the scattering of Israel. That lasted for 70 years and then they came back. But not all of them came back. Only 45 to 46,000 came back under Zerubbabel in the first return. There were two or three other returns but they weren’t large. They were mostly from Persia There were still large Jewish communities in Alexandria in Egypt, and throughout Egypt and in Babylon and as well as those who had scattered into what we call Turkey today which was called Cappadocia and Pontus and that area and further into Greece and into Rome.
 
The promise of God was that if Israel turned to Him then He would restore them to the land. This is Leviticus 26:40-42. But neither the return in 538 B.C. or its subsequent stages nor the return that we’re seeing today is the promised return of a regenerate Israel. There had to be a return in 538 B.C. because there had to be a national entity that the Messiah could come to the first time. If God hadn’t brought back a portion, maybe 30% of the Jews in the world at that time, to establish a national entity to be there to accept or reject the Messiah, then there would have been no nation for Him to come to so there had to be a restoration. 
 
In the same way there will have to be a national regathering of a large percentage of Jews today because the event that begins the Tribulation is when the Antichrist signs a peace treaty with Israel. The Tribulation doesn’t begin with the Rapture as a lot of people think. It begins after the Rapture. The first event that kicks off the stopwatch on Daniel’s seventieth week is the signing of the peace treaty between the Antichrist and Israel. That’s what starts it. There’s going to be restoration but not in belief, it’s going to be a restoration in unbelief before the Tribulation begins.
 
Then at the end of the Tribulation that’s when we have the regathering and the full restoration of a regenerate nation. God will bring them back corporately before the Tribulation ends and through the Tribulation so there is an entity there by the end of the Tribulation to call upon the name of the Lord to come and deliver them.
 
If there’s no national entity in Israel in the Tribulation period, there won’t be a temple for the Antichrist to desecrate. There won’t be a national entity there to fulfill the prophecies of Revelation and there won’t be a national entity there to represent all the Jews at the end of the Tribulation to call upon the name of the Lord to return. As we saw last time this calling on the name of the Lord takes place when the remnant has fled at the end to Bozrah.
 
Then there are the verses I talked about last time where the Messiah comes and rescues them and comes out of Bozrah and the picture is “who is this coming whose robes are covered in blood because he has defeated the armies of the Antichrist.” He’s coming as a victor. It’s at that future time when they’ll call on the Messiah and He will remove the national guilt of their corporate sin. That’s the unforgiveable sin that took place in Matthew 12 when He was rejected.
 
So the kind of salvation we’re talking about here is a national, physical deliverance. That’s part of the picture. The other part of the picture is that it’s talking about the same salvation we have in Romans 1:16 where Paul says, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel of Christ…” Now this isn’t the narrow gospel of Christ—which is how do we get to heaven?—but it incorporates all of the good news of Christianity that we’re not only saved from the penalty of sin but we’re saved from the power of sin and we’re saved from the presence of sin. It’s what I facetiously call the “real full gospel”. Not the Charistmatic-Pentecostal version but the real Biblical full gospel including the spiritual life and future glorification as we’ve seen. We’re not only saved from the penalty of sin, we’re saved from the power of sin, and we will be saved from the presence of sin.
 
So that takes us back to Romans 10:9-10, “That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead you will be saved [physically delivered].” That’s the context. You will be saved from what? Romans 1:17 says that those who rejected God in the non-verbal revelation will have the wrath of God revealed to them. So this salvation here is deliverance in time from the wrath of God.
 
The word for confess here is the same word we usually use. HOMOLOGEO,  but it not only means confess in the sense of confessing sin but it also means to declare and to praise. So it’s a declaration that they will declare with their mouth the Lord Jesus. This is not “lordship salvation” that you have to declare with your mouth the Lordship of Christ so you will be saved. It is a declaration that Jesus is God. This is what happens at the end of the Tribulation period.
 
We see that in the parallel passage in Romans 10:14 where Paul asks the rhetorical question, “How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?” The point is you have to believe before you’re going to call on the Lord to deliver you. Now we pointed out last time that there’s a literary structure to Romans 10:9-10 using parallelism. This form of parallelism is a chiasm. You have four statements: A and B and then they’re mirrored in B prime and A prime. So the first line, “If you confess with your mouth” is mirrored by the last line, “With the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” So both the first line and the last line are talking about the same thing, which is confession unto deliverance. The middle two lines are talking about the same thing. The first middle line, “And believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you will be saved.” Is that “you will be saved” talking about getting justified, getting eternal life, or is it talking about getting deliverance? In context, it’s deliverance so when we look at the second “B” line, “with the heart one believes unto righteousness” if that is synonymous to the first B line then the second B line cannot be talking about forensic justification. It can’t be talking about receiving the imputation of Christ. It’s talking about believing in reference to the spiritual life and spiritual growth so that “You will be saved” and “believing unto righteousness” are parallel and they’re talking not about getting justified but how the justified person believes in his walk with God.
 
My point is that the whole context here does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament passages that are quoted or the New Testament context. The issue isn’t how to get to heaven. The issue is God’s deliverance of Israel. Since “saved” in the first line is talking about phase two deliverance, then “righteousness” must also be talking about phase two or experiential righteousness.
 
Now we went on last time and looked at Romans 10:11 which is a quote from the Septuagint of Isaiah 28:16, the idea being that whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame. God will fulfill His promise. He will deliver Israel. Then Romans 10:14 is explaining how they shall call on Him. Now there are four things that are said for rhetorical questions in this verse. What the writer is doing is that he is presenting a series of steps in reverse order in how you get to the point of calling on the name of the Lord. Before you call on the name of the Lord you have to first believe. Before you can believe you have to hear a message. Before you hear a message there has to be someone proclaiming the message. There has to be a preacher. Then before there’s a preacher someone has to send the preacher. So it’s a reverse statement of all the steps that have to take place before you ultimately call on the name of the Lord.
 
But notice, belief takes place before you call. They’re not the same thing. They’re separate steps and they’re not related to salvation. In the correct order, first of all a preacher is sent. Second, the proclamation occurs. Third, the people hear the proclamation. Fourth, some of the people believe the proclamation and then fifth, those who believe then call on the name of the Lord for deliverance from wrath. Remember I said in Romans 1:16 Paul said, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes.” Salvation from what? In two verses later we read in verse 18, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” What we’re saved from in Romans 1:16 is the wrath of God and as I’ve pointed out when we went through our study of Romans 1 the wrath of God isn’t future eternal judgment in the Lake of Fire because the description of God’s wrath is how it’s poured out on people in history in time who disobey God.
 
“So the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” And in Romans 1 it talks about the antinomian man. In the first part of chapter 2 Paul talks about the moral person and then in the latter part of Romans 2, the Jew who’s trying to get righteousness by the Law. God’s righteousness is revealed to all three of those so that now we can call on the name of the Lord and be delivered from the wrath of God which reaches its fullest expression in the Tribulation period. And that deliverance from the wrath of God is equally available to both Jew and Gentile. That is Paul’s point in verse 12, “For there’s no distinction between Jew and Greek for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him.”
 
So that is a reference to the fact that this salvation isn’t just to the Jews but it’s equally available to the Gentiles. Where he’s going in Romans 9 is to point out that although the Jews rejected God’s offer, His offer is not just to be Jews but to the Gentiles. So God is expanding His offer to the Gentiles but eventually the Jews will also accept that offer. That fits into chapter 11. So this phrase “calling upon the name of the Lord” is a term to call upon the Lord for deliverance. It is used not only of unbelievers calling upon the Lord for deliverance from condemnation but it is also used of believers who are calling upon the Lord in prayer for deliverance from different kinds of temporal adversity.
 
For example, in Psalm 14:4 which is a passage talking about those who have rejected God and are the evil doers in contrast to those who have trusted God and are calling upon Him in their life. It starts off with a well-known verse, “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt. They’ve committed abominable deeds. There is no one who does good.” So it’s a picture of the one who has completely rejected God. “The Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, Who seek God.” See, Paul ends up quoting this whole section in Romans 3.
 
Then in Psalm 14:3 we read, “They have all turned aside and together they have become corrupt. There is none that does good. No, not one.” In summary, the writer of the Psalm, which is David, says, “Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? Who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call on the Lord.” So here’s an example of the atheists who rejected God. They don’t call upon the name of the Lord. In contrast, if we look down to verse 7, we read, “You shame the council for the poor [a condemnation for the workers of iniquity] but the Lord is his refuge.” So the poor here are the righteous and they do look to God for their refuge and they call upon Him. In Psalm 14:7 we read, “Oh that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion when the Lord brings back the captivity of His people. Let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad.” When does that happen? That happens at the end of the Tribulation period. That’s when God is restoring them to the land.
 
Then another passage using the “call upon the Lord terminology” is in Psalm 18:3 where the Psalmist says, “I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised. So shall I be saved from my enemies.” The word there for “saved” is the Hebrew word yasha where we get yeshua which is the Hebrew for Joshua or Jesus. So it means to be saved. Here David is calling upon the Lord at a time when he is surrounded by his enemies and being persecuted by Saul so when he’s talking about being persecuted by his enemies is he talking about getting into heaven? Or is he talking about being delivered from his enemies? He’s calling upon God to rescue him in time of trouble. “I’ve called on You. Let the wicked be ashamed. Let them be silent in the grave.” So again, David is in a time of adversity and he wants God to rescue him and provide for him in this time of adversity.
 
Now there are many other passages in the Old Testament which use “call upon the Lord” terminology. Psalm 50:15, 53:4, 79:6, 138:3, 141:1, 145:18. They are all believers calling upon the name of the Lord to deliver them. Calling upon the name of the Lord is not something an unbeliever does to get into heaven. It’s what a believer does to be rescued by God. 1 Corinthians 1:2 and 2 Timothy 2:22 uses similar terminology in relation to believers. In 1 Corinthians 1:2 we read, “To the church of God which is at Corinth. To those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling with all who in every place call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.” Whose calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ? Believers or unbelievers? Believers. 1 Timothy 2:22, “Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.” He’s talking about believers so believers call upon the name of the Lord, not unbelievers.
 
When we look at Romans 10 and we talk about confessing with the mouth parallel with calling on the name of the Lord, then this is what believers are doing in order to be rescued by God from some sort of present time adversity or wrath. “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Then Romans 10:14 gives us the reverse process engineering of how you get to the point of calling upon the name of the Lord. It comes back to a quote from the Old Testament in verse 15. “How shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things.[Isaiah 52:7]” I want you to notice that Paul changes the Old Testament reference here. He says, “How beautiful the feet of those who preach the gospel.” Have you ever thought your feet were beautiful? If you’re proclaiming the gospel you have beautiful feet.
 
That passage is applied to who? Those. It’s a third person plural. The original in Isaiah says, “How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of him who brings good news.” Who is that referring to? Him. Third person singular. One individual who brings good news. Guess who that one individual is who brings good news in the context of Isaiah 52:7. It’s the Servant. It’s the Messiah who is the One who brings good news. But now that He has brought the good news about who He is and salvation, then His followers must take that good news and proclaim it. That why Paul shifts it to a third person plural.
 
Notice in that initial message in Isaiah He is the One who brings deliverance [salvation] “Your God reigns.” Theologically what’s that a concept of? The Kingdom. I’m trying to tie this to what we’re studying in Matthew on Sunday morning. Matthew is the gospel of the King coming to present the message of the Kingdom. See that’s what Isaiah portrays, that the Messiah comes and He is going to present the Kingdom.
 
Now Romans 10:16 and following tells us that not all the Jews respond. “They have not all obeyed the gospel.” The gospel is a command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean doing good works. It doesn’t mean going out and doing all of the Law. It means to obey the command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. So they have not all obeyed the gospel for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?” That’s a quote from Isaiah 53:1. “Who has believed our report and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” You see, not all of Israel is going to respond. Many will reject the message of the gospel.
 
So then Paul concludes, “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” There comes that order again. You believe because you hear something. You hear the message. What’s the message you hear? It is the Word of God. So Romans 10:18 goes on the say, “But I say, surely have they never heard, have they? Indeed they have. Their voice has gone out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world.” What sound is that? That’s the proclamation of the Word of God.
 
Then we get into Romans 10:19, “But I say,’ Surely Israel did not know, did they? First Moses says I will make you jealous by that which is not a nation, by a nation without understanding.” [Deuteronomy 32:21] See now what Paul is doing is he’s saying that what happened is the gospel was near but you were looking in the wrong place and you rejected the Word of God. So it’s not until you call upon the name of the Lord and accept the message that you’re going to be delivered. Now this shouldn’t surprise you because in Deuteronomy 32 Moses warned about this. He said that the Gentiles would come and respond and provoke the Jews to jealousy.
 
Now Paul’s going to get into that more in chapter 11. Deuteronomy 32:21 saays, “For they have provoked me to jealousy by what is not God.” Moses says that God will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation. I will move you to anger by a foolish nation.” Then he quotes from Isaiah. In Romans 10:20 Paul says, “I was found by those who did not seek me. I became manifest to those who did not ask for me.” That’s again a reference to the Gentiles. That’s a quote from Isaiah 65:1 and then 10:21 is from Isaiah 65:2 which says, “All day long I’ve stretched out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.” See we saw that “all day long” and that offer of the Kingdom in the gospels, the second offer of the Kingdom all the way through Acts continually by extending the offer, stretching out His hand, but they are disobedient and contrary people who rejected the gospel.
 
So the natural conclusion then that comes is the question in Romans 11:1 where Paul raises this rhetorically and says, “I say this, ‘Has God cast away His people?’” When you end Romans 10:21 it sounds like God has just thrown up His hands and cast away His people. Paul says No. God has certainly not cast away His people. So we’ll come back and look at chapter 11 and start there next time.

Romans 120b-The Remnant

Romans 11:1 NASB95
I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.
Romans 120b-The Remnant Romans 11:1-11
 
Okay, let’s open our Bibles to Romans 9. I’m going to do a little review. We’re going to start Romans 11 tonight but I want to put things into context a bit, part of which is going to entail a review of what we covered last week in Romans 10. I had at least two people say that we needed to go through it at least one more time. So Romans 10 is tough but Romans 11 pulls things together when we see the whole context. I want to go back and sort of walk our way through Romans 9 and Romans 10 in terms of an overview before we get into Romans 11.
 
Let’s just go to the very beginning. Romans 9, 10, and 11 fit together. Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in His rejection of national Israel. Remember, when you think of Romans, the word you should think of is righteousness. The book of Romans is all about God’s righteousness, the fact that human beings don’t have it and they need it. God gives it to them on the basis of faith alone and because we are justified as part of our salvation package we are baptized by the Holy Spirit and we’re given a new identity. We’re no longer slaves to the sin nature. We’re now slaves to what? Righteousness.
 
Romans 6, 7, and 8 talks about how we’re to live a righteous life now that we’re declared righteous. In Romans 9, 10, and 11 the focus is on Israel so the question is how Israel fits this theme? Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in terms of His rejection of national Israel. Romans 10 demonstrates that the rejection is based on the prior rejection by Israel of God’s revelation. They have rejected and neglected God’s revelation to them. This is that passage that quotes from Deuteronomy 30 saying the Word of God is near you. They have rejected it.
 
Romans 11 then answers the question of whether God has permanently cast away His people of Israel. The answer is a resounding “NO”. God still has a plan for national, ethnic Israel. A quote from one of the most well-known, scholarly commentaries on Romans by C.E.D. Cranfield in the International Critical Commentary Series,makes an important observation when he says, “These three chapters, Romans 9-11, emphatically prevent us from speaking of the Church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.” If you remember, when we started Romans 9 I took you through two important issues related to Israel. The first had to do with replacement theology and the second had to do with that which came out of replacement theology, anti-Semitism. So what Cranfield is saying here is that these chapters prevent us, if we’re going to interpret it correctly, from going into replacement theology. He continues, “The assumption that the Church has simply replaced Israel as the people of God is extremely common. I confess with shame to having also, myself, used in print on more than one occasion this language of the replacement of Israel by the Church.” So Romans 9-11 is the stake in the heart of replacement theology.
 
Now let’s just sort of think about it a little bit. We’ll look at the first paragraph, Romans 9:1-5 which gives us a glimpse into Paul’s personal passion for the salvation of his fellow Israelites. He professes his profound grief for their spiritual condition and here we see that Paul is expressing the priority of the message of salvation to the Jewish people. That is still true today. I know there are some Messianic Jews like Arnold Fructenbaum who still believe in the principle that “it’s to the Jew first and then to the Greek.” I believe that principle’s priority died out with the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70. That was part of the transition period from the Cross to the final execution of God’s judgment on Israel in A.D. 70.
 
Nevertheless there’s a priority of taking the gospel to the Jewish people. But we have to understand some things when taking the gospel to the Jewish people. Number one is that different people respond differently to the gospel. The Jewish people have a history where they’re extremely sensitive to Christians who come to them and start talking about Jesus just right off the bat because it shows a certain level of insensitivity. They’ve had thousands of years of Christian anti-Semitism and they would rather be viewed as a person. They love to have a good relationship with Christians but they don’t want to have the sense that they’re just another notch on your gospel gun or that you’re just looking at them as another target of opportunity. You think because you’re in the presence of somebody Jewish you start witnessing to them within the third breath.
 
Now there are a couple of people in this congregation who really haven’t gotten this message yet. There’s always one or two who go on a trip to Israel that I find out later don’t get that message.  No matter how many times you tell people they think that you just sit down with someone Jewish and within the first two paragraphs you’ve got to start talking about Jesus. Now that is foolish and it’s not good sense. You build a relationship with people. What I’ve found in the Jewish community is that sooner or later people will start asking me questions and that’s the best time to respond so you create a friendship that’s not a friendship because you want to witness to them. You’re friends because you’re friends. As a result of that, eventually you’ll get an opportunity to communicate the gospel.
 
Then you have to understand your target audience. Some Jews are agnostic and they really don’t know Genesis from 2 Chronicles. They don’t know Psalms from Proverbs because about the only time they show up at the local synagogue is on one of the high holy days and that’s it. It’s more of a social, racial, ethnic, and historical thing than it is anything else. They don’t take any of it seriously at all. And then there are others that do. I find that there are some who would like to take it seriously but they’ve heard so many intellectual objections to really believing the Bible that that gets in the way.  
 
So there’s a lot of different things to kind of work through. I find that asking questions in any kind of witnessing situation is a really good way to approach it but it’s a slow way to approach it. It takes time to ask someone questions and wait for their answers. A lot of people don’t want to hear what the unbeliever has to say. They just want to tell them what they’re supposed to think so they get impatient. But Paul has a great desire to see these Jewish people justified, to see them accept Jesus as their Messiah, not just because this has a significance for how God’s plan will work out but because he knows that’s the only way for them to be in heaven. So Paul places a high value upon the justification of the Jewish people. He values them because as we read in verses 4 and 5, “who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the {temple} service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” So he recognizes the value and significance of the Jewish people because the descendants of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob are the ones through whom God is going to bless the whole world. They’re the center of human history.
 
Everyone revolves around God’s plan for the Jewish people. Even in the church age because once they start returning, once there’s a turning back, everything in history shifts. So in these first five verses of Romans 9 we see the emphasis on the importance of the Jewish people. Paul also concludes in verse 5 with one of the strongest statements of the deity of Christ in the New Testament. I reworked the word order there to show he says, “Christ the Eternally Blessed God who is over all. Amen.” Paul identified Christ here as the eternally blessed God.
 
The next section is from Romans 9:6-9 and the principle that’s laid down here is that not all Israel is Israel. Now when we get to Romans 11 we’ll develop that a little more, understanding that within ethnic Israel there are those who are saved, spiritually regenerate. And that’s the remnant. He develops the remnant doctrine. This sort of foreshadows it here but we get to it fully in Romans 11. Here he’s talking about “not all Israel is Israel” because not all of them have understood that Jesus is the Messiah.
 
So this is the principle and he goes on at this point about just the physical generation aspect and that physical descent from Abraham is not enough. He couches it in terms of the descendants of Abraham that were not the seed. Abraham had Ishmael and then after Sarah died he married Keturah and had other sons through that marriage. But it’s only through Isaac that the line is named. Rom 9:7 says, “nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but: “THROUGH ISAAC YOUR DESCENDANTS WILL BE NAMED.”
 
What happened among the Jewish people is that they began to think that they were going to go to heaven because of their relationship to Abraham. It’s interesting that here in Romans 9 we see this emphasized. Rom 9:8, “That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.” Here I pointed out that this is not talking about regeneration but this is talking about the children of the promise which goes through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and then the twelve sons. But it’s against this background of thinking that relationship to Abraham is everything so we’ll see in Matthew that when John the Baptist began his ministry and began to preach to repent because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, we’re told that all Judea and all of Galilee came out to hear him and all were being baptized.
 
Among them were Pharisees who were coming to evaluate his ministry which was a normal responsibility and part of their leadership role to identify or investigate anybody who had any Messianic claims. Now John wasn’t claiming to be the Messiah but he was functioning as the forerunner of the Messiah. So when the Pharisees came out he called them a “brood of vipers.” He asked them why they came out to flee from the wrath of God. He followed that up by telling them in Matthew 3:9 “and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham,” See John is particularly pointing out this flaw in their thinking that physical descent from Abraham is all you needed to get to heaven. Same thing that Paul is pointing out here in Romans 9:6-9.
 
The promise when he’s talking about the children of the promise is specifically identified in Romans 9:9, “ For this is the word of promise: “AT THIS TIME I WILL COME, AND SARAH SHALL HAVE A SON.” It’s not at this time I will come and you’ll believe on me and have eternal life. It’s not an eternal life issue. It’s a destiny issue: God’s plan and purpose for ethnic Israel. This is one of the most important things that we see coming out of this.
 
Then as we get on into the next section in Romans 10-12 it introduces this concept of election. That God makes a choice. We’ll get into that more when we get into Romans 11. It says that God chooses who will be saved and who will not be saved. Suddenly everyone sort of tenses up a little bit. I didn’t say on what basis He made the choice. The Scripture isn’t real clear on what basis He made the choice except in one or two places like in 1 Peter 1:2 which says that we are “elect according to the foreknowledge of God.” Foreknowledge is a subset of God’s omniscience. In God’s omniscience He knows everything that could happen, that might have happened, that should have happened, the woulda, coulda, shoulda and that will happen. He knows all the options, all the alternatives. He knows what will happen and on the basis of His foreknowledge He makes choices.
 
Now we’re not exactly told all the details that go into that but you have basically two options. Either God makes choices apart from His knowledge which means He’s just making a random, haphazard choices willy-nilly or He’s making choices on the basis of His knowledge and reason in terms of what is best for His over-all plan in which case He is taking into account His knowledge. In Calvinism where you have unconditional election what they are saying is that God’s choice is not based on any conditions.
 
Well, the Bible may not state there are conditions but the lack of evidence does not mean there are no conditions. The lack of stated conditions does not mean there aren’t any conditions and God doesn’t take any conditions into account. God takes into account our volition. Now the conditions that God takes into account when He makes a decision n can be meritorious or they can be non-meritorious. Meritorious means that somehow man would do something in order to gain God’s favor. Non-meritorious means there’s nothing that man can do to gain God’s favor but in the act of faith or trust, man is trusting in someone else who has done something to gain God’s favor. That’s the gospel that we trust in Jesus Christ. He’s the One who did the work. He’s the One who gained God’s favor.
 
Faith is non-meritorious the way we look at it. Now in Calvinism they’re consistent in their system. They say faith is meritorious and God gives the elect person faith. This is an assault on personal accountability and personal volition. We get into this as we get into the three examples that are given. One has to do with the statement “Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated.” This is not talking about choice for personal, individual justification. It’s talking about a national destiny. God has the right and the authority as Sovereign of the Universe to select who He will in terms of roles and responsibilities in His plan for the nations. So Jacob is loved. It’s not that Esau is personally despised even back in the original Genesis account in Genesis 25 the focus is on the nation. The two infants struggling in the womb are representative of the nations that will come from them. So the focus here is on national destiny.
 
Later there’s an example given from Moses. It’s not a context of justification. It’s a context of blessing people. What we learn here is a principle that goes through Romans 10 and that is a basic understanding of three different types of salvation. The Bible talks about three stages. Sometimes it’s called three tenses or phases of salvation: Phase 1 is justification; Phase 2 is sanctification, Phase 3 is glorification. Phase 1 takes place in an instant of time when a person trusts in Christ and at that instant you are saved from the penalty of sin, eternal condemnation. That is a one-time event.
 
Sanctification is an on-going process. We are “saved” every day as we learn the Word and apply it. This is spiritual life where we are saved from the power of sin. Phase 3 is our ultimate completion of the salvation process where we are saved from the presence of sin when we’re glorified and face-to-face with the Lord. So Paul talks in Romans 5:11 about having been justified, we will in the future we saved. In Romans salvation is a term that is not synonymous with justification. So it’s very important to understand that this event in Moses’ life was taking place in relationship to the spiritual life of the nation, Israel.
 
Then we have another example given in verse 17 of Pharaoh. This always confuses people—God hardening Pharaoh’s heart—and again that wasn’t in terms of a justification decision but in terms of a pre-determined state that the Pharaoh was in. He had already chosen to be hostile to the Israelites and he chooses to resist God’s demand to free them. So God is now going to harden his heart, which doesn’t mean to take over his volition. What it means is that God is going to intensify or strengthen his volition so he is going to fulfill what he wants to fulfill. He’s going to carry it out. He’s going to be able to be stubborn long enough so that God could teach a few lessons through Pharaoh’s disobedience to God.
 
Another example that comes up as we go through the passage is in verse 20 where it brings up an illustration in Jeremiah in terms of the potter and the clay. This is from Jeremiah 18. Again, we went back and looked at the context in Jeremiah 18 and saw that was focused on national destiny, not individual justification. It didn’t have to do with God forming some to go to heaven and others to have a destiny in the Lake of Fire but that God was forming certain nations to accomplish certain purposes and that he was raising up nations and he also brought nations down according to his own purposes and his own timetable.
 
Paul applies that to the Jews and the Gentiles starting in about Romans 10:22 to 24. This focuses on the national destinies that God has for the different nations. And then Paul brings in the value of the Gentiles, starting in verse 25 in relation to the quotes he brings in from Hosea because he is showing an application. This isn’t an interpretation of the original Hosea passage but it’s an application showing how God is going to extend His grace beyond Israel and He’s going to bring some salvation to the Gentiles, as well. Then we come to closing statements in verses 27 and following.
 
We have a quote in verse 17 from Isaiah 10: 22-23 where Isaiah prophesies that the remnant will be saved. Again it’s emphasizing that there’s a subset of Israel that is going to be rightly related to God spiritually and they will find their ultimate deliverance. Again, the word saved there doesn’t mean justified. It means reaching their ultimate deliverance. But you don’t get to Phase 3 without Phase 1 and Phase 2 so that’s included but the meaning isn’t limited to justification.
 
Then we come to verse 30 where the emphasis is on Christ. The last quote form the Old Testament is imagery taken from Isaiah 8:14 and from 28:16, “Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone, A costly cornerstone {for} the foundation, firmly placed. He who believes {in it} will not be disturbed [put to shame].” He will not find himself humiliated.
 
So this brings us then to the tenth chapter. He’s developed now the foundation for God’s plan for Israel that Israel has not pursued righteousness on the basis of faith. That was 9:30-33, Romans 9:30, “What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at {that} law?  Why? Because {they did} not {pursue it} by faith, but as though {it were} by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone, just as it is written, “BEHOLD, I LAY IN ZION A STONE OF STUMBLING AND A ROCK OF OFFENSE, AND HE WHO BELIEVES IN HIM WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.”
 
 This is all going to come out again when we get into Romans 10:3. Israel as a nation does not mean every Jew but their corporate national identity was that they were ignorant of God’s righteousness and sought to establish their own righteousness. It was on the basis of works, not on the basis of grace. Now when we get into Romans 11 Paul’s going to lay down a principle in verse 6 related to the remnant that they are saved according to the election of grace. So it’s important to nail down that election in chapter 9 because we’re going to hit it again in chapter 11, verse 5. Then Paul explains it by saying it’s an election of grace and not of works. The Jews have been trying to do it on the basis of a righteousness of works (9:30, 31; 10:3). These verses are like threads that are picked up again and then woven back in to his development in Rom 11:6 “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.” Work and grace are mutually exclusive.
 
So some things we need emphasized here is that what God promises, God fulfills. God will not go back on his promises to Israel and the application is that He won’t go back on His promises to you and to me. God is just as faithful to His promises to us and He will fulfill them. God promised Israel a worldwide scattering in the fifth cycle of discipline predicting that they would be disobedient and go into idolatry and God would have to discipline them by removing them from the land. This is seen in Leviticus 26:27-39 and in Deuteronomy 29.
 
Third, we saw that if God promised that if Israel turned to Him then He would restore them to the land. They would have to reverse course, turning back to Him. This is seen in Leviticus 26:40-42. Fourth, we saw that God will bring them back and they will corporately recognize Jesus as Messiah and welcome Him in Matthew 23:39. They will call upon the name of the Lord to deliver them and this takes place at the end of the Tribulation period or at the end of Daniel’s seventieth week when the remnant has fled to Bozrah.
 
I pointed this out that at the end of the Tribulation the antichrist is going to seek to destroy every last Jew. This is part of Satan’s ploy. Satan is defeated at the Cross but he is not going to just give up and say, “Okay, God, you won.” What Satan wants to do is prove that God can’t really be God either. He wants to prove God can’t control all these creatures who have their own volition. Satan certainly can’t. In fact, the chaos of Satan’s world system is great testimony that Satan really can’t pull off this God-thing he’s trying to pull off. But he wants to show that God really can’t do it either. The way he’s going to prove that is by destroying every last Jew before God can fulfill the covenants and the promises that He made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and to David and the Jewish people in regard to the land and the New Covenant. And if he can destroy all the Jewish people before Jesus comes back, before they turn to God, then Satan thinks he can checkmate God in the great chess game of human history.
 
He’s trying to destroy all the Jewish people through the antichrist. The Jewish people follow the admonition of the Lord and when they see the abomination of desolation take place and when they see all these signs taking place they’re going to flee to the wilderness. They flee south through the Judean wilderness and then they head east across the area south of the Dead Sea into those horrible badlands of what is the modern Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the area of Bozrah and Petra where they are protected geographically to some degree by the horrible terrain.
 
It’s at that point as the armies of the antichrist seek to destroy them that they corporately turn as a nation, as an ethnic entity, as a corporate entity that they turn to the Lord and they call upon Him to deliver them. He comes down and destroys the armies of the antichrist and then leads them in a victory march back up through the Judean wilderness to Jerusalem to destroy what remains of the armies of the antichrist and to destroy the antichrist and the False Prophet and to free those who are captive in Jerusalem.
 
So this is that “turning to the Lord” when they recognize who He is and they realize forgiveness for the national, corporate sin for their rejection of Christ as seen in Matthew 12. They are already justified individually. This is a corporate “turning to Jesus”. Now all of this is sort of a background and overview here. In the heart of Romans 10 are these three quotations from Deuteronomy 30. Last time I said it was so important to realize who was being addressed in any passage of scripture. The focus is either going to be on telling people on how we are to get to heaven or it’s going to tell us how to live as a believer or it’s going to illustrate how to live as a believer. It’s either about justification or the spiritual life. Everything in the Bible is talking about one of those two things.
 
So in Deuteronomy 30 Moses is talking to a generation of believers who are going to go into the land victoriously but he’s warning them because they’re still not quite where they should be spiritually. They’ve been influenced negatively by their parents’ generation but not to the extent of that generation. So he warns them not to go seeking somewhere else for the Word of God. Moses is telling them that it is near them. This is summarized in Deuteronomy 30:14 “But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it.”
 
Romans 10:9 and 10 says that “if you confess with your mouth Jesus {as} Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.” See mouth and heart comes out of this.
 
It’s important at times to structure the text. There are a lot of different ways in which writers structure what they’re saying, especially in different forms of poetry and narrative. The structure here is what is called a chiasm where you have two lines that intersect in the form of an X or the Greek letter CHI. In English that word is pronounced “ki” but in Greek it was pronounced “key”. We know that in a number of different ways. If you were a scribe in a monastery and you were writing down what the head monk was reciting a lot of time your ear can’t distinguish between distinct vowels. If you hear a vowel one way you might confuse it with another vowel so we can look at the kinds of transcription errors that were made and we can figure out how vowels were confused because they sounded similar. A whole science has grown up around that in the last twenty to thirty years. This gives us a pretty good idea, especially when it seems to fit the pronunciation of modern Greek. The Greek that most students learn and how to pronounce the letters in a Greek first year textbook was developed by a scholar at the time of the early Reformation named Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus never, ever, ever heard anybody speak Greek. He invented his pronunciation scheme out of thin air. It’s pure imagination. In recent years there’s been more a move to impact our pronunciation with Greek with modern pronunciation.
 
Anyway, what we see here is a parallelism where the first line and the last line are reiterating the same thought. They’re indicated as A and A prime. The middle two lines also mirror the same thought; they’re synonymous. This is really important. I want you to think this through. I misspoke a couple of times earlier when I was teaching this. It always throws people off. If you take this one line by itself, “with the heart one believes unto righteousness” it sounds like that could be justification but when you put it into context as a synonymous parallel to this line we get a different idea. The saved is not talking about Phase 1 salvation. It’s talking about Phase 2 salvation. If this is Phase 2 salvation because it’s parallel to believing unto righteousness this righteousness isn’t justification righteousness but it’s the experiential righteousness we get as a result of spiritual growth.
 
Now that’s a distinction that’s critical for us to understand. To get to heaven we just have to have justification righteousness. To get a pat on the back and a well done thou good and faithful servant and to have any measure of rewards and to have responsibility to rule and to reign with Christ in the Millennial Kingdom, we have to have experiential righteousness. That’s what’s produced by the Filling of the Spirit, and walking by the Spirit, and that is what has eternal value in terms of gold, silver, and precious stones in the imagery of the Judgment Seat of Christ in 1 Corinthians 3. So this means that this whole passage is talking about Phase 2. That makes so much sense in the whole passage.
 
Back in Romans 9 Paul reminds them what God said to Moses, that He would have mercy on whomever He had mercy and compassion on whomever he had compassion. The context of that quote by God to Moses is found back in Exodus 33:19 and it was in the context of blessing them or not blessing them after they had failed. They were already justified. This was a spiritual life issue so spiritual life is the theme that runs all through this section of Romans and the corporate deliverance of Israel. This is so important to understand that this is corporate Israel.
 
So the parallel between “you will be saved” and “unto righteousness” keeps us on track that this is a Phase 2 or Phase 3 issue. It also applies to Gentiles. It applies to you because God’s grace to the Jew is the same as God’s grace to the Gentile and he is the same Lord who richly provides for all of us. Just as God will deliver Israel from the wrath to come so He will deliver Gentiles from present day wrath. This is the whole focus of Romans 1:19 that God’s wrath is being revealed to those who have rejected His general revelation. The way to be delivered from His wrath which is His judgment in time is to call on Him to deliver us. This is from Joel 2:32.
 
It’s applied directly to Israel. Their deliverance will come at the end of the Tribulation period. Then Paul also is going to talk about a passage from Isaiah. He is going to quote here from Isaiah 25: 8 and 9 and bring in this issue of the order of the message. “How shall they call on whom they have not believed? How shall they believe on Him of who they have not heard? How shall they hear without a preacher?’ There’s an order there. This is listed in reverse order. It’s saying the Jews will need to eventually call upon Him. What do they have to call on Jesus? First of all they have to believe on Him. That’s a prior act. So before they reach the point of calling on him they have to believe. Well, how can they get to the point of belief? Well someone has to give them something to believe.
 
Dwight Pentecost who has been a professor at Dallas Seminary for probably before I was born is now 94. He still teaches one course a semester. He now has throat cancer so that slowed him down. He was teaching two a semester and now he’s down to one. Dr. P as we called him used to end his classes frequently by giving a challenge to the men on Fridays as they were going to go on some kind of ministry on the weekend. He would always say, “Give them something to believe.” I’ve modified that. I say, “Give them the gospel to believe.” “Give them the Bible to believe.” Something just sounded too generic.
 
But who’s going to give them something to believe? A preacher. The word for preacher means someone who is announcing or proclaiming something. It’s not talking about a rhetorical style that follows three points and a poem. It’s talking about a proclamation of the truth. Then where does the preacher come from? He is sent. God commissions preachers. In this age He commissions pastor-teachers. They proclaim the truth and they’re commissioned via their spiritual gift of pastor-teacher. Just because they have a gift doesn’t mean they are qualified to be a pastor. They need to be trained. They need to be educated. They need to learn how to think. They need to learn how to read. They can’t just go out and repeat what someone else has said. Everyone does that at some early stage when they’re an infant believer but as they grow and mature you have your own personality, your own style. Peter wasn’t going around trying to write like Paul because he wasn’t Paul. He was Peter. James didn’t write like anyone else. John certainly didn’t. This idea that everyone needs to sound like someone who’s a great effective teacher is just garbage. A person should be themselves.
 
God used each writer of Scripture within their own personality. He didn’t say, “Hmm, you need to be a little bit more like Moses. Or you need to be more of a weeper like Jeremiah.” God didn’t do that. So in the church age He gives the gift of pastor-teacher and then you have to go through the process of learning the message so you can proclaim it. So the preacher is sent. He makes a proclamation. People then hear the proclamation. Some believe. Those who believe then eventually in their spiritual life they call on the name of the Lord to deliver them from wrath. Paul concludes in Romans 10:18, “But I say, surely they have never heard, have they? Indeed they have; “THEIR VOICE HAS GONE OUT INTO ALL THE EARTH, AND THEIR WORDS TO THE ENDS OF THE WORLD.” This is that confession that’s made with the mouth.
 
So he says in Romans 10:19 “But I say, surely Israel did not know, did they? First Moses says, “I WILL MAKE YOU JEALOUS BY THAT WHICH IS NOT A NATION, BY A NATION WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WILL I ANGER YOU.” Notice how he’s bringing the Gentiles into the scenario that God has a plan for the Gentiles and He’s going to use them to provoke the Jewish people who are negative to anger and to jealousy. Then in Rom 10:20 Paul quotes, “And Isaiah is very bold and says, “I WAS FOUND BY THOSE WHO DID NOT SEEK ME, I BECAME MANIFEST TO THOSE WHO DID NOT ASK FOR ME.” (Isaiah 65:1) That’s God’s grace. God is making His truth known even to those who claim not to want it.
 
Remember the apostle Paul? He claimed not to want it for a long time, up until the time the resurrected, glorified Jesus Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus and he went from hostility to acceptance in a heartbeat. I would say in an eye blink but he was blinded by it. Then Rom 10:21 says, “But as for Israel He says, “ALL THE DAY LONG I HAVE STRETCHED OUT MY HANDS TO A DISOBEDIENT AND OBSTINATE PEOPLE.” That’s the grace of God.
 
It extends itself even in witnessing. There are too many Christians who are too impatient. We give someone the gospel once and they don’t respond and by giving them the gospel once we’ve just walked by them and said to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you’ll be saved and we just keep right on going. We just think that if we just throw it out at them that they’ll somehow catch it. That’s not right. God woos people over hundreds of years. With individuals it sometimes has to be ten, twenty, thirty, forty years before some people finally accept the gospel. So God continues to extend His grace.
 
Now remember there’s no chapter division, no verse division so we go right into the next chapter here. This leads immediately to the next verse where Paul says in Rom 11:1” I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be!” This verse is expressing a conclusion. In spite of everything Paul had just covered he reaches a conclusion. The way Paul structures this sentence the answer would be no. But to make sure we get the point Paul gives an extremely strong “no”. He’s saying that would be impossible. God has not cast away His people.
 
This is part of going back to the basic theme verse for Romans where Paul says he isn’t ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it’s the power of God unto salvation. Notice that’s not just justification. It’s all three phases. It’s for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. So from the very beginning Paul is emphasizing that this message is a message for the Jewish people.
 
I want you to notice something else there. He’s talking about the gospel. Does the word “gospel” here mean simply a message of how to get justified? No. He’s talking about how to get saved which we see now is more than how to be justified. Here’s an example in Scripture where gospel means more than just the message of what we need to believe in order to make sure we go to heaven. It’s the full-orbed gospel. It’s the whole Christian life. It’s not only what Christ did to justify us but what that means in terms of our life after justification on into eternity. So it’s a broad use of the term “gospel”, not a narrow use.
 
Paul does that quite a bit. In Romans 1:17 he said, “ For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.” Paul is relating Israel to this theme of righteousness all the way through. He mentions and talks about Israel in the first part where he relates Israel to the righteousness of God in justification. In the middle part of the book he’s dealing with spiritual life and he also talks about Israel and the Jews and he relates that to the righteousness of God in sanctification as he contrasts Law versus grace—law in Romans 7 and grace and the Holy Spirit in Romans 8. In Romans 8: 18-39 Paul relates Israel to the righteousness of God in glorification which sets up the section on Israel in Romans 9-11 where he relates Israel to the vindication of the righteousness of God. At the end he relates Israel to the righteousness of God in his practical application.
 
So in Romans 11:1 he says, “I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be!” “I say” is the Greek word LEGO. The word “then” [oun] here is usually translated “therefore.” Whenever we see therefore we need to see what’s it’s there for. It’s a conclusion. He’s going to say that therefore in light of everything said in Romans 9 and 10 that God has not permanently cast away His people.
 
Then he’s going to use himself as an illustration. He says that if God were permanently casting away His people then he, Paul, wouldn’t be saved. Since he’s a Jew it shows that God has not permanently cast away his people. “For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.”
 
So a couple of observations here. First of all that conclusion in verse one draws an inference from Romans 10: 18, “But I say, surely they have never heard, have they? Indeed they have; “THEIR VOICE HAS GONE OUT INTO ALL THE EARTH, AND THEIR WORDS TO THE ENDS OF THE WORLD.” You ought to circle “But I say”. Those of you taking the Bible Study Methods course know this is an observation. Romans 10:18 and 19 start with the same phrase, “But I say”. Romans 10:19, “But I say, surely Israel did not know, did they?” You have the words “therefore I say” in Romans 11:1 so that fits together. In each of these statements it refers to corporate, ethnic Israel. We’re not talking about the individual justification of Jews anywhere in this section. We’re talking about the corporate deliverance of Israel in relationship to God’s plan as outlined in the covenants, as seen in the ministry of Jesus as the Messiah. So Romans 10:18 and 19 lead into that.
 
Then the second observation we have here is that the references in Romans 11:1 to “his people” and then in 11:2 “his people whom He foreknew” indicates a corporate view again. We’re not viewing these Jews as individual Jews getting saved but as God’s plan for the nation.
 
Third, we have Paul’s use of an example from 1 Kings when we get down to about the third verse where he brings in Elijah. So in verse 1 he rejects the idea that God has permanently rejected His people because the first argument is that he, Paul, is also an Israelite of the seed of Abraham and the tribe of Benjamin. This is similar to what he says in Philippians 3:5 that he was “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee;” Paul does not back away from his ethnic, Jewish background.
 
Now in verse 2 of Romans 11 he states it positively and adds a new thought “whom He foreknew”. Now we’re going to get into issues related to the doctrine of election so we’ll wait and come back to that because in verse 5 he’ll talk about the election of grace and we want to tie these things together. That’s not something you hit real fast so we’ll break here and come back next time.

Romans 121b-God has NOT Rejected or Replaced Israel

Romans 11:1 NASB95
I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.
Romans 121b-God has NOT Rejected or Replaced Israel Romans 11:1-11
 
Open your Bibles to Romans 11. We’re going to review briefly and then continue going through this extremely significant passage in Romans. The issue in this part of Romans is that despite Israel’s rejection of God they have not been rejected or replaced. This isn’t just something that’s related to the generation that rejected Jesus as Messiah but as we’ll see this had been a pattern throughout the history of the Jewish people going back to Abraham. This was the theme and the claim of the prophets, the writing prophets that we know of, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others in the minor, shorter prophets who consistently rebuked the kings, the leaders, and the people of Israel because they failed to listen to God. The prophets were constantly challenging them with their disobedience and the fact they were constantly going after false gods and goddesses.
 
This is not a unique claim to the New Testament. It’s not a unique claim of Christians that somehow Israel has rejected God. It’s a consistent pattern going all the way back to Abraham as we studied in Genesis. Going through a number of the history and biographies of Jacob’s sons we saw this was part of the pattern of that generation. They were synthesizing and assimilating back into the pagan culture of Canaan. As a result this was one reason why God brought them out of Canaan, brought them to the situation in Egypt where they would be isolated from the surrounding culture and therefore protected. The Egyptians had a tremendous bias and racial prejudice against the Jews and so they basically sequestered them off into their own area, probably the original Jewish ghetto. As a result of that, they maintained their purity. Another result is that they grew from less than a hundred people, about 70 or so, to a nation between probably two to three million people who came out during the exodus.
 
So this is how God established the Jewish people. This is the story of the book of Exodus. Romans 11 begins with this emphasis that God has not rejected or replaced Israel. I put that word replaced in there because this has been so often a theme in Christianity, especially during the early and late Middle ages from roughly about the 3rd or 4th century A.D. Replacement theology which is based on an allegorical or non-literal interpretation of the Old Testament came in and talked about how Israel and the Jews had rejected Jesus as the Messiah so God permanently rejected them as His people.
 
This flies in the face of Romans 9, 10, and 11 which is one reason why in many Bible studies on Romans and in some commentaries these chapters are virtually ignored or skipped over. This is why these chapters are sometimes referred to as the “passed over” part of Romans. People in the Replacement Theology camp really can’t handle this. You find many people who have trouble handling certain Scriptures so they just ignore them. They take out their mental scalpel and cut those verses or chapters or pages out of their Bible and leave in what fits their theological system. Then they hit something like this and since they believe the Church is the new Israel or that Christianity replaced Israel in God’s plan they just ignore this whole section.
 
This is one of the strongest areas of Scripture that emphasizes that God has not cast off His people whom He foreknew. Paul is saying in this section that even though at the present time Israel has been disobedient in rejecting Jesus as Messiah, there will be a time when that will end and Israel will come back to God and there will be a full restoration of Israel, including a national restoration to the land. We’ve seen that in this section of Romans. It’s related to the basic argument of Romans dealing with the righteousness of God. Romans 9 deals with the principle of the righteousness of God in terms of His rejection of national Israel. It is not that God rejected them permanently but He rejects them in terms of divine judgment as clearly set forth in the Torah.
 
In Leviticus 26, God spells out a series of five stages or five cycles of disciplinary action, culminating in the action of removing the Jewish people from their land. This is what happened in 722 B.C. when Assyria conquered the Northern Kingdom. It happened again in 586 B.C. when Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians defeated the Kingdom of Judah and destroyed the first temple and it happened again in A.D. 70 when the Romans destroyed the second temple and conquered Israel and the people were further scattered in what is known as the diaspora. Diaspora is a Greek word for scattering.
 
As we’ve seen many times in our study of this section when we deal with these hard passages related to God hardening Pharaoh’s heart and in this passage we’re going to see an expression related to the “blindness of Israel”. This is God’s action in response to the initial reaction or decision on the part of individuals to reject God’s plan. So first Pharaoh rejected God’s plan and refused to let the Israelites go and as a result of that God “hardened”, or as we saw it actually means strengthened, his resolve in bringing about his rejection of Moses’ plea to release the Jews from slavery.
 
Now we’ve seen it in terms of individuals. But first the individual sets his heart against God. This is the whole process in Romans 1 which talks about the fact that God has revealed Himself through the non-verbal revelation of His creation. People, though, reject Him and they worship the creature rather than the Creator. What’s the result? Three stages that we’ve studied. Each stage is indicated in Romans 1: 19 and following where it states in Rom 1:24, “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” Then in Rom 1:25 “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen”
 
What God is doing is that if we go into negative volition, if we reject God’s Word and we harden our hearts against God, then He gives us our way, as it were. He lets us reap the consequences of our decision so He then allows that hardness, that blindness, to take place because we’re the ones in our volition and our free will who have set the course against God. So God is righteous in rejecting Israel temporarily, setting them aside because they rejected the offer of the Messiah. That’s the argument in Romans 9. Romans 10 demonstrates that that rejection was based on Israel’s corporate neglect of revelation that had been given to them. The quotes in Romans 10 are all related to the Old Testament and Paul is supporting his case with citations from Deuteronomy. That was a believing generation in the Old Testament but he is applying it here. Romans 11 then answers the question of whether God has permanently rejected His people. Paul answers that he hasn’t rejected them permanently at all. God still has a national plan for Israel and He’s going to be faithful to His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and eventually He will fulfill those promises.
 
It goes back to the theme in Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” See there’s no exclusion of the Jew. There’s an offer to the Jew as well as the Gentile. It’s up to their volition whether or not they accept it or reject it. So this is the background.
 
As we look at chapter 11 we see that it emphasizes that God has not permanently rejected Israel in verses 1-10. Then when we get into the second part of the chapter in verses 11-24, Paul expresses his assurance that the rejection by the majority of Jews of God’s grace is not going to last forever. There will be a time when there will be a turning to God among the Jewish people in the light of Deuteronomy 30:1.
 
The third section gives us an insight into the future of when that takes place and the circumstances around that and that’s brought to a conclusion in verses 33-36. So in verse 1 Paul raises the question, “I say then, God has not rejected [cast away] His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” Paul forms this question in a way that presupposes a negative answer. His answer is not just “no.” It’s “not at all”, “it’s impossible”. It’s the strongest way you can express “no” in the Greek language.
 
It’s “not at all” “not in any way” and then he uses himself as an example. As an Israelite himself he has not been rejected by God. The very fact that he as a Jew has been the recipient of God’s grace in salvation means that God has not rejected the Jewish people. There’s a couple of ways in which we see this connection in terms of its relations to the previous chapters. Paul says first of all LEGO OUN which draws an inference from the previous chapter where Paul says in verse 18, “But I say” and then in Romans 10:19 he again says “but I say”.
 
 This is one of those things that those of you in the Bible Study Methods class that you look for in terms of looking for patterns or repetition in the text in order to see connections and developments in terms of what the author says. This is one of those rare occasions when the English translations are consistent and accurate. Often in English translations, as I’ve pointed out before, English translators will try to vary the English vocabulary for some stylistic purposes. This is one of those man-made rules that you can’t use the same words too frequently within the same context or you’re just going to bore your reader. This might be good for creative writing classes at your standard Marxist liberal university but that’s not how the Holy Spirit writes. The Holy Spirit writes with a lot of repetition to drive home a point but when you take these silly little man-made English writing rules and apply it to a translation then what happens is the reader in the translation loses the point. The translator will find the same word in the Greek used five times in two verses and they translate it a different way each time for stylistic variation and the reader misses the point that the Holy Spirit is trying to communicate.
 
But this is one of those cases where they were consistent and accurate so in English you can see that there’s “but I say”, “but I say”, and then verse one starts “I say then” showing a conclusion drawn from what he says in those earlier verses. So that shows that Romans 11 is integrally related to Romans 10. Just as Romans 9 and Romans 10 emphasized Israel not as individual Jews or Jewish individual salvation or justification of the individual Jew, it’s talking about God’s plan for corporate, ethnic Israel for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So that ties it together. It’s important in understanding this passage that we’re talking about corporate, ethnic Israel and we’re not talking specifically about individual justification.
 
Second, we see the references in 11:1, “I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” 11:2 says, God has not rejected [cast away] His people whom He foreknew.” This indicates again a corporate view of Israel. That God had a plan for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and He elected them nationally. It’s a corporate election that applies to them.
 
So often we hear that word election used in theological context and we immediately jump to the assumption that somehow John Calvin and the Calvinist are right and that God’s up in heaven saying “eeny-minni-miny-mo” and He’s picking this one and rejecting the others for salvation. That’s not what this is talking about. This is talking about God’s choice of a particular people to accomplish his purposes in history. He decided it was going to be through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that God would reveal Himself to the human race and that they would be the recipients of God’s revelation. They would record his revelation, preserve it, and they would keep that and pass that on for the benefit of the human race and that it was going to be through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that the Savior would come, the One who would save the world from their sins. This is a theme all the way through the Old Testament prophets of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and on into many of the minor prophets, such as Zachariah as well as Hosea and some of the others. So this emphasizes this corporate nation and also Paul’s use of 1 Kings 19:10-18 which comes up at the end of verse 2 and verses 3 and 4. This, too, pulls together this same idea of corporate Israel.
 
So when the verse begins Paul uses this verb APOTHEOMAI which is translated cast away. It’s an aorist tense which means it’s talking about some undefined, indeterminate time in the past. It just sort of summarizing it under one basic simple past tense verb and this verb has the idea of pushing back, driving back, casting away, or rejecting. I would think the better translation is “has God rejected His people?” The question here is whether this is a permanent rejection. The answer is no, not at all. The example that he gives is himself. He reminds them that he is an Israelite of the seed of Abraham and the tribe of Benjamin. The point is that if God had permanently rejected the Jewish people from His grace then he wouldn’t be saved.
 
We all know that the early church was made up almost completely of those who were Jewish people. It says 4,000 were saved on the Day of Pentecost and 5,000 saved later. Thousands and thousands of other Jews were saved during the first century. Up until the time that the Emperor Constantine established the Edict of Toleration in 315 A.D. which made Christianity the legal and only religion for the Roman Empire, the Jewish and Christian communities worked together. Even though there were theological differences they worked together to take care of the poor and the sick, providing for orphans and widows, and things of that nature.
 
But once Christianity became the legal religion the church became dominated by those who held to a non-literal interpretation as a result of the influence of Origin that they started laying the groundwork for Christian anti-Semitism which is one of the most horrible things that ever happened in human history. It’s a complete perversion of what the New Testament teaches and it’s a complete perversion of what the Bible teaches. It came about because these early Christians by the end of the 4th century quit interpreting the Bible on the basis of authorial intent and on the basis of a literal interpretation of Scripture. That is taking the words of Scripture in their normal context. Once they began to mystify it and to bring mysticism and subjectivity into their interpretation and allegory, then they lost that literal interpretation.
 
Paul here clearly is using the term Israelite in a literal way in referring to those who are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s how it’s stated. You’ll run into the fact that today in a lot of ways, especially among reform Jews who are more egalitarian, they like to talk about the patriarchs and the matriarchs. They wouldn’t want to leave the women out but the Scripture always just emphasizes the male as the leader so we prefer to stick with Scriptural terminology and emphasize Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because it is through them that the seed came. That’s that terminology that is emphasized all the way through Genesis.
 
Philippians 3:5-6 is another place where Paul emphasizes his Jewish heritage, “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless” In Romans 11:2 Paul uses that same word again in terms of repetition. Remember whenever the Holy Spirit repeats Himself in terms of the revelation of Scripture, we need to pay attention to it. God wants us to recognize that there’s a significance and a connection there. And the answer to the question that he raised in verse one is stated didactically here and dogmatically that God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew.
 
Here we get one of those great words that once again brings us into this whole issue of the relationship of the Sovereignty of God to the freewill of man. It is true that in God’s Sovereignty He overrules and overrides human decisions but God, in His plan, included the dynamics of the chaos that freewill would bring so that His plan is great enough and grand enough to include the chaos that comes from the freewill decisions that comes from creatures. We see that even in the natural realm in Genesis 1-3 that when Adam sinned, it brought chaos into the geophysical, natural, biological world and yet God had built enough flexibility into the DNA structure, into the laws of physics, and into the various other natural laws and physical laws that it handled the chaos that came from sin.
 
God is able to still accomplish His purposes even when human beings go astray from His decreed will. He still controls that. I submit that that is a much greater, grander, and glorious view of the Sovereignty and Omnipotence of God then the “God in a box” that the Calvinist have who say God can’t know anything unless He’s determined it so His Omniscience is actually limited because in their view God only knows what he’s predetermined. And only what He’s predetermined does He know. God doesn’t know the counterfactuals as the philosophers put it. He doesn’t know the things that could’ve been, or might’ve been because they have such a limited view of God’s omniscience. In fact, they think that if you introduce that into God you basically end up making God into a slave to man which just shows how perverted and corrupt their thinking actually is. They just turn every truth upside down so they can have a rigid, mechanistic, predetermined and deterministic environment.
 
So here God allows for the flexibility of negative volition within His plan or purpose. In the Old Testament there’s no mention that there’s going to be a new entity called the Church. There’s no inclination that the Jewish people will reject the Messiah when He comes. There is simply the clear statement that He’s going to come and offer the Kingdom to His people. But then they reject Him.
 
So what happens? God, in His sovereignty, has flexibility to introduce a new game plan. He always knew that. It was no surprise to God but it just shows the flexibility that He has within His plan to handle all the corruption and chaos that comes from human volition. Now when Paul states this in Romans 11:2 he says, “God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew” this is a direct quote that comes out of the Old Testament. This section in Romans is just loaded with references to the Old Testament because Paul is making sure that everyone who reads this, especially the Jewish people who read this, understand that what he is teaching is firmly grounded in what was predicted in the Old Testament by the prophets, by David in the Psalms, by Isaiah, by Jeremiah, and by Ezekiel. They all predicted the worldwide dispersion of the Jewish people because they would completely reject the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
So when he states this Paul is actually quoting from Psalm 94. David says in verse 14, “For the LORD will not abandon His people, Nor will He forsake His inheritance.” So there’s this permanent promise in the Old Testament that God will always be faithful to His promise to Abraham and that God is going to bless the world through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And that God is going to permanently establish His people in the land, that there will be a time as God told Moses that they would be removed from the land, a time when they would be dispersed throughout all of the nations and then at the end of time they would turn back to God and they would be restored to the land and God would establish His Kingdom.
 
Later on He makes it clear that this Kingdom will be established under a king who is a descendant of David. That was articulated in the Davidic covenant in 2 Samuel 7–14. So again David makes this clear that God has not permanently rejected His people. This is another one of those examples where modern and medieval theologians come along and they reject this and pervert the interpretation of this because they have an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bent and they want to assert that the only people of God today is the Church.
 
Now when we look back at this issue of foreknowledge we have to understand what Peter says in 1 Peter 1:2. Peter, Hebrews, James, and Jude are actually Jewish epistles. They are all written to a strongly Jewish Christian audience and those four epistles emphasize a lot that comes from Jewish background. At the beginning of 1 Peter he talks about the fact that his recipients are elect, that is they’re chosen according to the foreknowledge of God. As we’ve seen before that God in His Omniscience knows all the knowable. He knows all the possible, all the potential. All the woulda, coulda, shoulda, mighta beens and in light of all of that He makes decisions not apart from His knowledge but on the basis of His knowledge of what will take place.
 
Understanding this concept in Romans 9-11 means it’s related back to what he states in 9:11 that, “for though {the twins} were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to {His} choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls.” It was not about individual salvation or individual justification. He chose the Jewish people and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for a national purpose, a national destiny that would culminate in a kingdom established in the land under the ruler ship of a descendant of King David. This is clearly stated, clearly defined here in this particular passage.
 
When we read in Romans 11 passages that talk about His people whom He foreknew in verse 2 and then in verse 5 it talks about the “remnant according to the election of grace.” We have to understand that this is not related to individual justification but to the corporate plan that God has for true Israel. Romans 11:3 and 11:4 provide us with a background of what he’s going to emphasize here in understanding what is going on with the Jewish people in this dispensation, in this era of the Church age. Notice at the end of 11:2 we read, “Or do you not know what the Scripture says in {the passage about} Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?”
 
So we’re going to go back into the Old Testament in order to connect to this particular event. He summarizes the event in two verses quoting from the Old Testament, quoting from 1 Kings 19:10, 14, and 19 in order to make his point here. We need to take a minute as we usually do to go back and quickly run through these passages so we understand what was going on. Some of you were here when we went through 1 Kings.
 
This whole episode here with Elijah is one of my favorite sections of the Old Testament. Just the impact that one man had on a nation is phenomenal but we learn that even some of the greatest of God’s servants in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament have great flaws. We all have sin natures. We all fail at times. After his tremendous success and tremendous victory over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel immediately Elijah heard of the threats of Jezebel the queen who sent out an order that he was wanted, dead or alive, preferably dead and she was going to make sure he would die. He immediately caved into his sin nature. He caved into fear. He caved into worry and anxiety. He forgot about God and he went on the run as a fugitive.
 
1 Kings 19 tells the story. Let’s just review it to catch the context of these whiny statements that Paul quotes in Romans 11: 3 and 4. Ahab comes back from Mount Carmel and tells Jezebel about everything that happened there and everything that Elijah had done, including executing all of Jezebel’s favorite prophets whish she had imported from the Phoenicians, the prophets of Baal, and all the false prophets. He had their heads decapitated which was the punishment under the Mosaic Law. Some people have said that wasn’t his responsibility but that’s a failure to understand the role and responsibility of a prophet in the Old Testament. He was God’s representative to fulfill God’s plan and purpose. This is what Elijah was doing. He was fulfilling the Mosaic Law so he executed all of the false prophets because this was the penalty, the death penalty, stated in the Torah. So he had all of them executed.
 
Jezebel wants to get her revenge. In verse 2 she says, “So may the gods do to me and even more, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.” She’s saying she’s going to send out the hit squads and by noon tomorrow she threatened he’d be dead. So verse 3 says, “And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there.” (Pastor Dean shows a map of the area here). Beersheba is located on the edge of the Negev, in the southern part of Israel which is down just on the north end of the wilderness of Zin which is a very barren piece of real estate. He left from where he was on Mount Carmel and runs south as fast as he can to get as far away as he can from Jezebel. Remember her area of dominion is in the northern part of Israel. Her husband, Ahab, is the King of the Northern Kingdom but they don’t have any authority in the south. So he heads not only into the Southern kingdom of Judah but as far to the other side of the Kingdom of Judah as he possibly can.
 
Let’s go back and look at the text. The Masoretic text, which is one of the things I’ve learned this past year that helps me work my way through the Old Testament. The Old Testament has textual problems just like the New Testament, where you have different readings at times in different manuscripts. Sometimes it’s a clerical error. Sometimes it’s an error of hearing or other reasons. When a copyist writes he’ll make a mistake. In the original Hebrew text there were no vowels. The word for “saw” and the word for “fear” have the same consonants. You change the vowels; you change the word. Besides the Masoretic text, there is the Septuagint which was a Greek translation made by the rabbis in about the 2nd or 3rd century B.C. and the Vulgate which is the Latin translation of the Old Testament, The Syriac version is translated as “he was afraid.”
 
I went to Dallas Seminary and the Hebrew Department, although I didn’t realize it then, was mostly in a camp where a lot of the professors didn’t really believe there was much in terms of Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament. Once I learned that I can look back to some of the discussions and things that were said and it suddenly makes sense to me. I just didn’t realize there was an issue going on in the background but you’d hear things from the professors about some of the Messianic Psalms and you didn’t really believe it. I couldn’t figure out how to correlate that and it left me a little confused. It wasn’t until I was listening to a lecture this year by Michael Rydelnik where Mike interviewed all the professors in the Old Testament department and he said there was only one Old Testament faculty member at that time who believed in real Messianic prophecy from the Old Testament. Now that impacted and was related to their view of textual criticism.
 
When Mike said this I realized that the view we were taught at Dallas when I was a student was that you were to go with the reading in the Masoretic text. A lot of times the Masoretic text which wasn’t finalized until the 7th, 8th, 9th century A.D. had the vowel points changed which changed the words in key Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament in order to remove the obvious interpretation of those passages as pointing to Jesus. So that affects what’s in the Masoretic text. Rydelnik’s written an excellent book called The Messianic Hope where he goes through detail after detail how this happened historically and theologically. It’s fascinating to come to understand that. There’s another prominent Old Testament Israeli scholar by the name of Emmanuel Cove who has done a tremendous amount of work on textual criticism in the Old Testament and his basic rule of thumb is if the Septuagint agrees with the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Syriac or one of the early Greek translations then that trumps the Masoretic text. That opens a whole new door of understanding in terms of interpreting lots of these Messianic passages. If you follow his rule then you end up straightening up a lot of these problems in some of these Messianic prophecies that look like or as interpreted by some people today as not really Messianic.
 
So that would make much more sense in verse 3 that it’s not that Elijah “saw” this but that when Elijah became afraid. He reacts to this threat by Jezebel in fear and runs for his life down to Beersheba and he leaves his servant there. (Pastor Dean shows pictures of Beersheba which is now a national park in Israel) It’s fairly arid territory except for irrigated spots which are extremely productive and they’re exporting that irrigation technology to a lot of sub-Saharan countries trying to help African countries farm and implement some of these technological advances which have been developed by modern Israel.
 
So in 1 Kings 19:4 we read, “But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper [broom] tree; and he requested for himself that he might die, and said, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers.” A broom tree doesn’t provide a lot of shade but when you’re in territory that looks like this any little bush and any little spot of shade is very welcome, especially if it’s very hot. Those who went on the first trip we took to Israel we went in late June, went over into Jordan, and when we came back we had to cross the border. The fence line was on a path about half the size of this room and you had two cyclone fences down each side and you had about two hundred yards to walk from one border checkpoint to the other one and you had to pull your little luggage behind you. We’re walking west and there was a sirocco wind coming off of the Judean desert right into our face. The temperature was 117 in the shade and it was like walking into a hair dryer. I frequently say the temperature was 117 with a heat index of 135. It would wither you in place.
 
So Elijah was looking for any place where he could rest and verse 5 tells us, “He lay down and slept under a juniper tree; and behold, there was an angel touching him, and he said to him, “Arise, eat.” (Pastor Dean shows a picture of a broom or juniper tree). It doesn’t give you a whole lot of shade but it’s what you get in the midst of the desert. So the angel took care of him. Again we see God’s faithfulness. The point that Paul makes all through Romans 9, 10, and 11 is that God is faithful to His promises to Israel. What we can take from that is that God is faithful to each of us in terms of His promises. He will never leave us or forsake us. He is always going to strengthen us, sustain us, and take care of us just as He did Elijah even though Elijah is running in fear and he is forgetting to depend upon God, God doesn’t forsake Elijah. You can blow that up even larger that even though Israel is in disobedience, according to Romans 11, nevertheless God is still watching over them. This is the same thing that is seen in the Old Testament book of Esther that when the Jews are in the Diaspora and there’s this huge anti-Semitic plot by Haman who’s the favorite of King Ahasuerus, nevertheless, even though God’s name is not mentioned anywhere in the book of Esther, God is really the one who is the hidden force protecting Israel behind the scenes. 
 
So that’s the lesson here. Whatever our condition is God doesn’t forsake us even though we forsake Him. So the angel takes care of Elijah in the wilderness. He provides food and drink for him and he goes on for forty days and forty nights on down to the Sinai so there’s a parallel drawn there between him and Moses. (Shows map of Sinai.) We don’t know exactly where it is. There are three or four candidates but the Sinai of Exodus is probably located in this area. You can figure this out because the Scripture says it took so many days to walk to different locations. Some have even placed it up into the wilderness of Zin but it’s probably not. 
 
So when he gets there he goes into a cave and spends the night there. The next morning the Lord comes to Him, probably the angel of the Lord, and speaks to him, under the title the “word of the Lord”. This is the pre-incarnate Christ, the LOGOS in the New Testament in John 1:1-3. The word of the Lord came to him and asked him what he was doing there. I brought this up because this passage is misused by a lot of people. They think this is a divine guidance passage. In a minute we’ll come to the verse where God isn’t in the whirlwind and God isn’t in the earthquake but God is in the still, small voice. They say you need to pull away from everything and get where you can listen to God and God will speak to you in that still, small voice. This is just pure mystical garbage. This isn’t a divine guidance passage. Elijah isn’t trying to figure out what God’s will is. He’s trying to run away from God’s will and God isn’t giving him direction to what His will should be.
 
God is going to give him an audio-visual demonstration of God’s incomprehensibility to drive home the point that Elijah, who had a preconceived notion of how he would have this victorious response from Ahab and there would be this huge revival in Israel as a result of Mount Carmel, finds out that’s not what happened. Afterwards he’s just crestfallen because he’s confused his plan with God’s plan. God is going to demonstrate that you can’t second-guess God’s plan. God isn’t doing what you think He’s doing unless He’s told you what He’s doing. So this is what takes place.
 
God asks Elijah what he’s doing there. Elijah in 1 Kings 19:14 says, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Elijah says there’s no one but him left who sees the truth, who understands reality; only him. He’s just having his own little pity party down on Sinai.
So this is when God teaches him a little lesson of His power. God is teaching that He sometimes operates in great dramatic ways and other times not in great dramatic ways. You can’t second-guess God. In many versions it’s translated “a still small voice”. The concept of a voice communicates revelation but that’s not in the text. The NASB translates it, “a sound of gentle blowing.” The NET calls it “a soft whisper.” The ESV says the “sound of a low whisper”. The NIV says the “sound of a gentle whisper.” Literal translation of the Hebrew says it was a “sound of a small, thin”.  Then it doesn’t say any more. It doesn’t use the word voice.
 
Basically the word in the Hebrew Aramaic lexicon of the Old Testament translates it as a “calm, vibrant silence”. See there’s all this noise of the storm, the earthquake, the fire, all these huge effects and then there’s nothing. Just the sound of silence. Deep, profound silence. There’s no communication going on here at all. God’s not giving Him His directive will. It’s just silence. The point that God is making here to Elijah is that you can’t second-guess God. Sometimes He acts in big, overt ways like He did on Mount Carmel and He comes down and acts in this huge thunderbolt that just destroys the altar and evaporates everything on the altar but at other times He’s working in silence and you can’t see what God is doing so don’t second-guess it.
 
Elijah tells God that he’s the only one left. He hadn’t really gotten the point yet. Then in verse 18 God tells Elijah to quit having a pity party thinking that you’re the only one. God says he has reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal. So what we see here is the example of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that’s gone into complete apostasy and have rejected the Torah and rejected God. They have been completely immersed in the pagan religion of the Ashera and the Baalim and they’re worshiping the idols and they’re involved in all the fertility worship and have completely rejected God but there’s seven thousand in the Northern Kingdom who are still true to the Torah, the Word of God. They’re still worshipping God and God alone even though it’s a time of tremendous persecution.
 
It’s that group of seven thousand that are referred to in some places technically as the remnant. That is a key term that comes out of verse 5 in Romans 11, “In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to {God’s} gracious choice [the election of grace].” Now we have to understand what this concept of “remnant” is. This is an important term and one of the reasons this is important is because I have heard some theologians and some pastors who are not well-studied in the word apparently wrongly apply the concept of “remnant” to the Church. There’s no scriptural basis for doing that. The term “remnant” is exclusively used of the core group of true believers in Israel among the Jews. It is never, ever used of the Church. It’s only used twice in the New Testament and both times in this passage. Once in Romans 9 and then here in Romans 11, both in reference to the Jewish remnant. There’s no such thing as the Christian remnant. Use of that terminology betrays an influence of replacement theology. There are certain terms that are restricted to Christianity and the Church and there’s certain terms restricted to literal Israel and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and remnant is an Israelite term. It’s a Jewish term to refer to the core group that is true Israel, those who have not rejected God, those who have stayed true to the Old Testament and have responded to whatever revelation God has given, whether it’s Old Testament or whether it’s the revelation given in terms of Jesus.
 
In terms of terminology there are basically four words for remnant. The first two are Hebrew, the second two are Greek. The first word is yathar which means remainder. That’s basically the idea of the remnant that which is left over, that which remains. The second is she’ar, also translated remnant and mean the same thing. These words in the Old Testament Septuagint are translated with the words that show up in Romans 9 and Romans 11. Romans 9 uses the word KATALEIMMA and Romans 11 uses the word LEIMMA. KATALEIMMA is just a prefix with a preposition, both referring to the remnant. This is an important term.
 
 I want to go through several verses and that will take time so I’m going to go ahead and close but we’ll come back next time and we’ll finally get there. You now understand the conclusion so we’ll go back and see how the term “remnant” is used in the Old Testament. It’s used in non-specific ways and it’s used at times to refer to the Canaanites who were left over and survived the conquest. Those who were the ones who remained alive, who survived, so sometimes the word remnant simply has the idea of a survivor. Sometimes it’s applied to Jews who survived the Assyrian assault, the Jews who survived the Babylonian assault. They’re referred to as the “remnant.” There’s no spiritual sense there. They’re just the ones who survived. Then it’s used in some key passages to refer to a subset of Israelites as Paul says in Romans 9 that “not all Israel is Israel.” So there’s a subset that’s faithful to God. The remainder are unfaithful. That’s the analogy that lies behind Romans 11. So to understand Romans 11 we have to understand the doctrine of the remnant and we’ll come back to that next Thursday night.

Romans 122b-The Remnant and Grace

Romans 11:5 NASB95
In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice.
Romans 122b-The Remnant and Grace Romans 11:5-11
 
We’re in Romans 11 tonight. I thought we’d get here the other night and we touched on it towards the end of last week where we got into the mention of the term “remnant” in Romans 11. I pointed out last time something that’s important. I want to go over the passages and the usage of the term because I have heard some people within dispensationalism talk about the Church or at least talking about positive believers in the church as the remnant. Many times remnant in Scripture is not used as a technical term related to spiritual maturity but when it is used that way it is always related to the believers within Israel. It’s not a term that is applicable in any way to the Church.
 
We’re going to study through that this evening as well as some other things related to the important aspects of the doctrine of grace and clarify some questions that might not occurred to you but they certainly have occurred to other people. I’ve heard some objections raised on some of the terminology related to grace over the years. We have one of the great passages on grace here in Romans, chapter 11. We’re looking at the doctrine of remnant and the doctrine of grace. Now just a reminder. It’s always important to conceptualize what we’re studying that Romans is about the righteousness of God. There’s a number of things that Paul says about the righteousness of God but in Romans 9 – 11 he’s relating the righteousness of God to God’s plan for Israel and the Church.
 
Romans 9 demonstrates the righteousness of God in terms of His rejection of national Israel. It is the rejection not in terms of His plan but because the majority of the leaders of Israel at the time Jesus came rejected Him as Messiah. That rejection, Romans 10, is based upon the fact that they had neglected revelation. They distorted the meaning of Scripture. Even though the truth of God’s word was near to them they rejected it, and this is why God rejects them and puts them under divine discipline. That discipline is temporary, according to Romans 11.
 
In this chapter, Paul shows that God has not permanently cast them away but eventually there will be a restoration of Israel to God. Fundamental to understanding that is to understand the role and significance of the remnant and how that has operated within the history of Israel. So the question that’s raised at the beginning of Romans 11:1 is whether God has permanently cast away His people. He answers that in verse 2 that God has not cast away His people that is, not permanently cast away. In Psalm 94:14 David says, “For the LORD will not abandon His people, Nor will He forsake His inheritance.”
 
Now this is important. It’s an important reminder for us because the underlying principle here is same for Israel as well as for the Church. It goes back contextually to the end of Romans 8 when Paul said, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The objection from the Jews is that it seems like God has rejected Israel and they think they’re not loved by God any more. Paul is showing that God still loves His people, Israel, even though they are under divine discipline. He has not permanently cast them away.
 
This was promised in the Old Testament and the point that he is making here in this section is to establish this foundation that God is true to His Word. We can trust Him and that no matter what our experience might be, no matter how horrible our circumstances may be, no matter how dark and despairing things might become at times, that’s just our experience. We have to trust in the Word of God over our experience because God is the one who holds us in His hand. God is the one who protects, provides, and sustains us. What usually happens is that things come along in our life and rattle us because they shatter our hopes and dreams of the things we want to do according to our plans and agenda for our life and God has another plan and He’s trying to get our attention to recognize that it’s not about us. It’s all about Him and His plan. But God, no matter how bad things get, God doesn’t forsake us. The Lord said He would never leave us or forsake us. He always sustains us. This is true in terms of God’s plan for Israel also.
 
Verse 2 says that God has not cast away His people whom He “foreknew.” That is always one of those terms that brings up the whole issue of determinism and predestination and election in relation to eternal salvation, especially as it’s articulated within Calvinism. I pointed out that the concept of foreknowledge in Scripture relates to God’s knowledge of what will take place in the future. How does He make His choices? The options are really very limited. God makes His choice as to what happens in human history either apart from His knowledge or He takes into account what He knows will happen. Those are the only two options.
 
God either does it completely apart from His knowledge or He takes His knowledge into consideration. But His knowledge of contingent events in history, what might happen, what could happen, what should happen, that includes also what will happen. He is aware of everything. Just because He knows this does not determine what He will choose on the basis of the merit of what He knows. In other words, it’s really clear form Scripture that He doesn’t make His choices on the basis of the intrinsic goodness or merit of individual people. He does it for His purposes.
 
He either does it consistent with His knowledge or He doesn’t take it into account. That makes it just arbitrariness. 1 Peter 1:2 says His choice is done in accordance “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father”. Now one thing you have to understand is that our background, our framework, is not Calvinist. In Calvinism God doesn’t know all the knowable. They say what might happen, what could happen, is all irrelevant. The only thing that matter is what happens. That’s determined by God’s foreknowledge. God only foreknows what He determines will happen. My problem is that is I think it places a limitation on the omniscience of God. I tried to chart this out on a graph but it made God’s knowledge finite so the only way to do this accurately would be to just shade the whole background because we’re only looking at a portion of God’s Omniscience.
 
God’s omniscience means that His knowledge is infinite and eternal. You can’t really diagram the boundaries of His knowledge because it goes without end. There’s no limitations to the knowledge of God. He knows everything. He knows everything that could happen, might happen, and would happen if certain other things took place. He knows everything and it is all known to Him immediately and directly. God doesn’t learn things. He’s always known everything. His knowledge doesn’t increase or decrease. He’s always known all there is to know and, as part of that knowledge, you have the subset of His foreknowledge. It’s defined as God’s infinite and eternal knowledge of what will happen before it happens.
 
That’s simply what proginosko in the Greek means. pro meaning before; ginosko meaning knowledge. It means God knows what will happen before it happens. This is a subset of His Omniscience. Omniscience is related to the thinking of God. In God’s thinking, which is not like our thinking because our knowledge is always acquired. His knowledge has always been the same. It has always been direct and intuitive. It’s different in some ways from our knowledge so it’s difficult for us to understand.
 
What happens is that when we try to compare our knowledge to His knowledge it’s a comparison of apples and oranges. They’re both fruit. In other words they’re both knowledge but we can’t extrapolate to God’s knowledge from our knowledge because our knowledge operates on finite cause and effect, which God’s knowledge does not operate on because His is always eternal and absolute with no acquisition of new information. There’s nothing he hasn’t not known. So on the basis of that in relation to His foreknowledge God makes choices as to the destinies of certain peoples within history.
 
As we’ve seen in our study of election in Romans 9 this choice in the context of Romans 9 to 11 is not a selection of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in terms of eternal or individual justification or salvation. It’s not a choice in terms of who will go to heaven and who will go to the Lake of Fire. It’s a choice of who He will use, what tribal group He will use in order to reveal His grace and His revelation, His Word, to all humanity. So He chooses within history to function within certain people.
 
That’s His prerogative as a Sovereign but He doesn’t do that in any way that negates their volition. It’s not a salvation related issue at all. In Romans 9:11 he says, “for though {the twins} were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to {His} choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls.” See the children were not born and had not activated any volition at all. It was not related to what they’ve done; it’s not related to the fact that they have or have not done anything of possible merit or goodness.
 
Why is it operative? It says, “so that God’s purpose according to [His[ choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls.” Now that’s going to be important when we get there because it’s not based on works or human merit. God is not doing it because He foresees some element of righteousness within someone. He is doing it for other purposes. Now I’ve paraphrased this a little bit, “That the purpose of God according to His selection of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for historic purpose might stand, a choice not based on their merits but on God’s determination for His purposes in history.” In taking into account all of the knowable, this is the best solution that will bring the greatest glory to God in angelic history. So that just gives us an orientation to this issue of election.
 
 Now at the end of Romans 11:2 Paul gives an illustration from the Old Testament which I developed last time. I don’t need to go back through it all again tonight. “Or do you not know what the Scripture says in {the passage about} Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?” This is in 1 Kings 17, 18, and 19. This is the prophet who stood on Mount Carmel and challenged the 400 prophets of the Asher and the 450 prophets of Baal to a contest of who could light the fire. Elijah built a huge altar and they were to see who could call down fire from heaven. That was important because Baal is the god of thunder and of lightning so if their god is a true god, then that should be an easy thing for him to just send down a lightning bolt and incinerate the altar.
 
So the prophets of Baal and prophets of the Ashera dance around and cut themselves and bleed and go into all sorts of religious histrionics to try to motivate their gods to light the fire. What’s interesting is to watch the behavior of the man of God who is totally oriented to divine thinking. See we live in an era today when people are basically spiritual weenies and wimps. We’ve been cowed by the politically correct crowd in America that you don’t act certain ways toward people who have other religious beliefs. But that’s not God’s way. That’s man’s way because man wants an equal playing field. All religions are equal they say so you have to respect all religions as being equal. But if you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you know that all other religions are shams. All other religions are false so Elijah sits back and tell them to scream a little more. That maybe their god went to the bathroom and can’t hear them. Elijah makes fun of them all day long. In our human viewpoint pragmatic culture that’s considered wrong but it’s only wrong if you don’t have an absolute frame of reference from the Scripture. If you have an absolute frame of reference from the Scripture, it’s just fine to ridicule the idiots. This is not ridiculing the man on the street; this is ridiculing the Jay Goulds and the Darwins, the leaders, and the false prophets in the country, not the everyday person. That’s what Elijah was doing.
 
He has this fantastic victory at the end of the day. He virtually submerged the entire altar and all the wood and the animals in water. Then he calls upon God to light the fire. A huge pillar of fire comes down from heaven and just incinerates everything and it just turns into vapor. It vaporizes the whole sacrifice, altar, wood, and everything. They all immediately disappear and are consumed. So Elijah is just at the top of his game. No one can feel better. He has had the victory of victories. The only thing you could relate that to is someone who has won every Super Bowl for fifty years and has all the rings and everything. He’s just undefeatable and he’s won the magnificent victory.
 
Then, like what happens so often, pride goes before a fall. He runs into the threats of Jezebel. Jezebel threatens she’s going to take his life and immediately he just has to run away and so he thinks that God has deserted him. He’s all by himself. There’s nobody else with him and he heads off into the desert and has a pity party. He’s depressed and he’s down and this is the scenario that Paul is referring to in Romans 11. He quotes from 1 Kings 19 where Elijah says, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” He’s won the big battle but he doesn’t think this war is winnable.
 
In Romans 11 Paul asks what was the divine response to him? God says, “I HAVE KEPT for Myself SEVEN THOUSAND MEN WHO HAVE NOT BOWED THE KNEE TO BAAL.” Seven thousand! Elijah wasn’t alone. Pick yourself up. Get over the pity party. You’re not alone. I’m never restricted to just one person. There’s a remnant, those who have not caved into apostasy, have not caved into idolatry, and have not rejected God. They may be secret, hidden believers who are not vocal and that you don’t know about, but they are there. You’re not the only one. The scenario is not one of defeat. This comes out of 1 Kings 19:10, He [Elijah] said, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”
 
The point here that we have to understand is that it’s difficult, especially if you are involved in communicating the gospel in the Jewish community, is that they see this as a sign of arrogance on the part of Christians. The reality is that unfortunately in the Jewish community many Jews are Biblically illiterate. That’s not too different from a lot of Christians but they’ve never read the Old Testament. In fact, when they read through the Torah which they’ve divided into 52 readings called the perashat and each week every synagogue in the world studies from the same section. It’s all from the Torah.
 
It’s developed in Judaism over the years that they never read from the prophets, from Daniel or from Isaiah. They’re too Messianic. It raises too many questions when your weekly reading comes out of Isaiah 53 or Daniel 9 or Daniel 7. It’s too obvious that this is relating to Jesus so over the years in the 1st millennia after Christ that within Judaism they just changed the readings to get rid of all these Messianic prophecies so there wouldn’t be an issue there. When you talk about some of these things from someone from a Jewish background they’re ignorant of this.
 
In most of the history of Israel, it was characterized by apostasy, by rejection of God, and by hostility toward God. There were a few periods when a majority were believers but in many periods in Jewish believers the vast majority out-paganed the pagans. They completely caved in and assimilated to the gods and goddesses of the Canaanite religions and the Phoenicians and others. So what’s left over, what remained was the group called the remnant. This is when the word is used in a technical sense and it referred to that group that were believers and had not succumbed to idolatry.
 
Now in 1 Kings 19:13-14, again there’s another section that is quoted. Elijah repeats himself about Israel having killed all the prophets with the sword and he’s the only one left and they seek his life and God reminds him that He’s reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal. So what we see is that Paul in Romans 11:3, 4 he’s just going back and quoting from this section to make his point that God has a remnant. Verse 5 says, “In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to {God’s} gracious choice. [an election of grace].”
 
This verse and Romans 9:27 are the only two verses in the entire New Testament that talk about a remnant. Both places they’re talking about the remnant of Israel. We need to look at the concept of remnant. Last time I pointed out there are four words used in Scripture for remnant. Two are Hebrew Old Testament words and two are New Testament words. In Romans 9:27 we have the word HUPOLEIMMA. HUPO is the prepositional prefix and then we just have the root word LEIMMA used here in Romans 11:5. Both have that idea of the remnant, that which remains, that which survives, and that which continues.
 
Now it’s used a number of different ways in the Old Testament. Sometimes it just has a normal everyday usage to refer to the group that’s left over. We see this in 2 Kings 19:4 and 30-31 and 2 Kings 31:24. Now these sections come out of the event that occurs when the Assyrian king has invaded the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 and they destroyed the Northern Kingdom and then Sennacherib headed south into Judah and conquered several cities in Judah. Then he surrounded Jerusalem and laid siege to that city. That’s the context of these verses and others in 2 Chronicles 30.
 
But if we look at 2 Kings 19:4 we read, “Perhaps the LORD your God will hear all the words of Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria has sent to reproach the living God, and will rebuke the words which the LORD your God has heard. Therefore, offer a prayer for the remnant that is left.” The Rabshakeh was the herald, the announcer, the chief of staff and he was announcing to the people that your god is not any good. Just give up now. We’re going to defeat you. Now this isn’t referring to the spiritual remnant believers. It’s just talking about the ones that haven’t been killed yet. Those that are left who can still fight against the king of Assyria.
 
Verse 30 talks about the “remnant who have escaped of the house of Judah.” See here it is talking about a spiritual sense here. Can you see the difference? It says, “The surviving remnant of the house of Judah will again take root downward and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem will go forth a remnant, and out of Mount Zion survivors. The zeal of the LORD will perform this.” Bearing fruit upward here is talking about spiritual fruit so here within that same chapter we see the word for remnant used in an everyday, non-technical sense and then in verse 30 and 31 talking about a spiritual remnant.
 
Then in 2 Kings 21:14 it says, I will abandon the remnant of My inheritance and deliver them into the hand of their enemies.” There he’s not talking about the spiritual of Israel. He’s talking about those who have survived the previous judgments. This is a non-technical sense of the word. That’s why it’s important to look at all the surrounding context whenever you’re doing a word study. We’re talking about that in our Sunday night Bible Study Methods class.” Words aren’t always used in a technical sense. Remember for the most part the Apostle Paul and Old Testament writers are just using every day, ordinary vocabulary. Sometimes they’ll use it in a technical sense; sometimes not.
 
That brings us to a parallel passage as the same time as Hezekiah. I want you to turn there. It’s 2 Chronicles 30. This is a really interesting chapter where you see the use of the word remnant but it also has a fascinating illustration of God’s grace. That’s why I want us to read through this. This is probably not in that section of the Bible where the pages are darkened a little because you’ve been reading it a lot and you may not have been here in the last fifteen, twenty years, if ever. This is a really interesting little episode. This is at the same time when Hezekiah has cleansed the temple and restored the temple and is bringing the people back to obedience. This is a reform period under Hezekiah. He’s calling the people back to observe the Passover.
 
In the initial introduction here we read, “Now Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah and wrote letters also to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of the LORD at Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover to the LORD God of Israel”. Remember the Northern Kingdom at this time had already been defeated and destroyed by the Assyrians. There were still Jews that lived in the north. A number of Jews who saw the invasion coming had gone to the south but there were still those that remained. Of those that remained, some were killed, many were deported by the Assyrians. They became known in history as the ten lost tribes. They weren’t lost. God knew where every one of them was. And many of them, as I said earlier, that survived escaped ahead of time so you had members of all of those tribes in the south in Judah, even at the time of Christ. They knew which tribe they were from. Even today there are many Jews today who can identify themselves as being from some of these so-called lost tribes.
 
It goes on to say, “For the king and his princes and all the assembly in Jerusalem had decided to celebrate the Passover in the second month,” Many had not celebrated the Passover in years but Hezekiah is executing a reform that the people are going to get back into obedience to God. So they make this proclamation and verse 6 tells us, “The couriers went throughout all Israel and Judah with the letters from the hand of the king and his princes, even according to the command of the king, saying, “O sons of Israel, return to the LORD God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, that He may return to those of you who escaped {and} are left from the hand of the kings of Assyria.” How is remnant used in this verse? Here it’s not talking about a spiritual group. It’s just talking about those who survived the war, who survived the invasion, and who survived the deportation. It’s not talking about their spiritual condition at all as we’ll see in a couple of verses.
 
Do you see any interesting words there other than remnant? Notice twice the word “return” is used. I would hope by now that many of you by now would automatically key on when you’re reading through Scripture. It’s a theologically pregnant word in that it’s the Hebrew word shub. It goes back to Deuteronomy 30 when it says that eventually when they’ve been scattered to all the ends of the earth, they will return to the Lord. This is a word that is basically a counterpart to the New Testament word repentance which we’ve studied recently in Matthew 3. It means to turn back to God, to turn away from the idols and the paganism and all of the false ideas and human viewpoint worldview you’ve been following, and turn back to the Word of God.
 
Then come some warnings, “Do not be like your fathers and your brothers, who were unfaithful to the LORD God of their fathers, so that He made them a horror, as you see. And do not stiffen your neck like your fathers, but yield to the LORD and enter His sanctuary which He has consecrated forever, and serve the LORD your God that His burning anger may turn away from you. For if you return to the LORD, your brothers and your sons {will find} compassion before those who led them captive and will return to this land. For the LORD your God is gracious and compassionate, and will not turn {His} face away from you if you return to Him.” How do you demonstrate that you’ve returned to God? You learn His word, you obey His Word, and you serve Him.
 
Serving the Lord doesn’t always take place today in local church ministries. A lot of it does. A lot of it takes place outside the local church in terms of family, where you work, where you play, whatever you do, you have opportunity to serve others. Notice this is an appeal to their volition. They have free will. They can choose not to return to God or they can choose to turn to God. Did you notice that some would still be taken captive? But if they turned to the Lord, wouldn’t everything be great and God would make them healthy, wealthy, and prosperous. No, the nation is still under divine discipline. The nation is still being kicked out of the land, out of the Northern Kingdom. The promise here is that if they return to the Lord, their brothers and children would be treated compassionately by those who are taking them captive. If you return to the Lord, it will change the nature of the captivity. See, the decisions we make spiritually change and impact many other things around us. When we’re obedient and we’re positive to the Word and we’re applying it, it affects those around us in terms of blessing by association.
 
There’s a consistent promise through the Old Testament that God is going to restore the Jews to the land that He promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The key concept here is that the “Lord your God is gracious and compassionate, and will not turn His face away from you if you return to Him.” All they have to do is determine to trust the Lord and follow Him instead of the idols. There are three words there that you ought to pay attention to. The first is that they need to return to the Lord. That’s the word shub. This is the idea of changing your mind, deciding not to chase after the idols and not be in a frantic search for happiness, deciding not to live your life the way you want to but instead walk in obedience to God. The next word is turn as in God will not turn His face from you. The word is sur in Hebrew and means to turn aside or depart. So God is saying He will not take His grace away from you at this point but He will continue to treat you graciously and compassionately even to the point of changing the nature of the captivity to your brethren and loved ones.
 
So in verse 10, “The couriers passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, and as far as Zebulun, but they laughed them to scorn and mocked them.” Look at this response of the people in the north. They laughed at them. They mocked them. See, the choice is to return or not. If you’re going to return then live a life consistent with that which means you obey the Mosaic Law and you go to Jerusalem to observe Passover.
 
But what happens as these heralds went out, like many pastors today and they proclaim the truth of God’s word, they get laughed at. They’re mocked. Christians are being ridiculed. Do you believe in a recent creation? Do you believe in a God who could become a man? You believe in a virgin birth? You believe in miracles? You believe in right and wrong? You believe there are real evil-doers in the world? They mock all of these.
 
I think no matter what else you think about President George Bush what really irritated and hacked off most of the liberals in this country is that he appealed to absolutes when he called the terrorists evildoers. Now you can do all kinds of things but in the minds of a relativists to appeal to a standard of right and wrong is one of the worst sins you can commit. That’s why they got so mad at President Bush. He acted as if there was absolute evil in the world and he was going to do something about it. That just really hacked off all the liberals. They don’t want to believe that they’re answerable to anybody. That’s the modern mindset. And it’s not just liberals. There are a lot of conservatives that way. They’re only conservative because that appeals to their personality. They don’t understand from where a lot of these issues ultimately derive. So the runners are laughed at and mocked at and notice the contrast here. Again, for those of you going through the Bible Study Methods class we’re talking about structure and different things to look for. One of the things you look for is things that are alike and things that contrast. What we have here is a contrast. There are those that laughed and mocked the runners and on the other hand there were some, the minority, the remnant, who humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem.
 
What is humility? I’ve taught these so many times. Humility isn’t thinking lowly of yourself. Humility is submission to authority. Humility is obedience. Jesus humbled Himself and was obedient to the point of the cross. That’s what Philippians 2:5-11 says. Humility is obedience to the proper authority. So this is what they do. They humble themselves, they submit to the authority of God and they came to Jerusalem.
 
They didn’t just say, “Oh, I’m going to do what God says,” and then stay home. No, they did what God said to the letter and they went to Jerusalem. Not because it made them righteous but because they were supposed to do so under the authority of God. Verse 12 says, “The hand of God was also on Judah to give them one heart to do what the king and the princes commanded by the word of the LORD.”
 
Now here’s another one of those passages where people might read this that God was asserting His authority and changing their volition. Not at all. Judah had already committed themselves to reform by following Hezekiah in reform. This is what chapter 29 covers in terms of supporting Hezekiah in the restoration of the Temple, the cleansing of the Temple, and the restoration of the Temple sacrifices. The Southern Kingdom is behind him as almost one person in their obedience to the Lord. There has been a true, genuine, Biblical revival in the Southern Kingdom. What God is doing here is He’s just strengthening them in their already committed resolve they have decided upon. So they have a singleness of purpose to obey the command of the king as the Word of the Lord.
 
They come together at that particular point. Now, what’s interesting is what happens after this. There’s some from the Northern Kingdom who have come south. That’s the remnant from the North. Then almost everyone in the south is oriented to God, oriented to His grace and obedient to Him. In verse 13 we read, “Now many people were gathered at Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread in the second month, a very large assembly.”
 
Passover is the first day of unleavened bread followed by a week-long feast and all Jews, male Jews especially, are required to come every year to observe Passover, Pentecost, and Yom Kippur, those tree festivals in Jerusalem. Verse 14, “They arose and removed the altars which {were} in Jerusalem; they also removed all the incense altars and cast {them} into the brook Kidron.” When you’re oriented to God it’s not only doing what you’re committed to do, it’s removing the things that are a distraction to your spiritual life. You get rid of those things which are a holdover from the paganism you held to dearly before you were saved. 
 
Verse 15, “Then they slaughtered the Passover {lambs} on the fourteenth of the second month. And the priests and Levites were ashamed of themselves, and consecrated themselves and brought burnt offerings to the house of the LORD.” They recognized their sin and so they had ritual cleansing in preparation for serving the Passover. They set themselves apart by going through the proper trespass offerings and guilt offerings so they are ritually cleansed to go into the Temple and to serve God and serve the people.
 
Then we come to verse 16, “They stood at their stations after their custom, according to the Law of Moses the man of God; the priests sprinkled the blood {which they received} from the hand of the Levites.” That sprinkling of the blood was part of the whole ceremony. It depicted the fact that real cleansing, not ritual cleansing, ultimately comes from the death of a sacrifice and that perfect sacrifice would be the Lord Jesus Christ.” Then in verse 17, “For {there were} many in the assembly who had not consecrated themselves; therefore, the Levites {were} over the slaughter of the Passover {lambs} for everyone who {was} unclean, in order to consecrate {them} to the LORD.”
 
This is interesting. These people want to obey God but they are ignorant or for whatever reason, there are many who haven’t sanctified themselves. They haven’t gone through the ritual that the Mosaic Law required for them to go into the Temple. “For a multitude of the people, {even} many from Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover otherwise than prescribed. For Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, “May the good LORD pardon. Everyone who prepares his heart to seek God, the LORD God of his fathers, though not according to the purification {rules} of the sanctuary.”
 
Technically that is an affront and a blasphemy to God. But look at this. They hadn’t ritually cleansed themselves, but not in disobedience but out of ignorance. Yet they ate the Passover contrary to what was written. You see Hezekiah prayed for them to pardon them. He’s praying like a priest for a people to be cleansed because they’re too ignorant to properly do it. This is the difference between ritual purity and real purity. Ritually they hadn’t gone through the ritual to be cleansed but they had humbled themselves spiritually and personally confessed their sins. They prepared their hearts to seek the Lord God of their Fathers. This is the grace of God.
 
The Lord listened to them. God dealt with them in grace in terms of their heart attitude toward Him. “So the LORD heard Hezekiah and healed the people.” This is a great example of God’s grace and goodness to His people and this is something we lose. As I read this I thought how this is overlooked by the liberal theological crowd who want to say that the God of the Old Testament is a hateful God and the God of the New Testament is a loving God. This is one of the greatest examples of God’s love and grace in the Old Testament and is on par with anything you see in the New Testament. This is not some hateful, wrathful God. This just shows that the liberals have rejected the truth of the Scripture and seek to destroy it.
 
Now all of that had to do with the remnant but it was fun to get off and talk about grace a little bit. Now 2 Chronicles 34:9 also talks about the remnant “They came to Hilkiah the high priest and delivered the money that was brought into the house of God, which the Levites, the doorkeepers, had collected from Manasseh and Ephraim, and from all the remnant of Israel, and from all Judah and Benjamin and the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” These are those who were the spiritual remnant because these are the ones who came to Jerusalem to observe the Passover. Ezra 9:14 uses the term but more in the sense of the everyday use of the survivor. He’s asking a rhetorical question in terms of God, “Shall we again break Your commandments and intermarry with the peoples who commit these abominations? Would You not be angry with us to the point of destruction, until there is no remnant nor any who escape?” That’s just a secular use of the term.
 
 Isaiah 1:9,”Unless the LORD of hosts Had left us a few survivors [a remnant], We would be like Sodom, We would be like Gomorrah.” He’s using the term remnant here to talk about a spiritual core of believers who because of them the rest of the nation is blessed. Isaiah 10:20, “Now in that day the remnant of Israel, and those of the house of Jacob who have escaped, will never again rely on the one who struck them, but will truly rely on the LORD, the Holy One of Israel. A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God. For though your people, O Israel, may be like the sand of the sea, {Only} a remnant within them will return; A destruction is determined, overflowing with righteousness.” Again, this is talking about a spiritual remnant.
 
Isaiah 11:11 says, “Then it will happen on that day that the Lord Will again recover the second time with His hand The remnant of His people, who will remain, From Assyria, Egypt, Pathros, Cush, Elam, Shinar, Hamath, And from the islands of the sea.” The question here is always when was the first time? This is at the end of the Tribulation. When was the first recovery? It wasn’t in the Old Testament. The first recovery I think is what we see going on right now, which is the recovery of unregenerate Jews to Israel to establish the nation in preparation for the end time events. So that’s not saying it’s right around the corner. The events have always been right around the corner. But we’re seeing more and more preparation today as we see a little less than 50% of the all the Jews in the world living in Israel. That hasn’t happened before. The paper I’m doing for Pre-Trib this year is an analysis of the history of Zionism from the Protestant Reformation to the present showing how God works behind the scenes, orchestrating political events, events within the Jewish community, events within the Christian community and none of them involve people who know what the others are doing. When you look back over history you see the hand of God in working time and time and time again to bring about the restoration of a nation of Jews in the land which He’s given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It’s not a chance thing. There are many times within that period that people thought it was going to happen in their lifetime and nothing happened. It took 300 to 400 years for that to come about. It’s not by chance.
 
Okay, so Romans 9:27 and 11:5 are the only two passages in the New Testament that uses the term remnant. So Romans 11:5 talks about Elijah’s remnant. We have all of Israel, ethnic Jews who are descendants physically from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the vast majority throughout history have rejected God. They’ve pursued the Baal, the Baalim, and the Ashera. They have not pursued the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s always been a minority. That’s illustrated by the remnant. At the time of Elijah in the north it’s Elijah plus the 7,000. It’s a minority position. The vast majority of Jews at any point in history have rejected the God of their fathers. But God’s choice or selection of them is based on grace.
 
Now here’s what’s interesting. The contrast here is between grace and works. We have to think in terms of what works mean. Now there are some people and I’ve talked to some of these pedantic types in seminaries who try to think that anything you choose to do is a work. Sometimes the Bible uses the term work as the basis for a decision. But that’s not what the context in these passages is talking about. It’s talking not just about doing something or even making a choice. It’s talking about doing something or making a choice that is considered to be meritorious that brings righteousness to the one who does it because the act or the choice itself is considered meritorious.
 
 What Paul sets up here is a contrast between grace and works. It’s either one or the other. This is one of the great passages. Grace excludes works one hundred percent. Works is trying to impress God by anything that we do. That some choice we make or some act we perform somehow brings us meritorious righteousness. It’s either grace, which means God does all the works and we accept it, or somehow what we think or what we do impresses God. It’s one or the other.
 
Paul thinks very clearly here. It’s not a little bit of this and a little bit of that. God’s not fuzzy-wuzzy up there in heaven and saying, “Well, he mostly wants to do the right thing.” No, it’s either one or the other. Grace excluded works. Works excludes grace. In the last part of the verse it says if it’s works at all, one millionth of one percent, it’s no longer grace. If just one little speck of works is in there, it destroys grace completely. That’s why Paul says that if someone preaches a different gospel than ours, a different one that’s not based on grace, let them be accursed. This term there is very strong. He’s basically saying to let them rot in hell because they’re teaching a false gospel. So it’s one or the other. This is the issue with Israel as stated earlier in the previous chapter in Romans 10: 3-4 where Paul indicts the Jews of Jesus’ generation who rejected His message of grace because the Pharisees thought they could merit God’s favor by doing this external religiosity.
 
Paul summarizes this in Romans 10, “For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.” This is what makes “works” works. It’s not just doing something or thinking something or making a choice, it’s thinking that what you’re doing brings righteousness to a person. It establishes their own righteousness as apart from Christ. Verse 4,”For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
 
So how do we conclude this? I’ve got about six points here that I’ll run through real fast. I want to hit them again next week. Point one: grace and works are contrasted. They’re mutually exclusive. It’s either one or the other.  Second point: Grace means the honor and the merit and the effort belongs to God, not to the individual. The recipient has done nothing whatsoever, no choice, no action, and no mental attitude to cause God to give it to them. Within Calvinism they want to make faith meritorious. They say faith is what God gives the elect so only the elect can have the right kind of faith. But that’s not what Scripture teaches. Faith is non-meritorious. It’s like a tube. It’s what’s at the other end of the tube that has the merit. The merit comes through the tube because the tube is grace and the believer has trusted in God and put that tube in place.
 
Third point: works is not to be understood as simply doing something but doing something that’s considered meritorious in and of itself and producing some righteous quality in the one who does the act. This is what works does. If they go to church, if they get baptized, if they repent in sackcloth and ashes, if they pray seven times a day, if they do something, it’s bringing merit to the individual.
 
The fourth point is that in God’s plan, sin destroys the ability of the sinner to ever perform anything whatsoever that creates meritorious righteousness in the unbeliever. It’s impossible for a human being, who is a descendant of Adam, who has inherited sin and committed sin to ever do anything that’s going to have any merit.
 
Fifth point: the Bible says that all humans are sinners and fall short of God’s character. Their best is as filthy rags [Isaiah 64:6). That’s our works of righteousness, not our works of unrighteousness. Also Isaiah 53:6, “All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him.” In Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
 
Point six: only God can provide the merit. This is done through the crediting of righteousness in justification. The key verses are Isaiah 53:11 where God says, “God shall see the labor of His [the servants’] soul and be satisfied.” God is propitiated by the work of Christ on the cross, by His knowledge [God’s knowledge] My righteous servant shall justify many for He shall bear their iniquities.” Genesis 18:6 says Abraham wasn’t declared righteous because of what he did; he was declared righteous because he believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. The New Testament says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He made Him who knew no sin {to be} sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” 
 
Then Titus 3:5 says, “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” It’s God’s grace. It removes all of that guilt, everything from us that’s not based on who we are or what we’ve done but is based upon what God did in His love for us in sending His Son to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. It’s a free gift. So God’s righteousness is freely given to us who believe, not because we believe but it is through our faith that we receive the grace of God.

Romans 123b-The Lump of Dough and the Olive Tree   

Romans 11:7 NASB95
What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened;
Romans 123b-The Lump of Dough and the Olive Tree Romans 11:7-23  
      
We’re in Romans 11. Tonight we’re going to get into one of the great metaphors, one of the great illustrations in Scripture that relates to God’s plan and purpose for Israel and the relationship between Israel and the church. Actually there’s two metaphors for this. One is more known than the other. The one is the metaphor related to the lump of dough which relates back to the Firstfruit Offering. The second is the olive tree, the domesticated olive tree that has branches that are removed and then branches from the wild olive tree grafted in.
 
It’s really important when you go through this passage to pay attention to some of the details. Ever since we started the Bible Study Methods class on Sunday night I’ve been pointing out little things we’ve covered in the Bible Study Methods class for those who are taking that course. This is a classic example tonight of the importance of looking at some of the details, looking especially at pronouns and the antecedents to pronouns. For those of you who don’t talk grammar, an antecedent is that word to which a pronoun looks back and is directed to. A lot of times you read a verse and you see the “he’s”, the “she’s”, the “their’s”, and the “we’s” and you think you know who it’s describing. It’s very important to nail that down because it helps clarify tremendously the significance of the passage.
 
So we’re going to start off by way of review. Instead of looking at Romans 9, and 10 as well which you’ve heard so many times you probably have that drilled into you, I just want to focus on our understanding of Romans 11. It answers the initial question of whether God has cast away His people. The implication from the way the question is asked implies a negative answer, and it’s an extremely strong negative. Paul puts everything behind it, saying “Absolutely not. God still has a plan for His people.”
 
The thing we have to continue to remember which doesn’t always fit with how we sometimes think about things is that Paul is dealing with God’s plan for Israel as a corporate entity. When God called Abraham, He called him out of Ur of the Chaldees, brought him to a new land and said that it would be through his descendants, his seed, which is that corporate entity, that God would bless the whole world. God would bless the Gentiles through the seed, through the descendants, through that corporate entity of Israel.
 
That’s important to understand. It doesn’t mean that every single Jew is going to be a blessing to the Gentiles. It means that in terms of their corporate destiny, the role of Israel in the plan of God, they would provide blessing to the rest of humanity. Of course, we know this is true primarily because it is through Israel that the Messiah would come. It’s through Israel that the Scriptures were revealed and preserved and passed down through the centuries. This was their corporate destiny.
 
That’s what we’re talking about in Romans 9, not the individual. It’s not God’s plan for every individual Jew but for Israel as a corporate entity. When we see that term Israel we’re also going to see it juxtaposed to Gentile and in the same way. It’s not talking about God’s plan for each and every Gentile but for God’s plan for Gentiles as a corporate entity and Jews as a corporate entity and the focus in this chapter as I continue to point out is not on individual justification or salvation. What’ interesting is that as we study in theology and we study in different groups of interpreters of Scripture what you will discover is that those who are of a consistent reform background, by that I mean they hold to covenant theology and are amillennial or post-millennial, they almost to a man will interpret this passage in terms of individuals and in terms of salvation. If you’re a dispensationalist, if you’re pre-millennial, then you don’t interpret it a certain way because of that but we’re consistently applying the principles of literal, historical, grammatical interpretation to the passage. We come out recognizing that this is not talking about individuals but is talking about that corporate entity.
 
Now we saw that going all the way going back to Romans 9 when Paul first introduced this topic of God’s plan for Israel, he talked about God’s choice, His historical selection of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that God’s plan would be accomplished. It’s important because in that passage we were first introduced to this concept of election and selection by God. When a lot of people see that, they immediately think about individual personal salvation or individual justification. As I pointed out then and have reviewed it many times, that’s not the context. The context is that God was selecting the group, the genetic groups, through whom He would work His plan. He wasn’t selecting Jacob for salvation and Esau for condemnation. He was talking about them in terms of the descendants they represented, looking at them as nations as it’s clearly indicated back in Genesis. 
 
So we get back into this issue. Last week we talked about the important doctrine of the remnant as it’s illustrated with Elijah in verses 3 and 4 and then we looked at the concept of remnant as it plays this important role within Romans 11. Remnant is important to understand because there are two groups within the total body of Israel. There is a non-technical use of remnant, which just refers to survivors or those who remain after something. And then there was a technical use of the word which we saw where remnant described positive believers within the group and within Israel.
 
Most of the corporate entity of Israel as a whole, has rejected God. It was true in the Old Testament time and time and time again. This was the message of the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea challenging and condemning the nation because they have gone after the false gods and idols rather than following God and worshipping Him. There were a few times when a majority was positive but that was just limited to 5 or 6 periods of their history. So within this overall group of Israel, there’s one group that is true Israel. That is the remnant described here in verse 5 at the time of Elijah.
 
Elijah was in the Northern Kingdom plus there were 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal. So we worked through the passages and how this illustrated grace. We reviewed the doctrine of grace last time and saw that grace excludes works. Now works is not a term that simply means you do something. Obviously in some broad sense of the words we perform some act when we get saved. We believe. We do something. We change our mind and make a volitional decision. That’s an act but that is not what we mean by doing works. There’s no merit to that.
 
When we get into the Scripture like this, it’s obvious that works refers to that which people think brings them merit or approval before God. There’s nothing we do that merits salvation. It is not of works at all. It is of grace. Grace is a free gift that completely excludes any basis of merit on the part of the recipient of grace. Now where that’s important is that in a lot of reform or Calvinistic theology faith is viewed as meritorious. Those who believe that also believe that God gives faith to the elect, gives saving faith to the elect. They believe there’s a categorical, qualitative difference between the kind of faith that saves and the kind that doesn’t. We don’t believe that’s right. We believe that faith is faith and faith is non-meritorious.
 
It’s sort of like a tube. We’re saved by grace through faith and what’s at the other end of that tube through which the grace and the faith goes is what has merit. What is at the other end of that tube is Jesus Christ and the Cross. So when we put our faith alone in Christ alone then we are saved on the basis of His work and His righteousness, not on the basis of our works or our righteousness. Not even faith, our decision to believe, has any merit. So verse 6 is one of those key verses that juxtaposes grace and works and makes it clear that works has no place whatsoever in earning or meriting salvation.
 
Now we come to verse 7, which again introduces a rhetorical question as Paul tries to guide our thinking through this issue of what is God’s plan for Israel.  He says, “What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened.” He’s asking what impact, if any, this has on God’s plan for Israel. This verse brings up another important issue, the issue of election. I’ve already reviewed us on this doctrine that the selection here of the elect is not a selection for salvation, individual salvation, but has to do with a selection for God’s plan and purposes within history.
 
So the first term we look at in here that’s important is the term Israel. Israel refers to corporate, ethnic Israel, that is all of those who were descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Paul points out that they have not obtained, as a whole, what they seek. Now what is it that they are seeking? That’s an important question here. A lot of this is going to telescope down to understanding the illustrations of the lump of dough and the olive tree. You’ll hear a lot of people who try to use that to refer to salvation, and it doesn’t refer to salvation. Both of them refer to being in a place of blessing.
 
The olive tree, as we’ll see, is composed of the root and the branches. The root is the Abrahamic covenant. The olive tree does not relate to being in a place of salvation. How do we know that? Well, because some of the branches are broken off. If the root has to do with salvation then breaking off a branch that’s already grown there would be indicative of a loss of salvation, being removed from a place of salvation. There’s no loss of salvation in the Scripture. Once you’re saved, you’re always saved so it’s not talking about salvation. It’s talking about being in the place of blessing.
 
And when Israel rejected the Messiah God removed Israel from being the primary channel of blessing to the world and replaced them with the wild olive branches which represent the Gentiles. Then there will be a future time when ethnic Jews are added back because then, as we know, they will be restored to their place as being the primary channel of blessing. So the main idea here is being in that place of blessing that Israel was to be in as part of the Abrahamic covenant. God told Abraham that “in you, all the world will be blessed.”
 
So when we read this passage saying that Israel has not obtained what it seeks, we ask what were they seeking. Within the context you ought to be really well trained in this by now. Within the context of pentateuchal theology…” How’s that for a couple of big words? “…within the context of what is in the Mosaic Law, if you obey God He says He will bless them and all the nations in the world will come to them and wonder what is different about this particular nation. Now don’t read the New Testament back into that, that they’re seeking salvation or heaven, they’re seeking blessing in the construct of the Torah. So Israel has not obtained that temporal or eternal blessing God promised because they have not been obedient.
 
The contrast here is between corporate Israel, the whole on the one hand that has not obtained what it seeks, which is the blessing, but the elect, those who are the select ones, the remnant, have obtained it. It is through those who are true Israel, as Paul says, that God’s historic plan of blessing to the world is going to take place. Again, it’s not talking about them being selected for justification. It’s talking about the fact that those who are the believing remnant of Israel are the ones who will realize the blessing ultimately in God’s plan of the Abrahamic covenant. That comes in the future.
 
Then we read the phrase “and the rest were blinded.” Now that’s always a fun phrase because it’s the passive voice construction and the word there refers to being made stubborn or hardened or becoming blind. So people want to look and say that God hardened them. Where does it say that? It just says they became hardened. So we’re going to have to talk about that in a little bit but first I will show you Romans 11:7 that says, “What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened.”
 
So Israel has a whole has “not obtained” but there is a remnant, the elect of verse 7, who have obtained. The rest are blinded. That applies to the pronouns “they” or “their” which is used about five times in verses 6-10. “They” and “their” are used 9 times in 11-15. This is talking about corporate Israel. So we need to determine who the “they” and the “their” refer to. The Greek word for “they” and “their” is AUTOS. Guess what? In verses 11-15 we talk about this group, that is the “they” and it’s not talking about the remnant. It’s talking about the group that’s “hardened”. We’ll see that as we go through and identify each of those pronouns.
 
So what is spoken of here is always a reference back to the group that is hardened. So the elect obtained already. We’re not talking about them in the rest of the verses. We’re talking about the rest that did not obtain. When it comes to election, we have basically four options. Let’s just think through this logically. We don’t exegete on the basis of logic but in the terms of understanding things we apply logic in order to include and exclude conclusions that wouldn’t fit with the passages or corollary passages. So the question we have to ask is whether God selects this group on the basis of no criteria whatsoever. In other words we ask if this is simply a random, haphazard selection. God just looks down on the mass of humanity and decides “eenie-minny-mini-mo” who is elect and who isn’t. That would be purely arbitrary. So we are asking if God chooses on the basis of no criteria or some.
 
Now I’m going to ask a rhetorical question if you can find a passage anywhere that says that God elected on the basis of something. The only passage is in 1 Peter 1:2 which says, “Elect according to foreknowledge.” But what does He foreknow? It doesn’t tell us. It just says that aspect of His omniscience that knows all events and knows future events and future contingencies that that is related to His choice. So yes, we can say that He obviously makes a selection on the basis of some criteria. It’s not an indiscriminate, arbitrary choice without basis. So it’s got to be based on something.
 
Secondly, if God chooses on the basis of some criteria it can either be on the basis of a meritorious criteria in which case His choice is based on works, which is merit in the one He’s choosing. Or it is non-meritorious in the one that’s choosing. Faith is non-meritorious. The object of faith is Christ. That’s the third point, faith is non-meritorious and the object of faith has the merit and that’s Jesus Christ. If God chose us because of faith, then that would mean that our faith would be the cause of His selection and that would be meritorious. But passages like Ephesians 2:8 and 9 do not say because of faith, they say “through faith” indicating that faith is merely a means of appropriating something and it’s not the cause. The ultimate cause is the love of God. The basis for it is the work of Christ on the cross.
 
So the Bible never really tells us per se that we’re elect according to foreknowledge of something. It never defines that which is the fourth point. There’s no clear evidence of what this foreknowledge relates to. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there. Just because there’s no clear statement doesn’t mean there’s no criteria. There is a criteria but God just doesn’t clearly tell us what it is. We deduct it by using deductive logic from comparing Scripture with Scripture. The selection is according to God’s own choice as Sovereign God. He has the right to choose what people groups He’s going to work through and which ones he’s not. He does it in accordance with His foreknowledge.
 
When you look at the history of the Jewish people you wouldn’t say that they’re a spiritually elite group, the best of the whole bunch of human beings. You wouldn’t say that at all but God chose them for His purposes based on what He knew. We’re not privy to all of the factors of His knowledge that weigh into that. Otherwise you’re going to say it’s totally irrational. It’s either rational based on knowledge or it’s irrational. We don’t live in an irrational universe, according to the Scriptures.
 
So now we have to understand this issue about they became “blind”. How do they become blind or hardened? What’s the mechanics for understanding that?  We have a couple of options. Option one God was the one hardening them. Is there a contextual argument for that? Look at verse 9, which is a quote from the Old Testament. Actually there are three verses here that Paul weaves together. So contextually there’s an argument here to say that God is the One who in some way brings this blindness. The question we then have to address is whether this it’s a direct or indirect act of God.
 
Does God just say that He’s going to make them spiritually blind and He’s going to make the elect spiritually awake? That’s how Calvinists handle this. But that’s not how the Bible handles this. What we see is that God does this indirectly through certain laws of obedience and disobedience, which He built into the framework of human history and the makeup of man.
 
We can go back to a passage I’ve covered before in Romans 1:18 and following. We’re told that God’s wrath, His judgment in history, is against all “ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth.” This is not a gnomic statement as some would take it, that all men would suppress truth and righteousness, but that His wrath is revealed against those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Paul deals with those kinds of groups in the rest of this chapter and the next chapter.
 
He goes on to say, “Because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” Even the most ardent atheist knows in his heart of hearts, in the center of his soul, that God exists and God will hold him accountable. That’s why they get so angry whenever anybody sort of tweaks that. Somewhere, deep inside them all of a sudden God starts to rattle the door of the cellar that they’ve stuffed Him in and then they get all upset and angry about it. What Paul says is that everybody knows God exists. It’s not verbal revelation. It’s not that He’s given this to them in sentences and propositions. It’s a nonverbal revelation but it’s enough when you look at the heavens and the earth, you know that somebody made it. God makes that evident within a person, not just outside them.
 
“Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God.” See, that’s negative volition. They’re rejecting God. They’re being disobedient to God. As soon as they’re disobedient to God it sets a course of reactions in motion. As soon as they disobey God it sets this course of action into motion and the thing that happens is that then they become futile or empty in their thinking and their foolish hearts become darkened. What’s the first thing in the chain of events? It’s their negative volition which leads to a darkened heart. Blinded and darkened hearts are related. Being spiritually blinded means that spiritual light is removed from your heart. What precedes the darkening of the heart is negative volition.
 
Then we see a series of things that take place. “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; {they are} gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”
 
There are three stages here into a descent of depravity. First of all God gave them up to uncleanness. Then He gave them up further to another level of depravity and then God gave them over to a debased mind. As a result of the initial negative volition of the human the result is that we go into negative volition and the heart is blinded, not because God intervenes and arbitrarily blinds somebody’s mind because this is the way God has created things in the universe.
 
So we come to Romans 11:8 where Paul is weaving together three quotes from the Old Testament. These are from Deuteronomy 29:4, Isaiah 29:10 and Psalm 69:22. What he is showing here is that God has given them a spirit of stupor because that’s the result of their negative volition. The non-remnant has hardened themselves against the truth because they have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. As a result of this, God has given them over to the consequences of their negative volition.
 
Deuteronomy 29:4 says, “Yet to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to know, nor eyes to see, nor ears to hear.” This is saying that because of their spiritual rebellion against God they have become spiritually obtuse. Isaiah 29:10, “For the LORD has poured over you a spirit of deep sleep, He has shut your eyes, the prophets; And He has covered your heads, the seers.” Notice the blindness has to do with a restriction of revelation to the prophets and the seers. God is blinding them by not giving them the truth.
 
I think this is happening in our nation today. I think we’re seeing this again and again because in contrast to a generation ago when we had dozens and dozens of young men who wanted to serve the Lord and learn how to teach the Bible and go to seminary, today we have many within our Bible teaching churches who don’t want to learn how to teach the Bible. They want to take the lazy way out and just learn off the internet. They don’t want to go to seminary. Now some online education courses are getting better. Pastor David Roseland who has been taking some Hebrew courses, secular Hebrew, through one of the educational organizations in Israel says their pedagogy and technology is just remarkable. Some of that kind of thing is available but it’s hard to find.
 
And you can’t replace the dynamic of men in a group learning the language together, encouraging one another in the process, as they struggle together to learn the language. I think today we have fewer and fewer men who want to become pastors. A lot of men in my generation who thought about it but didn’t go into the ministry are waking up realizing they should have gone to seminary years ago and want to learn now. But they’re in their fifties, sixties, and seventies already. They’re a little late. They’re not going to have a very lengthy ministry but at least they’re waking up.
 
But we have a younger generation in their teens, twenties, and thirties where the pastoral ministry is not a career option for them. This is tragic. I think this is God removing pastors who want to teach the Bible as judgment on this generation. Just as He did with Israel. He closed their eyes to prophets. He limited the number of prophets that were there to reveal truth to them. He covered their head, that’s a parallelism there as a synonym for prophets.
 
Then we get into Romans 11:9 and Paul goes on to quote from David in Psalm 69:22, “And David says, “LET THEIR TABLE BECOME A SNARE AND A TRAP, AND A STUMBLING BLOCK AND A RETRIBUTION TO THEM. LET THEIR EYES BE DARKENED TO SEE NOT, AND BEND THEIR BACKS FOREVER.” So in the quote Paul just quotes from the first part. What this idiom is saying is that they’re going to become trapped and ensnared by their own actions and by their own choices. The result of their negative volition is going to be spiritual insensitivity and spiritual darkness. They’re going to increasingly live within a fantasy world as they suppress the truth in unrighteousness and the result is that they’re going to be living in a world of their own imagination and they’ll have instability, unhappiness, and fear.
 
This is the picture we see in Psalm 69:3. They unstable and they can’t see the truth. They’re doubled over with anxiety. Our nation is so drugged now. The number of people who are on all manner of emotionally stabilizing drugs is because we have a nation of people basically scared to death. They’re depressed. They don’t know how to face life and handle life from the context of their own character and their own culture and so the only way they can manage to face each and every day is to have a prescription. This is how they make life work. That’s their problem-solving device.
 
What we see in verses 8, 9, and 10 is a description, not of the remnant, but a description of the rest. This is the group that is hardened against the gospel. They have rejected God’s grace in favor of works, as was stated by Paul back in chapter 10, verses 2 and 3. Then we get a quote here from Sanday and Headlam, “The rejection of Israel then is only partial. Yet still there is a great mass of the nation on whom God’s judgment has come.” Okay so there’s one small group that’s a remnant and a great mass that has been the recipient of God’s judgment. It goes on, “What of these? Is there no further hope for them? Is this stumbling of theirs such as will lead to a final and complete fall? By no means. It is only temporary, a working out of the Divine purpose.” That’s what we see in Romans 11 starting in verse 11.
 
Now in this section let’s look at some of the Greek words transliterated to see the flow of the argument here. If you know this in the New King James Version, in verse11, Paul says, “I say then, have they stumbled that they should fall?’ But the word for all is the word PIPTO and the next sentence says, “Certainly not but through their fall…” But it’s not PIPTO, it’s PARAPTOMA which means their transgression. It should be translated, “I say then have they stumbled with the result that they have fallen irretrievably or irrecoverably? Certainly not but through their transgression…” What’s their transgression? The rejection of the Messiah. “Through their transgression to provoke them to jealousy salvation has come to the Gentiles.
 
Now this isn’t talking about justification, individual salvation. How do we know? Because not every Gentile is saved. What we’re talking about is the opening up of God’s plan, Phase 1, 2, and 3, to the Gentiles. This is what we’ve studied in Acts. Paul was selected to be the apostle to the Gentiles. He’s selected for that and to take the gospel to the Gentiles. The Church is going to include both Jews and Gentiles on an equal status, equal footing within the body of Christ. So as we look at this particular passage here we see that the focus continues to be on corporate Israel and the Gentiles.
 
In the first 10 verses what we saw that while Israel as a nation, as a corporate entity, failed to attain righteousness, it was not permanent. There were many Jewish people, thousands and thousands who did accept Jesus as Messiah. Down through the generations there have been thousands who have. In fact, during the period called The Enlightenment in the 18th century, there was an incredible amount of assimilation. Somewhere in the percentage of 60% of Jewish marriages today are outside the faith. Fifty years ago it was less than 17%. That’s a huge shift.
 
What we’re seeing today is very similar to what was going on in the late 1700’s. In fact, the Jewish community in Berlin was just devastated because of the large number of Jews who were just assimilating into the culture and becoming Christians. One of the most well-known Jews of that era was Moses Mendelssohn. His son, Felix Mendelssohn, was a well-known composer and musician. He converted to Christianity as did every one of Moses Mendelssohn’s children. They all converted to Christianity. Moses Mendelssohn is considered the father of Reform Judaism which was a liberal form that rejected orthodoxy and basically all the tenets of Judaism in favor of one that was consistent with the new enlightenment in Europe. This was like a huge shift that occurred in the Jewish community in Europe in the late 1700’s.
 
So there have been thousands and thousands of Jews that have become Christians, who have recognized that Jesus is the Messiah. They’re the remnant. The vast majority have not. They’re the ones that are hardened. So when Paul says in verse 11, “I say then, have they stumbled?” To whom does the preposition “they” refer? That’s the key question. The “they” doesn’t refer to the remnant, does it? They didn’t stumble. The “they” refers to the remainder of the Jews, the corporate group of Jews that had rejected the Messiahship of Jesus. So when we read through this section we have to remember that what Paul is talking about is God’s plan, what’s going to happen to this entity who because of their negative volition has been removed from being the primary source of blessing to the world. We’re not talking about getting to heaven here. We’re talking about their role within God’s plan as the means of blessing to the world.
 
So Paul asks if they’ve stumbled so they should fall and the way he sets up this question indicates a negative answer. It’s a rhetorical question and the negative answer that you expect is definitely a “no”. Paul is extremely adamant about his answer. So we have the question asked implying a negative answer which he gives and the significance of the grammar between the verbs for stumbling and falling indicates that the “that” there is the Greek word HINA which is a final purpose clause which indicates have they stumbled with a result that they should have fallen? And the implication is “permanently”. I think the NIV translates it something like “have they fallen beyond recovery?” Did Israel stumble, that is, did this non-remnant portion stumble that they might fall irretrievably or completely or beyond recovery. Paul’s answer is vehemently “no, not at all.”
 
The cause of the fall is then given in the next phrase, “by means of their transgression to provoke them to jealousy, salvation has now come to the Gentiles. So Paul’s question is whether the hardened of Israel stumbled only to fall irretrievably? No, it’s not beyond recovery. There are lots of pronouns here. Have they [hardened Israel] stumbled that they [hardened Israel] should fall permanently? Certainly not but that through their [hardened of Israel] transgression to provoke them [the hardened of Israel] to jealousy, salvation has come to the Gentiles. So God has a plan and he says, “So you’re going to reject my plan for you, the plan to put you in a place of blessing to all the world? Well, I’m going to do an end run. I’m going to bring the Gentiles whom you despise and they will become the path of blessing and this is going to ultimately make you so jealous that you will ultimately return back to me. But it’s not going to be without a lot of difficulty.”
 
Romans 11:12 then states, “Now if their transgression is riches for the world and their failure is riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be!” Because the Jews have been taken out of the place of blessing, now that rich blessing of God is flowing to the whole world. So if their transgression is riches for the world and their failure is riches for the Gentiles, notice corporately, how much more their fullness? Now one of the reasons we know that this isn’t talking about individual salvation is not every Gentile was saved, neither is every Jew hardened. So we’re talking about God’s corporate plans for each of these groups in relation to His blessing, not salvation. So “fullness” here can have the meaning of fullness, wholeness, or completeness in contrast to something partial. That’s the situation we have with Israel right now is that there is a corporate removal from the place of blessing so there needs to be a corporate restoration and completion.
 
Then in verses 13 and 14, we see a parenthesis. “But [for] I am speaking to you who are Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry, if somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them.” It’s very important to note that this is a parenthesis. The failure to note this has led to some really odd conclusions. The fact that Paul is an apostle to the Gentiles doesn’t mean he wasn’t ever supposed to witness to Jews. Just like He didn’t say to Peter not to ever talk to the Gentiles. Remember it was Peter who went to Cornelius, a Gentile. Peter’s primary ministry was to Jews but that doesn’t mean he never gave the gospel to Gentiles. The same thing, in reverse, is true to Paul.
 
Then in Romans11:15, “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will {their} acceptance be but life from the dead?” See the idea here is that reconciliation of the world explains the idea of riches to the world, which is the gospel going out to the world. So if removing them from being the primary blessing to the world brings an increase of blessing to the whole world, how much more blessing there will be to the whole world when they’re brought back into the fold and they become a primary channel of blessing again. Then the blessing will be multiplied even more to the whole world.
 
So that’s his main idea that for God’s blessing to the world to be fulfilled, then Israel needs to be fully restored to that place of blessing. Let’s go back to verse 15, “For if [EI GAR].” This is an “if” and it’s true so the GAR is the explanation and it’s true that their being cast away led to the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be?” Their acceptance refers to when the remnant ultimately becomes the whole, the salvation of corporate Israel, then that will bring greater blessing to all.
 
Now we get into the illustration in verse 16. This is actually an on-going thought. It’s not an explanation but it indicates he’s breaking his thought to bring in an illustration. “If the first piece {of dough} is holy, the lump is also; and if the root is holy, the branches are too.” What’s being described here is the firstfruit offering described in Numbers 15:19-20, “Then it shall be, that when you eat of the food of the land, you shall lift up an offering to the LORD. Of the first of your dough you shall lift up a cake as an offering; as the offering of the threshing floor,” This is the exact same phrase Paul uses so he’s talking about the firstfruit.
 
Now the firstfruit is holy. What does that word “holy” mean? Does that mean it’s pure and it’s righteous? No, it means it’s set apart. We’re not talking about making Israel holy in a purified, righteous, salvation sense. It’s talking about setting it apart to God. So you have the whole lump of dough. You bread bakers know what I’m talking about. You have that whole lump of dough and if you take out just part of it, that’s the firstfruit, but that is holy and it has set apart and sanctified the whole.
 
 Then he changes the metaphor to a plant. In the second half of verse 16, he says, “And if the root is holy, so are the branches.” What he’s pointing out here is that the whole lump represents the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The natural branches on the olive tree also represent the physical, ethnic descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The part that is separated in the lump in the dough is related to the remnant which also sanctifies something larger, it sanctifies the whole, not in the sense of personal righteousness or holiness but in the sense that it’s still set apart for the purpose of God.
 
In the whole imagery of the firstfruit, the firstfruit was set apart to God and by that action the entire harvest would be said to be set apart to God. In the same way with the olive tree imagery, the root is said to be set apart to God and by the branches participation in the root, they are said to be set apart to God. Now this is important because in the parallelism of the imagery of the lump and the imagery of the olive tree, we see that the only thing that Paul could be talking about is that the root and the firstfruit is the Abrahamic covenant. It’s the Abrahamic covenant that establishes God’s plan for blessing through Israel. The patriarchs and their descendants were set apart to God as a chosen nation and that it was through them that the blessing of God, especially in salvation, would be channeled to all mankind. So what happens in Divine judgment is that because of Israel’s negative volition, if some of the branches, the natural, ethnic descendants of Israel are broken off, that is they’re removed from that special place of being a blessing to the world.
 
Verse 17, “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree.” So the Gentiles are the wild olive tree branches that are grafted in so that now we are a channel of blessing to the world. But that’s a temporary state. We’re warned in Romans 11:18, “Do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, {remember that} it is not you who supports the root, but the root {supports} you.” This is referring to the Abrahamic covenant.
 
This is why we still honor Israel, still honor the Jewish people even though we disagree on critical theological issues, we still support them because they are the natural branches and related to the root, or Abrahamic covenant. Romans 11:19 says, “You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” You’re thinking you must be special because God removed those branches so I could be grafted in. That’s the thinking of anti-Semitism. Paul says, “Quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be conceited, but fear, for if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either.” You Gentiles didn’t do anything special. It’s by faith. It’s non-meritorious. If God were willing to remove ethnic Israel from being the channel of blessing, what’s to keep Him from removing Gentiles? I just wanted to get through that illustration. We’ll come back next time and review it a little more. It really sets the stage for what follows.

Romans 124b-The Lump of Dough and Olive Branches

Romans 11:15 NASB95
For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?
Romans 124b-The Lump of Dough and Olive Branches Romans 11:15-27
 
Let’s turn in our Bibles to Romans 11 where we’re continuing in this tremendous chapter that deals with the future of Israel. Now we’re looking at the lump of dough and the olive branches, two great illustrations of Israel and of God’s grace and blessing. It’s so important to understand these illustrations. As I’ve been reading in various commentaries and various other sources I have become aware of the fact that so many misidentify and they just don’t deal with it textually. That is so important.
 
This has always been a favorite passage of mine because I wrote a lengthy paper on this when I was in the doctoral program in Dallas Seminary. I was so pleased because one of my favorite professors told me to send it in and get it published. I did and it was published. I’ve always enjoyed this crucial chapter and it is really amazing how many people really do miss this because we, as evangelicals, are so focused on salvation that we want everything to be about people getting justified. I’ve kept emphasizing all the way through Romans 9 through 11 that these chapters are really not about every individual Jew getting saved, they’re not about who’s getting justified individually at all. It’s about God’s plan for Israel and the Jewish people and that He hasn’t abrogated or broken His covenant with Abraham and discarded His plan for them. If you understand that that’s what he’s talking about and interpret everything within that structure then it makes more sense.
 
I’m going to point out that from the illustration that if he is talking about people getting saved then we can lose our salvation. That’s all I have to say about it so far. If this is about getting justified then this passage is teaching that people can lose their justification, but it’s not teaching that. It’s not Scriptural so it can’t be talking about getting justified. As I pointed out before, Romans 11 answers the question of whether God has permanently cast away His people. The answer is NO, not at all. God still has a plan for national, ethnic Israel. He hasn’t replaced them.
 
That’s the essence of what we studied at the beginning of this section on replacement theology. God hasn’t replaced them in a permanent sense. We live in an age that some have called the great parenthesis. There is a pause in God’s plan and purpose for Israel and He is doing something in this age in relation to the Gentiles as a corporate entity. He is treating the Gentiles as a group and the Jews as a group, as corporate entities. God is doing something in the Gentiles in the world. Then He’s going to return to that focus on Israel and that happens right after the Rapture.
 
When the Rapture occurs the Church is taken out and immediately after that, God goes back to His plan for Israel. The Rapture doesn’t begin the Tribulation period although a lot of people think it does. The Tribulation is defined as a seven-year period. In Daniel 9:24-27 Daniel gives a specific timetable for the Tribulation. It tells us what the event is that begins it. It tells us what happens in the middle and what happens at the end. At the beginning the Antichrist signs a peace treaty with Israel. That starts things going again.
 
God hit the pause button when the Jews rejected the Messiah on the Day of Pentecost when the Church began. He hits the play button at the instant of the Rapture but there’s a transition period between the Rapture and when the Antichrist signs the peace treaty. I’ve gone through this before, talking about different transition periods. It’s sort of like Christ is the end of the Law on the cross but remember the cross is at Passover and the Church doesn’t start for fifty days until the day of Pentecost, meaning fifty days. So you’ve got a seven-week period there that’s not Church age and technically, it’s not the Age of the Law. It’s still sort of under the umbrella of Israel though because the Church doesn’t begin until Pentecost. So it’s a transition period that’s not fully one dispensation or the other. It’s sort of a hinge or transition period.
 
Now as a result of this new emphasis on the Gentiles the question is raised in the early church, which is probably 50/50 Jewish and Gentile believers at this time. It might even have a higher percentage of Jewish Christians than Gentile Christians. Paul wrote Romans during His third missionary journey so that’s still fairly early, around A.D. 55 or 56. The Temple is still standing in Jerusalem. He’s still going to the synagogues first. He is still starting churches with a large Jewish component at the beginning but there’s also a huge response from Gentiles.
 
We know there are four Jewish-focused epistles in the New Testament. I bet you can’t name them. Hebrews is written to a group that is primarily Jewish and that’s coming out of a priestly background and they had become believers. Then there are two other books that are written to Jews that have almost the same name: First and Second Peter. Peter is writing to those in the dispersion, the diaspora. He uses that technical term. At the end of 1 Peter he gives a greeting to all those in Babylon, which was the second largest Jewish community, the largest outside of Israel itself. Then the fourth one is James. Those are four that are specifically addressed to Jewish believers.
 
So the early church had a very strong Jewish component and a lot of these Jewish background believers are asking the question of what exactly God is doing. This is one of the reasons we’re studying Matthew. He wrote his gospel to explain that Jesus was the Messiah and He came offering the Kingdom and now there’s no Kingdom. Jesus is gone back to heaven. What happened to the Kingdom? That’s Matthew’s focus.
 
These are important issues and themes in the New Testament and so in Romans 11 Paul is describing that yes, indeed, God has a future plan. God is always faithful to His promises. He’s not faithful to His promises always in the way we think he should be faithful to those promises. God’s thinking is not our thinking. God’s ways are not our ways. He knows everything and He’s accomplishing certain purposes that are beyond our comprehension. This is what Paul is explaining in Romans 11.
 
We got down to about verse 15 or 16 last time. I want to go back and pick up the context. In verse 11 Paul draws a conclusion from what he’s said before. He’s asking if they have stumbled so they should fall. This is a repetition of the first question they asked. This whole chapter revolves around these two rhetorical questions. The first one in verse one asks if God has cast away His people in the sense of permanent. Paul answers that with a resounding no.
 
The next question is whether they have stumbled that they should fall. In other words, is this a permanent stumbling? Stumbled here means just a tripping. It’s not the same word we have for stumbling as in Romans 9:32. This is a totally different word. The word here PTAIO means just tripped up a little bit. Did they stumble that they should fall down, PIPTO, and again he responds with a certainly not, not at all. He says that through their fall PARAPTOMA, which means through their transgression. They sinned. Transgression is one of several key words for sin. There’s sin, iniquity, and transgression. These are the three primary words used to describe sin. Each indicates something different so this one is a violation of a commandment, which is a commandment to accept the Messiah.
 
I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation {has come} to the Gentiles, to make them jealous. “If somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them.” I want you to think about something because most everyone in here is a Gentile. The reason that God has brought salvation to Gentiles is to make Jews jealous of the blessing God has given to the Gentiles. It doesn’t seem like that’s working real well right now in the Church Age but it’s amazing when I go back and read periods of history where there have been large amounts of genuine conversions within segments of the Jewish community.
 
What’s happening in chapter 11 is that Paul is beginning to shift from what happens to today and the fulfillment which will happen in the future during the Tribulation period. That’s when this really comes to its fruition. In verse 12, he says, “Now if their transgression is riches for the world and their failure is riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be!” What does he mean by “their fall”? The “their” indicates it’s corporate. It’s not talking about individual Jews rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. It’s talking about the nation rejects Jesus as the Messiah so God removes the nation Israel from being the primary source of blessing in the Church Age. That’s what their fall is. It’s their being removed from being the primary source of blessing.
 
Now that has become riches for the world because what God did when he removes Israel from being in that primary place of blessing, God then brings the Gentiles in and pours out His blessing through the Gentiles. The Gentiles then become the primary source of blessing. Now answer a question for me. When God says that He’s going to bless the world through the Gentiles, is He going to bless the world through every single Gentile? No. Does that mean that most Gentiles are going to get saved? No. That’s another indication that the focus here is not on individuals. It’s on this collective corporate unity. So if the corporate rejection of Christ means that God is going to open the floodgates of blessing to go through the Gentiles.
 
Paul then says, “How much more will their fulfillment [fullness] be?” I pointed out last time that to understand this word for fullness, PLEROMA, we have to understand it in contrast with the word “failure”. The word failure here is a word that indicates a corporate loss and a removal from the place of blessing. The word here that is used for failure HETTEMA is a word that refers to a military loss. It means a defeat of an army, not every individual in the army. The corporate entity lost the battle. So as a result of that defeat by rejecting the Messiah they’re moved out of a place of blessing but when they’re restores to blessing then there will be even more blessing for the world.
 
Then I pointed out last time there’s a parentheses that occurs between verses 12 and 15. Verses 13 and 14 are parenthetical asides. Paul is making a point here. The word at the beginning of verse 15 “for if” is not explaining verse 14, it’s going back to explain verse 12 which says, that if their fall is riches for the world and their failure how much more their riches. Then verse 15 says, “For if their rejection [their being cast away] is the reconciliation of the world, what will {their} acceptance be but life from the dead? Verse 15 continues and explains more of the thought of verse 12, not verses 13 and 14.
 
Verse 15 is talking about the fact that although they’re cast away, they’re not cast away permanently. The illustrations coming will help in understanding that. They’re just removed from being in this place of blessing. So the concept of failure there is the idea of defeat and being removed from that place of blessing and then they’re brought back. The word is only used one other time in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 6:7 which also refers to a military defeat.
 
What Paul wants us to understand here in terms of the role of the Gentiles is that he tells them that he’s speaking an aside to the Gentiles in the Romans church. He tells them that as much as he’s an apostle to the Gentiles “I magnify my ministry if by any means I might provoke to jealousy those who are my flesh and save or deliver some of them.” What he means by that in verse 14 that this is an objective for every evangelist. Whenever you’re witnessing to someone there’s another purpose besides helping them to understand the gospel so that they can go to heaven. The other purpose is so that with every Gentile who gets saved it’s to create a jealousy among the Jews.
 
So that’s a secondary purpose according to what Paul is saying that God showing grace to the Gentiles will eventually makes Jews become jealous and want to return to that place of blessing. So verse 15 says, “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will {their} acceptance be but life from the dead?” This is talking about their corporate position. We covered all of this last time.
 
 Now let’s get to our illustration. Two illustrations that are important to understand. Both illustrations deal with an entire entity and then a part of that entity. The first illustration has to do with a lump of dough and the second has to do with a tree. The tree is composed of roots and branches. So in the first illustration Paul says, “For if the firstfruits…” This is the first part of the grain offering. I was reading several commentaries that referred to this as a cereal offering. I always have trouble when I read something like this where someone calls the grain offering a cereal offering. I just can’t quite get a vision of God sitting up in heaven eating Cheerios. So it’s the grain offering which is at the beginning of the harvest and the first part is then offered to God. It’s taken and made into dough and that bread is baked and then that’s made into an offering to God.
 
That first fruit is like the first born son that’s dedicated. It’s set apart to God. That doesn’t mean that in the case of the first born son that that son is necessarily saved. It’s a way of identifying a value in a family and setting apart the first born as a recognition of the significance the first born plays and the first fruit plays as a dedication to God in the service of God. It’s set apart and holy as an idea of being set apart to the service of God.
 
So it is in the first fruit offering which is mentioned in Numbers 15:19-20, “Then it shall be, that when you eat of the food of the land, you shall lift up an offering to the LORD of the first of your dough and you shall lift up a cake as an offering; as the offering of the threshing floor, so you shall lift it up.” PHURAMA indicates the dough. Both of those terms are used in Romans 11:16. Let’s just think a little bit about this imagery here. The imagery isn’t talking about salvation. The imagery is talking about an entity, the dough, and you’re going to take the first part of it which represents the first initial part of the harvest and this is going to be set apart to the Lord. So the emphasis here is that the whole of the dough is set apart on the basis of this first little small part. So because the first part is set apart it sanctifies the whole. So if the first part is set apart as holy, the lump is also holy. That’s all we have of that imagery. The part that is set apart to God has an impact on the rest.
 
Now we shift gears. We begin the focus on the tree. It says if the root of the tree is set apart to God, the root is not referring to salvation because that would mean all the branches would automatically get saved. We have another problem. If you identify the root as salvation in the illustration and then Paul says branches are going to be broken off. Now if these branches were automatically saved, does that mean they lose their salvation when they’re broken off? Then he warns that at some time in the future God may remove the wild olive branches, which are Gentiles. If we’re focused on individuals then that’s the problem. It falls apart.
 
What we’re talking about is the root and what happens in this figure of the root which is sanctified and it sets apart something larger, the root is used metaphorically in Scripture to refer to the origin or ancestry of something. For example, it talks about the root of Jesse, Jesse being the father of David, David being the head of the Davidic line that culminates in the line of Christ. The root refers to the forefathers. The root represents the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
What sets them apart is that God made an everlasting covenant with Abraham and confirmed it again with Isaac and confirmed it again with Jacob. So God is true to His promises. He sets the nation apart because of what He did with the fathers. Now in Romans 11 skim down your page and look at verse 28, “From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of {God’s} choice [election of Israel as a nation] they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.” Here we have a confirmation in the text that the root of the tree is related to the patriarchs or the fathers.
 
So if the root is set apart so are the branches because the branches come from the root. (Here, Pastor Dean shows a picture of red flowered cherry branches that have been grafted into white-flowered cherry branches to show what grafting looks like.] All the branches feed off the same root systems. It is through one single root system that blesses both Jews and Gentiles. Paul talks about the removal of Israel for a time and replacing them temporarily with wild olive branches and so they became a partaker of the root and the fatness of the olive tree. They both become beneficiaries of the root of the olive tree.
 
God is removing Israel from the place of blessing and bringing in the Gentiles. Then when the times of the Gentiles end, then Israel is grafted back in. Romans 11:17 says, “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree…” We see that the root equals the patriarchs, broken off here is merely removed from the place of blessings, and grafted in is being put back in a place of blessing.
 
Gentiles are told not to look over and think they’re somehow superior to Jews. Don’t get sucked in to some sort of Christian anti-Semitism which sadly characterized too much of church history. Don’t think that somehow you’re better than the Jews because you figured out that Jesus was the Messiah and they didn’t. Well, a lot of Gentiles haven’t figured out that Jesus is the Messiah either. There were a tremendous number of Jews during the life of Christ and during the early Church in Israel that did accept Jesus as the Messiah. And there were a lot that didn’t. The leadership and the majority didn’t but just because the majority didn’t doesn’t mean that the minority was a small percentage.
 
So Paul reminds the Gentiles that they don’t support the root. We are in our position of blessing because of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We’re supported by that root which is the Abrahamic covenant which is the promise of God to bring blessing to the Gentiles through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So in verse 19 he says, “You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” I must be better than you.
 
In 11:20 Paul recognizes that while there may be some truth there because Gentiles did respond to the gospel more than Jews did but the Jewish nation was broken off because of unbelief, not because of inherent superiority among the Gentiles. Verse 20, “Quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith.” So he brings it back to the issue of faith, non-meritorious faith. It’s not something the Gentiles can boast about because it’s not something in you. It’s the object of faith, Jesus Christ. So don’t be haughty. Don’t get into arrogance but rather give into fear that is submission to God’s authority.
 
He explains that even more. “For if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either.” If you become self-satisfied and you reject God’s plan and you become arrogant, then God will bring judgment upon you as Gentiles and remove you from that place of priority. Therefore he says, “Behold then [consider] the kindness and severity of God…” Now the word “severity” is a Greek word which indicates rigor or consistency. It’s not that God is a harsh judge and a mean disciplinarian. The emphasis is that God is consistent with His righteousness. He’s going to be the righteous judge. So we need to recognize that if God in His righteousness brought judgment on the people that He loved, the people that He brought into existence through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the people he calls the “apple of His eye” in the Old Testament, if He brought discipline and judgment upon them then the implication is why wouldn’t He bring it upon Gentiles?
 
So God is good and He is consistent with His righteousness on “those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness.” The implication there is that judgment will come if you reject God’s grace. “Then; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off.” He’s talking to them as a group, not to you as an individual but in terms of the corporate entity of the Church. The implication there is almost a warning that at one point the church will apostatize and there will be judgment upon the Church, upon Gentiles, and God will shift the plan back to Israel.
 
Now, verse 23, “And they also, if they [the Jewish nation] do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.” He’s not talking about the remnant of Jews who responded to the gospel. So now he’s talking about corporate Israel that has rejected the gospel. They will be grafted in and brought back into the place of blessing. Verse 24, “For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural {branches} be grafted into their own olive tree?” This is a great verse for it shows that God’s plan for Israel is that He hasn’t permanently rejected them. There is a plan for their future restoration.
 
One of the great things that happened in history after the Protestant Reformation was a rise in Britain that has come to be called British Restorationism. That is really a term that we might refer to as proto or early Zionism. Often today we think of Zionism as simply the product of Theodor Herzl who’s considered to be the father of modern Zionism but that’s from a Jewish perspective. Actually there were many forerunners that set the stage for Theodor Herzl, one of whom was an American businessman from up in Michigan whose name was William Blackstone. He had a petition written that was signed by a huge number of leaders and politicians in America to petition for Benjamin Harrison, president in 1888, that the United States should support the return of the Jews to their historic homeland.
 
Theodor Herzl doesn’t hold the first Zionist Congress until 1897. He doesn’t write his book, DER JUDENSTAAT, until 1896 which is a benchmark for the beginning of Jewish Zionism. In fact, one of the early supporters was a Supreme Court judge named Lewis Brandeis. He was a very strong Zionist and advocate for Israel and very well known, for whom Brandeis University is named. Brandeis said in a speech that Theodor Herzl did not found Zionism. That honor goes to William Blackstone, who was a Christian and his love for Israel is because he read and understood what was going on in Romans, chapter 11.
 
So you have this great movement which really began in Britain but it had different parts in different areas of Europe. There were some Lutherans in Sweden and Germany, some others that after the Reformation Anabaptists groups came along also. The more consistently they interpreted the Scripture the more they began to realize that the term Israel meant Israel and the Jewish people and that it didn’t mean the church. They saw the Church wasn’t a code name for spiritual Israel from the Old Testament, that Israel really meant Israel. They began to interpret passages like this as indicating that God was going to restore the Jewish people to their historic homeland. Then they read and began to develop their understanding of prophecy and began to realize that God would restore Israel to their land and give them a Kingdom and that the end times of the return of Jesus would coincide with this restoration of the Jewish people to their land.
 
But it wasn’t just Christians that were coming to understand this. There were some Jews who came to understand this as well. Often today in the arguments and discussions that go on and sort of the fear factor that comes out of the Jewish community toward Christians is that they think the only reason Christians want to get Jews back in to the land is because they think if they get us all back in the land Jesus will come back and Jesus will kill all the Jews. No Christian has ever believed that. Christians believe that when Jesus returns there’s going to be a restoration of the Jewish people to the land. The restoration of the Jewish people to the land does not cause the return of Jesus. There’re connected events but not a cause/effect event.
In the 19th century there were a lot of the British Restorationists were either post-millennial or a-millennial. It didn’t necessarily come out of a pre-millennial view, even though there were a lot of pre-millennial at the time. It wasn’t necessarily related to any kind of view of prophecy is the point I’m making. They weren’t motivated by the same prophetic timetable. In fact they had more of a historicist view of pre-millennialism than a futurist view. A futurist view is that we would interpret all of the prophecies of Scripture as being future and all of Revelation as being future. Historicists would look at Revelation 7 and say that was in the Middle Ages. They might say Revelation 8 is at a later time. They think we’re about in Revelation 12:3 today. They try to find where we are today in terms of the signs of the times and that sort of thing.
 
Most Christian Zionists were that kind of pre-millennialists. They weren’t dispensational futurists. In fact, that’s why the historicist pre-mils were a lot more active in trying to set the stage for Jews to go back to the land because in some sense those groups did feel like the Jews needed to be back there and that would set the stage and Jesus would come back. So they wanted to help it along. So even though they tried to help it along for many times it didn’t happen until God was ready to start allowing different things to take place that moved the timetable along.
 
What we see is that when God is ready, He starts the movement in history. It actually started in the mid-1600 when you had a Jewish rabbi by the name of Manasseh Ben Israel who believed that Daniel said that the Messiah couldn’t come until the Jews get back in the land. He got that also from Deuteronomy and Isaiah. He’s not thinking in terms of Christianity but he was saying the same thing that some of the Christians were saying so they were able to mutually support one another in bringing the Puritan government under Cromwell to a realization that they needed to allow Jews back into England.
 
Under Edward II they had been expelled from England and even though there were a few of the Murano Jews from Spain, that is Jews who had made a superficial conversion to Christianity but still practiced Judaism in secret. You didn’t have very many Jews in England at all. It was due to the pressure of Puritans who were coming to the realization that God had a future plan for His people, Israel, and Manasseh Ben Israel that put pressure to let the Jews return. In fact, Cromwell invited Manasseh Ben Israel to come to spend time with him and he addressed some of the Puritan leaders from the Parliament. This put pressure on the leaders of England. They didn’t have an official policy to let the Jews back in because there was another problem with that. If you let the Jews in and you’re going to tolerate them then how were they going to tolerate the other heretics? They didn’t want to tolerate Christian heretics but they knew they needed to let the Jews back in because they were God’s people. So they sort of had a backdoor reversal policy. They said, “You know, let’s sort of rewrite history a little bit. We’re going to call Edward II’s law an executive action and that only applied then and it doesn’t apply now.” So as you see they just kind of winked at it and let the Jews come back in. Within another twenty years there were open synagogues in London and from there the Jewish community really flowered and grew within England. That laid the foundation for what became known as full bore British Restorationism by the late 1700s and 1800s.
 
God is able to graft them in again, Paul states. He then goes on the explain this in verse 24, “For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural {branches} be grafted into their own olive tree?” He uses what’s called an A FORTIORI argument or an argument from strength. He’s saying that if God is going to restore Israel, that’s the natural way, so if natural branches are grated into their own olive tree certainly they’ll take hold and produce fruit.
 
He goes on to say in verse 25, “For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery—so that you will not be wise in your own estimation—that a partial hardening [blindness] has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in As we know the word “mystery” does not refer to a whodunit, not some riddle you have to figure out, but the word “mystery” describes previously unknown revelation. In the Old Testament God did not let it be known that tin the future Israel would reject the Messiah and there would be a time of blessing, a parentheses there, between the first and second coming. If God had told them they were going to reject the Messiah they wouldn’t have really had a freewill choice when the Messiah came. They would say God said they would do it so they did. But they had no idea what was going to happen. They had a true choice.
 
God knew what would happen and that they would reject Christ so He said this is the mystery that was not revealed in the Old Testament that Israel would be removed from the place of blessing and then restored to the place of blessing. So he says that blindness in part would occur until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Now this is an interesting little Greek word here, ACHRI. It doesn’t mean “I’m going to work until 5:00 and then stop and everything stops.” It has an implication that it doesn’t just look at the end time but it looks at the fact that when that end time comes things are going to change. There’s going to be a transformation of things. It’s looking at what happens after that terminal point.
 
The implication here is that after the fullness of the Gentiles has come in the blindness will disappear from Israel and they will receive sight. I’ll show you some other places where this is used in the same way. Look at Luke 1:20. The angel is telling Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, that because he questioned the angel’s announcement that Elizabeth was going to give birth he was going to be struck speechless until John the Baptist was born. “And behold, you shall be silent and unable to speak until the day when these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their proper time.” The implication is that he was going to be able to speak after that. See the emphasis isn’t on just the end point but that things are then going to change back to the way things were before.
 
Matthew 24:38 Jesus is talking about using the flood as an illustration of the normative life in the tribulation period, “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark.” What happened then? Then they quit getting married, they quit eating and having parties. Why? Because they were dead. Everything changed.
 
1 Corinthians 11:26 says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” We celebrate the Lord’s death until He comes but once He comes we don’t do that anymore. There’s a change in circumstances and there’ll be a new set of circumstances, a reversal of those conditions after that point in time.
 
Paul says, “All Israel will be saved.” There’s going to be a change of circumstances. What’s interesting is this word “and so”. It’s the same word we have in John 3:16 which everyone here knows. “For God so loved the world.” That’s the word “so”. Some people want to translate that, “God loved the world so much.” That isn’t what it says. This word HOUTOS means “in such a way”. Now sometimes it can refer to something in the previous verse but most of the time it refers to “in this manner I am about to tell you.” Or as we say in Texas, “in this way I’m fixing to tell you.” So it’s saying this is how it’s going to take place.
 
In Romans 11:26 Paul is saying “in this manner all Israel will be saved.” It’s not talking about justification because the point described here doesn’t go back to the Cross, it looks forward to the Second coming. The word saved as we’ve seen doesn’t refer to individual justification in Romans; it refers to Phase 3 ultimate deliverance or physical deliverance. Sometimes it refers to the spiritual life. So what we read in Romans 11:26 is that we’re talking about how corporate Israel is not in the place of blessing but they’re going to be brought back into that place.
 
Well, how’s that going to happen? He says “This is how it’s going to happen. The deliverer will come out of Zion.” This is a Second Coming passage. The Messiah will come out of Zion and he will turn away ungodliness from Jacob. Verse 27, “THIS IS MY COVENANT WITH THEM, WHEN I TAKE AWAY THEIR SINS.” That’s not talking about the cross. That’s talking about when God establishes His covenant with them.
 
What covenant is that? It’s the New Covenant. This is seen because the language that’s used here comes out of three verses in the Old Testament, Isaiah 59:20 and 21 and Isaiah 27:9. Isaiah 59:20-21 says, “A Redeemer will come to Zion, And to those who turn from transgression in Jacob,” declares the LORD.” He’s coming to deliver them. Then the next verse says, “As for Me, this is My covenant with them,” says the LORD: “My Spirit which is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring,” says the LORD, “from now and forever.” This is when God in the New Covenant pours out His Spirit on Israel at the Second Coming.
 
Isaiah 27:9 says, “Therefore through this Jacob’s iniquity will be forgiven; And this will be the full price of the pardoning of his sin: When he makes all the altar stones like pulverized chalk stones; {When} Asherim and incense altars will not stand.” This is talking about the national deliverance and salvation of Israel, not individual Jews getting saved but the corporate or national deliverance will come when the nation accepts Christ nationally. They rejected Him nationally back in A.D. 33. It doesn’t mean every single Jew was unsaved but as a nation they had a national sin. That national sin has to be dealt with. This national sin is dealt with when they repent and they call upon the name of the Lord and then the Lord comes to deliver them in the Second Coming.
 
Then we come to Romans 11:28 and 29 which say, “From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of {God’s} choice [election] they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” You’ve heard that verse applied so many times, usually about spiritual gifts. There may be an implication there but He’s talking here about God’s call of Israel and God’s covenant with Israel is irrevocable. God’s not going to go back on it. This whole thing is tied up with the fact that when God makes promises to you and to me in His Word to take care of us, to sustain us, to strengthen us, to help us, God does not go back on His promises. They are ours irrevocably.
We’ll come back next time and look at verse 30 and following to get into the rest of this chapter. The closing part is a tremendous praise to God and focus upon the wisdom and knowledge of God’s plan. That also brings us to the end of this section of Romans 9-11 and it also brings us to an end to the instructional part of Romans. Starting in Romans 12 Paul shifts to something that is the application of what he’s taught in Romans 1 – 11 so we’ll get to that next time.

Romans 125b-To Whom Be the Glory Forever

Romans 11:33 NASB95
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!
Romans 125b-To Whom Be the Glory Forever Romans 11:33-36
 
Before we get started in Romans tonight I want to take just a couple of minutes to talk about the Pre-Trib Rapture Conference that was held in Dallas this past week. West Houston Bible Church and Dean Bible Ministries supplied video equipment and other equipment to help out and we have volunteers to help out with a number of things. We truly play a very important role in what we do to bring about this conference.
 
There were probably close to four hundred people in attendance this year. Most of the sessions were pretty well crowded. The focus of the schedule this year was on Israel, what the Bible teaches about Israel. I’m just going to review a little bit how the schedule went. The first morning Dr. David Hocking, a pastor in Southern California for many years, spoke. He’s a huge mountain of a guy. He probably casts a shadow over Goliath. He’s very strong speaker. He spoke on why the modern state of Israel is related to Bible prophecy. He did an excellent job of showing from the Scripture why Jerusalem and why Israel is important. I missed that section because I was just getting over a bad chest cold so I used the time to rest a little and continue to work on my own presentation.
 
The second speaker, for those who could understand his Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, Brooklyn, California, and Texan accent, was Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum. He spoke on the prophetic promise of the land of Israel in the Abrahamic covenant. Tommy Ice did an excellent job of organizing these presentations even though he said he really didn’t think about coordinating them but they came together in quite a significant order. Arnold started off with the promise of the Land in the Abrahamic covenant. The Abrahamic covenant promises a specific piece of real estate to Abraham and his descendants. So he went through all of those passages quite exhaustively showing that the Abrahamic Covenant is really the foundation for the land promise in the Old Testament. And that Israel’s ownership of the land is given by the One who owns the entire earth, which is God. He has the sovereign right of disposal of property and he has given that land to the descendants to of Abrahamic, Isaac, and Jacob. In the Mosaic Covenant there is a condition and that is that if they are not spiritually obedient then they are going to be kicked out of the land. So the only way to live in God’s land is to live in God’s land in God’s way. Arnold did a great job of substantiating that, as always.
 
Following lunch Charlie Clough was the third speaker on Monday. He spoke about the prophetic promise of the land in the Land Covenant in Deuteronomy 29 and 30. Now what Charlie did was a little bit different from what a lot of people might expect. There’s a debate within contemporary Old Testament scholarship about whether or not there’s an actual separate land covenant or Palestine Covenant as it used to be called by older dispensationalists. I usually refer to it as the land covenant or the real estate covenant. Deuteronomy 29 starts off by saying there’s another covenant other than the one given at Horeb. Horeb is another name for Sinai so that implies there’s a different covenant aside from the Sinai covenant that’s given in Deuteronomy 29. A lot of contemporary Old Testament scholars want to argue that the other covenant that is being discussed there in Deuteronomy 29 is sort of Moses revision of the Sinai covenant in his Deuteronomy message. There’s some minor differences between what was given on Mount Sinai and what is stated by Moses in Deuteronomy. They’re not contradictory. They’re complimentary. Among contemporary scholarship they argue that the Deuteronomic covenant is what is being mentioned there in chapter 29. Charlie was taking the view that if we assume that they’re right we’re going to show that the promise of the land is still embedded profoundly in Deuteronomy. Some of you have listened to Charlie’s Deuteronomy series online and you know that he did an excellent job of demonstrating that throughout the entire book of Deuteronomy there is the assumption that Israel has been given the land that God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in perpetuity. So he did a great job of establishing that.
 
Then in what I call the sleepers slot, because that’s what most of us want to do at 3:15 in the afternoon is sleep, Tommy stuck Randy Price. Anyone who knows Randy knows that he is just detailed-oriented, which doesn’t even come close to capturing him. Randy’s first book on the Temple was about 750 pages. It’s called The Coming Last Day Temple. Dr. John Walvoord with a little tongue-in-cheek said, “No one in all of history has ever written so much about the temple and I doubt if so much will ever be written again.” Since then, Randy has written two more books on the Temple. So Randy leaves no molecule of sand unturned. He looks at every detail so his presentation gets a little bogged down. He read it this time. Usually he teaches it more than he reads it but he read it and that kind of was hard for some people to track but he did an excellent job of dealing with the prophetic promise of the land in the New Covenant. See, what this is showing is that every one of those covenants with Israel has a promise of the land. The New Covenant is going to be brought into effect in Israel when they are back in the land and have a Davidic king on the Throne. You can’t separate the New Covenant fulfillment from the presence of the Messiah, the Davidic King on the Throne, and Israel being united and back in the land. They’re inseparable. He did a great job of that as well.
 
In the evening we had a banquet. Actually the rubber chicken wasn’t so rubbery and so the dinner wasn’t too bad. It’s been worse. The carrot cake was great. That’s my favorite cake as everyone knows and there were people at the table that didn’t even touch theirs, so “waste not; want not”.  After that we had a musician that Tim LaHaye had known for a number of years. He’s actually won a Country Music Association Award for his guitar playing. He’d been featured on a show some of you may remember way back in the later 70s called, “That’s Incredible.” People did these remarkable stunts and he was billed as the fastest guitar player on earth. He played the William Tell Overture in about 22 seconds while he was riding a motorcycle at 65 miles an hour. You could hear every single note. This guy is just an old cowboy with his black hat and jeans and coat and he played two Mozart overtures on the guitar at the same time. It was incredible. It sounded like three guitars. I’ve never heard a guitar played like that. He was quite remarkable. He even got everybody a little jazzed up. He told us we were going to sing a song we sang in Sunday school. There were a lot of us from Houston who had great fun with this because we got to sing, “Do Lord.” We had great fun with that. That’s an inside joke that some of you know why that’s so funny. Pastor Thieme used to always ridicule that song. Years ago we had a pastor’s conference at Berachah Church in 1988 and I tried to get some of the other pastors to put together a little men’s chorus group and go up and sing something special for him, that is, to sing “Do Lord.” They were so scared of him but people didn’t know what a great sense of humor he had. He would have just fallen over laughing but they were too scared so we couldn’t pull that off. We had fun anyway.
 
The speaker at the banquet was the real treat. That was a man I first heard here in Houston at the Jewish Community Center, Dr. Jacques Gauthier, who worked for twenty years on his doctoral dissertation on who has the legal ownership rights to the Old City of Jerusalem. Most people don’t realize that when they talk about East Jerusalem and the Palestinian claims for East Jerusalem they’re talking about the Old City of Jerusalem which has all the holy sites for Israel and Christians. Until the late 19th century that’s all there was. You didn’t have Jews buying land and moving outside the walls until about the 1880’s when land was being purchased in small amounts. So the real heart of Jerusalem is Old Jerusalem. The Palestinians are laying claim to that. Well, Dr. Gauthier is laying claim to that. You’ve heard me present a lot of his findings as I’ve discussed the San Remo Resolutions and the end of the First World War and how the Balfour Declaration which had no legal standing whatsoever was made completely a part of the San Remo Resolution and therefore gained the status of international law because it was adopted word-for-word into San Remo. He gave an hour-long presentation. When we get the videos up and ready, you’re going to watch that video. It’s the best I’ve heard him do and I’ve heard him three or four times. He does have some YouTube videos. He got his doctorate at Geneva University at their school of International Law and the three professors he had to defend his dissertation to were hostile. They were not at all sympathetic to his thesis, which is that the Jews have undisputed legal ownership of all of Jerusalem and have since the end of World War I. It took him over twenty years to write it. He has over 3200 footnotes and the dissertation, which I have a copy of, weighs about 15 or 20 pounds.
 
Then on Tuesday Dr. Touissant gave devotions. I hope we can get him here for the Chafer Conference. Then Dr. David Reagan spoke on the topic of the evil of Replacement Theology, its origin, history, and contemporary relevance. I only heard about twenty minutes of it but from what I hear he did a great job on it. He showed how replacement theology was not part of the early church in the first two centuries and then how it gradually came in because of a shift to an allegorical interpretation. Of course, you all have been taught about this many times but for many people this is new information. Historically this covered the Church from the early period up to the Protestant Reformation.
 
Then in the second part we had a message from Dr. Bill Watson who is a professor of history at Colorado Christian University and his topic was on the history of Christian Zionism. Basically he covered the rise of Christian Zionism from the period just after the Reformation through the 1700s so that means he covered the last part of the 1500s up through the 1700s. He is amazing. He’s a multi-linguist, a polyglot. He was a German translator for the United States Army back in the 60s and 70s and that training has certainly served him well. He also knows Greek and Latin and several other languages which enables him to do a lot of original language research through the 17th century which is his area of specialty. He’s very knowledgeable on 17 th and 18 th century British literature and he has discovered dozens and dozens of passages showing that many of the Puritans were not only pre-Millennial, they were pre-tribulational.
 
For years dispensationalists have been told by people who are not dispensationalists that John Nelson Darby was the first to “invent” the pre-tribulational rapture in the 1830s. Now because of the scholars that have been motivated by this think tank quite a number of historical figures, going all the way back to pseudo-Ephraim in the 4th century in Syria taught a pre-tribulational rapture. Not all of these guys had put the details together over the years. Some of them only had three and a half year tribulations but they teach that the church is raptured before the tribulation begins and that’s very clear. What he pointed out in this is that what was going along with this during this period was a shift to a literal view of the Jews, not the Church, and the literal land of Israel and that the Jews would be restored to the land before the Messiah came back. He did a fabulous job with that. It gets a little into historical minutiae and detail. He quotes dozens and dozens of these pastors and theologians Under the Puritan Commonwealth under Cromwell there were individuals like John Owen who was a chaplain to Cromwell and John Drury, another chaplain, and many, many others developing these ideas at this time and citing from the original sources to show that. Bill did a marvelous job and that covers the first thirteen pages of my outline, which is good. I had a sixty page outline so all of this jelled. Reagan did the Reformation, Watson did the first 200 years after the reformation and I did Jewish/Christian Zionism from the Protestant Reformation up to the Balfour Declaration. Of course the night before Gauthier’s presentation covered everything from the Balfour declaration up until the present so you can listen to these four messages I’ve described and you will get a panorama of Church history and what the Church has thought about Israel throughout the centuries from the birth of the Church to the present.
 
The current events on Tuesday night were developed by Bill Koenig who is a White House Correspondent and he has his own website. It’s called Watch.org, very conservative. I would recommend you looking at his website. He gave a lot of interesting analyses of what’s going on today. Some is frightening information when you realize what some people in this country in upper levels of leadership are trying to do.
 
Then the other speaker Tuesday night was someone known to this congregation, Norm Ettinger, who the editor of the Ettinger Report. We had him here in September. He spoke about some different things and one of the more interesting aspects was on the demographic issue. One of the big claims you’ll hear from people who support the two-state solution, is that Israel should have their own state and the Palestinians should have their own state, is that the demographics support it. The Arabs are making babies like rabbits. If it’s one state, the Arabs are going to overwhelm the Jews, some claim. But the reality is that the Arabs aren’t making babies like rabbits any more. Israel has poured a lot of money into Palestine which a lot of people don’t know, building the infrastructure in Palestine to try to build the middle class. The more middle class they become the more the birthrate drops so the Arab birthrate has dropped significantly. Whereas in Israel, not just the ultraorthodox in Israel are having babies but it’s become a mark of Zionist patriotism to have four or five children. This is becoming popular in Israel so the birthrate in Israel for the last ten years has been skyrocketing. At the current ate there’s not going to be a problem, If you had a single state like you have now, the Jews would be in the majority and would stay in the majority.
 
Then the next morning the first speaker was Michael Rydelnik. I’ve gotten to know him well the last couple of years. He’s the head of the Jewish Studies Department at Moody Bible Institute. He spoke about the land promise in the New Testament. He also began with his testimony which was fascinating because both of his parents were Holocaust survivors. All of their families were killed in the Holocaust. He was raised in an Orthodox home and the story of how he came to know the Lord is fascinating. I’m not going to tell you because when I go to Kiev in January this was such a great presentation I’m going to have that shown one night when I’m gone. Tommy Ice will be here both Sundays and the Tuesday and Thursday in between we’ll have videos of Thessalonians a couple of those nights and then this video of Michael Rydelnik one night and you will thoroughly enjoy that.
 
Last, Andy Woods, pastor of Sugar Land Bible Church, spoke on Israel and the Kingdom of God at the 10:15 slot. Andy always does a great job. That’s a tough slot because so many people have to get to the airport, get in their cars. And whatever and leave early so it’s not always a full house.
 
So it was a great conference. We’ll have the videos up. The papers are already up on the website so you can look at them. That reminds me. I skipped Paul Wilkinson. He spoke in the afternoon before me on the Palestinian case for the land for Israel. In other words, we know Israel’s case for why they own the land but what is the Palestinian’s case? And I’ll give you the short version. There isn’t one. But they have a lot of lies and a lot of propaganda. The world believes their lies and propaganda and they ignore the legalities and they turn their back on Israel. It really doesn’t matter what the truth is because the world just doesn’t care.
 
Okay, we’re going to look at Romans. This report shortened things but we have a short passage. I have several things I want to accomplish before we’re done so you might want to turn in your Bibles briefly to Romans 11. We won’t be there long. In the last several months we’ve gone through in significant and meticulous detail Romans 9, 10, and 11. I received two nice compliments from friends that I respect very much for their scholarship. One was Randy Price. He came up to me after my presentation and said, “I don’t know how you keep all those dates and people straight.” I said, “I had 60 pages of notes in front of me.” I should have just told him thanks, that I keep it all straight but no, I’m too honest. He said he couldn’t tell I was reading a thing. So that was nice. But the one I really prize was Mark Hitchcock. He’s pastor of a large church on the north side of Oklahoma. He had one of his deacons with him and they got on the same elevator with me and Mark said, “This is Robby Dean. I was telling you about him on the way down here. Whatever he does, he leaves no stone unturned when he develops a topic or subject.” I thought that Randy Price is really the one that leaves no stone unturned but that was a nice compliment and I appreciated that.
 
I’ve tried to leave no stone unturned in Romans 9, 10, and 11. The real meat of this section deals with God’s righteousness in relationship to Israel. It ends at Romans 11:32 which we finished last time. Verse 33 is a transition. Paul has built his case for the righteousness of God in relation to Gentiles, in relation to Jews, and their failure including that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Then he goes to Romans 3, 4, and 5 to develop justification. From there he goes to develop sanctification in chapters 6, 7, and 8. Then in 9 through 11 he deals with the righteousness of God in relation to Israel. As he builds to this climax, the apex of his argument, he just breaks out in his praise in verse 33, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or, who has first given to him that it might be paid back to him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Whom Be the glory forever. Amen.”
 
That final statement to the glory of God isn’t just concluding Romans 9, 10, and 11. It is a conclusion to Romans 1–11. Everything builds and then as Paul thinks about his intricate, detailed presentation he has made of the righteousness of God, he just breaks out in this spontaneous praise of God’s omniscience, His wisdom, and how He has worked this out in human history so He will ultimately be beyond our comprehension.
 
In verse 12:1 Paul is going to shift gears to talk about the application of what we have learned about God’s righteousness in different areas and different arenas of life. So Romans 1–11 is the foundation and then there’s a shift in Romans 12 through 16. What I thought we’d do is just go back and pick up an overview. It’s important to us to go through these kinds of overviews. So often we can get lost in the weeds and the details and the minutiae as we go through the exegesis of a passage and we forget that these are letters written to be read from the pulpit to the congregation. We go through and we take it apart and we look at all the nuances and everything which is important but sometimes we lose the forest for the trees. Since I haven’t done an overview in a while of Romans 1–11, I wanted to do that this evening.
 
In chapter one, we have the introduction which covers the first seventeen verses and introduces us to the theme of the book. We have the initial greetings and salutations in Romans 1:1–7 where Paul addresses this to the church in Rome and he brings out several facets about Jesus Christ, born of the seed of David, identifying him early on where he’s foreshadowing the emphasis on Israel. He states that Jesus doesn’t become the Son of God but His resurrection demonstrates that He is the Son of God. In verse 5 he talks about receiving grace and apostleship for the purpose of obedience to the faith. Okay, that’s the greeting in one through seven.
 
Then in verses Romans 1:8–15 Paul expresses his desire to be visit Rome and that he’s tried many times but he’s been blocked. It hasn’t been God’s will for him to make it but he wants to come. In Romans 1:15 he says, “So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.” I keep coming back to this because the term “gospel” we often use in a narrow sense, meaning what a person needs to believe to have eternal life or be justified. If Paul is writing this epistle to the congregation in Rome, why do they need to hear how to get to heaven?
 
He’s made it very clear that he’s not just talking about the gospel in terms of its simple message of how an unbeliever gets saved or justified and gets eternal life. There’s a full gospel. I hate to use this term but the Pentecostals do not understand it’s how to have the full, abundant life that Jesus gives us. It’s not just getting justified. It includes how the justified person is to live and experience all the blessings that God has given him. That’s what Romans does. It talks about justification in verses 3–5 and it talks about the spiritual life in 6–8. That’s very much a part of the gospel. We tend to think of in the narrow John 3:16 aspect but Paul uses the term “gospel” many, many times. It’s the full good news, all of the wonderful things God has provided for us in life, not just getting eternal life but getting all the blessings we’ve been blessed with in the spiritual life. So that’s how Paul uses it here.
 
The theme is expressed in verses 16 and 17, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” I’ve pointed out many times in Romans that the word salvation is not just getting phase 1 justification. It has to do with the entire spiritual life all the way out to glorification. So that’s how he uses it here. “For in it {the} righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS {man} SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.” That first faith is justification. The second faith is sanctification or spiritual life faith. This is grounded in the righteousness of God. Now that’s the introduction through verse 17.
 
Then in the first major division it goes through Romans 5:21. God’s righteousness is revealed in condemnation and justification. God is totally righteous in condemning the human race because we haven’t lived up to His standard. Chapters 1-3 focus on condemnation. If you think your way through Romans, the first five chapters deal with God’s condemnation and justification. That’s broken into two parts: condemnation in 1:18 to 3:20 and then justification in 3:21–5:21. Then we’ll see sanctification and Israel and you have the first eleven chapters.
 
In breaking this down in this first part of 1:18 through 3:20 Paul deals with immoral Gentiles. God brings judgment in time, discipline in time against them. That’s the wrath of God. It isn’t the future judgment it’s the present tense being poured out today. Wrath of God is (present tense) being revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness for what may be known of God is manifested in them. Every pagan unbeliever knows that God exists. And they hate it. And they suppress it and they fight against it. That’s what this is all about. Because they’re worshipping the creature instead of the creator God then delivers them over. He just pulls back the restraints and says “You want to do that? Good, I’m just going to let you have your way.” He gives them their head and they go forward. So we have these series of verbs in verse 24, “God also gave them up to uncleanness.” You have a series of different sins that characterize that first giving over.
 
Then verse 26, “For this reason God gave them over to vile passions.” This is the introduction of homosexuality. This is a judgment. We’re not being judged for homosexual marriage. Homosexual marriage is a judgment on this nation for the fact that we have rejected God, for the fact that we have rejected the Scripture. What we’re seeing in our country today is the judgment of God for negative volition. We’re not going to be judged for these horrible things that are going on. That is the judgment for our rejection of the truth. The third stage in verse 28, “And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; {they are} gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” That is the ultimate stage of cultural collapse because when that characterizes a people, people can no longer stand.
 
So we go from the condemnation of immoral Gentiles to the condemnation of moral Gentiles in chapter 2. God judges those who think they are better than everybody else and good enough to get into heaven. So the self-righteous and moral Gentiles are condemned in the first sixteen verses, the hypocrites in the first verse. “Therefore you have no excuse, every one of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.” This is in terms of their pride and their arrogance. So there’s a condemnation of the moral man.
 
Then the Jews are condemned. The Jews have the Law. The Gentiles sinned without the Law. They didn’t have the revelation of God; nevertheless they have sinned and God judges them based on obedience to the revelation He has given them, which is natural revelation. They have rejected that and because of that, God is going to bring judgment upon them. Then the topic shifts to the fact that not only are the Gentiles guilty, but the Jews are guilty. Yes, they have the Law. Yes, they revere and honor the Law superficially but they broke it.
 
There are six privileges they had, Romans 2:19, “and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal? You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God?”
 
The Jews only held to the Law in a formal way but they didn’t obey it. Their failures are outlined in verses 22 and 23, “You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?  You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God?” So they come under condemnation.
 
Secondly, in verses 25-29, they revered circumcision but they didn’t obey God. They thought a superficial obedience was good enough but it wasn’t so they condemned by God. They rejected the oracles of God in chapter 3, verses 1-8. That brings the Jews under condemnation and then from 3:9-20 Paul shows that the whole world is condemned because no one has lived up to the righteous standard of God so that all are under sin, verse 9, “What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, “THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD; ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.”
 
So those who are with the Law are condemned by the Law. Those who don’t have the Law are still disobedient to the revelation that has been given to them. And then we come to 3:21, which starts the great section on justification by faith alone. “But now apart from the Law {the} righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even {the} righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” In verses 21 to 31 we see the development of this doctrine of justification by faith alone. In verse 24 we see it’s a free gift. It’s not something we earn, “being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” Redemption is the purchase price that is in Christ Jesus whom God set forth as a propitiation.
 
These are great words that are lost today because we’ve dumbed down translations and we have raised a generation of children and adults who don’t have a vocabulary. It’s sad because these are great words: redemption, justification, imputation. This morning I had a great conversation with Jim Myers. By the way, there’s a little turmoil over in Ukraine. I’ll be going over there in January. Don’t worry, it’s worse on the news than it is in reality. He says there’s been a few riots downtown, a few demonstrations and the people demonstrating have done stupid things like throw rocks at the thugs who pass as police officers and they get shot. If you don’t want to get shot by police, don’t throw rocks at them. It’s pretty simple but these things have only happened in a few small areas. One event that happened is there were a lot of western journalists there. The police thugs beat up on the journalists because the journalists were telling everyone what they were doing. It’s confined, and Jim says 95% of Kiev business is going on as normal but there have been a few incidents that we need to be in prayer for them.
 
Jim was talking about the fact he had an opportunity that I may have the same opportunity when I go to teach at a church named St. Paul’s. It’s been there for quite some time. He said, “Robby, I’m going through Romans and they never heard of justification or imputation. And they call themselves St. Paul’s church and they don’t know anything. No matter how dumbed-down I get it’s not down enough. I teach what I think is pure pabulum and people come and say that’s too heavy, too hard to understand.” It’s not any different here. Internationally we have raised a generation of nitwits. People who can’t think anymore. It’s not just an American problem. It’s an international problem. I think this is one of the things that’s going to set the stage for the Antichrist, people who can’t think any more. Anyway, Romans 3:21 to 3:31 explains justification.
 
Then chapter 4 illustrates it from Abraham, that Abraham believed God and it was accounted or imputed to Him for righteousness. Why? Because He believed God. This was long before there was a Mosaic Law, before He was circumcised, before there was any of that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness. If you understand that is the illustration in Romans 4, you can understand chapter 4. It all relates to that illustration of Abraham.
 
Then in chapter 5 we have the benefits of justification. Because God has declared us just before His Supreme Court these are the benefits we have. We have peace with God in verse 1. In verse 2 we can rejoice in hope of the glory of God. In verse 3 we have these blessings and we can glory in tribulation because we know that tribulation produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope. Hope does not disappoint because of the love of God.
 
That’s the fourth point. We have a tangible expression of God’s love poured out in us by God the Holy Spirit. A fifth benefit is that we will be saved in the future from the wrath through Him. We will miss out on aspects of divine discipline in time because we’re obedient to His Word. And the sixth benefit is that while we were enemies in verse 10 we were reconciled to God, therefore we can rejoice in God through the Lord Jesus Christ in verse 11. Then we have justification applied to all in verses 12 through 21. Verse 21 says, “So that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
 
So how do we experience that on a day to day basis? Well, that’s the next section called sanctification or the spiritual life in Romans chapters 6, 7, and 8. The first part develops the fact that sanctification or the ability to live for God is based on the baptism by the Holy Spirit at justification. That’s 6:1–14. Then we learn that sanctification means that not only has the power of the sin nature been broken, but that means we’re no longer slaves to sin but we’re to live as slaves to righteousness. Is that done by the Law? Paul answers that in chapter 7 by saying, “No, it’s not done by the Law.” The Law is righteous, just, and good but you can’t get sanctified by the Law. It’s just going to leave you frustrated.
 
The answer comes in chapter 8 which is that sanctification is based on a relationship with God, the Holy Spirit. We have to walk by the Spirit if we’re going to experience the fullness of life God has for us and that brings Paul to a conclusion in verses 31–39 where he emphasizes God’s everlasting, eternal love, and that nothing can separate us from God’s love. As he comes to that conclusion in verses 38 and 39 which says, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 
 
But someone may say who’s Jewish, “Wait a minute. God seems to have dumped the Jews. He’s promised these things in the Old Testament and now He’s going to the Gentiles. God doesn’t like the Jews anymore. So how can we believe in His faithfulness?” So in Romans 9–11 we see God’s righteousness revealed in His relationship with Israel. Romans 9 shows that His righteousness is revealed in His rejection of corporate Israel. Not every Jew is unsaved but corporately Israel is now removed from a place of blessing because they have rejected Jesus as Messiah. This isn’t permanent. This is only temporary. He says this reveals God’s righteousness because Israel disobeyed God so God is going to punish them. It’s not a permanent state and it’s not against individuals but it’s dealing with corporate Israel. Israel is still the chosen, the choice one, of God.
 
Election is corporate here. It has to do with the corporate selection of Israel. Then in Romans 10 we saw that God’s righteousness is based on Israel’s corporate neglect of Israel. Because Israel has rejected what God revealed God is just and righteous in punishing them. But it’s not permanent. There will be a time when any who call on him, and when Israel calls on Him in the name of the Lord, they will be delivered. That is a quote from Joel 2 and that refers to an end time fulfillment.
 
Then we come to Romans 11 where God’s righteousness reveals His faithfulness to the promises to Israel and there will be a future deliverance of Israel and they will be restored to that place of blessing. That’s seen in that olive tree illustration. I had a great example of this sitting at the banquet table the other night talking with a lady at the table who was a Bible teacher at a church up north and she made a comment and it related to the olive tree illustration and she just had the interpretation dead wrong which isn’t unusual today. People think the olive tree illustration has something to do with salvation or something to do with this thing or that thing. It has to do with the place of blessing within the Abrahamic covenant, that Israel is removed temporarily. Breaking off the branches can’t be salvation because that would indicate a loss of salvation. It’s that they’re being temporarily removed from the place of blessing. That’s the whole theme in these three chapters. The wild olive branches are grafted in and this is all going to work itself together in the plan of God so that eventually He will bring the natural olive branches back in and he says that God’s plan will work out even more to the benefit to all of the nations.
 
In verse 28 he says, “From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of {God’s} choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you once were disobedient to God, but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience, so these also now have been disobedient, that because of the mercy shown to you they also may now be shown mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all.”
 
This is how it all comes together when the final part comes together in God’s plan we’re just going to be speechless how it all came together and that what brings Paul to this great statement where he says, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” When he says this he begins with a figure of speech, “the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God.”
 
Now often we use the figure of speech of something being incomprehensible. We say it’s “unfathomable.” A fathom is a unit of measurement. Long time ago they used to measure of a hand width or the length of the arm from the shoulder to the tip of the thumb for a cubit or the length of a forearm for a cubit. A fathom was if you stood up and held your arms out in a circle, the circumference of that circle was roughly a fathom. It came to be six feet. This was a nautical term. This would be used when you were going out into the water and you want to measure the depth of the water you’d see how many fathoms deep it was. If you can’t see the bottom it’s unfathomable. You can’t find the depths. You can’t reach the bottom of something.
 
So that’s the idea here. You can’t plumb the depths. We can’t comprehend God. So this is a great figure of speech used many times throughout the Scripture. It’s usually related to wealth, the depth of the riches. Riches is a metaphor used to describe the abundance of what God has given us. Passages like Romans 2:4, “Do you despise the riches, that is the abundance, of God’s goodness, that is forbearance and longsuffering not knowing that the goodness of God brings you to repentance.”
 
Riches of God there refers to the abundance of His grace gifts. Romans 9:23 says, “Oh, that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy.” Ephesians uses it a lot. Ephesians 1:7 talks about the riches of His grace, the abundance of His grace. Ephesians 1:18 talks about “the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” Ephesians 2:7 talks about the “exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ.” Then Colossians 1:27 says, “To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles.”
 
It’s the superabundance of what God has given us freely in grace. Wisdom and knowledge, how unsearchable are His judgments. This is the Greek word ANEXEREUANETOS meaning that you can’t search it out, you can’t seek it all, and it’s incomprehensible. So the wisdom and knowledge are incomprehensible to us. It doesn’t mean we can’t comprehend what God has revealed to us but there’s more to God than that. God hasn’t revealed Himself exhaustively to us so we’ll go through eternity and never come close to plumbing the depths of what we can learn from God. They are past finding out, past tracing out; they’re unsearchable and inscrutable.
 
So let’s look at the terms wisdom and knowledge. Knowledge is more than information. Information is just facts and data. Knowledge takes that and constructs it together in various ways to produce something. So contextually knowledge has to do with God’s understanding of every aspect of creation. It’s part of His omniscience. God’s knowledge is all-inclusive. There’s nothing we can imagine that is beyond the knowledge of God. God is infinite. All of His attributes are infinite. Infinity applies to all of His attributes including knowledge. His knowledge has no limits. He knows everything that is actual, and everything that is possible. He knows every conceivable permutation. His knowledge is direct and exhaustive. He knows all the knowable. His knowledge includes everything from the most minute detail to all the macro relations, causes and consequences of anything and everything in the universe. And He knows it directly, intuitively, and immediately. He is always aware of everything. His knowledge never increases or decreases.
 
Now wisdom is more than knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to take knowledge and to use it to craft something that is skillful and beautiful. It has to do with not only knowledge but artistry. So wisdom is the application of knowledge in a skillful or artistic way in the production of the creation of something. Proverbs 3:19, “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth,” Wisdom is the skill that God used in creating the universe. Psalm 104:24, “O Lord how manifold are Your works. In wisdom You have made them all.” Psalm 136:5, “To Him Who by wisdom made the heavens. His mercy endures forever.” So knowledge and wisdom are brought together in Romans 11:33 because it pulls together everything that God used in developing and carrying out His plan and it’s beyond us. We cannot unscrew the inscrutable. We can just sit back and marvel at how it will all come together.
 
Then Paul supports this with two quotes from the Old Testament. In Romans 11:34, he quotes from Isaiah 40:13 and 14, “For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, OR WHO BECAME HIS COUNSELOR?” In Isaiah 40:13 we read, “For who has directed the spirit of the Lord or has His counselor taught Him?” The answer is no one. No one can teach God. He already knows everything. No one can give him guidance. He is already aware of everything. Then Isaiah 40:14, “From whom did He take counsel and who instructed Him? Who taught Him the path of justice or who taught him knowledge or showed Him the way of understanding?” No one did because God knows it all. This is a remarkable passage on the omniscience of God.
 
Then Romans 11:35 says, “Or WHO HAS FIRST GIVEN TO HIM THAT IT MIGHT BE PAID BACK TO HIM AGAIN?” This is just a really free translation from Job 41:11. It’s sort of a paraphrase of the verse. In other words God is saying there was nothing that preceded Me. Everything is Mine so you can’t appeal to anything above me or before me as the basis for my knowledge.” This brings us to the concluding prayer which says from the source of God comes everything. Romans 11:36 says, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him {be} the glory forever. Amen.” He is the source of everything and He is the means by which everything has been created and it is ultimately for Him. That brings us to the end of the first eleven chapters in Romans and next time we’ll come back and start in Romans 12:1 where we get into the application of God’s righteousness to everyday living.

Romans 126b-Transformation

Romans 12:1 NASB95
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
Romans 126b-Transformation Romans 12:1–2
 
We are in Romans, chapter 12. Tonight we’re starting a new section in Romans. This gets into a section related to what, unfortunately, a lot of theologians have divided into the practical section of Romans. It’s really unfortunate the way theologians talk about a lot of Paul’s epistles. There’s a pattern. Galatians is this way. Colossians and Ephesians are both this way. For instance Ephesians 1–3 give instructions regarding the Christian life which is usually labeled doctrinal. Ephesians 4–6 is labeled application. Romans is the same way. Romans 1–11 is labeled as doctrinal and Romans 12–16 is labeled as application. In several other epistles Paul followed that pattern.
 
To me, that’s a problem because what happens it creates the impression that doctrine is separate from application. Doctrine that isn’t application isn’t biblical doctrine. Application that isn’t doctrinal isn’t biblical application. Doctrine has been given this sort of restricted and narrow meaning to refer to that which seems to some more abstract theology as opposed to practical principles for the spiritual life. That’s a false use of the word doctrine. There are many areas of life and many different disciplines in life, the military is one area, where the word doctrine covers everything from the initial, theoretical design of something all the way through to its final application out on the battlefield. That’s how the word doctrine is really used in Scripture because the root word DIDASKALOS is just teaching or instruction. We’re instructed about God. We’re instructed about salvation. We’re instructed about justification. We’re instructed about how to apply those principles. It’s all instruction. That’s what the word doctrine describes.
 
I prefer to think about this in terms of reality and responsibility. What usually goes under the concept of doctrine is really Paul teaching the nature of reality, such as the nature of God, the nature of salvation, or the nature of whatever the area is. Then in the latter part of the book he’s saying that once we understand the nature of reality with respect to different areas of revelation, then he talks about what our responsibility is in the light of that reality. And so, Romans 1–11 has been a discussion of the reality of God’s righteousness and how it relates to the human race. Now in light of that, in the latter part of Romans we’re going to talk about the responsibility of the truth as explained in the first eleven chapters.
 
Even in these chapters there are many places where Paul talks about the immediate application of those principles of justification and sanctification. There was much there related to application. We create this false dichotomy and I think that’s just one of the ways human viewpoint, which is just a manifestation of Satan’s thinking, seems to separate the Word of God from day-to-day significance in people’s lives. I think that’s what’s happened in the evangelical church over the last hundred years. It’s created this tendency for people to think of doctrine or theology as something sort of abstract but it doesn’t really relate to everyday living.
 
I want to talk a little bit about that as we go through the lesson today. There’s this false separation. Theology is up here and we live down in this everyday area so there’s a disconnect between the two. For many Christians that’s their reality because over the generations in the last hundred to hundred and fifty years pastors have fallen prey to that kind of thinking so that if you go to a church that’s talking about application all the time, you get something like you find in these motivational churches. People feel good. They learn positive thinking. They learn some establishment principles. They get all revved up to face another week but they’re never really taught anything about the Bible.
 
And then there are some churches you go to where the Bible is taught and theology is taught but it’s never really connected to day-to-day living. People live with sort of an academic disconnect from the day-to-day issues of life, whereas Scripture teaches and shows us that anything we learn about God is intensely practical. So real theology, Biblical theology, is always going to be intensely practical. Now you may not be able to draw the connection or connect the dots but sound Biblical theology is always intensely practical. And any practical principle of application can never be separated from its theological foundation. You’ve heard me and others that if we were to ask the Apostle Paul how to brush our teeth, he would start off with Genesis 1 and 2 how God formed man’s body from the dust of the earth and the chemicals of the soil so that we would have a proper and Biblical understanding of the significance of the body. Then the responsibility to take care of the body that’s created as part of mankind, the whole of which is created in the image and likeness of God.
 
So we have to understand things in their proper place and the proper structure. We have to understand that this must be understood as God’s instruction about every aspect of life and the purpose of that instruction is to teach us how to think with the result that it changes how we live. If we change how we live without changing how we think then we end up being like the Pharisees who are called by Jesus “white-washed sepulchers”. They just had an external change but there’s no internal transformation and that’s at the heart of this opening verse we have in Romans, chapter 12.
 
This is one of the most challenging pair of verses in the Scripture and I think, at least in my thinking, that this presents the essence of the pastoral mission, especially in verse 2. Now I ran across a quote the other day. It was in a forwarded e-mail, someone with whom this had originated is a retired military officer. He included this as sort of a quotation under his signature in the e-mail. It’s a quote from Pericles who was an ancient Greek general but it also states something very significant that I think applies to the local church in many ways, and is a great challenge. Where do you fall within this quote? He says, “Of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there …” He’s talking in military terms but there’s an application to the church. “Of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are nothing but targets. Nine are real fighters. We’re lucky to have them. They make the battle. Ah, but the one. One of them is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”
 
Now I have had the philosophy of ministry for years that I’m in the business of producing people who would fit in those ten, the nine who are the fighters and the one who is the warrior. Many pastors waste their time and truly it is a waste of time because those other ninety never, ever get the picture. I know pastors who’ll spend all their time trying to get the ninety to wake up and ignore the other nine or ten. What the church is all about and we’re going to see this increasingly in Matthew, what the Christian leadership is all about, is making disciples. The challenge in the gospels of what a disciple is ought to make all of us sit up and pay attention because it isn’t just something easy. A disciple isn’t someone who is just a casual student or who just seems curious about the Word of God but that’s often where we start.
 
The word disciple means a learner, not just someone who’s learning and filling up their doctrinal notebooks with information but is being transformed according to the principles of Romans 12:1–2 where their thinking is being radically overhauled and renovated by the Word of God. You sort of have to start off with the mindset that you want to be one of those ten, you don’t want to be one of the ninety. Because if you’re one of the ninety you’re either a target or you shouldn’t be there. And sadly, if you take this and extrapolate it to Christendom I think that fits. I think in this congregation these percentages are skewed. We have many more who are fighters and who are seeking to be the warriors than not. That also means you have many churches such as ones composed of a thousand people 2,500 of them shouldn’t be there, and the other 7,500 are targets, including the pastor. Nobody in those churches is a fighter or a warrior. That characterizes too many churches in the world today. We make up for a little of that because I do believe we have people in this congregation and people who listen online who are serious about their spiritual life. They want to step up to the plate to be counted among those who have been faithful in their Christian life and those who have been used by the Lord and have truly wanted to serve the Lord.
 
So the question is what do you want to be? This is the real challenge we’ll see in the Scriptures of being a disciple. There were a lot of people who wanted initially to be disciples. If you trace that through the gospels, you see there are thousands who are the casual, curious disciples that show up to listen to Jesus. But as He starts to make clear what is involved in being a true follower of Jesus, then everything changes. You remember the command given to the disciples and to the original disciples and it is applied to all the pastors in the churches that we are to make disciples. That’s our responsibility to challenge people to be disciples. Jesus’ responsibility is to build the Church and our job is to feed the sheep and make disciples and let Jesus worry about how He’s going to build the Church.
 
 But what we need to do is lay this challenge out there of whether we want to be just casual, curious believers. Remember when we get to passages like John 6, as people understood what Jesus was saying they just went their own way. They just walked away. They didn’t hang in there because they really didn’t want to do what it took to be a disciple.
 
Now I think of all the passages of Scripture that summarize what the Christian life and its challenge is all about, what the pastoral ministry is all about, is in Romans 12:1–2. Paul begins by saying, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, [beseech you] by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, {which is} your spiritual [reasonable] service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
 
So I think there are some things in this verse that are a little antiquated, words like “beseech” are a little difficult for people to comprehend today. “Holy” is a word that’s been so overused that most people don’t understand what that means. The phrase “reasonable service” as it’s translated in the New King James doesn’t quite capture what the Greek says. But I’m not sure any single words in English really capture the sense of what the Greek is trying to communicate.
 
Verse 2 is really a contrast for verse 1. Verse 1 tells us we’re to present our bodies a living sacrifice and in contrast we’re to not be conformed to the world. That’s how we present our bodies a living sacrifice, by not being conformed to the world but by being transformed by the renewing of our mind. So let’s get into this. A lot of applications come from this but I think we need to understand the translation and understand just what is being said before we go very far.
 
At the very beginning we have Paul making a very strong personal statement. He says, “I beseech you.” “Beseech” is just an old English word and it translates the Greek word PARAKALEO which means to encourage, to strengthen, to come alongside. It has the idea of urging, exhorting, comforting, or challenging someone to a particular course of action. This is the significance of that word. Paul isn’t saying, “I command you to do this” but he’s recognizing that the listener, which in the 1st century was the Roman church, by extension that’s each one of us. Paul is talking directly to me. He’s talking directly to you. He’s saying, “I’m giving you this challenge but you’re the one that has to make up your mind whether or not you’re going to accept the challenge. Some of you are just willing to be E minus students, others of you think B minus is okay, but the focal point of ministry should be toward the ones who want to be A plus students. This is a challenge to them. It has the idea of pressing somebody, pushing them, challenging them to a particular course of action, telling them to do something. I would translate this, “I challenge you” or “I urge you”. There’s a sense of impending disaster if they don’t do this because they’ll come under divine discipline and they’ll destroy their life or destroy their spiritual life.
 
He addresses them as “brethren” because he views them as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ and he says “I challenge you on the basis of the mercies of God.” The word here translated mercy is the Greek word OIKTERNOS which is in the plural, and he’s talking about the manifold grace of God in his life. This is the ground for his urgent exhortation is that God’s mercy has been manifested in his own life. God’s saving grace has been manifested and he’s talking about the grace of God at the cross that provided a free salvation for us. He’s talking about God’s free provision of His word to us and He’s talking about God’s provision of God the Holy Spirit to us to empower us and to fill us with His word so all of these are part of that concept of the mercies of God.
 
He uses the structure in the Greek, DIA plus the genitive, like we have in Ephesians 2:8–9, meaning through faith. It’s talking about the intermediate grounds or basis for something. Now we have passages like 2 Corinthians 1:3 where Paul says, “Blessed {be} the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” He views God and God the Father ultimately as the source of mercy in terms of His plan of salvation and His plan for the spiritual life. So he draws a connection by basing his challenge on the mercies of God. He’s drawing a connection back to everything that he has said in the first eleven chapters.
 
That’s reinforced by the fact that he uses the word “therefore”. Those of you who have been in the Bible study methods class know that whenever you see a “therefore”, you have to see what’s it’s there for.  This is a conjunction that draws an inference or conclusion. It’s the Greek conjunction OUN which is one of the strongest inferential conjunctions and it’s not just referring to what was just stated in Romans 11 or 9–11 but really on the basis of everything that had been said before. So when you take the “therefore” along with this further statement on the ground or the basis of the mercies of God that all takes us back to this wonderful exposition that Paul has given us of God’s wonderful grace in salvation and in justification and in providing God the Holy Spirit and the baptism by the Holy Spirit which frees us from the tyranny of the sin nature. All of this is the manifestation of the mercy of God.
 
So on that basis, because we see this wonderful manifestation of the mercy of God and this is seen in Romans 9–11 in God’s treatment of Israel that this has a natural consequence and that natural consequence is that we should present our bodies as a living sacrifice. Now the concept of presentation here is expressed in the word PARISTEMI which is grammatically an aorist active infinitive. An infinitive is frequently used to express purpose or result. So Paul is stating, is urging them, that the result of his challenge is that we engage in action. That the reader, and that you and I, engage in a particular action and that is to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.
 
Now as we look at this word we recognize that it is a word that is commonly used to express the act of bringing a sacrifice to the altar. A living sacrifice which of course would be killed but what Paul is talking about here is like a praise offering where there’s not a death but something given to the Lord in response to what he has done which is a sacrifice. The verb here is the same word that’s used in Luke 2:22 when Jesus’ human parents brought Him to the temple to present him and to consecrate or set Him apart for service a week after He was born. It’s also used frequently of offering sacrifices. Josephus tells us this was a technical term for the offering of sacrifice and it’s used of the Christian presenting himself to the service of God in Romans 6:13–16. So this isn’t the first time Paul has mentioned this concept.
 
He’s going right back to connect what he’s saying here to the foundation he’s explained already in relation to the spiritual life in Romans 6. It’s also related to God presenting the saved. What we are to present, then, to God is our bodies. There’s a couple of different ways we might take that. First of all, we could take it literally and this is a problem you would have if you were thinking in terms of Greek culture that there’s a harsh distinction between the material part of man, the body, and the immaterial part of man, the soul and the spirit. But Paul is not talking about just a bodily sacrifice. Part of the problem you have from Greek philosophy is that they would create certain artificial distinctions in the composition of man.
 
Under Platonism they put such an emphasis on the immaterial part of man that the material part of man was not really that important. So they would emphasize that what’s really important is your soul. But see the Lord created man as a unit, as a body, where the body was specifically designed by God for a purpose. You can’t go in and say, “Well, the soul is the real you.” That’s pure Neo-Platonism when people say that the soul is the real you. The Bible emphasizes value of both the material and the immaterial. Platonism says the material is not that important, that what’s important is the soul. That has tremendous problems with it. There are implications to that that have baggage we don’t want to deal with.
 
So what Paul is emphasizing here is the body. He doesn’t just mean the physical body. That is the first option to just think he is talking about a bodily or material sacrifice. Second, Paul is using the body as a figure of speech where the body is used to represent the whole of the person. This is called a synecdoche, which means a part for a whole. That’s the technical term for this kind of figure of speech where you talk about a part of a thing and it involves all of the thing.
 
The fact that the party involves all of you is indicated by the fact that you can’t have your body go someplace without having your soul go with it. That is a unity there. If you think about it, the soul never, ever has an existence without a body. How can you see without a body? How can you hear without a body? How can you experience all of the essential feelings if you don’t have a body?
 
Even in the interim state we have the story in Luke 16 where you have the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Lazarus is a beggar outside the gates of the rich man, who is never named. The fact that Lazarus is given a name indicates that this isn’t simply a parable. It is a story about a real person. If you read all the other parables they just talk about a certain man, a rich man, a landowner, a servant. It never names them. The fact there is an individual identified here with a specific name indicates that Jesus is talking about a specific situation and a specific reality. When Lazarus died, he goes with the Old Testament saints to an area called Abraham’s Bosom which is in Sheol. Sheol is divided into two compartments, the New Testament word for it is Hades. It is divided into two compartments. The compartment for the righteous was known as Abraham’s Bosom or Paradise. Then there was another area known as Torments. The rich man was not a believer so he died and he went to Torments. While he’s in Torments he can look across this great chasm or gulf which is between Torments and Paradise and he sees Abraham on the other side. He begs Abraham that Lazarus can take his finger, which means Lazarus has a finger, to dip in the water and put it on the rich man’s tongue because he’s burning up.
 
 So all of this indicates there’s something there. It’s not the present, corporeal body but it is an interim body. After the resurrection, there’s a resurrection body. There’s even some sort of body for the unsaved and it is through the body that the soul is able to interact with what surrounds it. Without the body the soul would just be blind and deaf and speechless. The body is important and theologians from the 1st century, including the Apostle Paul, have understood and taught the importance of the body for the composition of man. Very much against the Neo-Platonic idea. So Paul uses the term body here to represent the totality of each person. Some translations come along and translate this as yourself but that’s open to interpretation. Paul is talking about body, soul, and spirit here. He’s talking about the entire makeup of the regenerate believer. He’s talking about the fact that the body is important. He’s done this already in Romans 6. The body can be an instrument of righteousness in 6:13, that the body is a member of Christ in 1 Corinthians 6:15, that the body is  made a temple by the Holy Spirit for the indwelling of Christ in 1 Corinthians 6:19 which sanctifies or sets apart the physical body so the body is important and significant.
 
So he says we’re to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. The fact that it’s living shows that this is something that is going to endure. This will continue. That is indicated also by the present tense of the verb. The aspect of presenting your body is an aorist infinitive which is simply presenting it as a single action. It’s not a single, one-shot decision. That’s how people taught this that weren’t well-schooled in Greek. When it comes to the aorist tense it was taught this was punctiliar action, a one-shot decision. That’s not what it means. It just means that when you’re talking about the aorist tense, it’s a summary tense. It’s taking a lot of action and summarizing it at one-point, not that it is one-point. An aorist infinitive is simply expressing that as one action but Paul recognizes by using the present tense in other places that this is something that goes on and on. We don’t just make a one-shot decision and that’s it. Every single day we have to reinforce that particular decision.
 
Now this concept of presenting ourselves to God is clearly stated in passages like Romans 6:13–16. In Romans 6:13 Paul says, “And do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members {as} instruments of righteousness to God.” Members there is talking about the parts of your body. See contrast in Romans 12:1 you present your bodies as service to God, where in 6:13 it is saying not to present your bodies to sin. Why? In the Baptism by the Holy Spirit the tyranny of the sin nature is broken so we’re no longer in the position of being a slave to sin. If you re enslaved to sin it’s because you’ve put yourself back in that position. You no longer have to be a slave to sin. We have been freed from the power of the sin nature, though we still have the presence of the sin nature.
 
We don’t have to yield to it. Yield is another antiquated term. You read Lewis Sperry Chafer’s volume on “He That is Spiritual” and he talks about yieldedness. That was a catch phrase that came out of the victorious life movement at the end of the 19th century. Yieldedness was just another way to talk about presenting yourself to God. It’s the presentation of something to a superior for His use. So we are not to present our bodies as members of unrighteousness to sin but we’re to present ourselves to God for His service because He’s the One who has made us alive.
 
We’re to present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead and the members of our body as instruments of righteousness to God. Why? He explains in verse 14, “For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” In verse 15 he draws another conclusion. He says, “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone {as} slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” You have two options. You’re either going to present yourself as a slave to obey your sin nature or you’re presenting yourself as a slave to serve God. One or the other; there’s no in-between.
 
When I present myself to do what I want to do and I’m just serving my own selfish desires and needs, I’m serving my sin nature. Because the primary focus of the sin nature is on the self. What Paul says is that we need to learn that we’re either serving ourselves and our sin nature or we’re serving God. It’s an authority issue. It always boils down to an authority issue. Are we going to obey God or just do what we want to do?
 
Now back to Romans 12:1, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, {which is} your spiritual [reasonable] service of worship.” Now when we look at this in terms of the original Greek. The last phrase is describing categories relating to service, not related to the sacrifice. The sacrifice is not a sacrifice in the sense that we’re going to feel like we’re just suffering, like we’re giving something up. You know, some people get the mistaken notion that sacrifice means you’re giving something up. Actually not. You’re not giving anything up. You’re accepting the authority of God in your life, which means you’re going to have the fullness of life that Jesus promised. You’re not giving up anything. That’s what a sacrifice is in the Old Testament imagery. It is giving something to God.
 
It does not have the primary idea of suffering through some sort of pain or discomfort. It is giving something over to the service of God. That’s what a sacrifice is. It’s being given to serve God, not to serve our own desires. For many people, that’s what makes it suffering because we just don’t want to give it up. We just don’t want to let God use us in the way He would use us. We want to live life on our own terms. So this is what is addressed in these next two words. HAGIOS which is translated holy, a word that is so overused and abused that most people don’t know what it means. The core meaning of holy is to give something, to consecrate, to set apart something to the service to God. It doesn’t have the idea of moral purity. That’s a secondary idea in many contexts but it’s not the primary idea. How do we know this? We know this because a form of the word HAGIOS is used to describe the male and female prostitutes who served in the fertility religions of the Baal’s and the Ashtoreth’s. Now they certainly weren’t morally pure as male and female religious prostitutes but they were given over to the service of their god.
 
The same thing can be said about the inanimate objects that were part of the worship in the Tabernacle and the Temple. The bowls that were used, the laver, the altar, all of these are impersonal and inanimate. They can neither be moral or immoral. A piece of metal can be neither moral now immoral. A piece of wood can be neither moral nor immoral but it can be set apart to the service of God. That’s what makes them holy. It is that they’re set apart to the service of God. It’s set apart for a divine purpose.
 
This is why the land of Israel has been called the holy land. I remember going to Israel on the first trip and someone asked, “Why do they always want to call it the holy land?” Holy means set apart. It’s the only piece of real estate on the earth that’s set apart for God’s people and God’s purpose. That’s what makes it holy. It’s a set-apart piece of real estate. So that’s why it’s accurate to refer to it as the holy land even though most people think that means it’s something special.
 
You always get these people who have the “Jerusalem syndrome”. They end up coming to Jerusalem and all of the sudden they have all kind of mystical experiences. They end up in the insane ward in a hospital in Jerusalem thinking they’re the Messiah or Peter or Abraham or David or something like that. Some people flip out when they go over there, thinking it’s something special. It is in one sense but it’s not a mystical type of special.
 
So when we present ourselves to God what we’re saying is, “God, I want my life to be used by you. I want to serve you. I want Your will, not my will, to be accomplished in my life. I understand I was saved and redeemed for a purpose and that purpose is to serve you.” So that’s the idea of the fact we are to be a living sacrifice, set apart to God, acceptable which is the word EUARESTOS, meaning something that is acceptable and pleasing to God. It’s acceptable and pleasing to God because it is functioning as God intended us to function. He saved us to serve Him. So it’s pleasing to Him because we’re doing His will.
 
This is then described as out “reasonable service”. Now this two-word phrase is one that’s difficult to translate into English because we don’t really have words that fully capture the translation. The word translated “reasonable” is the Greek word LOGIKOS. It’s a hard “g”. We would soften it if we brought it into English. It’s where we get our word “logic”. It has something to do with thinking something through from its foundation to its conclusion, to reflect upon it. It’s something that is logically derived from a certain set of assumptions. Now what this is showing is that the Christian life is to be a life based on thought, not a life based on emotion, not a life based on a response to some kind of emotional appeal or a feel-good sermon.
 
It is something where people are taught to understand what God has done for them as we’ve done by going through the first eleven chapters of Romans, that God had a plan for salvation, that He sent His Son to become a human being, to go to the cross and to die on the cross as a substitute for every human being, to bear in His own body on the cross the punishment for our sins so that we could have freedom from sin and forgiveness from sin by simply trusting in Him and His substitutionary death. Now once we come to understand all that God has done for us and we reflect upon that we realize that by believing in Christ we become identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection and we are given a new life in Christ. Then the logical consequence of understanding that is that we should live that new life in service to God. So the idea of using the word LOGIKOS here brings us to the fact that a person should reach this point through a logical consideration of all that God has done for them with the result that they recognize they are to live to serve God and not themselves.
 
The second word there “service” is the word LATREIA. Now this isn’t your normal word for worship, which has more the idea of bowing the knee. This is another aspect of worship, which is service. It’s not emphasizing the submission to authority side, which the other word emphasizes but it’s emphasizing the service side. So it’s a service of worship. It is serving God with our life. That’s why it’s a living, on-going sacrifice because we’re serving God rather than the desires of our sin nature.
 
The sentence ends there in English but it really doesn’t end there in Greek. It continues on. The thought of the second verse grows out of and develops from the first verse. Here we read the prohibition, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” There’s a reason for that because it demonstrates something. It puts something to the test. The word “proof” there is DOKIMAZO which has the idea of not just proving something but it’s like in a laboratory where you’re demonstrating the truth of something through your life. It’s not just testing just for testing sake but it’s testing to demonstrate the quality of something. “… So that you may prove [demonstrate] what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” I prefer to translate that as that “you’re supposed to demonstrate that the will of God is good and acceptable and perfect”. It’s demonstrated through our life.
 
So let’s just look at the first part of this. The first part we have a present passive imperative. Present imperatives emphasize sort of a standard operating procedure in the Christian life whereas an aorist imperative is more like a jab to get our attention or to emphasize a priority; a present imperative emphasizes something that is to continually be a reality in our life. It’s an ongoing characteristic in the Christian life. So we’re not to be conformed, which is the word SUSCHEMATIZO. It has the idea of not being impressed into a mold of something.
 
So the picture is that we have our sin nature but there’s something outside of us that is pushing us to conform to this preset mold of the world and the environment around us. We’re not to be conformed to this world but instead we’re to be transformed. The word SCHEMA is emphasizing more of an external conformity whereas the word here is METAMORPHOO which emphasizes an internal transformation. It, too, is a present passive imperative. We don’t transform ourselves. There’s something else acting upon us that brings about that transformation. That’s the Word of God and the Spirit of God, which we learn about from other passages. It changes us from the inside out. It’s not just an external transformation.
 
So we’re not to be conformed to the world but we’re transformed by the renewing of our emotions. Right? No, that’s not what it says. But that’s what you think when you look at a lot of Christians. They’ve given up on rationally defending the Scripture. They’ve given up on believing in the inerrancy and the infallibility of the Word of God. They don’t believe it’s historically accurate. They don’t believe it’s scientifically accurate. They don’t believe that when it touches on things of history or archeology or science that it’s right. They say it’s right in the spiritual things but remember, Jesus said that since we can’t validate the spiritual things, the way that we know that it’s true spiritually because when it talks about the things that we can validate it’s always true. So modern man has everything turned inside out. So we have to believe in the Word of God and trust in the Word of God and that changes our thinking, not our emotions.
 
It is by transforming the way we think and not just what we think but how we think. It’s not just changing the content of our thinking but how we think, the structure, the forms in which we use to think. We can think right thoughts in a wrong way and a right thing done in a wrong way is wrong. I’ve seen this happen a lot of times. You get a certain type of people who are saved out of an existential mystical background which was typical of hippies coming out of the 60s and they get converted and they hear the gospel and they get converted through some sort of the ministry of a charismatic church. But charismatic theology is basically existential mystical theology so they don’t have to change their worldview at all. They’re still existential and mystical but they go from being in a pagan environment to charismatic theology. They change a lot of the content but it’s still within the same structure of existential mysticism. It doesn’t do them much good because it’s a right thing now but it’s done in a wrong way. So we have to learn how to think differently. As one of my professors in seminary said so wisely at one time, “It’s hard enough to think. But it’s really difficult to think about how we think, to analyze our own thought forms and structure that.” That gets really tough.
 
Fortunately, it’s not ultimately up to us, we have God the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. Now we’re not supposed to be conformed to this world. The word for world there is not the word you might expect. The Greek word normally translated world such as “For God so loved the world,” is the Greek word KOSMOS which is sometimes translated earth but ultimately it refers to an orderly or organized system. Often it refers to the earth. Sometimes as in John 3:16 it refers to the inhabitants of that system.
 
But the word used here is AION. It’s a time word. Sometimes it’s translated “age” but each age of earth’s history is characterized by different thought forms. Worldliness based on the word KOSMOS often talks about how human beings think a certain way that is in contrast to God’s way. What AION emphasizes is that this is related to a certain time frame in history. Just think about the history of ideas. We know there was a time before Greek philosophy when things emphasized the fact that things were more supernatural. Then the Greeks came along and began to transform that into ways to try to remove any religion or supernatural ideas or superstition and you had the pre-Socratics and then you had Heraclitus and Parmenides and then you had Plato and Aristotle and then the Neo-Platonics and others like the Epicureans and the Stoics who came along. Each age does a shift in the way people think. You get into the period of Christianity some people thought according to the Bible but a lot of early Christians were still thinking within the structure of Neo-Platonism. That characterized much of the early Church. It wasn’t biblical Christianity. It was a Neo-Platonic interpretation of Christianity. Until you get to the Middle Ages around the 11th or 12th century and there’s a rediscovery of Aristotle under most notably Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and some others. Then they had an Aristotelian interpretation of Christianity. It wasn’t until Luther came along and argued for the Scripture alone that you have a genuine “back to the Bible” movement that gave birth to the Protestant reformation. But then it’s not long before Europe gets corrupted again by secular forms of the ancient rationalism of Plato, now the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Aristotle becomes the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume and Spinoza and some others. Excuse me, Spinoza was a rationalist. So each era is characterized by different ways of thinking.
 
We live in one of those eras where most people have one leg in one era and another leg in another era. One leg is firmly planted in modernism and the other leg is firmly planted in post-modernism so they have a really jumbled way of thinking. But that’s the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist as the German word calls it. It’s the common way in which people think. It’s gotten really screwy how people think. If you look around, many of you wonder and ask me questions about what in the world is going on. Well, people are working out the implications of their assumptions. These assumptions got firmly embedded in Western culture as a result of Darwin, Freud, Spencer, Marx, and many others. Ideas that were on the fringe 150 years ago are now embedded so deeply in the thinking of the children running around the ghetto that they’re existential nihilists and they can’t even say they word, but that’s what they are. And they’re post-modern relativists. They know how to work those systems and they think that way. Your children are that way and your grandchildren are that way. You wonder where in the world they’re getting these ideas. They just sort of absorb them from the culture. And they pick it up. Why? Because they’ve got a little culture magnet inside of them called the sin nature that just attracts these ideas, and their sin natures just love these ideas because it gives them a rationale for self-serving.
 
We’re not immune from that. Just because you’ve been around for a while and you’re a believer doesn’t mean you’re immune from this same kind of thing. We are all very prone to falling into the trap because that’s our sin nature and it gravitates to these different kinds of thought forms. So this is the command to us. We’re not to be conformed to this world but we have to be transformed by the renovation or overhaul of our thinking. The word there for renewing is ANAKAINOSIS meaning to renew, and it has to do with a transformative overhaul. The word mind is the word NOUS which is the idea of a manner of thinking, the way in which you think.
 
The illustration I’ve used is that most Christians are in a mess. If you’re north of 15 when you get saved you’re probably a little bit unhappy. It’s not quite what you thought it would be. But if you got saved like I did at six there’s not a whole lot to repent from and not a whole lot of problems because you’re just a little kid. When you get older you mess up and you figure out that you need to really rely upon the Lord but the way most Christians are is that they have a house that’s just disheveled. It’s in shambles. The sheetrock is peeling off the walls. The paint’s peeling off. The hinges in the kitchen cabinets are breaking. The roof leaks a little bit and the house has settled, it’s a little crooked and if you put a ball down on the floor it’s going to roll from one end of the house to the other. They want God to come and straighten it all up.
 
The trouble is the Holy Spirit shows up with a bulldozer. They just want Him to come in and kind of, like an interior decorator, slap some new paint on the place and kind of straighten up the cabinets and a few things and just do a superficial fix but the Holy Spirit shows up with a bulldozer and He wants to tear it all down, including your rotten human viewpoint foundation and rebuild from the get-go. Most Christians once they realize that’s what the Christian life is all about say, “Uh Oh. Wait a minute. You’re not the guy I want. I want the guy who’s just going to slap on a fresh coat of paint and whitewash everything so it looks good.” We don’t want to really substantively change anything from the inside out and yet that’s what Romans 12:1–2 is talking about, a deep, internal renovation, down to a destruction and replacement of the very foundation of how we think. We’ll get into that next time.

Romans 127b-The Worldview Shift – Part 1

Romans 12:1 NASB95
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
Romans 127b-The Worldview Shift – Part 1 Romans 12:1-2
 
Unless you just never watch the news or you’re living in a cave somewhere, I don’t know that anyone could have escaped all of the hubbub the last couple of days about the interview that appeared in the GQ magazine with Phil Robertson who is the patriarch of the Duck Dynasty clan and the Duck brand free enterprise industry. Now I’ve read some interesting comments from people on Facebook from believers, some of whom have been associated with this church. And the issue here isn’t his understanding of the gospel which I don’t really know if it’s straight on. He’s is apparently an elder at a Church of Christ. If it’s the denomination of the Church of Christ they believe in baptismal regeneration. In other words you’re not saved unless you’re baptized. That’s a problem with their gospel but it’s not an issue here.
 
The issue isn’t the accuracy of their doctrine. It’s not that he’s being a spokesperson for Christianity because he’s not setting himself up as that. What happens when Christians become celebrities is the pagan press sets them up to be spokespeople and then targets them and seeks to assassinate them. It’s a simple dynamic whereby we see the world which is in the process of “Operation Suppression” are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. The way the dynamic works is they’re rationalizing their actions. We do that some, too. We rationalize the dynamics of our life but not to the degree that the secular, atheist perverted pagans do, but we do it in our own way and we have to watch out for that. We have our little pet areas and we have to watch that we don't want the Lord to deal with or mess with but what happens is that when you’re suppressing the truth in unrighteousness something has to fill that vacuum when you take the truth out of your soul. So something gets sucked into that vacuum in your soul and it’s a fantasy.
 
Most are living in a fantasy world. In today’s environment what gets sucked in is a utopian version because the basic difference between the liberal left and the conservative right as Thomas Sowell so accurately pointed out in his book, The Conflict of Vision, is that liberals believe human beings are basically good and conservatives don’t. They believe that people are basically bad, or they have a propensity to be bad, that as dirt runs downhill, that’s the direction we go when we get into a default position, our sin nature takes over. But if you’re a liberal. If you start with man as basically good, then man is perfectible and society is perfectible. So you build your view of social programs and economics and politics around a fantasy that man is perfectible and society is perfectible.
 
Now conservatives, whether you’re a conservative Christian, or whether you’re just a traditional conservative, you believe that human beings are basically flawed and that if we’re given too much power absolute power corrupts absolutely. Given the opportunity, human beings under a certain amount of pressure and stress will default to sin nature info and they will go in the wrong direction. So there needs to be standards and there needs to be absolutes that guard and protect society. We’re never going to have a utopic society. It doesn’t mean we don’t strive for order and discipline and civilization but the greatest levels of civilization that have been developed in the western world, in Western Europe and the Americas, has been developed by countries, nations, even the United States specifically that have had the greatest impact of Christianity.
 
There’re not Christian nations in the sense that they have become primarily dominated by Christianity or a theocracy which is always a lie the left wants to use. I’ve even read this with some so-called, I would call turncoat, conservatives. There’s a book on American theocracy by Kevin Phillips. Now in certain areas I can’t tell if he’s telling the truth or not because those aren’t in my areas of expertise, such as economics and some areas of politics. But he has a whole section on church and state and on the religious right and he is just distorted and perverted and dead wrong.
 
I’ve had the privilege of knowing many of the leaders in the so-called Christian right. I’ve had the privilege of knowing people like Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye and a number of others that are castigated by him and he has an absolute total ignorance about things. This is what happens when you buy into an “Operation Suppression” and you’re suppressing truth and you’re building a fantasy world in which you’re living, As soon as someone comes along and they prick your little utopian bubble then you just throw an absolute tantrum because you can’t live in any other kind of reality.
 
We have a lot of segments of American culture today that are living in these fantasy castles. You have one group in the militant gay/lesbian/transgender community building their fantasy castles. You have others in certain racial communities on the liberal left, in Hispanic communities and in black communities and other minority communities who are involved in the liberal/socialist community and the antigun crowd. It’s interesting how most of these people sort of flock together, the old adage “birds of a feather flock together” is what really sets off Thomas Sowell in his opening introduction in “Conflict of Visions”.
 
He recognizes that on many apparent disconnected, disparate issues from birth control to gun control, the same people seem to always line up on the same sides of the issue. The liberal left has the preponderance of lies and it’s just unconscionable. The media is complicit in all of this and they want to do everything they can to support the fantasy world, the utopian fantasy castles that are out there. One example with this in gun control is the fact that you never hear anybody on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN talk about the fact that the recent shooter in Denver was a radical socialist and he was all in favor of gun control.
 
The vast majority of the shooters in these mass shootings have espoused socialist/leftist political positions and nearly every one of them have been on some kind of psychiatric medication or either they’re just coming off of it, as is the case with several of the most recent shootings. Also, a number of them have been involved in satanic and occultic worship. But we never hear that side of the story. That’s important because it helps us understand two important areas in terms of their outlook on life.
 
Tonight as we get into our passage in Romans 12:2 we’re going to talk about worldview. A number of these individuals have a view of man, a view of ultimate reality that is completely distorted and skewed. Several of them are even Satan or devil worshipers involved in the occult but you never hear the media talk about this kind of things because by definition if someone owns a gun they have to be a radical, rightwing fascist. That just goes without saying to them but that’s not at all true.
 
The lies just continue to go out there but today we’ve seen all the hubbub about Duck Dynasty and the fact is that Phil Robertson doesn’t say anything that’s particularly pointed at any individual who is homosexual. It’s not a personal attack. He is simply stating his own opinion in relation to his own preference and he backs it with the Bible. The extreme reaction that we’ve seen out of the homosexual community just indicates how extremely bigoted they are.
 
In fact, one article I read today written by a homosexual journalist made that exact point. He said the embarrassing thing about this whole thing is that it shows the knee-jerk reaction in the homosexual community is to shut down completely anyone they disagree with and remove them from visibility. They don’t believe in the 1st or 2nd amendment rights. They don’t believe in the Constitution unless it happens to be something they can utilize to promote their utopian fantasy world so this is part of the whole culture war we are engaged in today. Trust me, we’re on the losing side. It’s not getting better. I’m not the bearer of good news other than the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think that as we’ve seen it go in the last twenty years we’re going to see a decline at a more rapid pace over the next ten to twenty years. What we have to do is be prepared spiritually for it. I think that some of us will see the inside of a jail because of our stand for Christianity and we have to be prepared for it.
 
Now open your Bibles to Romans, chapter 12. Romans 12:2 as I pointed out last time really gives us in one verse a summary of your mission and my mission in terms of our own spiritual life. The verse begins, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” The context comes out of verse 1. Properly punctuated, there would be a semi-colon at the end of verse 1, not a complete stop.
 
Paul comes out with an urge to challenge, to put before his audience, a high standard that they should achieve. He urges them or challenges them on the basis of the mercies of God that you present the totality of your person as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. The way you do that is verse 2. Verse 2 explains how we present our bodies as a living sacrifice. It’s by not getting conformed to the world but being transformed by the renovation of our mind.
 
Now as I pointed out last time that there are two important words here for understanding this passage. The first word is conformed, suschematizo, is a present imperative. It’s passive because it’s emphasizing an external action upon us. We see a great illustration of this in this whole Phil Robertson’s Duck Dynasty thing today, because you see how the gay/lesbian community is trying to intimidate the Judeo-Christian community and anyone who believes that homosexuality is wrong.
 
By the way, in the orthodox Jewish community, they recognize that homosexuality is a choice and it never gets any press coverage but there are quite a few treatment centers for homosexuality. One is Stephen Bennett’s ministry in Connecticut. He’s a former practicing homosexual that has had tremendous impact on those who want to leave the homosexual lifestyle. So by the results of their ministries in both the orthodox Jewish communities and the Christian environment they have shown that homosexuality is a choice. It’s not genetic. There may be, like we all have, certain genetic predispositions toward certain sins, but that’s never a justification for committing those sins. We can’t say, “Well, it’s not my fault. I just inherited that trend.” No, we don’t have to act upon that trend toward those weaknesses. But that’s what the gay community is doing.
 
I had a professor in seminary who called them the “sads” because they’re not really happy, they’re miserable. I went through a lengthy study on homosexuality in the Genesis series and you can go back and review that. Homosexuality, as Phil Robertson pointed out maybe not in the best way, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-12, is a sin. The passage says that homosexuality is a sin just like adultery or any other form of sexual immorality. He wasn’t comparing it to bestiality. He was listing different categories of sins and including within those verses drunkenness. He is a recovering alcoholic so he would include himself as a former practitioner in that list of sins.
 
But all that’s overlooked by the arrogance and hostility of the truth suppressors in the homosexual community. It’s not just them. It’s the anti-gun crowd, all these other things. I just wish people would legitimize my sins. You know? Gluttony for ice cream? Things like that. Let’s just make those things just fine and okay. But no one will do that. So we can’t have “Fat people for ice cream.” It’s not going to go anywhere. There’s this pressure, though, from the truth suppressors to legitimize their truth suppression.
 
That’s what this word “conform” means, to legitimize a fantasy world. The word for world here is the word aion, not the word kosmos. Kosmos focuses sort of on the world itself, the earth itself and the inhabitants of the earth whereas aion has temporal and spatial nuances and emphasizes the spirit of thinking of the age or the culture of the age so we’re not pressured into the mold of the world around us, the zeitgeist.
 
We’re going to have to have an overhaul. As I pointed out last time, unfortunately a lot of Christians are like someone who lives in a rundown house that needs a new paint job, work on the floors, new carpeting, maybe needs “Oops Steam Cleaning”. I don’t know if you ever listen to that commercial on the radio. They need work on the house. What the Holy Spirit does is show up and gets the bulldozer and wants to take out everything including the foundation, which is human viewpoint, and start over. Most Christians say, “No, no, no. I’m really not that serious. I really don’t want everything torn down, especially the foundation. I just want a veneer of Christianity. I just want to get enough of Christianity to get stability in my life to where I can manage to make things work and still take care of all of my little pet sins and not totally give up all my fantasies related to my own truth suppression.”
 
So this verse says we’re not to be thinking like the world but we’re to be transformed, metmorphaoo. We are to be transformed internally. It’s not just to be pressured into the mold of the world. One of the articles I read today pointed out that the vast number of Americans agree with the statements that Phil Robertson was making. That’s a traditional view that Americans and those in western civilization have had for hundreds and hundreds of years. But now no one wants to really speak up like that because we’re going to be labeled as somebody who is spouting hate and we’re going to be called bigoted and all these other things. Rather than put up with all of that opposition we just keep our mouths shut. That’s what happens. We just go along and we don’t say anything. So we’re letting the world pressure us into its mold.
 
But the mandate for the believer to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, anakainosis, which means a complete transformative overhaul from the inside out. If we just change the outside we’re like the Pharisees. Jesus called them whitewashed sepulchers. That was a gravestone and as they built a sepulcher, which was a concrete stone box over the grave. They painted it white. It looked good on the inside but on the inside were dead men’s bones. It was just a camouflage, just a veneer.
 
As Christians we want to be completely transformed from the inside out and that means an overhaul of the mind, not the emotions. A lot of Christians just don’t want to think. In fact over the last 50 years since the end of World War II we’ve created church after church after church that major in emotional appeals. Part of this is seen in the popularity or the commercialization and entertainment aspect of the mega church which is built on using all of the advertising methodologies which have come out of the advertising world. This is how they bill themselves. This is how they get so many people there. Then they water down the message so if you don’t say anything that offends anyone then more people will come.
 
In fact, we have one of the largest, if not the largest mega churches, in the country. It’s right here in Houston, Texas. I know any number of unbelievers, some of my closest Jewish friends who just love listening to the pastor because he doesn’t say anything that could possibly offend them. Remember the Scripture says the cross is offensive. It’s a stumbling block to the Jew. Well, he never says anything that causes them any kind of a problem. Now if I were a Christian pastor and I read my Bible with my blinders off, I’d be downright embarrassed that if unbelievers could listen to me and not be offended by the cross then I was obviously not doing what God wanted me to do.
 
So there has to be this overhaul of the mind, not just to appeal to emotions, not just to make people feel good, not just motivate them but to overhaul the mind. But people don’t want to think. They don’t want to learn how to think. That’s why churches that focus on teaching aren’t exactly overcrowded. What’s happening is that we’re seeing a trend for the last 30 years that the more you teach, the less people come. Jesus saw the same thing. In John 6 the more he made it clear what was required of a disciple the faster the disciples left him. He would have 5,000, 6,000, or even 7,000 people and by the end of his message there would be the twelve. That’s it. No one really wanted to deal with what He was saying.
 
But we have to renew our mind, completely change how we think. It’s the battle of the mind. That’s what spiritual warfare is all about. I don’t know if you’ve realized this. I’m putting another plug in for the book Tommy Ice and I wrote which the Lord has used in tremendous ways about Spiritual Warfare. It has been reprinted. It is available and because this is a noncommercial publication now there’s no charge put on it. Before it was always published through your standard publishing houses so they put a charge on it. But these are now available under our normal grace policy, just like all the other materials that Dean Bible Ministries puts out. So that is now once again in print and available. You can also get it in Logos format and because of the nature of that it’s going to have a small cost on it. We’re also preparing it to make it available in Kindle, which will have a cost. Hopefully in another six months you’ll be able to purchase it in a Kindle format for those of you who want to view it on your Kindle reader.
 
Okay, so we’ve got to renovate our mind. It’s a battle for the mind. That’s what spiritual warfare is. It’s not going out and engaging in pugilistic contests with demons and throwing demons down on the stage and all the other theatrics and dramatics that come across from false teachers. If you actually study what the Bible teaches about demons and demonic activities as we’ve outlined in the book, you’ll realize that these people are just filled with a lot of heresy and emotionalism that has nothing to do with what Jesus taught or the Bible.
 
We do have a battle, a spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare takes place between your ears. It takes place in your minds as the Apostle Paul says in II Corinthians we are engaged in tearing down fortresses. These fortresses or fortifications of those fantasy worlds, those fantasy castles that we developed within our minds as a result of our suppression techniques. We see a glimpse of this in James 3:13-15 which says, “Who among you is wise and understanding?” So that’s one category. Those who are wise and understanding relates to believers who are skillfully applying the Word of God. It continues, “Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom.” Next James is saying that external behavior can reveal the internal mindset of an individual.
 
So in contrast, verse 14, “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart …” These are just two mental attitude sins but you can think of anger, bitterness, revenge motivation, hostility and all of these which are part of a pagan mindset, “Do not be arrogant and {so} lie against the truth.” Lying against the truth is another form of truth suppression. This is James’ writing. Paul talked about suppressing the truth. James is talking about lying against the truth and it’s the same thing. So in verse 14 James continues, “This wisdom [human viewpoint wisdom] is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, and demonic.” This wisdom doesn’t have its source in God.
 
What we see is the Scripture describes two basic contrasted worldviews. The one is Satanic or demonic. If you’re operating on self-centeredness, mental attitude sins as your motivation, that’s demonic. That’s demon-influence. That’s the same kind of thinking that characterized Satan and his rebellion against God. So Satanic or demonic thinking is human viewpoint. Human beings are simply reflections of Satan. This is what happened in the Garden of Eden. Satan took on the form of a serpent and he came to Eve and said, “Has God really said this? That’s not so true that you can’t take that fruit. You won’t really die. God just doesn’t want you to be like Him.” So he presents his arrogant hostility to God as an enticement to Eve and she fell for it. So her thinking followed Satan’s thinking so when we’re thinking on the basis of our sin nature we’re just thinking like our father, Satan. That’s exactly what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for when he said they were of their father the Devil. He said they were following his kind of thinking.
 
In contrast to that we have divine thinking, usually referred to as divine viewpoint thinking or biblical viewpoint thinking. The Word of God, all 66 books from Genesis to Revelation expresses one consistent unified view of reality. There’s no contradiction between the more than 40 different authors of Scripture who come from a wide variety of backgrounds. You have those who were commercial fishermen like Peter and Andrew and James and John. You had those who were trained in the highest institutions of education in their respective cultures who were meant to serve in high places in the administration and democracy of those countries, like Daniel, men like Moses, men like Nehemiah, from all different cultures. Moses was from Egypt, Daniel was in Babylon and Persia, and Nehemiah later in Persia. They thought differently in terms of their human culture where they grew up but because of their devotion to the Word of God they had a unified view. 
 
Paul was trained and reared in the rabbinical system of Pharisees. Others were farmers. David was raised in a family where he was a shepherd. You have Amos who was a fig picker. You had others who had various different roles and jobs. Joshua was basically an assistant to Moses and he is usually referred to as a military commander because he commanded the armies of Israel against the Canaanites. So you had a wide variety of men coming from different backgrounds. Matthew was a sell-out tax collector, a sell-out to the Romans. A lot of different background but they all had a unified view of what they wrote. That’s because the second author, the one who’s working in and through them, was God the Holy Spirit.
 
So our job when we’re saved is to take all the garbage in our soul, which is everything that’s there just about. Even if it’s right thinking in a wrong framework. So we have to let God the Holy Spirit overhaul that and that only comes about through the study of God’s Word. So we have to understand a little bit about how we got the garbage in our soul and how that is set up because we’re all influenced. We’ve all been pressured to conform to the zeitgeist of our generation. You can see the examples of this and it’s so interesting to see generational change. You can look out there and see all these kids that were born around 1995 to early 2000s and you can see they all seem to think alike. You can draw up these charts outlining how they think and they don’t think like their parents. The baby boom generation doesn’t think like their parent’s generation. With the influence of the media, television, things like that what we see if that the generational conformity is even greater today than it’s ever been before in history.
 
Many parents try to protect their children and I think that’s good if you can do a good job. It’s more important than ever before to try to remove them from the influences. You can limit the television, if not just take the television out completely and not even have that come into the house. Recently I read an interesting sort of parable about that. There was always a stranger who came into the house of this family and that stranger could come into any time the family wanted that stranger. He could promote all kinds of values and beliefs that no one in the family agreed with. Of course, it was a parable about television today. People just allow this stranger into their family and all kinds of programs and music comes on that influences everyone in the family against the values of the family.
 
We have to think about how we, each one of us, have been pressured by the world system to think that way. We all have been. Since all of us were saved at different ages, some at five and six, others as teens and in our twenties or older. But many of us, even if we were saved at the age of 5 or 6 we didn’t really start getting serious with the word until we were older. Now our parents drilled some things into us which were helpful but it really didn’t do everything it could have done to circumvent the influence of the world system. Then we have this little traitor inside of us called our sin nature which has this affinity for everything the world system was promoting. And the devil’s thinking is so adaptive to our sin nature that it’s constantly providing us with rationales for living on the basis of our sin natures.
 
We don’t even know it because this sin nature inside us is constantly throwing out ideas of rebellion and we think, “Oh, that’s a great idea. I’ll just gobble that up.” By the time we’re 4 or 5 or 6 we’ve developed a well-ensconced pagan worldview. Think of this worldview as a blender, a Worldview Mixmaster. We need to understand a little bit about what goes into this. This is what makes up this zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the thinking of the age.
 
There are basically four areas of assumption. The first area of assumption is ultimate reality. What is a person’s view of ultimate reality? What do they think is out there? The second thing is what do they think about the human race? Of course, this brings in the whole issue of origins. Are we just a product of chance, where there was an electrical charge that accidentally sparked and brought some form of life into a protoplasmic glob and that eventually developed into a Harvard professor? So we have the human race as a pure accident. And then we have the issue of knowledge. How do we know anything? Is there a soul as an immaterial part of man? Within evolutionary theory everything is determined by the chemical components of the mind and the body so everything is material. Knowledge is material so you have all these different views of how we come to know anything and beyond just knowing something, how do we know it’s true? 
 
Then this gets to the issue of ethics. What is right and what is wrong? This is usually where we start the conversation and we get into this huge battle, such as over this Duck Dynasty thing. I can’t believe God orchestrated this just to illustrate this message. Everybody is arguing about an ethical issue related to sexuality, specifically homosexuality. That’s what they spend their time talking about but that’s only the tip of the iceberg that’s above the surface. Underneath the waters the next thing down that nobody’s talking about is how do you know whether homosexuality is true and valid as an alternative lifestyle or not? How do you know it’s genetic versus volitional? How do you know if it’s environmental or if it’s personal responsibility and personal choice? How do you come to know that the things that you’re espousing about homosexuality are true?
 
Well, some people say, “That’s just the way I am.” Then you’re basing that on your experience. Other people are basing it on their view of determination. If everything’s physical, everything’s material, then this is just mechanistically determined. That’s just the way that the genetic dice fell and that’s the way you are.
 
So that takes us back to a prior issue. That is the human race. What do you think about human beings? Are they individually responsible and accountable or are they just the product of time plus chance and mechanistically determined by their DNA and various chemical factors and not responsible for their choices? What makes human beings distinct or are they distinct or are we just the latest accident in the chain of being?
 
Then that takes us back to the ultimate reality. Are we just the product of time plus chance or is there an ultimate reality? Were we created with a purpose as Christianity and Judaism teach? That the human race was created in the image and likeness of God and as such are unique and distinct image-bearers of God? Distinct from every other category of living beings? So these are the issues that go into that Mixmaster and we take our conclusions in each of those areas and if you know anything about philosophy those are the basic four categories of philosophy: ultimate reality which is metaphysics, human race which is anthropology, knowledge is epistemology, and then we have ethics.
 
So all of this goes into this worldview Mixmaster and then what comes out of that is our views on origins. The major challenge today is between evolution and creation. If you have questions about that we had a creationist conference at the Chafer Conference back about five years ago and we had some great speakers. John Whitcomb who is in his 80s. I think he’s still doing well, has all of his wits about him and was a great teacher. Our evening speaker was Dr. Steve Austin who was a geologist at the time and since then he’s gone out on his own. He’s now living in three places. He lives in Pittsburgh, in southern California, and he’s an adjunct professor of geology at Cedarville University in Ohio.
 
I talked with him yesterday and we have finally settled on a date of May, 2015, we are going to go on his last trip to the Grand Canyon. Start saving your shekels now. It’s a seven-day trip, creationist geology trip, through the Grand Canyon. It’ll run about $3,000 or so each. We’ll fly to Las Vegas and then we’ll get helicoptered out to the Grand Canyon, put in a couple of boats which are registered as restaurants in the state of Arizona. So that’s the quality of food. Then we’ll spend seven days on the river. There’ll be a lot of geology hikes, equivalent to one semester of geology in an undergraduate course.
 
No, this is not Israel. This is the Grand Canyon trip in May of 2015, not to be confused with the Israel trip in November, 2014. When we get to the end of the destination, we get to take a helicopter back to Las Vegas. It’ll be an interesting, challenging trip. I’ve known people 70 to almost 80 years of age who have gone on these trips. So don’t let that bother you too much. Just start walking to get ready for it.
 
Now back to origins. Origins come out of your worldview. Then religion comes out of your worldview mix. The world has produced all kinds of religions, polytheistic religions, secular religions, atheistic religions, everything is religious. Everything that comes out of a view of ultimate reality can be religious. The Supreme Court of the United States in a decision in 1974 recognized that secular humanism was a religion. Despite all of their disclaimers, your friendly neighborhood atheist or agnostic is religious. That’s his religion. And he just needs to understand that if you make a statement that there is a God and he considers that religious then the negation of that is also religious. Or the statement that there might or might not be a God which is agnosticism also has to be religious. Anything related to that proposition that there is a God is religious. Use that sometime in your witnessing to somebody who is an atheist or agnostic and get them all twisted up on their own petard. They won’t like that.
 
Everything’s religious and out of that comes your view of man. Man is either a little god or he’s totally independent of the gods or he’s just a toy of the gods in some sort of deterministic framework. Your view of origins, your view of religion affects your view of man and of nature and of creation as well as science and math and society and all the issues in society such as marriage, family, and oh yes, politics. The only things that are really worth talking about. We got one of those much-hated Xeroxed Christmas letters from an old family friend of my wife, this last week. It was the first time we’d been on their list. I immediately fell in love with the old guy who wrote it because he complained about all of the intrusion of the federal government over the last several years. At the very end he said that this Christmas letter has focused on religion and politics. “We haven’t bored you with our personal life, our health, or our children, which is how it should be. We just talked about the things that matter.” So I appreciated that.
 
Then out of all of that comes our view of suffering and solutions to suffering. Why is there suffering in the world? This is why the Bible has included the book of Job. God revealed that as the very first book that was ever inspired and written by God. Job was written before Moses wrote the Pentateuch and it is all about suffering because suffering is such a fundamental issue for every single human being. We go through all kinds of suffering and adversity.
 
We have to learn to deal with that and for the unbeliever, the agnostic or the atheist, they have a real problem because in a closed environment where there’s no god and no devil and no sin, suffering is a real problem for them. They have to admit, then, that suffering has to be normal for them in their system. For Christians, suffering is abnormal. It’s the consequence of sin. It’s not how God originally designed things but for the secular atheist, suffering has to be normal.
 
Listen to what the evolutionist says, “Evolution is based on the principle of the survival of the fittest.” Therefore, it’s based on the non-survival of the unfit. That means it’s based on death. The mechanism to advance in evolution is the death of those who are unfit. The suffering and destruction of those who are unfit. So for them the only way to advance, the only way to improve, is on the backs of those who suffer and die and are unfit. So suffering and death are good. That’s the mechanism of advance in evolutionary thought. They don’t want to think about it that way. They don’t want to really say that something is good or bad or horrible that you’re going through that.
 
They always say the universe is doing that to them to advance the evolutionary cause. Well are they ascribing consciousness to the universe? And purpose to the universe? Well, that sounds awfully close to a purpose-driven universe, a whole new theology. Okay? Teleology, that there is an intelligent design. Then we have law. How do we view law? Is law just something we agree on? Or does law have an ultimate reference point? Are there absolutes or is law just something we can make up and change as often as we wish? And who determines that? What’s the authority there?
 
If we don’t have an external authority such as the Bible or revelation from a deity, that means societies just make it up as they go along with no external reference point, so it’s pure relativism. So you can change it whenever you want to. It depends on who has the power. Do you want to understand what’s happening in politics? It’s power politics because if God is removed the only thing that matters is power because power is what gives you the right to determine what is right and what is wrong.
 
The reason Republicans don’t do a good job with this is because many of them are still operating on a biblical worldview and they haven’t awakened to the whole issue of the problems in a secular worldview where the ultimate ideal is power where you can change everything in order to validate your own trends of your sin nature. This also impacts art, music, theater, literature, and all of those areas within the liberal arts. So this is the worldview Mixmaster.
 
Now if you spend twenty years growing up in the pagan worldview, then you have a whole worldview system that relates to origins, ethics, values, right and wrong, science and math, marriage, everything that comes out of a foundation that has rejected God that’s built on a utopic framework that man is basically good. You have all kinds of small, tiny assumptions in your thinking that came out of that and you held to those views for most of your life. And now, all of a sudden you become a Christian and those things don’t automatically go away. You have to be educated in terms of biblical truth and you have to eject all of the negative and wrong ideas and replace them with biblical ideas.
 
You have to understand that’s your mission. It shouldn’t take you long. The Bible really isn’t that difficult to understand. What makes the Bible that difficult is that people don’t want to understand it. They don’t want it to be true because it’s inconvenient to their sin nature. That’s the real inconvenient truth: that the Bible is true. It also affects economics and business.
 
So every worldview answers basic fundamental questions. The most basic is what is ultimate reality. Then you have the question, what is the nature of external reality? This was something that Descartes, Rene Descartes who was a Jesuit priest, a mathematician and geometry expert, struggled with. Is external reality real or is it just a cosmic deception from God or the universe? Do you really exist? Am I really in this building or is this sort of a delusion that God has wrapped around me? How do I know that anything actually exists? And this is what drove Descartes to the conclusion: “I think, therefore I exist.” It’s like the story of Descartes went into a bar and he was just sitting there looking at his drink. The bartender came up and said, “What are you thinking about?” Descartes answered, “Nothing.” So poof! He was gone.
 
Descartes built a whole philosophy of rationalism. The trouble with rationalism is that when you start inside of your mind, you have to get out of it to the existence of external things. Making that jump is what’s difficult. So pure rationalism, whether it’s the idealism of Platonism or the rationalism of Descartes, falls apart on the problem of solipsism. Solipsism means you never really get outside of your soul. You don’t get to external realities.
 
So the empiricists come along and say, “Okay you’re born with a blank slate, a tabula rasa and you’re out there in the world and you’re just being bombarded by all this sense data and that’s how you learn truth, how you come to knowledge. So you see how we’re moving from ultimate reality to knowledge. We have the question, what is mankind? Is mankind just sort of an accident or is there purpose? Is he under a determinative purpose or does he have personal responsibility?
 
What happens when a person dies? What happens when they physically die? Do they go to another existence or is that the end? It’s been so great with the Good News Club. About two or three weeks ago a little boy came up to one of the teachers and said: “Wait a minute. Do you mean that there’s another life after this one? No one ever told me that before. That’s incredible.” We’ve had four or five kids trust the Lord at those Good News Clubs in the last three weeks. We’re going to have more. I’ve got about fifteen fifth graders in my group and I think four of them are saved and I don’t know about the others. I know there are some that need to be saved. But it’s just a great opportunity. Some of them just need to be sanctified and others need a little divine discipline but that’s another issue.
 
What happens when a person dies? And, is there an afterlife? Is it good or bad? How do we get there? How do we know what’s true? How can we know anything with certainty? And what is our basis then for evaluation? How do we know right from wrong? You look at these attacks on poor old Phil Robertson and you have people who are saying he’s just dead wrong. How do they know that? Where do they get the idea that he’s wrong? They’re moral relativists. They rejected God or any kind of absolutes so what gives them the right to make an absolute moral statement that he’s wrong? How do they know they’re not wrong? These are the kind of questions we need to ask.
 
Then if you take the whole cumulative aspect of humanity, you have to deal with the history of humanity. What is the meaning of history? Or is there meaning to history? Or is it just some big cosmic accident? If it’s a cosmic accident then it’s pretty depressing because there’s no afterlife, no purpose, just an accident so the only way to go is existentialism or nihilism. If everything’s an accident then it really doesn’t matter whether I kill you or kiss you. You can’t distinguish the merits of one from the other because there’s no basis for saying something’s good or something’s bad other than personal preference. So these are the basic questions we answer in every worldview.
 
Now the really tricky thing is how human viewpoint coming out of our sin nature neutralizes any principle from the Word of God. Once you talk to someone about the gospel, you put out a little nugget of truth there and if they’re operating in truth suppression just like an amoeba they want to reinterpret and absorb the doctrine within their own categories. Immediately they isolate it and neutralize it. I had a great example of this some years ago when I was at Preston City Bible Church. I had some family members (unnamed) visit the church. These extended family members were not believers. One of them had been very much involved in New Age/metaphysical type of quasi-cult and had been a teacher. It just so happened that I was teaching John 3 the day they visited the church. I was teaching about Nicodemus and regeneration. You have 45 minutes to really get the gospel across. Afterwards at lunch I heard the statement, “You know I really haven’t been involved in my religion in a while, but after listening to you this morning, I just wanted to go back to it.”
 
Great example. The unbeliever in negative volition takes the truth that you tell them and they immediately, unconsciously almost redefine it, reinterpret it, reshape it, and conform it to fit their worldview so their little fantasy world isn’t challenged by what you said. You just beat your head against the wall thinking “what happened?” That’s what happens in the sin nature. The sin nature is set in rebellion against God.
 
I’m going to stop here. The next time we’re going to come back and understand this whole issue of how we thought as pagans because it’s still there lurking from our sin nature. When we’re out of fellowship this is the garbage that surfaces in our soul. We have to recognize that there’s internal and external pressure to conform to the spirit of the age. The only solution is that we renovate our thinking through the Word of God. This has to be a conscientious determined approach on our part. It doesn’t just happen because the default position of your sin nature is to slide into the slime of sin and depravity and just to relish it. The only way to oppose that is to make a conscientious effort to walk by the Spirit on the basis of the light of God’s Word.

Romans 128b-Worldview Shift – Part 2

Romans 12:2 NASB95
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 128b-Worldview Shift – Part 2 Romans 12:2-3
 
We’re going to do a little review of what we covered last week so we can continue to set up where I’m going in this particular study. Romans 12:1-2, as I’ve stated in the last lessons, is a critical passage. The more I have studied this over the last ten years or so, the more I think this is the blueprint for the Christian life. Paul begins, “I beseech you, I urge you, I challenge you by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God which is your reasonable service.” Reasonable here means it’s a logical deduction once we understand what God has done for us in His grace then we conclude that we should serve Him.
 
The way we do this is explained in verse two telling us in the negative not to be conformed to this world. It has the idea of being pressed into a mold. The phrase “mercies of God” is the same as the beginning of the next verse. Paul has explained in the last eleven chapters that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Bible doctrine is not just an academic exercise in learning things about God and theology but it implies and demands a change, a course of action in our lives.
 
 I used the example last week of how the pressure of the world system with the example of Phil Robertson and the whole Duck Dynasty. I did hear that Jessie Jackson opened his mouth as usual and stated that what Phil Robertson did was analogous to the man who wanted to force Rosa Parks to go to the back of the bus. Of course this is so surprise coming from the Rev. Jackson. He has now firmly planted his feet in the anti-God, anti-Bible, anti-Christian mode and he just says there’s no reason for Robertson to say what he did. Well, what about the verse that was quoted? Isn’t Jackson supposed to be a Christian pastor? I was driving back from Louisiana this morning when I heard that. I was wondering what kind of Christianity he holds that takes a razorblade to various passages of Scripture that identify homosexuality as a sin. Then you say that’s akin to racism.
 
This is just an example we’re developing when we talk about modern and postmodern thinking. It turns everything inside out and we no longer have any kind of input or reference point by which to evaluate anything. That’s a perfect example of it. I just love it when the news gives me my illustrations. So we’re pressured constantly to conform or think like the world or we’re threatened with all kinds of consequences. Instead we’re to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.
 
The word for world there is the idea for the thinking of the world. We’re going to see several different words for thinking in this chapter. This word AION has to do with the thinking of the world system but as it’s expressed in different time periods. Every time period in history has different nuances. It’s obvious to any thinking person that they all manifest the same lie of the Devil, but every generation dresses it up in different clothes. So those different clothes somehow disguise it for us because we’re sheep, remember. We’re not too bright and so we have to come to understand how Satan’s lie is being manifest in our generation so we can understand it in terms of our own thinking.
 
So we’re not to be conformed to the world but we’re to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, which means that the Christian life is essentially thinking. It has to do with understanding how to think as God thinks. It’s not a life based on emotion. It’s based on thinking accurately and objectively according to God’s revelation. When we change the way we think it changes the way we act and by living that out, we demonstrate that God’s will is good, acceptable, and complete. The New King James translates that word as “perfect” but it has the sense of being complete. It deals with the sufficiency of the Scripture.
 
I then went to James 3 and talked about the contrast between the wisdom that is above in James 3:15 versus that which is earthly, natural, and demonic. The word there for earthly is focusing on what’s manifested on the earth by the inhabitants of the earth. The word “natural” is the word PSUCHIKOS in the Greek. It’s translated natural also in 1 Corinthians 2:14 and referenced to the soulish or unregenerate man who is unable to understand the things of God because they are spiritually revealed.
 
So this is showing that false wisdom is that which comes from the creature that is not oriented to eternal things. This emphasizes these two worldviews we have. You either think like the devil or you think like Jesus Christ, one or the other. In our lives from one moment to the next we may be thinking according to God’s principles and then we’re out of fellowship and we’re thinking like the devil. We may think we’re just as neurotic or borderline psychotic as we can be but that’s because one moment we’re thinking and living according to the Scriptures and we’re walking by the Spirit and then the next minute we’re in rebellion and we’re walking according to the sin nature and we’re completely out of fellowship. We closed last time talking about the fact that we all have a worldview. We all have a way of looking at the world. Every human being does. We think of the world in terms of our religious assumptions, in terms of other intellectual assumptions and I showed this in terms of basic assumptions every worldview has.
 
There are four basic areas: ultimate reality, what philosophy calls metaphysics, that which is beyond the physical senses and this refers to God or theism as a worldview or it can refer to pantheism, polytheism, atheism, Darwinism, and secularism. All of those have different views of what exists such as ultimate materialism which looks at the universe as only material and everything is controlled by material forces. From our understanding of ultimate reality we also have a view of who we are as human beings.
 
In terms of anthropology we have a view of knowledge or epistemology as it’s identified in philosophy. This asks how we know what we know. Then we have the practical outworking of those in terms of ethics and how we live. All of these as they go into that worldview Mixmaster gets stirred up and from that develop different views of origin, different views of religion, man, nature, creation, science, and society including marriage, family, politics, suffering and the solutions to suffering and law as well as the arts.
 
This is important because a lot of places where people pick up the worldview of their time is through the arts, through literature and stories that are read, through the music that is heard, not just the words in the music but the music itself. Music changes when the worldview changes, just as everything else changes in history. All change when our presuppositions about reality change. It also affects things like economics and business. So that’s the worldview Mixmaster.
 
When we break down a worldview it’s helpful to break it down in terms of the four fundamental assumptions: what does it say about God or ultimate reality? What does it say about man and the nature of man, such as whether man is basically good or basically evil? Knowledge which is how do we know what we know and how do we know for sure? And ethics and even the relationship of those four to one another.
 
Last time I identified the basic questions that every worldview seeks to answer: What is ultimate reality and how do we know that it’s real? What’s the nature of external reality? What is mankind? Is mankind just the product of time, place, and chance? Was there an accidental spark in some primordial ooze and out came and what developed from that over a period of time is essentially human beings? What happens when a person dies? Are we just composed of electronic impulses acting upon different aspects of our physical nature or do we have volition and responsibility? Or is that just something that we think we have but it’s actually just the function of chemical reactions within our body? If it is physical reactions within our body then how can we be responsible?
 
That has huge impact on our understanding of law and punishment. That is something every lawyer deals with every time he’s in the court. Many of you know Bob Guerra. He’s a lawyer down in the Valley and he’s told me many times that it’s getting so much worse than we imagine. Nothing that anyone does is their fault. Never. It’s never their fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. This is accepted in the courts. It’s not their fault. It’s their parents’ fault. It’s someone else’s fault. It’s the food that they ate. Whatever it might be, the environment, the chemicals put out by the petro-chemical plants, whatever it is, it’s never someone’s fault because they made a decision. That flows out of a natural assumption that we’re products of purely physical force from a purely material universe.
 
Next we come to knowledge questions. How can we know? How do we know? Can we know anything with certainty? Then how do we know right from wrong? What determines right from wrong? For example going back to the current event with Phil Robertson and the Dynasty controversy, what gives anyone the right to say that he was wrong? What gives him the right to say that homosexual behavior is sinful? Where do you get your absolutes? Where do you get the ability to say that something is right and something is wrong? If there are no universal absolutes outside the human race then we just make it up as we go along.
 
That’s what we’re going to see when we end up in post-modernism is that everybody’s story is competing and no one has the right to a meta-narrative or overarching story that determines absolute truth. So it’s just pure competition so what gives anyone the right to come along and say something is right or wrong. That is where it boils down to power. What we see that the movers and shakers in our culture who understand this realize that in post-modernism when there’s no absolute authority then the real issue is who has power. Coming to a place of power and using that power regardless of what a Constitution or anything else says, is how you have success. That’s how it’s measured. That’s how we get into what we have today in terms of power politics.
 
Next, what’s the meaning of history? Is history going anywhere or is history just random events that occur and it has no meaning and as Henry Ford said, “It’s just one damn thing after another”? So is there meaning to history? From a Christian viewpoint, a Biblical Judeo-Christian viewpoint, history is supremely important because history is the outworking of God’s plan and history is going somewhere and God is going to eventually bring resolution to all of the conflicts and problems that take place within human history. So if you are opposed to God what you will propose is that history is meaningless. You will do everything you can to demean history and to change history and to change the details of history and revise them to fit your story. That’s a lot of what we see going on today.
 
 I ended last time with a diagram that Charlie Clough developed which I think is a great illustration of the whole principle of Romans 1:18 that when men reject the truth of God and the truth of His Word then they have to replace that with something. The Bible says they’re suppressing truth in unrighteousness. Any Biblical truth and principle, for example the principle that Phil Robertson said last week about homosexuality being wrong, that immediately gets absorbed by the systems of unbelief that are dominant in a culture and they attempt to neutralize it, to destroy it, to prevent it from having an impact on a culture.
 
Now a culture that is more influenced by Biblical truth will witness less of this but a culture that has less Biblical truth is going to see this happen again and again. We live in a culture that is in decline and so the forces that seek to stamp out any one who raises their voice for Biblical truth, unless they manage to push it off into a one-hour segment on Sunday morning that is isolated from the other six and a half days of the week so that what is said from the pulpit has no real connection to everyday life, then they have a victory. This is where the world is headed these days.
 
What is one of the ultimate issues in determining a worldview from a Christian viewpoint has to do with understanding what we call a sin nature. A sin nature in Judeo-Christian thought means that human beings are born basically corrupt. We have been impacted by the sin of Adam so that we are all corrupt in our thinking. That doesn’t mean we can’t do good and wonderful things and many people do many good and wonderful things. But what it means is that we are driven mostly by selfish desires and self-centered desires. We’re driven by what’s good for me and we often do good things because ultimately it comes back positively to us. That’s our motivation.
 
We recognize this and there’s a huge worldview clash that is seen over this. As I pointed out last time Thomas Sowell in his book, “Conflict of Vision” goes back to writers in the 18th century who point out that the difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals have a high view of man, that man is basically good, and he is perfectible. The worldview of conservatives is that men can do wonderful things but they’re basically corrupt and there needs to be a guard or protection on that self-centeredness and that corruption. The difference between conservatives and liberals basically boils down to how they view man. How someone views man and mankind and human nature is a reflection ultimately of how they view ultimate reality.
 
From a Judeo-Christian viewpoint that means they have a view of a deity that is personal and infinite and righteous and sets the standard for what right and wrong is all about. So it’s important to understand the nature of man because that sin nature affects how every human being interprets and understands the world around them from the time they come into the world.
 
The first area when talking about ultimate reality is understanding the nature of God. From a Judeo-Christian background God is the creator who is totally distinct from the creation. We refer to this as the Creation-Creature distinction. It says that God is totally other. He’s personal, which means He’s not a force. He’s not just an energy field out in the heavens. He has revealed Himself to us. He is also infinite.
 
That concept of infinity applies to all of His attributes. We apply it to His knowledge and we call His knowledge omniscience. He has unlimited knowledge. He knows everything. God’s knowledge is different from our knowledge in that our knowledge is acquired. We learn from day to day. We will never have infinite knowledge because, as finite beings, we will never reach infinity. So even when you and I have been in heaven for eons and eons we will still have things to learn. God’s knowledge, in contrast, is not acquired. He knows everything possible and everything actual and He has always known it and He is always able to know all of the interactions between all the events that transpired. He never gains knowledge and He never loses knowledge. So it’s personal, He’s able to have a relationship with creatures. Even though He is infinite He is able to express Himself and to communicate as individuals.
 
When we think about how the Bible presents God, starting with those opening chapters in Genesis, God creates the human race in His image and likeness so that we are a finite counterpart to God so that He can communicate to us. We can understand what He is communicating to us. He has designed us in such a way as an omnipotent God who can do whatever He desires to do. He has created us in such a way so that we can understand what He is communicating. He has, as it were, built the right receptors into us so that when He communicates we can receive it and understand. Now that got mucked up a little bit after Adam’s sin because of sin in our lives but it’s not destroyed. The communication and the reception of that communication is just rendered a little difficult. There’s a little static in the airwaves.
 
So God creates man as the ultimate in His universe because we are to rule over the universe as God’s representatives, as his vice-gerent... Now that’s not a vice-regent. Those are two different words. Vice-gerent is someone who is set up to rule in the place of someone else. A vice-regent is like a vice president. You have the regent and then you have the vice-regent who is the assistant under the rule of the regent. We are not a vice-regent. We are a vice-gerent. We rule in God’s place over His creation.
 
Then God has placed man over the animals and vegetation, over matter and energy and everything in creation. We are to rule it honestly and responsibly. This is the foundation for the true Biblical view of environmentalism. It’s not the pagan view of environmentalism that is dominant today. As Christians we should emphasize the responsible and efficient use and development of all the natural resources on the planet. God put these and creates these things on the planet for our use and for our benefit.
 
Now a pagan approach to deity is that there’s just an infinite, impersonal universe. There’s just matter. There’s no personality out there. There’s no individual in control, it’s just matter. How matter can affect things from a rational viewpoint can never be explained. That’s just a huge leap of irrational logic. People will say, “Well the universe is influencing this.” Well, how? Just explain that. Because they’ve rejected God they have to apply religious language to an impersonal universe in order to give them some sort of comfort as and explanation to who they are and why they exist.
 
Man can’t live as if there is no God. As the writer of Scripture says, man has a desire to know God and when he removes God from that place he puts something else there. He will worship the creation or a creature rather than the Creator. So what man does is that he comes along and he circumscribes all of the universe, the physical world that he can observe, and he places everything that he sees within that circle. It’s like Man has the capital letter and god has the lower case because Mankind gets deified. Mankind becomes the ultimate reference point and determiner of truth and determiner of right and wrong. God becomes just as much a part of the mechanisms of the universe just as everything else.
 
This is seen clearly in some of the ancient creation myths where, for example in the Babylonian creation myth, Tiamat is slain by Marduk and the universe and the earth are made from those body parts.  They’re already pre-existing but everything is part of what’s already in the universe. There’s no ex-nihilo creation, that is, creation out of nothing. So it depends on where you end up, whether it’s an infinite personal God or with an infinite, impersonal universe. Those are the ultimate realities. There are various permutations that fall in between those extremes but that’s basically what you’re talking about.
 
I think C.S. Lewis made the observation that the two extremes are either Biblical theism, which is Judeo-Christian theism, or Hinduism. Hinduism has a purely impersonal universe and everything else falls out in between. So what’s our view of ultimate reality? As a theist we’re going to start with ultimate reality but what really happened with the Enlightenment as it was initiated by Rene Descartes whose famous statement is “I think, therefore I am”, shifts ultimate reality from out there and ultimate being to thought, to knowledge.
 
This is what occurred during the Enlightenment which came to be known as Modernism. Modernism says that the real issue is how we think. The real issue is knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge and so that shifts the center of the thinking. This is part of what is usually referred to as the history of ideas and it’s really important to understand the history of ideas because we see where some of these things that are influencing our culture today have their origin and how they fit with other things. So we start off talking first of all about ultimate reality.
 
Then we talk about the basis for knowledge. How do we know what we know? Within the history of human thought there are three basic ways in which man comes to know truth. Now each of these has a measure of truth to it. That’s what makes some of these claims so viable because there is an element of truth there. But it’s not ultimate. The first system of thought is rationalism. Now we can talk about ancient rationalism which was exemplified by Plato. Plato believed that ultimate reality was in ideas, within the mind. Sometimes this is presented as idealism. So you have rationalism as the starting point, innate ideas that Plato taught were inside the soul.
 
But ultimately the starting point is faith. Faith is not a separate system of perception. Faith is foundational to every system of perception. Faith here is in human ability to think, that we believe that man is so bright and so brilliant and so capable in intellect that starting from principles of pure reason alone he can arrive at overarching truths that explain everything in the universe. This was both Plato’s view and Descartes’ view.
 
Now prior to Immanuel Kant in the late 1700s every philosopher and every thoughtful person believed that we could arrive at an ultimate truth, an overarching explanation or in post-modern terminology, a meta-narrative, a story that would organize all the data. Now they fought like cats and dogs about what that overarching story was but up until the end of the 1700’s they believed there was one overarching story. They just couldn’t agree what it was. The way you got there was through logic. They believed in logic and reason and that the universe was rational and that you could explain it.
 
The second system is called empiricism and empiricism is based on the fact that no, we’re not born with innate ideas, we don’t start with some sort of thought within us and then work out way out, we learn through sense perception. We’re born with our souls as an empty slate and through what we hear and what we see, taste, touch, and feel, that’s how we learn the world around us. Both rationalism and empiricism become the foundation for the scientific method but once again it’s grounded in a faith in human ability to properly interpret the data that comes in through the eyes and through the ears, etc. and putting all that together.
 
Now there are many things we can learn through rationalism and empiricism but it’s limited. The best example from the Scripture is that Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden. God had planted the garden and He’s planted all these trees that produced fruit for food and there was plenty there and God told them they could eat freely from the trees in the Garden of Eden. They could have learned that to a great degree empirically. God had already given them the task of identifying and naming the animals and taking care of the Garden and there is a tremendous amount they could learn through the application of the scientific methodology to learning everything about what was in the Garden of Eden. But there’s one thing they could never learn through either rationalism or empiricism. That one thing is what actually organized all the data into its proper setting. That was that there was one tree they couldn’t eat from or shouldn’t eat from and that was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They could not gain that knowledge through rationalism or empiricism. It had to come through revelation.
 
So rationalism and empiricism is based on the individual use of logic and reason. Now historically when rationalism and empiricism fail as a foundation for cultural knowledge, there’s always a reaction. That reaction is always to go against it and that’s the rise of mysticism. Mysticism is anti-reason. Mysticism is anti-rational. Mysticism is reason gone to seed and it turns the outward look inward and seeks to find truth from some sort of inner light, inner experience, or inner intuition but it again is faith in human ability. See, what each of these systems has is the concept that man can properly interpret his experience, both internal and external, or his thinking and come to a knowledge of absolute truth.
 
While mysticism operates independent of any revelation, it’s non-rational, non-logical and non-verifiable. Somebody says something and you immediately want to say, “How do you know that God wants you to do that? How do you know that’s true?” They answer, “I just know it.” Well sometimes that’s a combination of experience, somebody for example like a police officer in an investigation or someone who is involved in law presenting a case or in science. They’ve got so much experience it’s almost non-verbal for them and they know something is true even though at that point they may not be able to give you all the lines of evidence leading to that conclusion they just have sort of a gut reaction and that’s really based on their experience in the past not on some sort of inner light. Now this is mysticism.
 
Now in contrast for the Christian in the Judeo-Christian heritage, from the Biblical heritage, we have revelation. Revelation trumps rationalism, empiricism, and mysticism. Revelation means that God, who is the creator of everything, has actually entered into human history and communicates information to mankind so that we can learn some things that we can’t discover from reason or experience. That would be the case with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden in Eden. We have to have revelation from God in order to understand things. This was what happened each day in the Garden of Eden when God came and taught Adam and Eve about the creation. He gave them foundational information so that they could then go out and develop the use of that in their interaction with the creation as they’re ruling over the creation as God’s vice-gerent. Revelation is objective and its information that is disclosed from God.
 
As Christians we’re often accused of being irrational and illogical because we believe in revelation. But revelation isn’t the opposite of reason and logic. Revelation gives us a foundation, the starting point for reason and logic. We develop this from the Scriptures. This is why the psalmist says, “It is in your light, God, that we see light.” The presupposition, the framework, the foundation that we have for truth comes first from God and then we build upon that. So this is how we come to knowledge.
 
This is one of the big debates in philosophy which asks how we come to know anything. The starting point is always within creation. You can’t start within creation and build to an infinite meta-narrative to explain everything. This is one place where postmodernism got it right. You have to start somewhere else.
 
In our world we live in a world that has a mix of modernists and post-modernists. Actually we also have pre-modernists. Pre-modern are people who believe the Bible. The term that came to be used in terms of modernism described those who were following the modern thinking of the rationalists and empiricists coming out of the Enlightenment. But before the Enlightenment what dominated? In the Middle Ages the thinking of the Bible dominated. They may have come to wrong conclusions at times, and they did, but they believed the Bible would give them that ultimate reference point. That’s considered pre-modern thinking because it believes in the legitimacy of Divine revelation.
 
Modernism dumps or excludes any kind of Divine authority and the authority becomes man himself. So the human race becomes that ultimate reference point. There’s a well-known quote from John Paul Sartes, the noted existentialist in the 40–60s where he says, “For a finite reference point to have any meaning it has to have an infinite reference point. In other words, if you just have a dot or a speck of light, for that to have any kind of meaning in terms of its size, intensity, strength, any of those factors, there has to be something ultimate that you reference it to, that you compare it to, that gives it it’s meaning and definition.
 
Modernism’s ultimate reference point is human thought. Whether it’s expressed through reason like in the philosophy of Descartes or whether it’s expressed through the rational use of data in empiricism man is the one who initiates. Descartes was a theist. He has his own form of the non-theological argument for the existence of God and other arguments for the existence of God. He was a Jesuit geometrician and he clearly believed in God but when it comes to knowledge, the starting point for Descartes is inside the human soul, not divine revelation, so he shifts that starting point to human thought.
 
Modernism emphasized empiricism or rationalism until we really get to David Hume. David Hume introduces skepticism into the thought system showing that neither rationalism nor empiricism can bring about any kind of certainly with regard to knowledge and truth. So this created chaos in the intellectual thinking community and Immanuel Kant, who wrote his book on “Critique of Pure Reason” around 1775, right around the time of the American War for Independence, says that we don’t know things as they are because we only know things as we perceive them. This was called the Copernican Revolution in thought because it shifts the center of knowledge from outside of man to inside of man just as the Copernican Revolution in astronomy helped us understand that the center of the solar system wasn’t the earth but the sun. So there was a shift in terms of that center point.
 
So from Immanuel Kant you have the rise of subjectivism. This works itself out through the 19th century and it impacts everything from theology to physics down through the 20th century. So this is a major revolution in thought, that man can’t know truth as it is anymore. But they still believed there was something that would unify truth. This is still called modernism. Postmodernism really isn’t a new development in my opinion. It’s just the natural consequence of modernism. It’s modernism gone to seed.
 
As a result of Immanuel Kant’s subjectivism it developed skepticism about knowledge in the 19th century, skepticism about God, skepticism about knowing truth, and this leads to the nihilism of Nietzsche and existentialism where you don’t really know truth. There’s no overall meaning; there’s no hope. It’s a black, dark world out there because we only know what we think we know. We don’t know anything for sure. It’s pretty hopeless. And God is dead and finally we [Western civilization] wakes up in the 1980s and begins to realize this. It took us a couple of hundred years for these ideas to really impact the everyday man on the street.
 
Actually what postmodernism is, in my opinion, is just existentialism played out to its ultimate, logical conclusion which is we don’t know anything, we can’t say anything for sure and there are no absolutes, and even that we’re not sure about. So we’re just left in a black hole. Where this goes ethically is that since there are no absolutes, we don’t have a criteria as thinkers to determine who has a right view. This means we have many different cultures and now they’re all equal. The culture of the most primitive stone-age tribe is no better or no worse than the most advanced enlightened culture or the most advanced western civilization culture in all of history. We don’t have any criteria for making those kinds of judgments.
 
 The way this works out even in this whole thing with Duck Dynasty is that you can’t say one person’s right and another person’s wrong because there’s no ultimate criteria for doing that. This little episode is really a great illustration of how our whole western civilization has completely lost all balance and is falling apart, and it can’t succeed because it’s lost the one thing that gave it coherence, which was the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God that gave meaning to every detail within society and within culture. So that’s postmodernism. In the literature there’s a lot of debate about what its characteristics are. It’s just a collapse of all enlightenment thought since the time of Descartes showing that it can’t provide any answers for mankind or the human race.
 
Now another way of looking at this that I think is very important is looking at thought in general where we look at the world and we see all the details of the world. This can relate to people, anything we observe such as things, events, language, history, or law. All of these are details but we need to have something that gives order and organization and meaning to just this mass of data that’s out there. We believe there’s an overarching story or an overarching truth or reality that gives meaning to all those details. Those are the universals in terms of God, absolutes, morals, and ideas. But when Immanuel Kant came along and said you can’t know things as they are, you can only know things you can perceive, up to that point we had universals that gave meaning to everything else. Buy in terms of knowledge and intellectual theory, what happens with Immanuel Kant is he draws a brick wall and you can’t go upstairs and look to see what’s up there that gives meaning to what’s downstairs so you’re just left with this mass of data downstairs and nothing that can give it meaning.
 
So what happens now is there’s no meaning, there’s no God, there’s just existential darkness as the only reality and so it leads to a culture of despair. No wonder drugs and alcoholism and all kinds of extreme things have entered into our culture because people are desperately trying to find something that gives them some hope and some meaning because intellectually they’re told there’s no hope and no meaning and they’re just the result of a cosmic accident. They’re not any better than anything else. The only thing that gives meaning is the Scriptures.
 
So where I’m going with all of this and what we have to understand is that a culture teaches the people within the culture how to think about the things around them. We’ve grown up in a modern, postmodern culture and these ideas and the relativism in there is very much a part of our background. If you’ve been a believer for a long time and been taking in the Word, then it’s not so much. If you’re a young believer, then more so. But this is the process of spiritual growth to remove the garbage and put the truth in place. For a lot of younger people today just coming to know the Lord in their 20s and 30s they’ve got a whole history behind them where there are no absolutes, there’s no truth. They really wrestle with understanding how these things come together.
 
Now to compare Christianity with modernism and postmodernism. In terms of the human nature Biblical Christianity says that mankind is thoughtfully created in the image of God, spiritually and physically. He’s composed of a spiritual component and a physical component. In modernism humans are material machines: the universe is purely physical; nothing exists beyond our senses. In postmodernism there’s no real opinion on human nature. They’re suspicious of any dogmatic assertion. How can you say anything for sure? You don’t know anything.
 
In terms of morality, in Biblical morality, mankind is internally corrupted by sin but he can still do relatively good things though short of divine righteousness. In modernism man is considered inherently good. See we’ve had four or five generations raised on pure modernism, that man is basically good. That’s why they vote Democrat because they don’t understand that the whole philosophy of the Democrat party is grounded upon the assumption that man is basically good. Of course man isn’t basically good so they’re living in a fantasy world. In postmodernism it denies objective evil. Now if you deny objective evil, how can you condemn the Holocaust? It’s impossible intellectually. For the postmodern morality is just a cultural construct. There are no absolutes. In other words it’s just your opinion if you think the Nazi’s thought the Holocaust was good and that was their opinion. We don’t have a meta-narrative to discern whether you’re right or whether the Nazis were right. All we have is what works. What works today may not be what works tomorrow so you may not be able to make those kinds of judgments.
 
In terms of free will, biblical Christianity teaches that we have free will. It’s diminished by sin but we’re still morally responsible for the decisions we make. In modernism every human being is purely autonomous and self-governing and they can choose their own direction because there’s no external authority. It goes back to that. There’s no God. There’s no external authority. You can just do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it.
 
In postmodernism people are products of their own culture and they only imagine that they’re self-governing. So you are determined more by your culture, then by your volition. So it’s somebody else’s fault. In terms of reason, in Biblical Christianity reason is necessary but it’s not the basis for understanding reality. Reason can discover some truth but revelation is also needed. Revelation is what ultimately governs what is true. In modernism, rationalism and empiricism are the only bases for discovering truth but post-modernists deny objective reason. Rationality, they say, is just a myth. It’s just a veneer. It really doesn’t give solutions.
 
In terms of progress or history, Biblical Christianity teaches that mankind isn’t advancing toward anything. Advances are positive but there’s no utopia brought in by man. Whereas in modernism, mankind is not basically evil so he’s improvable, he’s perfectible. So mankind is progressing by science and reason.
 
Post-modernism denies any kind of objective reason. Rationalism is just a myth so there’s no hope there at all. This influences the world we live in. It influences politics. It influences law. It influences social studies. I think social studies are more evil in terms of challenging Christians than the sciences are. All of us have been impacted by this from the music we listen to because most of the music that has been popular in the 20th century grew out of either a pure modernist worldview, a romanticized worldview or a post-modern worldview so the values that are expressed in both the music and the lyrics are grounded in modernism or post-modernism, not in a pure theistic Biblical worldview. You can apply that to every area of human thought.
 
When we look at a passage like Romans 12:2 which says that we are be transformed by the renewing of the mind it’s learning things like homosexuality is sin, lying is sin, murder is sin, all of these things are sins so we shouldn’t do them but it’s more than just exchanging one set of values for another. You can be a post-modern relativist and have as your personal ethic a biblically correct ethic. The problem is you’re doing the right thing in a wrong way. The wrong way is that you’re still thinking like your culture in a post-modern way. That little adage that a right thing done in a wrong way applies to thinking. You can think right thoughts but in a wrong framework and it’s just as wrong as if you’re thinking wrong thoughts in a wrong framework. So we have to think about not only what we think, the content, but how we think. We have to learn to think biblically. We have to learn to become radical, militant biblicists in how we think as well as what we think.
 
So Paul is going to take this principle that he’s outlined in the first two verses and start applying them in terms of the body of Christ in the rest of chapter 12. Then applying that to the realm of government in chapter 13 as well as in relation to one another and then applying that to loving one another in the last part of chapter 13 and on into chapter 14 and even into the beginning of chapter 15. So we’ll come back and press on into that next area dealing with spiritual gifts next time.

Romans 129b-Spiritual Gifts – Part 1 Romans 12:3

Romans 12:3 NASB95
For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
Romans 129b-Spiritual Gifts – Part 1 Romans 12:3
 
Now many of us, at some point in our lives, I hope, have memorized the first two verses of chapter 12. These are foundational and it’s a positive thing that we should memorize verses like that. It’s one of the greatest statements in Scripture related to the spiritual life. To review, “Therefore I beseech…” The NASV translates that as urge. It could also be translated as exhort or challenge. “Therefore I challenge you by the mercies of God that you present your bodies…” By that we saw that Paul means the entire person.
 
That you “present” is a term often used with the presentation of a sacrifice in the temple or of an offering. “To present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service…” Some translations say your spiritual service of worship but the word there indicates reasonable or rational. It’s a logical result of the premise that you have trusted Christ as Savior. That’s the challenge that he presents.
 
Now that verse comes at the beginning of this final section in Romans, which is chapters 12, 13, 14. Why is this important? He’s making a transition from the didactic section explaining the righteousness of God in relation to justification, in relation to sanctification and in relation to God’s plan for Israel. Now he begins this next section as a conclusion, as a logical conclusion from the previous eleven chapters. What is he doing here? What is he saying that should capture our attention? He challenges us on the basis of everything seen in the first eleven chapters to present ourselves to God as a sacrifice. That’s all of who we are, to be presented to God.
 
In contrast he says “and do not be conformed to this world.” Now we studied verse 2 in the last couple of classes that the contrast here is to not to be conformed to the world. The word translated world here is not the one we might expect which is kosmos which often relates to the inhabitants or the organized thinking of the inhabitants of the earth but to this word, AION, which relates more to a time-based period. So it’s emphasizing a way of thinking in certain time periods.
 
Every time period thinks a certain way. The Germans have a word for it called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Literally zeit is time; geist is ghost. So zeitgeist is the spirit of the time or the spirit of the age. So we’re not to be conformed or pressed into the mold of the world but instead we’re to be transformed. This is how we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, to go through the transformative process of not being pressed into mold of the world system and the way of the world in terms of thinking but to be transformed by the renovation of our minds. So we see that the emphasis here is on thinking.
 
That’s going to be important for what we study in the coming chapters. Many people today just have a hard time thinking about … well, thinking at all. I could just stop right there and say amen and we’ll all go home early. Those of you who want to see the Alabama game will be very happy. The point is that people today don’t think. We live in an America today which is in such a cultural slide. We have almost hit avalanche speed in terms of deterioration and self-destruction. We operate on emotions.
 
People can’t think if they’re not educated. We’ve destroyed the ability of many people in this country to think critically because of the way they have been educated over the last fifty years. Many people in churches are the same way. We’ve dumbed-down the Bible. Now you have modern translations that come out that are geared for the fifth grade or sixth grade reading ability. I understand the importance of that because many people can’t read beyond the fifth or sixth grade level. They do well if they can read at that level. That’s what’s happened.
 
Now if you can’t read or think beyond that level you’re not going to be a good citizen and you can’t handle the kind of thinking needed to process what’s going on culturally or if you’re a believer to process it spiritually. Now we understand that we all have the Holy Spirit to help us understand the Word of God. Anyone who walks in off the street, starts coming to Bible class, and not have much of an education at all and not have done very well in the education that they got can learn the Bible. These people knew there was something there about the Word of God so they stuck with it over a period of three or four or five years and they assimilated a tremendous amount of information. That’s important since anyone can understand the Word of God and the principles and the doctrines because of the Holy Spirit.
 
But you have to think. You have to learn to think. It can’t be done on the basis of emotion or feeling or mysticism or intuition, which is what’s popular in the culture as a whole. People want to respond emotionally to images. This is what has driven a lot of the culture the last forty or fifty years, whether it’s film, television, or commercials. Commercials have basically framed and taught people to react to certain kinds of music, images, certain things that are presented instead of thinking about it critically they just react to it as if they’re trained that way. They’re just like animals reacting to certain stimuli but the Bible emphasizes that Christianity is for thinking people.
 
The world is going to try to portray all Christians as if they’re some sort of backwoods, Appalachian snake-handlers. They say no Christians have brain cells that can recognize each other. But the opposite is true. Many Christians throughout the ages have been tremendous thinkers. If you study the great men of science up through the middle of the 19th century when they were perverted by Darwin, the great scientists who laid the foundation for modern science were all deeply committed Christians. Isaac Newton wrote more about theology, more commentaries on Scripture than he did on science. Yet those kinds of facts are easily and quickly ignored by science teachers today because they can’t assimilate the fact that these committed Christians were the scientists who made it possible for them to do what they do today.
 
Christianity is based on thinking, it’s based on thoughtful reflection. The Old Testament calls it meditation which is thoughtful reflection upon God’s Word. In the Bible Study Methods class that we have on Sunday night we emphasize the importance of thinking and observation. Right now we’re in the middle of interpretation. But it takes a lot of time and effort. You have to learn to really read. Anything that’s written well is written in a logical manner. Reading means you have to follow the logical development of the thought of the writer that’s been put down in writing. So Christianity more than anything else and more than any other “religion” is based on thought.
 
It’s based on the fact that God has revealed Himself to us in propositional truth. Propositional truth is a technical term that means that God expresses Himself in propositions. A proposition is like a declarative statement. The term proposition is a technical term that means a statement that can either be verified or falsified. It’s not just sayings. A question asking what the weather’s doing outside can’t be proved true of false. A command telling someone to go to the store can’t be proved true or false. Only a declarative statement or proposition can be declared to be true or false.
 
Now in order to demonstrate whether it can be true or false a person has to think through all the issues involved in that sentence. They have to understand the vocabulary, the logical structure that’s laid down in that sentence and when it comes to the sentences of Scripture, that’s not always easy. Sometimes the Apostle Paul uses what would appear in an English Bible to be seven, eight, nine, or ten verses, even as much as thirteen verses, to express one sentence. Now in English they’ve often broken that down into sentences but in the original Greek it was often one sentence. Often we see a sentence of the Apostle Paul that’s several verses long but that’s a long statement. To understand it you really have to stop and think.
 
It used to drive me nuts when I was in high school I spent many summers on the work crew at Camp Peniel. The founder’s son, David Whitelock, has just graduated from Dallas Seminary at that time. He had an hour long Bible study every day and one of the things he had us do is to take two or three verses in English and paraphrase it, writing that out so we could understand it in our own words. Now this was before the New American Standard Version. We had to wrestle with the old King James Version. That was a real challenge for anyone with a public school education. We were never taught to think that way.
 
Look at any two or three verses of Scripture. Go home tonight and paraphrase it so your eight year old kid or your ten year old grandkid can understand it and you’ll realize that it’s not that easy to do. You really have to understand what the author is saying. Those were incredibly difficult exercises. As a ninth grader, that was the first time I realized that when you’re talking about the Bible, you have to think. That’s what Paul is getting at in verse 2.
We have to renew our thinking for a purpose. We saw this last time. The purpose is for “demonstrating” which is a Greek word meaning testing something. So we’re proving with our life that God’s will is good, acceptable, and sufficient. Many translations take that last word and translate it as perfect. It’s TELEIOS. We’re going to get into a passage that I’ve always struggled with but I think I’m getting a grip on it right now which is in Matthew 5 or 6 where it says, “Be ye perfect as God is perfect.” That’s the only place where it appears that the word has the sense of perfection or flawlessness but we can never be flawless as God is flawless. Whatever it appears that the Lord is teaching there, He’s not teaching us to be totally perfect or morally perfect or spiritually perfect as God is.
 
This word group always indicates something related to sufficiency or completion so when we get there in Sunday morning study we’ll figure out where I’ve come in my understanding of that particular verse. The idea here is clearly sufficiency. God’s will is sufficient for us but we only get there if we study it and we make that exchange in our thinking between God’s way of thinking, not only the content of the thinking, but how God thinks. Also, how God wants us to think, and it’s not based on anything other than accepting the truth of His authority as the foundation for our thinking.
 
Now Paul starts this next section with those two verses. How do we think that the rest of Romans 12-16 relate to that? This is the topical preface to the next four chapters. Why has Paul done this? That’s an important question to ask. What he is stating here is a framework for understanding the basic issue in the Christian life is to get rid of all the garbage in our soul, all the human viewpoint, all the wrong ways of thinking that put rationalism or empiricism or mysticism first, and to replace that with a way of thinking grounded in revelational authority and building upon the Scriptures as the foremost presupposition in our soul. That calls for a radical overhaul of the way we think.
 
The first thing that Paul does is state this challenge that we need to present our whole life as a sacrifice to God. That just means we’re going to give our life over to serving Him and that this is primarily done by first exchanging the wrong way of thinking in our soul for the right way, the wrong content with the right content. And then look at verse three. Verse three says, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.”
 
One of the things we have noted many times in Bible class and one of the things we’ve noted in our Bible Study Methods class are those little connective words, those conjunctions we find at the beginning of verses, words like “therefore”, “wherefore”, “because”, and “for” are very important. When we see that first word “for” it tells us that Paul is starting to explain the implications of what he’s said before. He giving a reason for why he has said what he has said and he’s developing it. What that means is this shift of topic that occurs in verses 3–8 which gets into the topic of spiritual gifts and the topic of the relationship of every individual believer to one another and the body of Christ is fundamental to the application of the command in verses 1 and 2.
 
I would bet that most of you have never thought about that, that when we think about spiritual gift often in our self-absorbed culture we start wondering what spiritual gift God gave us. Spiritual gifts connect to these first two verses because spiritual gifts are enablements or spiritual enhancements that God has given us to serve God within the body of Christ. There’s important.
 
Now we’re going to start an introduction here so that will answer a lot of questions that come up initially about spiritual gifts but that’s the first thing Paul goes to when he is going to cover areas related to how we present ourselves as a living sacrifice and how we flush out the human viewpoint and exchange it for divine viewpoint. It’s going to start in terms of how we think about the body of Christ.
 
It really doesn’t matter whether you’re an ancient Greek rationalist/Platonist, Aristotelian/empiricist or a Neo-Platonist or a modern rationalist, evolutionist, nihilistic secularist post-modernist, there’s one thing that every one of these systems have in common. It’s the product of a sin nature. What have I been putting in the middle of the sin nature for the last several times I’ve used it? The whole concept of self-absorption.
 
From the instant of Adam’s fall the human race has been absorbed with itself. The whole human race. It’s all about me. That’s the orientation of the sin nature. You may think it’s all about you but it’s really all about me, me, me. That’s the only one we care about: me, me, me. Just think about some of the wonderful popular magazines we have today. First of all remember we started off with People. Then it wasn’t long, less than a decade in fact, that it was about US. Then it wasn’t long before it was about Self. So it’s all about each individual. So when we come to understanding the body of Christ there is something revolutionary and radical about the body of Christ. That is, it’s no longer about each of us as an individual.
 
Arrogance is supposed to be flushed out as part of that process of renovating the mind. It’s about one another. It’s about the body of Christ ministering or serving God by ministering to one another. There are things that are said here in these coming verses that just come categorically opposite of our natural instinct. It’s important if we’re going to function as a church, as a body of believers, to understand these principles. So he’s going to talk about it first of all how this radical transformation impacts our relationship to others in the body of Christ. Then it’s going to go on and develop that further in verses 9 -20 in terms of how we handle different circumstances and different problems with different people. We’re going to see some things indicated there that aren’t too different from what we’re studying in the Beatitudes on Sunday morning.
 
Then in chapter 13 he relates it to government. We think differently about government from a terrible government, even a tyrannical government like Nero Caesar. Then he goes on talking about other believers in chapter 14 and 15 so this is very important from the standpoint of the doctrine that we learn, how the teaching and the instruction that we learn is to replace the self-absorbed orientation of our fallen soul to the regenerate nature which is now supposed to be a slave to righteousness according to Romans 6 and not a slave to the sin nature.
 
So Romans 12:3 continues to carry forth this theme of thinking. This theme where we are to have our mind renewed. The word for mind in verse 2 was the Greek word NOUS which is the thinking part, the mentality of the soul. That is referring to that part of the soul that performs a certain action. That action is what we see talked about in verse 3. We see the introduction of four words built upon the root verb PHRONEO. The first word is HUPERPHRONEO. The root verb PHRONEO basically means to be wise or to think or to cogitate or any kind of mental activity as opposed to emotive activity.
 
Paul uses four words that tells us that what Paul is talking about here in this whole issue of thinking which goes right back to what he’s talking about in verse 2 of renewing our mind. He starts this out by saying, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” The phrase “through the grace given to me” is parallel to the words used in 12:1. The only difference is that in 12:1 we read “by the mercies of God” and here it’s by the “grace given to me”. It’s the same construction, DIA plus the genitive in the Greek so it should be translated the same way with the same English preposition. Translators don’t do that but that’s the point the Holy Spirit is making. Romans 12:1 should read, “I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God…” If you’re going to use “by” in verse 3 you should use “by the grace given to me”. If you want to translate it with the English preposition “through” it should be the same thing in both places because the phrase is the same in the Greek. It’s indicating the intermediate means by which something is accomplished.
 
Paul is talking about the mercy of God which is explained in chapters 1–11. In all that God has supplied us through His righteousness, justification, sanctification, all of this has been supplied to us and what he’s really saying is on the basis of this and our understanding of what God has done for us in mercy and grace we should be motivated. Grace is unmerited favor. Grace emphasizes more the principle whereas the word mercy indicates its personal application to individuals in difficult circumstances. So they represent the opposite sides of the same coin. So “I say through or by the grace given to me to everyone who is among you…” In other words he’s applying it to every single believer. You can’t opt out. This isn’t an elective class. This is essential to spirituality and spiritual growth.
 
“I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly…” Now there are two English infinitives here, “not to think” and later in the verse “ought to think”. Those two verbs are the root verb PHRONEO. The word translated “more highly” is the word HUPERPHRONEO. HUPER is a preposition that often indicates “in the place of” or “beyond” or “more” and here when it’s added to PHRONEO it has various ideas such as to despise or to hold an opinion of one’s self that is too high, to overthink, to think too highly of one’s self, to be in a state of fantasy about one’s own capability rather than thinking honestly and objectively about who we are and our weaknesses and our failures and our strengths. It’s having an over-inflated view of one’s self.
 
So what Paul says here is a warning that we’re not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. That’s part of what it means to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. We have to quit being so self-absorbed. We have to quit thinking that church is all about my spiritual life and my spiritual growth. Part of our spiritual life is to serve one another and to serve one another within the framework within the local church ministry.
 
Now we have to think about how serving one another that we often find in many churches is a little superficial. As soon as you hear a sermon on serving the Lord in the local church it’s followed up by an announcement that we need more prep school teachers or we need helpers with the Five-Day Club or we need ushers or we need something like that. Those kind of things might be true and there’s nothing wrong in a sense with that but this is going a lot deeper in terms of our spiritual life. This is impacting who we are as individuals and how we’re relating to one another in the local church. We’re here to serve each other. We’re to care about each other. We’re to support each other. We’re to encourage each other.
 
Now we can’t do that equally to everyone in a local church. We all have circles of friends. We have five or six people with whom we’re a little more intimate. We have five or six or seven more than that we might be a little acquainted with and we might have spent some time with them socially. Then we have others that we know because we can sit in the congregation and look across the congregation and at least we know their name. That’s one of the things that’s important in a local church and one of the reasons why we have some of these social events we do is just so we can get to know one another and not just sit there and know that’s so-and-so over on the other side of the church that I’ve seen them a lot but don’t have a clue who they are. We’re not that large.
 
It’s different if you’re a congregation of five hundred or a thousand or fifteen hundred. Often you have some people who come to large churches because they seek anonymity. They don’t want to be known. Some people are very shy. They really don’t want to be known. They just want to come in the back door, sit down, and learn the Word and go home. One of the areas where God has to work on them is that they need to realize that’s a form of arrogance just like the person who is too exuberant and too hyper about getting to know everybody in the congregation. It’s just another form of self-absorption. Some people are more private. Other people are less private and we have to recognize those personality differences. That runs counter to a lot of stuff that I think goes on in the practice of church in a lot of places.
 
Having gone through seminary I saw a lot of professors that are expecting everybody to sort of be the same. But the whole point of this passage is that everybody’s different. They’re gifted in different ways. Some people are extroverts; some people are introverts; some people are more private; some people are less private. We have to respect those differences but don’t let those differences become an excuse or crutch for your not being involved in the local body of Christ. The principles we see in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 is that we’re supposed to be involved in each other’s lives but the reality is we can’t be involved equally in everybody’s life. That is often lost in the way this is presented in some churches and we have to be careful because this can also become an excuse for gossip. It can become an excuse for people violating the principle of privacy and getting involved in other people’s lives in ways that they shouldn’t but it’s based on a genuine Biblical love and care for one another.
 
So the fundamental principle here is that first of all we have to get rid of the self-absorption. We’re not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think but in contrast we are to think soberly. The word translated soberly here is the word SOPHRONEO. We have PHRONEO again repeated but we also have the word SOPHRONEO, which means to be in a right mind, reasonable, objective, self-controlled or prudent. It’s not thinking soberly in contrast to being drunk. It is thinking in an objective, balanced, temperate manner. It is understanding the issues calmly and objectively.
 
We are to think on the basis of truth, which means we have to know truth. In order to think objectively you have to understand the issues and we have to know truth so we’re to think objectively and then Paul says, “As God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” In this last phrase we have to be a little careful. This seems to indicate that God has apportioned faith differently from one person to another. We have to make some important observations here. First of all this is not a section dealing with saving faith. There are different types of faith or different categories of faith discussed in the Scripture. There is saving faith. There is faith in relationship to our ongoing spiritual life or spiritual development, which we might call sanctifying faith. I use the phrase faith-rest drill because that describes the process of mixing our faith with the promises of God, trusting God in the midst of a difficult situation and so we’re going to put our faith in the promises in His Word and we’re going to trust or relax in terms of God’s control, God’s provision for the situation or circumstances.
 
Faith is also listed in 1 Corinthians 12 as a spiritual gift. That would be a further enhancement of everyone’s ability to trust God. One of the things that we see here is that the context is in terms of spiritual gifts. We know that this isn’t saving faith so he’s taking about faith in relation to something. The context tells us this is faith in relation to the spiritual gifts that God has given us. Faith in relation to using the spiritual gifts that God has given us. Look at verse 6 which says, “Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us…” That indicates that people have different degrees of giftedness.
 
Some people have the gift of pastor-teacher to a large measure; some people have it to a smaller measure. Some people have it to a small measure and maybe in where they use that is in a Sunday School class, or something of that nature. I know I have pastored many churches and most of the churches I have been involved in have had 200 or less people in them. I had a high school Sunday School teacher that some of you knew by the name of Dick Seman who went to First Baptist and taught a Sunday school class of about 600 to 800 people. It was broadcast on KHCB here in Houston every Sunday morning. He had a Sunday school class that was larger than many churches and congregations of pastors I know. He wasn’t the pastor of the church but he functioned as a teacher, which he certainly had the gift of. If you know Dick, he had the gift of gab. He was quite humorous and had a great ability to communicate.
 
Everybody has a different spiritual gift to a different measure. Some people have a great degree of mercy. Some people not so much. Back in the 70s they started applying psychology to Christian life. That’s not valid in my opinion, but they were always coming out with these little tests which said to answer these 50 questions and you could figure out what your spiritual gift is. You’d find out that one or two gifts are probably your major area of giftedness and one or two aren’t. Of course, those things are flawed because they reflect what you’re thinking about yourself at the time. But people do have different gifts, different abilities to different degrees and the issue in verse 6 is that we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.
 
It goes on, “{each of us is to exercise them accordingly:} if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith.” So this says we are to apply or utilize our spiritual gift in relation to the proportion of our faith which if you’re a baby Christian that’s going to be a baby or small portion of faith. If you’re more mature then you grow in your faith and in your knowledge of doctrine and in your ability and you’ll use your gift in a greater way. That’s the idea here, to serve Christ in proportion to your faith. So God has given each one a gift and we use that in proportion to our faith.
 
In verse 4 we read, “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” We’re different. We’re not all supposed to be the same. What’s interesting we all have a tendency to a little hero worship and personality worship but what God’s emphasizing is that we’re all different. We don’t imitate one another in gifts; we imitate in terms of character but not in terms of personality or giftedness. We’re each different and we need to function as God has intended each of us to function within the body of Christ.
 
In verse 5 he says, “So we, who are many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another.” That’s a challenge for people in a culture that has valued rugged individualism, which is an American character value. We appreciate that. We flaunt it but when it comes to the body of Christ that is not a primary virtue. The primary virtue is that we’re to serve one another and we’re one in the body of Christ. It’s not about each individual. It’s about the body of Christ, serving one another. So Paul says we’re one body and then he makes a difficult statement, “and individually members one of another.” There’s an interdependency among believers in the body of Christ. We’re not all running out on our own, depending on our own strengths and our own abilities exalting ourselves. We’re not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. We have a mutual dependency in the body of Christ because some people can’t teach. They’re dependent on those who do teach to come to a better understanding of the Word. Some people don’t have the gift of mercy so they’re dependent on others who have the gift of mercy to serve in terms of areas of visiting homes where people are shut-ins, where people are in tough health situations, visiting the hospital. That’s where they exercise their spiritual gift and where it’s important for them to exercise.
 
Some people have the gift of giving. It’s very important to them to utilize that gift of giving. Whatever the spiritual gift you can find passages where everyone has that same responsibility. Every believer is supposed to give but we can really learn about giving by watching someone who has the spiritual gift of giving. Or someone who’s teaching and really has the gift of teaching, we can learn from them and it challenges us to improve the quality of our own teaching whenever we’re called upon to teach. Just because you don’t have the gift of teaching doesn’t mean you shouldn’t teach. Just because you don’t have the gift of giving doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give. None of us would say they weren’t going to witness to anyone because they don’t have the gift of evangelism. We know how absurd that is but functionally many of us act like if it’s not our spiritual gift we don’t do it. No, we learn in the body of Christ from those who have those gifts so that we can improve in our own application in those areas.
 
So that brings us to what the Scripture teaches about spiritual gifts. We’ll start this this evening. First of all, let’s get a definition of a spiritual gift. A spiritual gift is a talent, an ability, or an aptitude that is sovereignly bestowed on every believer in the Church Age by the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation. It’s not something you get later on. In the early church they got it at the instant of salvation. It’s related to the Baptism by the Holy Spirit as Paul defines it in 1 Corinthians 12. So it’s different from natural talents.
 
Now I have a theory that God often uses or enhances our natural talents with a spiritual giftedness. There are men and women who are gifted teachers and they were gifted teachers before they were ever saved. But now after they’re saved they have a spiritual enhancement to that gift that functions in the spiritual realm. Same thing can be said about other areas of service, such as administration, management, and these kinds of things. It may be that your spiritual gift is different from your natural talent but somehow God takes our natural talents and abilities and when we’re saved he gives us these spiritual enhancements that work and intersect with our natural talent. So the manifestation of these gifts are going to be different from person to person.
 
If you think about it, the gift you’re most exposed to and see regularly are pastor-teachers. You see a lot of different personalities. I have a colleague who’s a pastor of a Bible church out in Katy. When he was in his early to mid-thirties, his wife had a series of strokes. It was an extremely difficult situation. It lasted about twelve or thirteen years. They were very dependent upon many members of the congregation helping to be caregivers but if you had a problem in your life and you started talking to him about it, it was just like every pore in his body oozed compassion. You knew this guy really had walked the walk in your tough shoes. You knew that he understood. Some people you talk to about your problems and it’s like they have a machine gun of five doctrines they throw at you and they’ve never truly gone through difficult times, it seems, and they don’t really have a genuine Biblical identification to come alongside someone who’s going through difficult times. Some people get the wrong idea of compassion. It doesn’t mean you legitimize their weaknesses when they’re going through a hard time but you knew with him that was true. He was a good teacher but his teaching came across in an extremely compassionate manner.
 
I had another pastor friend of mine who was in business for about fifteen years, was an investment banker. He thought in a very cold, calculated manner and his personality someone once described as trying to “snuggle up to a porcupine.” He was very much different from the other. Both were excellent teachers but because of their personalities and other talents how that gift was utilized was very different. No two believers are going to express themselves the same way because of different measures of the gift as well as different personalities and different backgrounds.
 
Every believer is given a talent, ability, or aptitude at the instant of salvation by God the Holy Spirit and it’s for the purpose of serving one another in the body of Christ. I had someone tell me that he just went to church and left, that he was using his spiritual gift at work or with others in the family. No, you’re to use your spiritual gift for its purpose, to minister to the body of Christ in the local church you’re in. Not your family. Not your co-workers. Not the people in your neighborhood. It’s for service within the body of Christ. That’s the emphasis in passages such as Romans 12: 6-8 which we’ll go through. Also 1 Corinthians12, Ephesians 4:11-12, and Hebrews 2:4.
 
In terms of Biblical terminology there are a couple of terms we’ll use. The term PNEUMATIKOS emphasizes the source and the nature of the gifts, that they’re related to the Holy Spirit who gives this and its related to our spiritual life, our spiritual relationship with God and it related to the spiritual life of the believer. Another term that’s used is CHARISMA which emphasizes the grace nature of the gift. The root is CHARIS which is the Greek word for grace, that God in His sovereignty freely bestows these abilities on us. It’s not based on any merit. We haven’t earned these things. They’re given at the instance of salvation. As I pointed out already, in some believers it may enhance a natural ability or inclination. In others it might not.
 
Then we have a third term, MERISMOS which emphasizes a distribution or an apportionment so that it’s not all the same. Your spiritual gift may not be the same or to the same degree as someone else. For example, in Hebrews 4:2 we read, “God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will.” The Greek word for gifts there is MERISMOS. It’s understood to relate to spiritual gifts but it’s not PNEUMATIKOS or CHARISMA which is what you normally expect for gifts. It means distinctions of the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit makes distinctions among members of the body of Christ according to His own will. So spiritual gifts are distributed on the basis of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.
 
The third point is that spiritual gifts are unique to the Church Age. We didn’t have spiritual gifts in the Old Testament. You had giftedness in terms of God giving some the ability to prophesy. You had some who had the ability to lead but they’re never called spiritual gifts. This is something that is distinct to the body of Christ. So don’t take something in the body of Christ and read it over into something else. Where this is important is that no gifts are given prior to the Day of Pentecost. Why? There’s no Baptism of the Holy Spirit prior to the Day of Pentecost so you didn’t have any spiritual gifts. There won’t be any spiritual gifts given after the Rapture of the Church. Now why is this important? Whenever I talk about the cessation of the sign gifts, the cessation of prophecy, knowledge, and tongues in 1 Corinthians 13 it’s very clear it’s talking about two periods in the Church Age. Before the canon of Scripture is completed the Church, the body of Christ, was dependent upon people who had these revelational type spiritual gifts for new revelation because they didn’t have the New Testament yet.
 
When you think about it, up until the period of about A.D. 60 only a little over or less than half of the New Testament was written. That’s thirty years from the death of Christ. They were dependent upon new revelation from God through the apostles, the prophets, and others who had these kinds of revelatory gifts. But once the canon of Scripture was given it was no longer necessary for God to communicate that way. At the end of 1 Corinthians 13 you have this contrast between “now” and “then”. Now is that transitional period up through A.D. 70 to A.D. 90 when these gifts ended. After that there was a completed canon of Scripture so those gifts were no longer needed.
 
Whenever I teach that and it happened this last year in Pennsylvania someone always says, “Well, what about the tribulational period? There are prophets in the tribulational period. How can you say the gift of prophecy ended?” I answer, “Wait a minute. The tribulation period is not part of the Church Age.” By definition that’s not a spiritual gift any more than the gift of prophecy in the Old Testament was a spiritual gift. We’re talking about Church Age gifts and we have to restrict it that way. So spiritual gifts are unique to the Church Age. No spiritual gifts after the Rapture. No spiritual gifts before the Day of Pentecost. We’re going to stop there. We’ll come back and continue this next time as a prelude to understanding what’s going on in verses 3–8 in Romans 12.

Romans 130b-Spiritual Gifts – Part 2

Romans 12:3 NASB95
For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
Romans 130b-Spiritual Gifts – Part 2 Romans 12:3
 
You'll be getting the details in an e-mail shortly but on February 16th, a Sunday night at 6:30, we're going to have the third in these special events, these on-going educational-type current event seminars. Our speaker is going to be Dr. Susanna Kokkonen who is the director of the Christian friends of Yad Vashem, which is the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. She originally went to Jerusalem as part of the embassy from Finland. I think she speaks five or six languages fluently and while she was working at the Finnish Embassy in Jerusalem she earned a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Holocaust Studies and Anti-Semitism. She's going to be speaking on Anti-Semitism and the Road to the Holocaust. It's not just an historical thing. She's going to tie it in to a lot of things going on today in Europe because there is a repetition of many of the patterns we saw a hundred years ago developing in Europe.
 
In fact, Sweden made a big deal about a year and a half ago that there were now judenfrei. Judenfrei is a horrible German term meaning "Jew Free". There's a 65% increase in Jewish emigration from France this last year as they are leaving. Many of them are making aliyah to Israel because of the increase in Anti-Semitism in France. This is a crucial topic. Vida is bringing two IDF officers who are going to be speaking about their experiences in the recent military action in Israel, as well.
 
Okay, open your Bibles to Romans 12. As I pointed out last time in verse 3 it develops an emphasis on the fact that God has given to each and every believer at the instant of salvation a spiritual gift. Spiritual gifts are often misunderstood today. They're often distorted. Many people sit around, and I'm sure this is probably true of some of you, and wonder what their spiritual gift is. Well, that's not a problem. Some people think that's a problem. Unless you have one of the more overt leadership or teaching gifts such as evangelism, pastor-teacher, or administration you probably have a service gift that is not related to any individual function. Even if you don't know what your gift is, it's not important. The important thing is that you're to pursue spiritual maturity.
 
Since we're all required to function in all the areas of the spiritual gifts, as I pointed out last time, it doesn't give any of us the right to say, "Well, I don't have the gift of "whatever" so I'm not going to do that." We're all required to teach and admonish one another. We're all required to give. We're all required to be witnesses. We're all required to lead in some capacity even if it's within the home. We're all expected to function in some sort of administrative area however small that may be, but there are spiritual gifts or enhancements in each of these areas. I believe that as we grow as believers and we pursue our application in every area of our spiritual life, that as we mature we will realize that we are gifted in certain areas and that giftedness will manifest itself.
 
Think about your own background and your own life. As you were growing up you had certain natural talents, natural abilities, things that you were interested in and excelled in and things you didn't do quite so well in and things you didn't do well at all. As you grew up in many cases your parents tried to expose you to a lot of different things such as sports, piano, music, drama, and all these range of activities, not only because they're good to develop you as a person and to educate but also as we're exposed to different things we find that all of a sudden something we didn't know anything about we begin to like. We begin to gravitate to it and before long you realize that you may have some talent or ability in that area that you really hadn't recognized before.
 
As many of us went through our adolescent years people were asking us that great question, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" (Some of us are still trying to answer that), we were trying to figure out where our strengths lay and what we were going to do with these talents and what talents did we have. Eventually as we grew up we gravitated toward certain kinds of things because that's what we were confident in. Those were the talents that God had given us. Not in terms of spiritual gifts but in terms of his common grace to all individuals.
 
I think there's an important analogy there that just as every individual believer has been given certain spiritual gifts or enhancements, as you grow up and mature as a believer you will gravitate to certain areas of spiritual life and service to the body of Christ and that reveals what your spiritual gift is. I think that it's just a manifestation of the whole psychological, self-absorbed orientation of our church culture that people run around navel-gazing trying to figure out what their spiritual gift is instead of focusing on the real issue which is individual spiritual growth. As you pursue spiritual growth these other things will develop and be exposed in your life.
 
So in verse 3 Paul says, "For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith." Here Paul is tying this back to the grace God has given in terms of justification and sanctification in Romans. The foundation is that if we're going to have the kind of renewed mind that he talks about in verse 2 the foundation for this new mentality is going to be genuine humility. We're not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think but we are to think soberly.
 
Now that doesn't mean that you're not under the influence of alcohol. It's the translation of a Greek word that means thinking objectively but all of these terms as I pointed out last time are forms of the same Greek root, PHRONEO, which is the verb meaning to think and to reflect upon things. So we have HUPERPHRONEO meaning to think more highly of yourselves and PHRONEO translated "to think" twice in this chapter and then at the end to think soberly, that is SOPHRONEO. Using this play on words the Apostle Paul is emphasizing for us the point that the spiritual life is a thinking oriented life.
 
Then we come to this particular statement that is a little difficult for some people to understand because of the way it appears in the English. It sounds like God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. As I explained this last time I saw a few people sort of scrunch up their face a little bit trying to figure out what I was saying. I want to cover this again to point out a couple of things. First of all we have three options in how we understand the word "faith".  One is faith in reference to saving faith. It's obviously not talking about the kind of faith that is needed to be saved. The second kind of faith is faith in terms of the on-going faith-rest drill. As we exercise faith in God's promises, faith in God's Word as we face different circumstances and different situations each day. Then a third way in which we use the word faith is in reference to the body of doctrine by which we've been taught or the standard we've been taught.
 
Now if you look at verse six, thinking about verse 3 as sort of a summary introductory statement followed by an explanation of the different kinds of gifts. There's vocabulary repetition as we go through verses 4 through 8. Verse 6 states, "Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to each of us." What has been given to us is a measure, a proportion, in relation to a spiritual gift. God does not give everyone who has the gift of evangelism the same degree of giftedness. He doesn't give everyone who has any particular spiritual gift an identical way of expressing that because we're different people, we have different personalities, and we have different gifts and talents. So what Paul is simply saying here is that these spiritual gifts derive from God and God apportions them through the Holy Spirit as He sees fit.
 
So these gifts differ according to the grace given to us and then he starts going through a list. "If prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith." Now it would be easy and I think some people read this that if you're less mature you have less faith and if you're more mature you have more faith and that's not what it's talking about. It's not saying it's a variation so that as you grow and mature the one who has the gift of prophecy, that that gift changes. It has to have to do with the standard that all gifts have and that is the standard of doctrine. They're to be given and used with reference to what the Bible teaches about the body of Christ.
 
Now having seen that in verse 6 it helps us to understand what is being said in verse 3 that that is that God deals with each one of us according to this measure of faith. That's in terms of the faith or doctrine that is given to us as a standard for the spiritual life so that becomes an objective standard and then verses 4 and 5 just emphasizes that there are differences in the body of Christ. Everybody's different. There's a unity in the body of Christ. We're members of one another which is a deep, deep integral relationship, deeper than physical siblings and a physical family. We are members of one another and we're inter-dependent and so there's a unity, there's distinction, and there's this mutual service that comes out here.
 
So I started with the introduction to spiritual gifts last time, defining a spiritual gift as an ability or an aptitude that is sovereignly bestowed on every believer in the Church Age by the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation for performing a particular service in and for the body of Christ. You may have the gift of service. It might manifest itself in ways when you're with your family or you're at work or you're with friends. That's not its purpose. Its purpose is to be utilized within a local congregation. This is one of the problems that we have when people can no longer participate in a local congregation. I understand the dynamics today.  Some people because of health reasons are no longer able to do that. If they're growing older they've grown beyond this and they're in a different stage of life. If they're younger and have health problems, they're limited in their participation. Fortunately, due to technology they can hear the Word of God and they can function as sort of an associate member of a congregation in many ways. They can pray, they can give, they can serve in some capacity but they can find some way in which they can be of service to that local congregation where they are being taught and fed the Word of God.
 
Then we have other people who are just geographically challenged spiritually, you might say. We have a problem of living in an apostate culture today. It's getting worse. It's very hard for many people who are serious about their spiritual life and serious about the Word of God to find a church within their geographical vicinity. One of the reasons I like this location for a church right on a Beltway is because it allows people from 30 to 40 minute drives away which takes us all the way down to New Territories off of 59S and all the way up to the Woodlands and Kingwood, including everything in-between from Tomball to Katy and all the way towards the inner loop that gives us easy access to this location. At 7:30 at night and 10:30 on Sunday morning there's not a lot of traffic out there, outside of holidays, for people to have to deal with. So it's an easily accessible area but because of the fact that it may still take some people forty minutes to get here they can't always make it. We have a certain number of people in the congregation that would prefer to be here on Tuesday and Thursday nights but they can't because, for whatever reason, they just can't get here. So they're able to live-stream.
 
But there are some people who live beyond the area I just outlined. So they have to rely on electronic media. I encourage people that if you live in Podunk Junction somewhere, which actually was about five miles north of Preston, Connecticut. I remember one time we went over to Foxwoods, a restaurant there. They had these paper napkins that had a diagram of what areas in Connecticut went to different Indian tribes. The area just north of Preston was the area for the Podunk Indians so Preston was truly at Podunk Junction, U.S.A. No matter where you are, hopefully you can find a local church where you can have some time of ministry.
 
I've taught this for many years. I'm going to give you two examples, one negative and one positive. The negative was a man sent me an e-mail when I was in Preston City. He lived in Vermont and he said that he had tried for the last six months to attend a Congregational Church in my area and he wanted to be a good example to teach his children the importance of being involved in a local church. But he was beginning to wonder if he should continue? The pastor didn't believe anything related to the infallibility related to God's Word. He didn't even believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ. I told him no that he shouldn't go to an apostate church.
 
There are a lot of people who because of one reason or another the pastor may not be as in line with them with their doctrine as they would like. They think that justifies them in not going there. Well, there was another young man who was a major in the army at the time. He was an armored officer, outside of Fort Leavenworth. He found a small Baptist Church. The pastor was a little bit "lordship". He wasn't real sure if he was dispensational but the pastor did try to teach the Bible. He didn't have a whole lot of training. Well, it wasn't too long before this guy was recognized by the pastor as someone who knew something about the Bible. The pastor asked him to teach the adult Sunday School class. For the next two years, he taught dispensationalism and free grace and the Bible to that class. He had a tremendous ministry in that little local church.
 
So just because you go someplace and it's not everything you want it to be, even may not be half what you want it to be, but as long as they're not compromising the deity of Christ, compromising on salvation and a few other foundational things such as miracles and infallibility of Scripture and things like that, then try to make a go of it. Another individual which I know recently was working very hard to make a go of it in a local church not too far from where he lived but there were just too many little things that were throwing up as conflicts. He would ask the pastors about these things and finally the pastor said that he really didn't fit in there and that he needed to find someplace else to go. I don't believe he was being obnoxious in the way he was approaching it but it was just that there were a lot of areas of disagreements. When the pastor asked him to teach a Sunday School class and he would teach it and talk about the angelic conflict, the pastor would call him on Monday and ask where in the world he was getting that out of the Bible.
 
So we need to be involved in a local church but it is getting harder and harder today, even in large urban locations in the south where you would think you would find something. If you had time to go visit 150 to 200 churches, you probably could find one. So if you pray about it, God will let you know. But sometimes you just can't find it so thank God we have the internet. Still spiritual gifts are not designed for you to function at home with your family. That violates the whole principle. You need to figure out how to be more involved with a local church. If that means packing your bags and finding a job and moving half way across the country so you can be part of a physical congregation then that's really what you need to do. Some people can't do that because of certain restrictions on their job and talent and family and kids. I understand that but the Biblical standard is that people be involved in a local church utilizing their spiritual gifts because that's why God gave every believer a spiritual gift to serve in a local congregation, not just let it lie fallow.
 
This is something that is very important. Even if you're in a position where you're out in the middle of nowhere maybe you can eventually organize your life so you can get somewhere. It may take you ten or fifteen years and I can give you any number of stories of people who did that. That's important to understand with spiritual gifts. Utilizing your spiritual gift is not something that's optional. That's part of your spiritual life.
 
So every believer has been given a spiritual gift. They're restricted to the Church Age. Now there are gifts of God such as prophecy in the Old Testament but those aren't spiritual gifts by definition which is a Church Age bestowal that focuses between the Day of Pentecost and the Rapture. So that's important. There are some of these revelatory abilities that God gave in the Old Testament and will give again in the Tribulational period and in the Millennial Kingdom but they're not by definition spiritual gifts because they're not related to the body of Christ.
 
As for terminology, I talked about three words. PNEUMATIKON which emphasizes the source of the nature of the gifts from the Holy Spirit. CHARISMA. We're all charismatics Biblically. Unfortunately the charismatics have co-opted and distorted a number of Biblical terms, such as charismatic and such as holiness. If you're a Church Age believer you're Pentecostal. I used to love it when I would get phone calls asking, "Are you a spirit-filled church?" I'd say, Yes, after we confess our sins we are." "Huh? What does that mean?" I used to love twisting people up like that. Biblically speaking all Church Age believers are charismatic. We're all Pentecostal but those terms have been distorted by confused, Biblically illiterate, theologically impoverished people today. MERISMOS is the third term that's used. I pointed that out in Hebrews 2:4 as it's translated gifts in that passage.
 
That brought us to the third point which is that spiritual gifts are unique to the Church Age. No spiritual gifts were given prior to the Day of Pentecost and no spiritual gifts will be given after the Rapture of the Church. That brings us to point four. For point four I want you to turn in your Bible to Ephesians 4. This is one of the other key passages on spiritual gifts. (Also Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 12) Just remember the number twelve. It's not a hard Biblical number to remember. How many disciples were there? Twelve. How many tribes of Israel? Thirteen. In some cases fourteen. No, those are from the tribe of Levi who are divided but that's another story. Anyway, just remember 12. So remember Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 define spiritual gifts.
 
Then we have Ephesians 4 which talks about four specific spiritual gifts. Now if you read the literature or you listen to some pastor they get wrapped around the axle trying to decide whether these four gifts are gifted people or gifts. I always ask if they're gifted people that's because they have a gift. Let's not get too caught up in this issue of whether they're gifted people or spiritual gifts. In other passages these are identified as spiritual gifts and they're manifest through specific individuals so they become gifted people but they have a gift. That comes out of the quote from verse 8.
 
So these four are talking about leadership, communication gifts that are listed in verse 11. So let's look at the start of the passage. In verse 7 Paul says, "But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift." Just reading the English does that have any familiarity to you at all in light of what we've already seen? It uses the same vocabulary that we've seen in Romans 12 and in 1 Corinthians 12. And it does mention the "measure of Christ's gift." Then in verse 8, "Therefore it says, "WHEN HE ASCENDED ON HIGH, HE LED CAPTIVE A HOST OF CAPTIVES, AND HE GAVE GIFTS TO MEN." The "He" in verse 8 is God speaking in and through the prophet, David, in Psalm 68:18. Psalm 68 is what's referred to as an enthronement Psalm and it's a victory psalm where David has conquered Jerusalem and he is ascending the Temple Mount so it borrows on the imagery of a conqueror who after conquering a city or a country takes of the spoils and distributes those to his army. Some people call that plunder but that's the imagery here. The picture here is Christ in His Ascension, after 40 days of teaching and training his disciples in relation to the coming Kingdom of God He then ascended to Heaven in Acts, chapter 1. One minute He's standing there in front of his disciples and the next second they're all standing there looking up in the sky as He sort of blasted off.
 
The Scriptures use a passive verb so He's basically taken into Heaven. It's almost a "beam me up, God" kind of thing. God just extracted Jesus from the planet. So He ascends to the high point of the universe, the right hand of God the Father. God the Father is sitting at the command and control center of the Universe. At the right hand of the Father is a human being who has had victory over sin and death at the Cross. So the picture, the imagery that the Scriptures use is very strong military imagery of a conqueror who is now taking a victory lap, in our terminology.
 
It's a victory ascent to Heaven where He sits at the right hand of the Commander and Chief of the Universe. He's sitting there until the Commander and Chief is going to give Him the controls. By that I mean He is going to give Him the Kingdom. What he does as He ascends is that He distributes gifts. This is analogous to what a human conqueror would do distributing plunder to his troops so He leads "captivity captive" and He gave gifts to men." That's the foundation. I'm not doing an exegesis of all the details in this passage. I just want to emphasize the point that we have here that spiritual gifts in the Church Age are the direct result of the Ascension of Christ.
 
That's why we can make the point we made in verse 3 that spiritual gifts are not distributed in the Old Testament period. It's unique to the Church Age. It's similar to the point I've made in teaching Romans 6 is that when Paul talks about the Baptism by the Holy Spirit in that chapter and our identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection so it can't have ever happened to anyone prior to the death of Christ on the Cross or prior to the Day of Pentecost in A.D. 33. No Old Testament saint had the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. Therefore no believer in the Old Testament had the power and the tyranny of the sin nature broken because what breaks it is that identification with Christ in His death. That's Romans 6:1-8.
 
And so it's the same thing here. We have a situation of spiritual gifts being given that are the result and only the result of the Ascension of Christ. So that never could have happened prior to the Ascension which was 10 days before the Day of Pentecost. So spiritual gifts are the direct result of the Ascension of Christ, His current Session in Heaven, and the purposes of God in the present Church Age in preparing a bride for the Lord Jesus Christ and a people to rule and reign with Him in the Millennial Kingdom. That's a mouthful.
 
The point that I'm making here is that the giving of spiritual gifts are distributed as a result of Christ's victorious ascension to Heaven. They are given in relation to His current Session where He is serving as the High Priest of the Church and in relation to the purposes of God. Now which purposes are we talking about? We're talking about God's purpose in preparing a bride for the Lord Jesus Christ. Part of my job as a pastor is to prepare the people who listen to me so they become mature believers and are ready then for the time when Christ returns for the Church which is His bride. He doesn't want to return for a baby bride. He wants to return for a mature bride but unfortunately there are too many believers who reject the whole concept of pursuing spiritual mature. So in a spiritual sense they're not going to be really ready for the return of Christ.
 
But the mission of the church, in terms of discipleship, is to prepare a bride for the Lord Jesus Christ and those people who comprise the Church, the bride of Christ, are going to be the same group that rules and reigns with Christ in the Millennial Kingdom. So the issue is for each one of us is are we willing to go through the process that God has designed for us to mature so that we are prepared and ready for the return of Christ as part of the bride of Christ, the Church, and part of the ruling and reigning cadre of the future Millennial Kingdom? Spiritual gifts fit into that.
 
Now when we understand this training aspect to the spiritual gifts it makes sense in terms of what Paul is saying here in Ephesians 4. He quotes from Psalms 68:18 and he goes on to say, skipping past verses 9 and 10 which are parenthetical and explanatory, verse 11 says, "And He gave some {as} apostles, and some {as} prophets, and some {as} evangelists, and some {as} pastors and teachers." He is a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ via the Holy Spirit. Both the Holy Spirit and God the Son are involved in that distribution of gifts.
 
There are four gifts mentioned here. These are all communication gifts and teaching gifts because in verse 12 we're told their purpose is "to equip the saints for the ministry." So the goal of the apostle was to equip or train saints. The purpose of the prophet was to equip or train saints. The work of the evangelist is to witness to people? Wrong. That's not what it says. The purpose of the evangelist is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. We think that the person with the gift of evangelism is to evangelize. Not on the basis of this passage. If the purpose for the pastor is to equip the saints the purpose for all four is to equip the saints.
 
I know that's always a rude awakening for some people. It's really hard when we come face to face with the exact verbiage of Scripture. We have to sometimes revise our theology. That doesn't mean evangelists are not engaged in personal evangelism. But that's not their primary mission. Their primary mission for the evangelist is to train the rest of us who aren't very good at evangelism to be better at evangelism. That's their function—same as the role of the pastor-teacher. That doesn't mean the pastor-teacher doesn't function in other areas of service within the local church but it means his primary purpose is to equip and train others to be able to function in their areas of service within the local church.
 
So the goal of these leadership gifts is to equip the saints for the work of ministry. That means the pastor is the coach but the team that does all of the work, all of the operational ministry of a local church, are the people in the church. The individual believers in the local church should utilize their spiritual gift in whatever area they're gifted in order to carry out that ministry. A pastor cannot do everything. All the pastor can do is to teach and communicate the Word.
 
Both this ministry at West Houston Bible Church and the ministry at Dean Bible Ministries run on the backs of a lot of people who give a lot of time to do a range of things. That's everything from running the website, preparing materials teaching kids in prep school, taking care of the nursery, various administrative functions, all of these things take a large number of people to make things work. When you're involved it means that everybody carries a little bit of a larger load than when you're operating in a larger church.
 
One of the reasons a lot of people like to go to a mega-church is because they can be anonymous and irresponsible. They don't have to do anything. They can hide and no one know they're there. No one's going to ask them to teach Sunday School. There's not going to be a need for them to do anything. They can just think that someone else is doing it. They think they don't really need to give so much because someone else will do it. Someone else will help with the kids. And it's easy to do that, to rationalize that way. But when you're in a smaller congregation then there's more responsibility and fewer people so everyone needs to get involved so the team functions well.
 
So the pastor equips the saints for the work of the ministry for the edifying, that is the spiritual maturation of the church. This concept of edification is using a building metaphor in relation to strengthening and constructing within the soul a body of doctrine that becomes the foundation for that individual's life. Then it leads to something which is the "unity of doctrine". See, ecumenicalism isn't wrong in its goal of unity. It's wrong in how it seeks the unity. It seeks the unity at the expense of doctrinal accuracy. It's the unity of doctrine, of what we believe, of our understanding of the Scriptures and that comes only as a result of being trained and taught by a pastor-teacher.
 
So the goal is "until we all achieve the unity of the faith" and as I was teaching just last week in the Bible Study Methods class is that one of the characteristics of the Scripture is the unity of the Scripture. We have sixty-six books in the Bible, thirty-nine in the Old Testament, twenty-seven in the New Testament. We have over forty different authors who wrote throughout a period of a little over two thousand years. They wrote from many different educational backgrounds, many different vocational backgrounds, and many different cultural backgrounds. And yet they spoke with one voice. There's a unity in the Scripture so that there's only one opinion expressed in the Scripture and that's God's opinion. It's Divine viewpoint and so only by studying the Scriptures can be all come to a unity of the faith. Our agreement is then based on what the Scriptures says and teaches.
 
And this leads us to a further knowledge of the Son of God and to maturity, "a perfect man". Perfect almost always refers to completion of something such as maturation, not flawlessness. "To the measure according to the standard of the stature of the fullness of Christ that we should no longer be children." See the whole purpose of the local church is to get rid of little children. The sad thing is and you all have heard me say this many times before, one of my favorite quotes, one of the most insightful things I've heard somebody say was a statement by Dr. Earl Radmacher, the former president of Western Baptist Seminary, now Chancellor and a strong advocate for free grace. He was speaking at one of our pastor's conferences long before Chafer Seminary existed and took them over. It was in Phoenix in 1991 or 1992. He made the comment that the largest nursery in the world is the evangelical church. Most of the nursery workers don't know how to get their charges out of diapers. That is a fascinating statement. If you didn't catch what he's saying is that most pastors don't have a clue how to get the baby believers in their congregation out of their infancy. The pastors haven't studied the Scriptures in any measure of depth to be able to do that.
 
So when you look at a congregation it's a lot like a one-room schoolhouse. You have a congregation made up of people who are brand new believers, and people who have been around a long time and are fairly mature in their understanding of Scripture and their application, and everyone else is in-between. It's like having a one-room schoolhouse with everything from Pre-K all the way up to high school. The pastor has to address the congregation in a way so that he presents enough meat and nourishment so that everybody from the high school advanced adolescents and mature believers to the infants who need to find something that they can absorb and assimilate and grow.
 
But what we have in our whole culture is that "babies rule". It's happening in homes where the kids set the agenda. It happens in the schools where the kids set the agenda in classes. It happens in churches where we ask the people in the pew what they want. That's like asking a bunch of kindergarteners what they really want. Well, they want milk and cookies every day. They don't want to have to work. They don't want to put in the effort. They want ice cream and cake all the time so that's what they get in 99% of the churches. They get ice cream and cake. They don't get any meat. They don't get their vegetables. They're not taught to eat salad. They don't have any nourishment. That's the focus of the church.
 
What's happening is that if you're a new believer and you want cake and ice cream you can go get that at a hundred places in this city but if you want to have a steady diet of really good spiritual food you can't find it except in about a half a dozen places. In some places they try but I know pastors who try but worry that if they do that everyone will leave. That's a problem. We live in an apostate culture where Christians don't want to grow and they don't want to be fed.
 
But we get another picture of the mission of the local church in Ephesians 4:7-14 here that the purpose is to build maturity into people. I made a decision when I went back in the pastorate and went to Preston City Bible Church in 1998 that I was going to teach the Word of God to build maturity into people. And if people who didn't want to mature came and they didn't like it, they were welcome to go somewhere else. I encouraged them to stay so they could grow but I was going to focus my ministry and target my ministry to people who wanted to grow. If you don't want to grow, there's a thousand other places for you to go. But if you want to grow, there aren't too many. I'm going to be one of those pastors who focuses on spiritual growth. That's why these leadership gifts are given. They're given by the victorious Christ who ascends to Heaven and distributes these gifts to the Church in view of their future victorious reign upon the earth. That sets it in a Biblical context.
 
Now the fifth point. As with most activities we find in the Scriptures, talking about creation and salvation, all three members of the Godhead are present. It's a Trinitarian function: the Father's involved, the Son's involved, and the Holy Spirit's involved. In 1 Corinthians 12:11 we're told, "But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as He wills." That "He" there refers to the Spirit but what we just read in Ephesians 4 is that the "He" refers to God the Son and overall it's all orchestrated by God the Father so Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all involved in the distribution of spiritual gifts.
 
The sixth point about spiritual gifts is that they're not earned or deserved. Spiritual gifts are grace gifts. That's the emphasis in the word CHARISMA. They are based upon grace. Oh, by the way, a reference on the distribution of spiritual gifts by the Father is Hebrews 2:4. God gave you a gift free of charge at the instant of your salvation. The gift itself is not developed or learned. You can't do anything to get more of the gift. You've been given x-amount of the spiritual gift of service or giving. You've been given a certain proportion of that gift but you can't do anything to increase that proportion or decrease it but you can do something to develop it.
 
All spiritual gifts, just as any natural gift or talent, has to be developed. It's part of our training, part of our focus, and we develop it. Say someone has the gift of pastor-teacher. I've heard a lot of misconceptions and garbage about pastor-teachers from people who came out of doctrinal churches and ought to know better. The gift of pastor-teacher doesn't mean I can just pick up the Bible and read a passage and I immediately know what that passage means. The gift of pastor-teacher isn't a study gift. It's not a knowledge gift. It's not a revelatory gift. It's a communication gift.
 
The gift of pastor-teacher is a gift related to leadership. That's the concept of pastor. And he leads through his teaching. It's not a gift that I can just get up and open my Bible and boom, I'm going to understand what it says. I've heard people say that but that's not what the gift is about any more than the gift of evangelism is that somebody with the gift of evangelism can properly give the gospel five minutes after they're saved. They can't. The evangelist has to be trained. He's got to learn how to give the gospel. He's got to fall on his face fifteen or twenty thousand times in the process of giving the gospel to people and that's how you learn. That's how pastors learn.
 
That's why I think it's so important and I pray all the time and you should too that we can get some young men who are interested in pursuing seminary education and being involved in West Houston Bible Church. We need to train young men. The only place you can learn to ride a bicycle is by sitting in front of a computer and using a bicycle riding app. Right? No. The only place you can learn to ride a bicycle is to go out and get on a bicycle and fall down once or twice. That's how you develop that ability.
 
The same thing with a pastor. You get in the pulpit and you teach. It's hard on the congregation. That's a service ministry in a local congregation because they have to listen to him and watch him fall off the pulpit, as it were, a few times but that's how they learn. There's not many other ways where they can develop that skill of teaching, communicating, and reading an audience so they can understand and communicate accurately the Word of God and train people. So the spiritual gift is not developed or learned but its use is learned and developed and that comes with experience and it comes with utilization and it comes with time. So that's what's important. A pastor has to go through training. Others have to go through some training in order to learn how to properly utilize their gift. Well, when I get back from Kiev we'll continue with the seventh point dealing with the categories of gifts.
 
Gene? What Gene Brown is saying for the people who are listening because you can't pick up his voice real well with the microphone is that one of the important things if that if you know someone with the gift of evangelism, you should hang with them. Travel with them. Watch them. Observe them. I remember about ten years ago Gene and I went up to the Pre-Trib Rapture Study Group one week and on the way it was raining and nasty in Dallas as it usually is that time of the year and one of the windshield wipers on the car I'd borrowed had gone bad. We just couldn't see anything out of the windshield so we had to pull in and find an auto supply place where we could get a new windshield wiper. One of the guys that worked there said he'd come out and put it on for us. He put it on and while he was wrapping it up, Gene said he had a little test he wanted to give him. You may know the little tract Gene has with a test on things and it was just great watching him. Gene led that guy to the Lord right there on the curb and it was just great to see how smoothly and naturally he just used that opportunity to communicate the gospel. I've been with Gene many, many times and observed this and I've been with others like that. It's just so great. I sit back and wish I could do that. I'm not gifted in that area of evangelism but you watch someone to do that and it encourages you to emulate that and to approach it that way. So that's one of the best ways to learn. Thanks for adding that, Gene.

Romans 131b-Spiritual Gifts Introduction – Part 3 Permanent vs. Temporary Gifts

Romans 12:3 NASB95
For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
Romans 131b-Spiritual Gifts Introduction – Part 3 Permanent vs. Temporary Gifts Romans 12:3-4
 
The last couple of lessons we've gone through spiritual gifts so this is the third lesson by way of introduction. I'm just giving a summary here. Then as we get into the exegesis in the next couple of verses it'll go fairly quickly because we understand the Biblical framework. As we'll see tonight, there are three basic passages in the Scripture that talk about spiritual gifts. They're easy to remember if you can remember the number 12. Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and then Ephesians 4 which is 12 divided by 3. You've just got to remember that and then you've got it. Okay, Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 are your main passages and they're both 12 so that's an easy way to remember it.
 
The last time we got through the sixth point on spiritual gifts, which was that spiritual gifts are not earned or deserved. The gift is given at the point of salvation. The gift is not developed or learned but using it effectively may be learned, depending on the gift. We become more effective in our use of the gift. I used the example last time of a pastor-teacher. A man receives the gift of pastor-teacher at the instant of salvation but he still has to go through seminary, still has to go through classes related to teaching, education, and Bible study. He has to learn the languages. He has to learn theology. He has to learn how to think critically.
 
 I'm always amazed when I run into people who think that if someone has the gift of pastor-teacher they can just pick up the Bible and teach it. No, it's not a gift of knowledge. It's a gift of communication and pastors have to go through education. There was a time in this country when pastors held a high standard and no church worth its salt would hire a pastor who was not well trained in the original languages. I don't know if I've told this story or not but in my first church, which was down in LaMarque. LaMarque is the last little city on the mainland before you cross over to Galveston. The pastor of that church who had been pastor there from 1933 to 1973 was a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Austin Presbyterian Seminary. When he was ordained as a Presbyterian pastor in 1933 he had to pass reading exams in Greek and Hebrew. He had to answer oral questions from his ordination council relating to the exegesis of the passages in the Greek and Hebrew that he had just read and translated as part of his exam. If he wasn't competent in Greek and Hebrew, then he would not get ordained.
 
Now in many churches all you have to do is have the gift of gab and be able to gather a crowd of people together or recite what some pastor has taught you and you're ordained. You don't have to demonstrate competency. This is why in the last thirty years pastors have become some of the least respected among the professions in the U.S. Now that's due to some other factors as well but part of it is that they have lost the professionalism that was once there because churches no longer require the high standards that was once there. In many denominations they brought that on themselves because rather than teaching content in the seminary they teach them a lot of "how-to" courses related to management, people skills, counseling, and everything but the Word of God. This leads to a dilution of the integrity of the pulpit. So we need to demand quality.
 
This is just an example that spiritual gifts are given to us. We don't learn a spiritual gift to get it but you have to develop and mature in your ability to utilize your spiritual gift. In the seventh point there are two categories of spiritual gifts and we'll probably spend most of our time tonight and sometime next week talking about this issue. It is an extremely controversial issue in some circles, not as controversial as it once was. Some places just quit having a controversy over it but we have to explore what the Word of God says.
 
The best classification of these two categories coming from the way the Scriptures talk about them is to call them permanent gifts and temporary gifts. Sometimes people talk about "sign" gifts but the Bible doesn't necessarily classify all of these as "sign" gifts. But the Scripture does indicate that some of them are temporary, that they were not designed to be part of the life of the Church throughout its history. They were temporary in nature. So two categories we're going to talk about a little bit.
 
It helps to be able to compare the passages that list the gifts. In Ephesians 4:11-12 it lists apostles, prophets, evangelists, and teachers. Apostles and prophets are also listed in 1 Corinthians 12: 28 and in Romans 12:6-8 you have the gift of prophecy mentioned. 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 at the beginning of the chapter gives a list that includes all temporary gifts. Some of these we're not sure how they function or what they were because this is the only mention of them in the Scripture and there's not even a reference given anywhere else. Due to the influence of the charismatic ministry, such as the more extreme Word of Faith heretics on the extreme end of the charismatic movement, they really defined for contemporary culture "word of wisdom" and "word of knowledge." They didn't get their definition out of the Bible. They generated it out of their own experience. That's not how you do Biblical theology.
 
We don't know what a "word of wisdom" was. We don't know what a "word of knowledge" was. It has to do with some sort of message. It might be that it's not even a revelatory gift. They may be gifts related to wise application of Scripture, a message related to wise application of Scripture, or a message related to knowledge in terms of understanding or insight into Scripture. The fact that they're called "a word of" indicates that they may be related to some sort of special revelation. Since special revelation ended at the end of the 1st century, then these would no longer continue. So they're more than likely related to revelatory gifts and that would mean they would have a certain authority. Since it would be revelation derived from God then it would have the same level of infallibility and inerrancy as any other divinely-enabled utterance. Therefore it's not subject to error so someone can't have a mistake. This would violate a number of principles. We'll get into that as we look at the prophecy gift.
 
Faith is listed, healing, that's obvious, miracles, again obvious, prophecy, we'll discuss some of the things related to that so prophecy is listed in every list. Discerning spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. Later in 1 Corinthians 12 there's another list, apostles, prophets, teachers, healing, miracles, tongues, administrations. A better translation of that Greek word might be leadership. Helps which uses the word ANTILUPSIS, which means giving assistance to someone. That's a different word from the word in the Romans 12 list for helps which is service. Service and helps in English may be very close to one another. The Greek words may even be synonyms but they're not the same words so it's not the same gift.
 
Then Romans 12 mentions the gift of leading. The Greek word has the idea of management there, as well, so it's probably very close to the idea of administration. Romans 12 also mentions mercy, exhortation, and giving. So that's all the spiritual gifts that are listed in Scripture and I'm not sure that this is even meant to be exhaustive. There may be other gifts. As I pointed out before, it's not really necessary to know what your spiritual gift is to function in your spiritual gift. If we have the attitude as believers to serve the Lord and to serve in the local church in whatever way we can then over the process of our spiritual growth and maturation then our spiritual gifts will be manifest in whatever we do. We'll be strengthened in those particular areas.
 
Now, we break these categories down into temporary gifts and permanent gifts. The temporary gifts were distributed initially to the apostles and certain disciples who were closely associated with the apostles. They served as giving credentials and authentications to the message of the apostles during the time that the Canon of Scripture was being developed. Since the Canon was incomplete and revelation was incomplete, Scripture was not sufficient. An incomplete Canon of Scripture could not be thought of as sufficient so during the New Testament period from when Jesus dies in A.D. 30 you don't have the first epistle which was probably James. It was probably not written until the late 40s, 15 and more years after the crucifixion. Most of the Pauline epistles are not written until the late 50's, say around 58 to 68 and then you have several others written during that period. The Petrine epistles are written during that period. The Johanine epistles and the Gospel of John are not written until the late 80s and completed by A.D. 95 so during much of the New Testament period, about 25 years after the crucifixion, less than half of the New Testament has been written and these books had not had time to circulate among the churches at that time. So they're operating on a foundation of insufficient revelation about the new dispensation of the Church, the new dynamics of the spiritual life related to the ministry of God the Holy Spirit, so it is through the gifts of prophecy, and possibly the word of knowledge and the word of wisdom that believers are taught the truth about what is going on until the Canon is complete. These gifts functioned during that particular time.
 
The permanent gifts are given and distributed throughout the body of Christ for the on-going mature ministry of believers to one another within the body of Christ. If you think about the different gifts, whether its evangelism or teaching, administration, helps, service, mercy, exhortation, and giving these also represent responsibilities that should be carried out by every believer. Every believer is expected to give. Some believers have a spiritual-enhancement in that area. Every believer is expected to encourage one another. We're commanded to encourage one another but some people are specially gifted in that area. We're also to teach one another, not necessarily in a formal sense but we're to teach one another. Some are given a special enhancement in the area of teaching. Same thing in areas of helps and service. We're to serve one another. We're to help one another but some people are given special spiritual enhancements and giftedness in those particular areas. So those gifts are permanent gifts for the edification and maturity of the body.
 
Now there are two other terms you often hear when talking about the permanent versus the temporary gifts. One is to classify or differentiate between the temporary gifts and revelatory gifts. Gifts of healing and gifts of miracles are not revelatory so revelatory is not a perfect synonym for temporary gift. Revelatory gifts are those which involve some form of special revelation from God. That would include prophecy, the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, and I believe in my opinion, the gift of apostle. I believe the apostles had all the gifts. That was part of their foundational ministry in the early church. I can't prove that but I think that when you look at what they did, they seem to exhibit many, if not all, of the gifts in their ministry.
 
Now I want to talk a little bit about why we classify these gifts as temporary. There's a lot of debate over this. This really didn't bubble up to the surface in the history of Christianity until the beginning of the 20th century. There were people who were seeking some of these gifts, gifts of healing, gifts of tongues, interpretation of tongues, by the late 19th century. That primarily grew out of a revival movement that began in the middle of the 19th century and is usually classified under the terminology of the "holiness" movement. The holiness movement had its start within a Methodist background in the mid-19th century as a desire to reform the Methodist Church from the inside out due to a misguided perspective that somehow the Methodist Church had lost its passion, lost its drive, and some of this was based on the fact that many of the churches in America were growing smaller from what they had been at the beginning of the 19th century.
 
We now have historical perspective. They were shrinking because people were listening to the advice of Horace Greeley and they were going west. So people were leaving their home churches on the Eastern seaboard and they were heading west. So the churches in the east were shrinking to some degree as people left and headed for the west. Whenever you see churches shrink and churches all go through ebbs and flow of church life. At first membership comes along for a while and the church grows and something happens. A lot of people have to move or they get older, whatever the cause is, the population of the church drops a little bit and we go through these ups and down.
 
What happened was, they asked the question "What are we doing wrong?" Well, they really weren't doing anything different or doing anything wrong, there were demographic factors, American expansion factors that were affecting the demographics of the local church. Once you start asking "what are we doing wrong" if you're not doing anything wrong, you often come up with the wrong answer which is exactly what they did.
 
This was particularly traced to a woman Bible study teacher in New York City who was the wife of a physician there. Her name was Phoebe Palmer and they began to go back to the perfectionist teaching of Charles and John Wesley, that somehow they had missed the boat and they needed to have a "second work of grace" that came after salvation. So this dedication or second work of grace was identified with the Baptism of the Spirit. So now what they've done is that you have one work of grace at salvation when you trust in Christ as Savior but you have to have a second work of grace for spiritual blessing, for spiritual growth which elevates you to a higher level of spiritual experience, whether you call it dedication or yieldedness or whatever it is, that's what they labeled it.
 
By the end of the 19th century they began to associate the possibility of speaking in tongues as the sign of that experience. No one was speaking in tongues. The first modern example of anyone claiming to speak in tongues was on New Year's Eve, 1900, as you were shifting into a new century, 1901, when a young Bible college student in Topeka, Kansas by the names of Agnes Ozmon suddenly started speaking what she claimed to be Chinese. It's interesting that in the early stages of the charismatic movement, they assumed that on the basis of the Bible that when the apostles spoke in tongues they were speaking in legitimate languages. It's only after a while that they realize in the early 1900's that the people doing this weren't speaking Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew, that they changed their understanding and interpretation of Scripture.
 
The problem is they had correctly interpreted the Scripture that speaking in tongues is the word GLOSSIA means a language, a known or recognizable language even though the person may not have gone through the normal process of learning it. He had a miraculous ability to speak in a normal human language. So that was the beginning of the charismatic movement. At that time it was simply known as the Pentecostal movement and it was marked by the idea that you had a second work of grace after salvation that they identified as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and it was signified by speaking in tongues.
In the history of that movement it changes again around the 50s and instead of being separated out from other denominations they stayed in denominations so you had charismatic Episcopals, charismatic Presbyterians, charismatic Baptists, charismatic Methodists and that became known as the charismatic movement.
 
The terms charismatic and Pentecostal are technically different although often they're used together as the charismatic/Pentecostal movement. It was very controversial in the 60s and the 70s and there were a lot of people who tried to utilize linguistic studies and recordings of glossalaic utterances in order to substantiate these as legitimate languages. Many of these studies were conducted by people who were in the Pentecostal/ charismatic movement. A number of these were published. A couple of years ago I read through a number of these and found that no one could ever substantiate it. They never came up with any documented evidence of someone speaking a verifiable language. So they often came up with other ideas, such as they were speaking a Holy Spirit language, a prayer language, or an angelic language but the reality was that a linguist who examined any of these utterances would come away saying that they weren't speaking any language at all. They said whether or not you could understand the language was not necessary for linguistic analysis. Someone who is a specialist in languages and linguistics can spot patterns and determine whether or not someone is speaking gibberish or speaking a language. All of these turned out to be simply gibberish. There's no miracle there.
 
I remember when students at Dallas Seminary would memorize the Lord's Prayer in Greek or Psalm 23 in Hebrew or some other passage. At the time there was a huge conflict over a Baptist Church in Dallas. They would go over there to their evening service and recite something from the Hebrew or Greek text and get a myriad of different interpretations. It was just a field test to see if anyone actually had the gift of interpretation or were even performing according to the standard of Scripture and of course they weren't.
 
So this is a problem. The issue comes down to understanding what the Scripture teaches. In 1 Corinthians 13:8 it's very clear that the Scripture itself recognizes these distinctions between temporary gifts and permanent gifts. It also ultimately comes down to a recognition of the growth factor, the maturity factor, in the church. We'll look at that before we finish.
 
1 Corinthians 13:8 comes at the end of Paul's remarkable explanation of the wonders of love in 1 Corinthians 13:1-7. We will notice in our passage in Romans 12 that once Paul discusses the gifts he's going to come back because they have to be balanced with love. One of the weaknesses with spiritual gifts is that people get all self-absorbed and full of themselves in terms of what their own spiritual gift is. This is one of the things that was manifested a lot within the charismatic movement. It's also been manifested a lot in other churches where they put a lot of emphasis on training people in terms of their spiritual gift. So it always has to be balanced with love.  
 
Paul makes the point in 1 Corinthians 13:8 by saying, "Love never fails." He's making a contrast between the permanency of love and the impermanence or the temporary nature of some of the gifts. Now if you look at 1 Corinthians 12 you'll note that Paul begins with a blanket statement that love never fails and then when he ends this discussion he says that faith, hope, and love abide but the greatest of these is love. Why is love the greatest? Because love is permanent. Everything else is temporary but love is permanent. So your topical sentence shapes our understanding of this section that love never fails.
 
He's going to give three examples of things that are temporary: prophecy, tongues, and knowledge. He says in 1 Corinthians 13:8, "Love never fails; but if {there are gifts of} prophecy, they will be done away; if {there are} tongues, they will cease; if {there is} knowledge, it will be done away." When he says knowledge will be done away [vanish away], he's not talking about knowledge per se that will vanish away because in the eternal state there will be a lot of knowledge, a lot of things to learn. We will not be mindless in eternity. It's not going to be just an absence of intellectual activity. He's talking about the gift of knowledge or the word of knowledge mentioned earlier in the context.
 
The first thing he mentions in verse 8 is prophecy. Now how in the world are we to understand prophecy when it's mentioned in the New Testament? The frame of reference should be the Old Testament but in recent years you have two erroneous views of the New Testament gift of prophecy. One has been around a lot longer than the charismatic movement and that is the view that prophecy in the New Testament is equated to preaching or the proclamation of the gospel. Prophecy is never to be identified as preaching. There are a lot of people, non-charismatic, evangelicals, as well as others, who try to identify prophecy in the New Testament as preaching.
 
Prophecy must be understood in terms of its Old Testament reference. There's no change. There's no place anywhere in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, or Acts where the writer comes along and says, "Ah, we're talking about prophecy now but it's not what you've heard before. We've spent 4,000 years where prophecy meant one thing and now all of a sudden it means something else." There's no place where there's a re-definition of the term or the concept. So prophecy must be understood in terms of that Old Testament reference. It's also not some lower-grade guess at what God's going to do.
 
Now I'm making a little bit of fun of this and I'm going to give you some documentation in a minute but in the mid-80s there was a scholar that came out of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago by the name of Wayne Grudem. Today he's the president of Phoenix Theological Seminary. He's a well-respected scholar in a number of areas. A few years ago he published a systematic theology which is highly recommended and touted by a number of people. I have serious problems with a number of things in that theology. This isn't the least of it but a lot of people talk about him as if he is really great. His claim to fame, what put him on the map, was his doctoral dissertation where he claimed that the New Testament gift of prophecy was not the same as the Old Testament gift of prophecy.
 
Here are some of the things he said about it. He said, "Prophecy in ordinary New Testament churches was not equal to Scripture in authority." See in the Old Testament, prophecy which is speaking "this is the word of the Lord" is equated to Scripture. But he says that the New Testament gift doesn't have to pass the same quality standard. It doesn't have to pass the same test. He continues, "[This prophecy] was simply a very human and sometimes partially mistaken report of something the Holy Spirit brought to someone's mind." In other words you have an idea just pop into your mind and you say, "Ah, the Lord put this on my mind so I'm going to say it and attribute it to the Lord." But it may not be true. You may get it wrong. That's okay, but he says that's New Testament prophecy and has nothing to do with the Old Testament standards. He says, "New Testament prophecy is telling something God has spontaneously brought to mind." In another place he says New Testament prophecy is an unreliable human speech act [note that he says it's unreliable] in response to a revelation from the Holy Spirit. Finally he says, "This is a somewhat new definition of the nature of Christian prophecy." He recognizes that no one else has ever defined it this way in all of Church history. Further he says, "Much more commonly prophecy and prophets were used of ordinary Christians who spoke not with absolute divine authority but simply to report something God had laid on their hearts or brought to their minds."
 
The trouble with this is that there's no place in the Scripture that uses that kind of language. He goes on to say, "There are many indications in the New Testament [I want to know where because I've never found them] that this ordinary gift of prophecy had authority less than the Bible or less than the recognized Bible teaching in the early church." So he is basically saying that the Holy Spirit puts a perfect thought in your mind but when you're reporting on it you just get it all messed up and make mistakes about it and so it's not exactly accurate. I treat this kind of lightly and I poke a little humor at this because I just find this so absurd. I just see the contradictions in this to be so self-evident. The trouble is this has become a dominant view among evangelical Christians today.
 
But it just flies in the face of all kinds of evidence, not only Biblical evidence, but also evidence from the early church. From writings we have, such as one particular writing we have called the DIDACHE which is a short form which was the teaching of the apostles. There were even some teachings of the early church fathers who thought that the DIDACHE was so beneficial to people that it should be included in the Canon of Scripture. Dates as to its origin differ. Some think it's as early as A.D. 60. Some think it's A.D. 80 but it was clearly written during the early apostolic period when the Canon of Scripture wasn't closed. So in the DIDACHE they recognized that there were people who still claimed prophetic utterance. They claimed they were speaking by means of God the Holy Spirit and according to what was said in the DIDACHE, they were held to the same high standard as prophets, as anyone who claimed to be saying, "thus sayeth the Lord" from the Old Testament.
 
There are other examples that I could go into from early church writings that demonstrate that in the early church they did not view prophecy functioning in the early church as anything less authoritative than the Scripture itself or than the Old Testament so this is clearly a problem. When we come to the New Testament we have to recognize that the New Testament gift of prophecy is not redefined in the New Testament. It means the same thing it meant in the Old Testament.
 
Second, New Testament prophets were seen as equal in divine authority as New Testament apostles, according to Ephesians 2:20 where it states that "apostles and prophets are the foundation of the church". Third, early church writings from the late 1st century understood the New Testament gift of prophecy to be identical with the Old Testament gift.
 
Finally, we must recognize that New Testament prophecy died out with the closing of the Canon and the passing of the last apostle. The ultimate group that you would appeal to for validation of your claim that God had revealed something through you was to the apostles. Once the apostles were no longer on the scene, there's no one to appeal to, there's no board of verification to go to anymore and when the Canon was closed the content of the Canon, then, became the standard or the rule of faith in the early church.
 
Now Paul recognizes that these three gifts, prophecy, tongues, and knowledge, are temporary. When you look at the way the text is written, two of these gifts, prophecies and knowledge, are said to be nullified or abolished. The same word is used in the Greek to describe what will happen to them. It's a future passive indicative. The future means that at some point in the future this will be abolished. Passive means that something is going to happen to cause it to be abolished. It's going to be the recipient of an action. It doesn't state what that will be but something will happen to cause prophecy and knowledge to be abolished.
 
Tongues, however, is treated a little differently. Tongues uses a different word, the word PAUO, which indicates cessation. This means it will cease, it will die out on its own. It's used in a middle voice which would intensify that and it indicates that whatever causes knowledge and prophecy to be abolished is not the same thing that causes tongues to die out. There's an indication that that could be related to the purpose of tongues which is what we get from 1 Corinthians 14.
 
So just a couple of observations that prophecy and knowledge are both abolished but tongues stops. Secondly, we see that prophecy and knowledge are both partial. This is very important in 1 Corinthians 13:9 which states that we know in part and we prophesy in part. In other words these are viewed as having some element of incompleteness or insufficiency to them. Prophecy and knowledge are both considered to be partial and these partial gifts are what is abolished. So the second point is that prophecy and knowledge are both partial but the gift of languages is not said to be partial. I would say that is because prophecy and knowledge are both related to the giving of revelation and tongues was not a revelatory gift.
 
Third, Paul states that the partial prophecy and the partial knowledge are abolished when something called the "perfect" comes. We're going to have to figure out what in the world the "perfect" is. Look at 1 Corinthians 13:10, "But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done." What's in part? Knowledge and prophecy?  The word "done away" there is the same word used in 1 Corinthians 13:8 that prophecy be done away." It's all the same word even though it's translated differently in the English. It's all the same in the Greek.
 
Fourth, Paul specifically uses this verb KATARGEO a final time down in verse 11 when he's giving an illustration to make sure the reader realizes that the putting away or the abolishing of childishness is related to the cessation of prophecy and knowledge. It's important if you're doing Bible study to tie these things together because by using that same word throughout this section the Holy Spirit is bringing our attention to it so we understand the thread of his argument.
 
In fact, Fred Toussaint, professor at Dallas Seminary for many years, has said that KATARGEO means to render inoperative or to supersede. In the active voice KAO means to cease. Why is there a change? Toussaint says, "The change of verbs cannot be accounted for by saying that Paul does this to avoid repetition." You often find that among scholars. They'll say, "Well, that really doesn't mean anything. It's just a stylistic change." The problem is that the Holy Spirit doesn't function according to rules of modern English writing. Modern English writing says to change up your words and don't use the words too often or the reader will get bored. Sometimes the Holy Spirit uses the same word again and again and again because He wants the reader to connect the dots. The way they did that was to repeat the word again and again and again, something that the Holy Spirit would be graded down on by a modern English teacher in an American school.
 
Paul did not fear overuse of a word as seen in this passage because he uses KATARGEO four times in verses 8, 10, and 11 in order to make this particular point. So in 1 Corinthians 13: 9 and 10 he says, "For we know in part…" The spiritual gift of knowledge is partial. Partial is a term related to completeness. That's the opposite. It's incomplete or it's complete. It has to do with quantity. He says also, "We prophesy in part…" Prophecy gives us a little bit of a picture here, a little bit of a picture there, but it doesn't give us the complete picture. It's partial. So knowledge and prophecy are both partial. Then he says, "But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away [abolished]." Again that verb KATARGEO means rendering it to no effect. Now the thing we have to really pay attention to is this concept of "in part." In Greek that's EK MEROUS meaning something is partial or incomplete. Now that's going to be contrasted by that which is "perfect". The word perfect in the Greek is TELEIOS.  Usually it means complete as compared to incomplete. In one or two places it means perfect in the sense of flawless. Flawless is a qualitative idea. If it's not flawless, it's imperfect so it's not the same quality. If it's complete it's a quantitative idea. If it's incomplete it doesn't have enough quantity there.
 
So I'm going to use this term qualitatively and quantitatively. If perfect is contrasted to partial, do we have a qualitative idea or a quantitative idea? We have a quantitative idea, incomplete versus complete. So what we're talking about here is that something comes along that completes that which is incomplete. Well, prophecy and knowledge have to do with giving of revelation. Giving of revelation has to do with giving a "little here and a little there." It was incomplete until the Canon of Scripture was complete so the term complete has to do in context most likely with the completion of revelation.
Now as we look at the structure here we see that prophecies which are incomplete will fail or be abolished. Knowledge will be abolished. They will be abolished according to 1 Corinthians 13:10 when the perfect comes. So it's the arrival of this thing called the perfect that's going to end these gifts. Now some people have come along and come up with all kinds of ideas of what the perfect means. Completion is one view and it's either the complete Canon or the mature Church. I argue these are two sides of the same coin.
 
The other meaning is perfection and under that some say this happens when we die and we're face-to-face with the Lord. In 1 Corinthians 13:12 we read, "For now we see in a mirror dimly but then face-to-face." See, that's face-to-face with the Lord. Some people say it's at the Rapture which is similar to death and we're face-to-face with the Lord. Then we're going to have clear insight. Others say it's the Second Coming or the eternal state or if you just want to be nebulous or academic enough you just call it the sometime in the future when we'll see perfectly. None of those actually work as I'll show in a minute.
Now in James 1 the Word of God is referred to as a mirror. A person looks in a mirror and you see a self-reflection. You get up in the morning. You've got bed-head. You haven't shaved. You need to comb your hair and shave because you're paying attention to what you see in the mirror. You respond to it. So the Bible is compared to a mirror that you look in the Word of God and it reflects what you see. Now the King James Version didn't translate it in this manner. It said, "Now we see through a glass darkly." Well, glass and mirror are different things. If you're looking through a glass you're looking to something on the other side. But is the glass is a reflecting glass or a mirror then you're not looking through it at your own reflection.
 
The word used in James 1:23 is the Word of God being compared to a mirror. In James 1:25 it describes it as a perfect law of liberty, so what we have here just to review is that love is permanent but some of these spiritual gifts are temporary. In fact there's a lot more than spiritual gifts that are temporary. Prophecy and knowledge are incomplete type of spiritual gifts and when something that is complete comes it's going to end those incomplete gifts.
 
Now he's going to give two illustrations. In 1 Corinthians 13:11-12. In verse 11 he says, "When I was a child I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child but when I became a man I did away [abolished] with childish things." Using that word KATARGEO again, he connects it back to the abolishment of prophecy and knowledge, making us understand that what we're talking about here is that when you move from immaturity to maturity some things that were necessary at the immature phase are done away with and set aside when you hit the mature phase. Now the question we need to ask is what is it that is thought of as making us mature? The hint is it's a complete Canon of Scripture, the completed revelation of God. That's what makes the Church historically mature.
 
Then in 1 Corinthians 13:12 we see this "now" and "then" comparison. "For now we see in a mirror dimly but then face-to-face to…" Some people think this is face-to-face with the Lord but that's looking at someone else. That violates the mirror analogy. What we see in a mirror, we see ourselves. We come face-to-face when we look in the mirror of God's word. You're face-to-face with yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning. So Paul is talking about that there's a current situation where we see ourselves but it's an incomplete thing. But in the future it will be complete. Is that a future in time, right now in history in our life or is that future when we're face-to-face with the Lord? We see that now we speak in tongues, now there's prophecy and there's knowledge. But when the perfect arrives, these temporary things are set aside and as we become an adult the characteristics of childhood, that is the necessity for these gifts was removed.
 
In the second part of I Corinthians 13:12, Paul says, "Now I know in part." That word "now" is important. There are two different Greek words for "now". One word means right now in the immediate sense. The other means now in a general sense. When we look at 1 Corinthians 13:13, Paul says, "And now abide faith, hope, and love..."  The "now" there is a different word than the "now" used in verse 12. That's really the key to understanding this passage. What Paul is saying is that right now in this period of history in his lifetime because he didn't have a complete Canon of Scriptu4re this is what it's like. He didn't see the whole picture because he didn't have the whole Word of God yet. Then he says but what will abide in this age is faith, hope, and love.
Okay let's look at this. The "now" that's used here is the Greek word ARTI and it's used in both of these sentences, indicating an immediacy, meaning now, right now. He says we see in a mirror dimly. This is the Greek word AINIGMA where we get our English word enigma, which refers to something that takes a certain special insight in order to understand it because it is expressed in a somewhat puzzling manner or it refers to something that's indistinct as the mirror is incomplete. When it talks about face-to-face this could easily relate to the imagery in Numbers 12:6 because there God is speaking face-to-face with Moses. It's a situation where God has appeared to Moses. He says, "I don't talk to those other guys mouth to mouth like I talk to you." In other words, "I get in your face and I'm talking directly to you but I don't talk to any of the other prophets that way."
 
So this idea of "seeing in a mirror dimly but then face-to-face" is an illustration of prophecy. I Corinthians 13:11 is an illustration related to the ending of knowledge. In Numbers 12:6 God says "Hear now My words. If there is a prophet among you I, myself shall make known to him in a vision, I shall speak to him in a dream but not so with Moses. He is faithful in all My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth even openly and not in dark sayings." That's the word enigma which is where Paul gets it and uses it in 1 Corinthians 13. Though he's contrasting this. God is speaking through visions to the other prophets but He says that's not as clear as mouth to mouth or face-to-face so there's it's related to giving revelation.
 
So the child has partial knowledge, partial prophecy, and has an incomplete reflection from the Word of God because the Word of God is incomplete but when the perfect come the characteristics of childhood are removed and we see face-to-face. So now in this current age when we don't have a complete Canon of Scripture Paul says he knows in part. See that's knowledge. "But then I shall know just as I am also known." When is this knowledge going to be?
Okay, let's wrap this up. As a child we know in part, as an adult we know fully. It doesn't mean we're going to know exhaustively. It doesn't mean we're going know omnisciently because we never will, even a billion years into eternity we won't know everything God knows. We're still creatures with finite knowledge. But this is talking about complete understanding of who we are as described in the Scripture. So in contrast to the incomplete nature of prophecy and tongues, Paul concludes by saying, "But now…" He changes the word for now to a word that has a broader sense, NUNI, which means now in this age. "But now what continues is faith, hope, and love. These three. But the greatest of these is love."
 
Now let me tell you something. A lot of non-charismatics and most charismatics say that the face-to-face is face-to-face with the Lord. All of the gifts will continue, knowledge, prophecy, and tongues, will continue until we go into the eternal state and then they won't be needed anymore is what they believe. But the contrast here is between prophecy, knowledge, and tongues that are going to stop at some point and faith and hope and love will continue beyond prophecy, knowledge, and tongues. Now will faith, hope, and love continue into the eternal state? That's the model from the Pentecostal side, that prophecy, knowledge, and tongues all continue until the eternal state and faith, hope, and love continue.
 
It's obvious from the passage that faith, hope, and love continue beyond knowledge, prophecy, and tongues. The problem is that when we're in heaven there won't be faith. Because now we walk by faith and not by sight but then we walk by sight. We'll be face-to-face with the Lord. Faith ends when we're absent from the body and we're face-to-face with the Lord.  So faith doesn't continue into eternity. Not only that but hope doesn't continue into eternity. Romans 8:24 says, "For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees?" When we're face to face with the Lord there won't be hope because we're seeing it. So that means that if faith, hope, and love continue beyond prophecy, knowledge, and tongues then prophecy, knowledge, and tongues have to end at some point in history and faith, hope, and love continue beyond that point throughout the rest of the age and then when we're face-to-face with the Lord the only thing that continues into heaven is what? Love. Because love never fails.
 
So what we see here in terms of a time line is that now in this early pre-Canon period, prophecy, knowledge, and tongues are operational. But then something comes along and stops that. It's the completed Canon of Scripture. Then faith, hope, and love continue through the rest of the Church age and into the tribulation. They are the dominant virtues. Quit worrying about prophecy, knowledge, and tongues. The issue is faith, hope, and love. Then when we go into eternity whether at the time of death when we're face-to-face with the Lord or at the Rapture or whenever what continues into eternity is going to be love.
So based just an understanding of the passage and Scripture it's impossible to have the temporary gifts continue beyond the early Church Age. Now some people have said that there's prophecy in the Tribulation. There is. There's prophecy in the Old Testament. But those are not spiritual gifts by definition. We're talking about spiritual gifts which are enhancements given by God the Holy Spirit to the Church, the body of Christ. The Church began on the day of Pentecost. The Church ends at the Rapture. What happens during the Tribulation is related to the same thing that happened in Israel in the Old Testament. It's prophecy but it's not a spiritual gift.
 
That's what we're talking about in these passages, spiritual gifts related to the body of Christ. Not God's ability to raise up prophets as He did in the Old Testament. Those weren't spiritual gifts, by definition. So that establishes our boundaries. We'll come back and cover that a little bit more next time and then finish out the introduction and then talk about our passage in Romans 12.

Romans 132b-Spiritual Gifts Introduction – Part 4 Permanent vs. Temporary

Romans 12:3 NASB95
For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
Romans 132b-Spiritual Gifts Introduction – Part 4 Permanent vs. Temporary Romans 12:3-4
 
Before we go to Romans 12 open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13. Last time I talked about permanent versus temporary gifts. This is a problem today and it has been in the Bible believing segment of the Christian Church in its broadest, sociological sense, since the advent of what is known as the modern Pentecostal movement that began on New Years’ Eve in 1901 when a Bible college student in Topeka, Kansas by the name of Agnes Ozman thought she was speaking in Chinese and spoke in “tongues” that night.
 
This was preceded by a decade or two of an increasing awareness of what is known as the Holiness movement that there needed to be an overt sign of what they thought was the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. They defined it as a second work of grace that came after salvation. Now no movement has probably been as divisive in Christianity as the Charismatic movement. It’s been divisive for a number of reasons but primarily because it put its emphasis on experience over doctrine. How do you understand the Bible? Do you understand it on the basis of your experience or do you understand it on what the Word of God says. In the Charismatic movement, known as the Holiness/Pentecostal movement because it came out of that, the problem that they had was that they were interpreting their own spiritual life on the basis of experience.
 
Unfortunately this is so true about many believers. It’s part of a subtle form of mysticism that has entered into evangelical Christianity. Actually it’s been there since the Protestant Reformation. It was very strong within the Anabaptist tradition. Later it became strong in what became known as the Pietism tradition and there’s always been a weak strain of this in the Bible church movement. It’s a little strong in some Baptist traditions because that goes back to the old Anabaptist roots and it’s very subtle.
 
Last summer I noticed with great joy that when there was teaching on certain topics that touched on this at Camp Arete that Jeff Phipps and Mark Perkins and David Roseland, and even Jim Myers all made it a real “slam-it-home” point to try to kick this out of the thinking of young people I wish we could figure out a way to get some spiritual dynamite and blast it out of the thinking of a lot of adults. I was having a conversation with Pastor Roseland this last week. He had come down for a three day Bible conference in Corpus Christi last weekend and he had a great illustration that I just thought I’d pass along. He heard from a number of people who had come there for one reason or another. They hadn’t thought about coming and then there was some sort of circumstance in their life that they took as some sort of indication from God that they ought to go to this conference.
 
If you’ve heard me teach on how to know the will of God, that is how to know the will of your emotions, how to know the will of your subjective experience, how to know the will of anything but it’s not how you know the will of God. And David had a great illustration. Remember he’s living outside of Preston City, Connecticut where the temperature has been a little bit colder than it’s been here. They’ve got a little bit more snow of the ground. The heaters in their houses usually don’t work like ours. They operate off of a radiator like most of you had in school at one time if you go back a certain distance. Heated water generates steam that goes through radiators and heats the house. I forget what they call them but they’re basically floor vents. The hot water cycles through there and heats the home. So when your well goes down, you don’t have hot water, and when you don’t have hot water you don’t have heat. So about a day and a half before David was to leave to come to Corpus Christi something in the well broke and they couldn’t get any water out of the well. They still haven’t figured out what the problem is unless they have since he went home Tuesday. He spent a day and half instead of getting to study the Word and get ready for the conference trying to get the water to flow, so they could get heat in their house, and so they could take showers, and wash their dishes and do all the things they do with water. So he made the comment that how many people had taken certain positive circumstances to indicate that it was God’s will for them to go to the conference. He said if he was basing his decision on being there on circumstances, he never would have left Connecticut.
 
The apostle Paul if he were basing his decisions about the will of God on positive circumstances he would have bailed half way through the first missionary journey. Probably before that, maybe the time they were trying to stone him in Damascus. When he headed into Arabia he wouldn’t have returned. This is all part of the core problem we’ve got with the whole Holiness/Pentecostal Charismatic movement. The symptom of the problem is their wrong, not Biblically derived emphasis on the Baptism of the Spirit signified necessarily by speaking in tongues as a work after salvation. The real root problem is interpreting Scripture on the basis of experience rather than interpreting experience on the basis of the Word of God. This leads to all kinds of distractions in the Christian life.
 
I’ve been surprised although I shouldn’t be at how many people, some of whom are in this congregation, some of whom have been part of this congregation or other doctrinal teaching congregations in this city, who, when they said when they read some of these books published recently about people who have an out-of-body experience. I don’t remember the names of these books but one was a young boy who told his father about an experience he’d had when he’d had surgery when he was three or four years old. He said he’d had the experience of dying on the operating table and having all these experiences there in heaven. Over the last few years there have been two or three of these kinds of books that have come out.
 
I have just been amazed at some of the so-called mature believers that I thought knew better who thought how wonderful these stories are. “They tell us so much about heaven,” they say. Well why you aren’t reading your Bible to learn about heaven? The apostle Paul went to heaven and when he came back God wouldn’t let him tell anyone about it. So this little boy is better than Paul? Some of these other people are better than Paul? See, the problem here is that we’re judging the Bible on the basis of our experience and we’re not learning from the Word of God what it says and then taking that as our spotlight and shining that on our experience and thinking that no matter how much the experience may feel as if something is happening, the Word of God just tells us we’re being deceived. What does Jeremiah say? “The heart is deceptive above all things.” It also says it’s wicked but I’m emphasizing that one attribute. The heart is deceptive. You’ve got something inside you that is constantly deceiving your mind into thinking that your experience is one thing when in reality it’s something else.
 
The only thing that cuts through that, that shines a light through that, is the Word of God. So this is part of the problem whenever people teach on the spiritual gifts. The spiritual gifts have to do with people’s abilities to serve the Lord within the body of Christ. Especially this is true in our self-absorbed culture. I’ve witnessed this going back to the time I was a teenager that as soon as you start talking about spiritual gifts people start turning inward and trying to figure out, “Oh, what’s my spiritual gift?”
 
A spiritual gift is not a key to growing spiritually. A spiritual gift will manifest itself in your life as you grow spiritually and as you seek to serve the body of Christ. If you are living the Christian life, applying the Word, as you seek to serve in any capacity your spiritual gift will manifest itself over time. It will indicate itself simply because you will end up ministering in areas where you feel most competent and comfortable. Just because you don’t have one gift or you have some other gift isn’t an excuse for not functioning in all these different areas.
 
Giftedness or spiritual gifts are only enablements in certain areas. All believers are still held accountable for ministering in all of the different areas of the spiritual gifts. Serving one another, teaching one another, encouraging one another, giving, all of these are spiritual gifts. Leadership, for instance. Some people will lead in one way, some in another. You lead in the home if you’re a parent. If you’re teaching in a Sunday school class, you’re teaching and you’re leading. All of these are just functions of the service ministry that every believer is responsible for.
 
So going back to our doctrine of spiritual gifts, we just covered the one point last time. There are two categories of spiritual gifts, permanent and temporary. This has been such a distraction for a lot of people. I want to go back over it one more time just to hit the high points and help you think through this passage. There are times when you may get involved in a conversation with someone and need to understand what these passages are saying. So we looked at 1 Corinthians 13 which is really the primary passage for understanding that some gifts are temporary, specifically revelatory gifts. A couple of the temporary gifts, though, were not necessarily revelatory, such as healing and miracles. So the best clarification is to classify them as temporary versus permanent.
 
The temporary gifts had their own basis. The key passage is 1 Corinthians 13:8-13. I just wanted to review some of the observations that we see here. There are three gifts mentioned: knowledge, prophecy, and tongues. Knowledge and prophecy are both said to be partial and they’re both said to be abolished at some point in the future. A different verbiage is used for tongues but tongues are said to cease. So those three gifts are not permanent. They’re contrasted with three virtues of the Christian life that are more permanent: faith, hope and love. While knowledge and prophecy are said to be partial or incomplete, the gift of languages or tongues is not incomplete. So 1 Corinthians 13:8 says that “prophecy will faith [be abolished], knowledge will also fail.” That’s the same verb used for prophecy and then 1 Corinthians 13:9 says, “We know in part; we prophesy in part.” So those have to do with something that’s incomplete.
 
Paul then states that the partial knowledge and the partial prophecy are abolished when something called the “perfect” comes. This is the Greek word TELEIOS. Perfect is not the best translation here. It has to do with something complete because it’s contrasted with that which is partial. So last time I used the term quantitative. You have an incomplete quantity or a complete quantity. So knowledge and prophecy are incomplete but when the perfect [that which completes] comes then that which is partial is done away.
 
Why is it done away? Because it’s no longer needed. That which is complete has arrived. So that’s clearly showing that knowledge and prophecy are incomplete and will not continue. The fact that tongues are said to cease indicates that it probably ceases and dies out on its own before something happens that completes the prophecy and knowledge. Then Paul uses that word KATARGEO, the word translated abolished or cease or will fail, again in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 showing that those verses down there are illustrations of what happens.
 
So 1 Corinthians 13:11 uses a growth metaphor, “When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, and I thought as a child.” A child’s thinking is incomplete. It’s also immature. Now there are some who hold a view that really isn’t talking about the completion of the canon but maturity. Let me help you understand that. In the view of the Church, what makes the Church shift from being immature to being mature is that the apostles and prophets pass off the scene. The apostles and prophets function like a tutor. They function like a nanny. Okay? So the early Church functioned under a system of nannies, of baby sitters, of parents that could guide and direct the early Church because they were receiving new revelation from God which wasn’t yet enscripturated and wasn’t yet available for all believers. So the apostles and the prophets are said in Ephesians 2:20 to be the foundation of the Church.
So when the apostles and prophets moved off the scene there wasn’t anyone left to oversee and guide the Church so that when someone said that God told him to do “x” there wasn’t a group to say that you’re wrong, that God’s not telling you that. They didn’t have that authority structure. In that sense the Church moves from immaturity to maturity but what it is that ultimately makes that difference? When the apostles and prophets are there the reason they’re needed is because the revelation from God hadn’t been completed yet. The New Testament canon hadn’t been completed yet so the early Church was functioning on an insufficient knowledge base and it was through the apostles and prophets that you had a system of checks on anyone who claimed to be giving new revelation. They were the ultimate authority to guard the Church.
 
 Once the canon is completed then you have all the information to continue through the centuries. So this is where the maturity view and the canon view are two sides of the same coin. The apostles and prophets pass off the scene because the Church is reaching a maturity stage. What makes it a maturity stage it that it has a sufficient canon. It has a complete canon.
 
Now when I was teaching this at the conference on Dispensational Hermeneutics at the Baptist Bible Seminary there was a pastor who asked a perceptive question and one I’ve thought about since. He said, ‘Well, when’s the canon closed? Does this really end when the apostle John puts the last period and the last verse of the last chapter in Revelation 22? Or is there a transition stage even though at that point even though the canon had objectively been completed most people didn’t even have ten books of the New Testament and probably never saw more than ten books. It actually took a period of collection and circulation over the next hundred years before people had most of the New Testament available to them.” I’ve thought about that and most of us has this idea that God sort of separates dispensations with a guillotine. I think I’ve abused a lot of people with that notion by understanding the idea of transition in Acts. You see this happens every time there’s a dispensational shift.
 
When Abram was 65 years old, God appeared to him in Ur of the Chaldees and told him to get out and to head to a land God was going to show him. That’s an objective dispensational shift. But how many people knew that? Abraham. It was a long time before it became apparent that God had shifted how he was going to work in history. But the shift had come objectively. The revelation of that shift took time for it to be communicated. People didn’t have Twitter account. They couldn’t just flash the news all the way around the world instantly. It took time. I think it’s helpful and this is something I’ve just kind of worked through recently to realize that was probably a bit of transition time there.
 
Let’s just think about this. Let’s say you’re saved and you’re about twenty years old and the year is A.D. 55. So you were born in A.D. 35. You’re going to be 65 when the century shifts or technically 66 in 101. Okay? So you get saved when you’re 20 years old. You were born in A.D. 35. You get the spiritual gift of knowledge or prophecy or tongues or wisdom. Did that gift disappear when John put that period at the end of Revelation? Or did it still continue throughout your lifetime because that still was needed through that early period of the collection and circulation of the canon?
 
Now I don’t know but I think those are interesting questions to kind of think through and when you read the literature in the early Church at the end of the 1st century and at the beginning of the 2nd century it’s clear that they were still dealing with a people who claimed to have some of these gifts. Now there were very strict regulations on this. That’s helpful for us because it causes us to understand how the early Church understood these gifts and they understood them the same way the Old Testament did, especially the gift of prophecy.
 
I pointed out last time in terms of Wayne Grudem’s idea that the New Testament gift of prophecy was something different from the New Testament gift. I’m not talking about the apostles. I’m talking about the ones who heard the apostles and listened to the apostles like the Epistle of Barnabas, the DIDACHE of Clement, a 1st century pastor. These were written, some arguably as early as A.D. 60, 70, 90, maybe early into the next century.
 
It’s very clear that by the time you get to A.D. 160 you have the rise of one of the first heresies in the early Church that was known as Montanism. In Montanism you had an early form of the charismatic movement. They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were emphasizing prophecy and the Church came down hard on Montanus and his followers. Incidentally, Tertullian, the man who is known as having coined the word Trinity that we use today describing the triune God, was a Montenist and they believed in the continuation of the gift of prophecy. But the standards that the Church used to show Montanism was a heresy came right out of Deuteronomy 13 and 18.
 
So basically what I’m saying and it’s a new thought for probably everyone here, is that maybe you have a little bit of a transition period between A.D. 95 and A.D. 130, 140, 150 that these gifts died out as the canon was taking hold and being passed around. But clearly it’s because there’s a completed canon and the Church is shifting from that immature dependency view in the early Church to a mature Church based on a completed canon that these gifts died out so that by at least the mid-point of the 2nd century, if not twenty or thirty years earlier, these gifts would have all passed from the scene.
 
So 1 Corinthians 13:8 which says “love never fails” emphasizes the permanence of love in contrast to the temporary nature of this set of gifts. Then we look at the way in which people have interpreted the “perfect”. And this is the real issue. Does it refer to the completed canon or the mature Church? That’s the objective view that there’s something that happens at the end of the 1st century that brings knowledge and prophecy to a completion point. They’re no longer needed so they’re no longer given.
 
Then you have the other view that is really the dominant view. You’re going to hear that from a number of people that somehow when we move from this life when we’re face-to-face with the Lord, whether that’s death or the Rapture or the Second Coming or the eternal state or sometime in the future that that’s when perfection arrives. Now this is the key to understanding the interpretation here one more time. If the perfect arrives when we enter an eternal state face-to-face with the Lord, then what that means is that knowledge, prophecy, and tongues continue until we go into heaven when we’re face-to-face with the Lord in whatever sense that is and faith, hope, and love continue from that point on in heaven where we’re face-to-face with the Lord.
 
The problem is that since hope and love are contrasted with sight, such as “today we walk by faith, but then by sight” but when we’re in heaven we’re going to be face-to-face with the Lord. We’ll be walking by sight, not by faith. Faith is limited to this earth. Romans 8:24 says the same thing regarding hope. When we’re face-to-face with the Lord it won’t be hope anymore because is a confident expectation of something and that expectation will be fulfilled. Okay, so hope and faith are for temporal environment today, not an eternal state environment. So obviously we can’t have the temporary gifts continuing in a temporal environment and then faith, hope, and love continue in an eternal state environment. Faith and hope won’t be there so that means that the temporary gifts must continue to a point in time and then they end. Faith, hope, and love continue after that in time but then when this temporal environment is over with and we’re face-to-face with the Lord what continues is love. Faith, hope, and love. Love is permanent. 1 Corinthians 13:8, “Love never fails.”
 
So that makes it very clear that the faith and hope position as related to eternity just doesn’t work. The “perfect” as the eternal state just doesn’t work with the rest of Scripture. The other key element in opening up this interpretation is that the “now” in 1 Corinthians 13:12 and the now in 1 Corinthians 13:13 reflect different words in the Greek and that’s huge! Paul doesn’t shift synonyms that close together without a reason. The Scripture doesn’t. Now you have a trend in modern studies to shift words for stylistic purposes. Well, Paul uses that verb KATARGEO four times in this passage without changing it. He doesn’t change words for stylistic reasons. He changes words for doctrinal reasons.
 
So the “now” in 1 Corinthians 13:12 is the Greek word ARTI which according to a number of Greek grammars, when these two words are used in the same context, the ARTI means right now, like today or this minute. It’s an immediacy. Whereas NUNI, the word used in 1 Corinthians 13:13 has a broader sense like now in this decade, or now in this century or now in this age, in contrast to now today, now in this immediate period.
 
So the contrast then is between a now that Paul is talking about when knowledge and prophecy are operational and an end in the same Church Age when they’re not because love will eventually continue. The same thing is true in relation to the illustrations that he gives. The Church goes through a period like a child and then when he reaches maturity, he puts away childish things, which is incomplete knowledge of life. He next uses the image of a mirror. As I pointed out last time a mirror is not like the old King James version where it says we see through a glass darkly. We’re not seeing through glass. We’re seeing a mirror that reflects back on us so what we’re looking at in the mirror is us. If the mirror is incomplete or if the mirror is foggy then we can’t see ourselves clearly. And when knowledge and prophecy are partial and that relates to the mirror, you can’t know, so he uses this image of the mirror to say it’s face-to-face with the mirror, not face-to-face with the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
The reason why many people have missed this is that they read it and they read theology into the passage. How many times do you hear someone say that when we die we’re going to be face-to-face with the Lord so then you see face-to-face again and you think it should mean with the Lord. That’s reading your preconceived notions into the text. When you’re looking in a mirror, you’re not face-to-face with someone else. You’re face-to-face with yourself. That’s what this is describing. When the mirror is incomplete it’s a puzzle. You don’t see the whole picture and that’s a picture of knowledge.
 
See, looking in the mirror is related to partial knowledge. It’s a fuzzy mirror, it’s a foggy mirror, it’s enigmatic but then when the mirror is complete then we’ll know completely. We’ll have a sufficient knowledge or ourselves. Someone called that the perspicacity of Scripture. That’s a great term. The Scripture is not perspicacious if it’s insufficient or incomplete. But when the Scripture is complete then it shows us who we are in all of its completion so we move from knowing in part to knowing fully.
 
Knowing fully doesn’t mean omniscient. Even when we’re in heaven we’re not omniscient. Only God is omniscient. A million years from now when we’ve been there ten thousand years as we sing in “Amazing Grace” we’re still not going to know everything. When we’ve been there ten thousand times ten thousand times ten thousand there are still going to be things to learn. We’re not going to know everything. So we know partially from the Scripture but the Scripture gives us a complete and sufficient knowledge of who we are. 
 
The “now” that Paul talks about is in the timeframe he’s living in, when Scripture is still being composed. Remember he wrote 1 Corinthians sometimes around A.D. 54 or 55 when he’s in Ephesus and this is during the pre-canon period so he’s still a good sixteen years away from the destruction of Jerusalem and the judgment on Israel. That what ends the use of tongues because according to 1 Corinthians 14:21 the purpose for tongues was a sign of judgment for Israel. It’s a quote from Isaiah 28:11-12. Israel was warned even in the Mosaic Law that a sign of judgment was that they would hear the Word of God in strange languages, in foreign languages. That was a sign that God was bringing judgment on the nation and on the land.
 
Paul is talking about this period in which he lived when talking about the immediate “now” when knowledge, prophecy, and tongues were operational. But after A.D. 70 tongues ceased and once the canon was complete then knowledge and prophecy died out. Then you enter into the mature stage of the Church Age, the post-Apostolic period which began in approximately A.D. 95 and will end with the Rapture. After the Rapture comes the Tribulation and the Millennial Kingdom and what endures into eternity is love. As long as we’re in this period which includes the Tribulation and the Millennial Kingdom love and then faith and hope will be operational but in the eternal state, God sets up His dwelling upon the earth and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dwell upon the earth.
 
So I concluded then that the perfect completes the two partial gifts which are revelatory, therefore the perfect must be revelatory which means the canon of Scripture. The arrival of the perfect separates the immediate “now” from the future “now”. This is then illustrated by the child/adult and then the mirror statement in 1 Corinthians 11-12. So the final point was that the completion of the canon and the passing of the apostolic era transitions the Church from a childhood stage based on an incomplete canon to a maturity stage based on a complete canon.
 
The bottom line is that you can’t evaluate on the basis of some sort of subjective experience. This was the problem the Corinthians had. Corinth is located just across the Isthmus of Corinth and down the road from a place called Delphi. Delphi was known because there was an oracle there, the Oracle of Delphi, who was said to possess a PUTHONOS, a python snake. She sat over this hole in the ground—and no one knows what really came up but some kind of vapors or gas came up and she would enter into some sort of trance—and she would speak in glossolalic utterance, the language of the gods. You also had this tongues-speaking kind of thing in the worship of Dionysius. He was the god of wine. The worshippers would go up into various sacred groves and drink enough wine until they started speaking in these glossolalic utterances because the idea was that if you drank enough wine then the spirits [no pun intended] would enter into you and the god would speak through you in these divine-like languages.
 
So within the charismatic movement you have people who often make these claims that they’re speaking in angelic languages or it’s a special prayer language. I had a conversation one time with a charismatic who said, “But when I pray in tongues, God always answers my prayers. It’s so much more effective.” I said, “Really, do you know what you’re praying for?” He answered, “No.” Then I said, “Then how do you know that God is answering them if you don’t know what you’re praying for?” He didn’t know, but they make these kinds of claims all the time.
 
Okay, so the seventh point is that there’s a difference between temporary and permanent spiritual gifts. The permanent gifts are given for the edification and the strengthening and service to the body of Christ. These gifts are given to every believer at the instant of salvation by God the Holy Spirit. They’re sovereignly distributed. We’re given a list of gifts as I pointed out last time in the New Testament but I do not believe that these lists are necessarily exhaustive but a number of these gifts are very broad, like the gift of service or the gift of helps. They’re very broad categories and people can have the gift of service and the gift of helps and it can be manifested a lot of different ways. Singing in the choir is not a spiritual gift. Playing a musical instrument is not a spiritual gift. Going on the mission field is not a spiritual gift. But these reflect spiritual gifts. If someone is singing in the congregation in the aid of worship that can be a function of the gift of helps. Some of us really need a lot of help in that area. It can be a function of service.
 
Someone who goes on the mission field may have the gift of evangelism, may have any of the spiritual gifts, actually because all of those things are operational on the mission field. Many of them have the gift of pastor-teacher. But one of the things I’ve always been concerned about since I was a young man is that on the mission field you have pastors and teachers who are always the most obvious. But in order for any pastor to be effective in carrying out his ministry there are dozens and dozens of people who are working behind the scenes to make that happen. We have deacons who serve in the church leadership. We have a lot of other volunteers who do many, many things in this congregation that are often unseen or unknown by most of the people. They just assume that bills get paid and the floors get vacuumed and websites get built but people in the congregation help do all of these things. That’s the body of Christ working together.
 
And that’s true on the mission field. I find that it’s a little bit shallow for a lot of Christians who say they want to support Billy Graham, Jim Myers, or George Meisinger, but what about supporting the secretaries? What about supporting the people who are working in the offices that help them produce the materials they need to produce? Working on translating materials? All of these kinds of things. Some of that can be done by volunteers, some of it needs to be done by people who do it full time and need to have enough financial remuneration to be able to live according to that. It’s just as important as supporting the person who’s at the front, the one who is seen and heard most of the time. All of that is important. All of that is part of the mission field. So missionary is not a gift. It’s just someone who decides that instead of being a pastor in Houston, Texas or in Cleveland, Ohio or in Los Angeles, California that he’s going to just be a pastor in Berlin or Kiev or in Rome or in Thailand. They’re just using their gift of pastor-teacher or evangelist in another location.
 
This takes us to the eighth point which is the purpose of these permanent spiritual gifts. It’s for mutual ministry within the body of Christ. The purpose of spiritual gifts as I pointed out a couple of lessons back isn’t for you to use it at work. If you have the gift of evangelism, you as stated in Ephesians 4:11-12 you are to equip your co-workers. Right? No, it doesn’t say that. It’s to equip the body of Christ to do the work of the ministry. It’s to equip your family. No, it’s not to equip your family. It’s not to equip your neighbors. It’s to equip the members of the body of Christ to be more effective in evangelism.
 
The work of the spiritual gifts is to minister to one another. That’s other believers in the body of Christ. This is one of the weaknesses we have when the body of Christ gets atomized into small groups, usually one, sometimes two, who are crutching along on tapes or media or internet or something like that because they don’t have a group of believers to minister to. It shortcircuits the operation of their spiritual gifts to the body of Christ. On the other side one of the things I’ve witnessed (and its good and bad, depending on where it is) is that in some internet communities it’s provided people who are isolated to get together with other believers via the internet so that they cannot gossip. That’s a failing that can happen some times, but it’s so they can have a ministry to one another.
 
We live in a world today where the body of Christ, in terms of a true disciples who are seeking to grow and mature on the basis of the Word of God, is shrinking. In some locales, even in large urban areas, it may be extremely difficult to find a local church where the pastor is teaching the Word of God and where there’s not too much heresy and too much distraction. I’ve always counseled people that you can go someplace and things may not be everything you want them to be but the pastor may give you a great opportunity to teach a Sunday school class or just to help out here or help out there and you may have a tremendous ministry in that local church. You never know how you might impact that local church over the next five or fifteen years. Just because you go in there and the pastor is pretty shallow and superficial, don’t just write that off. Look at going to church as not what you’re going to get from it, me, me, me, but how you can have a ministry to this local body.
 
Now I’m not addressing this to people here in West Houston Bible Church as much as I’m addressing that to a lot of people who listen. A lot of people have drifted into a bad habit where they just flip on their iPad or their iPhone or whatever and listen and they think that’s great, that’s wonderful. You’re missing out on a whole portion of your spiritual life, which is ministering in some capacity to the body of Christ within a local church ministry. The local church was instituted by Jesus Christ, not the internet.
 
Now it’s great to have the internet. I had a guy listen to me one time when I was talking about this. He lived up in Vermont. He sent me an e-mail that said, “Pastor, I’ve really tried to be part of a local church. The best church in town is a Congregational Church and the pastor doesn’t believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ and I just don’t feel comfortable taking my kid there anymore. We’ve been going there about five months.” I said, “No, you don’t need to go there.” You don’t sacrifice core orthodox Biblical doctrine to be part of a local church but there are a lot of local churches that aren’t that bad. They may not be that great and you may not be the most comfortable all the time.
 
I know of one person. I’m not going to mention his name because he brings his pastor to the pastor’s conference all the time but he could run intellectual circles around almost every pastor we know and his pastor isn’t that well-educated but this man has had an incredible ministry with that pastor. Another one is George Meisinger. George goes to a huge church in Albuquerque and since he’s been going to that church he’s been meeting with that pastor one-on-one and challenging him in areas of exegesis and getting deeper in his messages and has had a tremendous ministry there. When I went to Israel last year one of the ladies on the trip helps with her husband teaching a Sunday school class and whenever her husband can’t be there, George teaches it. It’s had a tremendous impact on the adults in that congregation.
 
But George or someone like that could say, “You know, I could run intellectual, theological circles around this pastor and leave them in the dust but I can have a great ministry here serving the Lord and have an impact on this congregation instead of being self-absorbed and saying you’re here just to see what you can get out of it.” I’ve heard that from a lot of believers over the years. They say, “Well, I went there once or twice but I can’t get anything out of it.” On the other hand, I recognize and I know someone who may even be listening tonight who really put forth a strong effort to be involved in a local church that was fairly close to where he lived. He doesn’t live here in Houston, he lives somewhere else in the state. It just finally got to a point where the pastor asked them to leave because every time the pastor would ask them to teach a Sunday School class or this thing or that thing this man would teach something and the pastor would say, “No, no, no. That’s not right.” There were just too many little doctrinal conflicts that eventually they just couldn’t operate there.
 
So we have to understand that we have a role as believers in mutual ministry in service to the body of Christ. That’s something that’s true at West Houston Bible Church. Another thing that’s part of that is that you have to get to know people in the congregation in order to be able to minister. Now you can’t know everyone in the congregation but you ought to get to know four, five, or six people fairly well. Not just walk in at the last minute and walk out as soon as I say Amen. You have to know people to have this kind of ministry with them in the body of Christ. I keep coming back to that because it’s so obvious. But I keep hearing Christians say they can function in their spiritual gift at the office or with other Christians I know but the focal point of these passages is within the local church. That’s what was established by the Lord Jesus Christ. So we have to function there.
 
We also have to balance this by realizing spiritual gifts are not the means of spiritual growth or church growth. The reason I added that last part is because we live in an era when something started, something horrible started, in the late 1960s. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea. It spawned a lot of bad ideas and that’s known as the church growth movement. The church growth movement came mostly out of Fuller Seminary. A few other places were influential. C. Peter Wagner was one of the leaders. This spawned a lot of those mega-churches and it believed in building churches just on the basis of human skills and human tactics.
 
 I interviewed Wagner around twenty-five years ago. We got around to talking about this. I had had him recommended in a couple of seminary classes telling me I had to read Peter Wagner’s book on spiritual gifts because you have to get your people to know what their spiritual gift is. Otherwise you can’t build a healthy church. Well, I’ve known a lot of healthy churches that never did that. They weren’t going to go along with the self-absorbed culture of the day, but that’s where the self-absorbed go. It says, “You’ve got to get people plugged in to their spiritual gift.” No, you have to get people plugged in to the Word of God. You have to get people plugged in to doctrine. And you have to get them walking by the Spirit so that the Holy Spirit can enable them and strengthen them in their spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. The issue is the Word of God, not the experience.
 
You may go your whole life and never know for sure what your spiritual gift is if it’s not one of the more obvious one. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not utilizing it in your spiritual life. That’s really the ninth point, which says that it’s really not necessary to identify your spiritual gift in order to use it. As you’re growing and maturing in Christ, as you seek to serve the Lord, you will use your spiritual gift. The tenth point I have is that there’s a distinction between natural talents and abilities and spiritual gifts. Some of us were born with great natural talents, natural skills mentally, an I.Q. of 140-150-160. Other people had great skills with numbers in mathematics. Other people had great skills in their ability to think logically. Some people didn’t. I’ve known some people who really weren’t all that bright but they sure were faithful to their study of the Word. I think some of those people are going to be in some tremendous places in the kingdom because they were just faithful to the Lord. They weren’t given a lot of natural talent but they used it well.
 
People are born with natural talents and abilities in music. Some people are naturally good orators, good speakers. That’s not their spiritual gift. They would be that way even if they were unsaved. They just have a natural ability or talent in that area. Spiritual gifts are divine enhancements that are given at the point of salvation. It’s developed in some degree as you develop spiritually and it becomes more and more apparent.
 
Sometimes I believe, although I can’t give you a Scripture on this, but I think spiritual gifts often intersect with your natural talents and your natural abilities and they work together so that spiritual gifts look different in everybody. Everybody is different; they have a different personality. If you’re a pastor then you’re going to have a different personality than the pastor that influenced you because he’s a different person. Doctrine doesn’t change. Teaching the truth doesn’t change. But be true to yourself, be true to your own personality, be true to your own style, your own talents, your own abilities and whatever the spiritual gifts are that God’s given you. But don’t make the mistake of identifying spiritual gifts with natural talents or abilities.
 
Point eleven says that spiritual gifts only have spiritual efficacy when operated under the filling of the Holy Spirit. I don’t mean that you can’t use your spiritual gift unless you’re operating under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit. I don’t mean that. Just like anything else in your spiritual life, unless you’re walking by the Spirit when you’re doing it, it’s either going to be gold, silver, and precious stones or wood, hay, and straw. If you’re walking according to the flesh it’s just going to produce wood, hay, and straw. People may benefit from it because God is going to bless His word even if you’re out of fellowship but if you’re in fellowship it’s going to accrue spiritual significance to you and to others.
 
The twelfth point is that we have to recognize that the body of Christ is like a team. Think about a team like the Seattle Seahawks as much as you may not like them. Where would they be without a quarterback? Where would they be if all they had were quarterbacks? See, there’s a lot of different positions and a lot of different talents and a lot of different skills that need to come together to produce a healthy team. That’s what the body of Christ is. There’s a lot of different people doing a lot of different things and they don’t have to all be the same way so we have different positions, different spiritual gifts, and when we’re all walking by the Spirit it is a magnificent and wonderful thing.
 
The thirteenth point is that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to edify the body of Christ and not unbelievers. And I mean the local body of Christ. There are ways in which we can minister to other believers at times but the primary purpose as seen in the New Testament is functioning in the local body of believers. Spiritual gifts is not about what you get out of it. Although a person may receive edification as a by-product of his use of his spiritual gift, this can be a big problem in the charismatic movement. They think they’re edified when they use their spiritual gift of tongues. Well, buddy, the use of your spiritual gifts is to edify somebody else and not yourself. If you’re doing it for yourself then you’re carnal and it’s a wrong use of a gift. You may be edified as a by-product.
 
Let me tell you. I learn a lot studying the Word of God when I’m preparing for a message but I don’t study the Word of God for what I get out of it just in terms of my own spiritual life. I’m studying it so I can utilize my spiritual gift to help guide, teach, and inform believers so that they can be more effective in their spiritual life. And yeah, I enjoy that, and I get something out of it but I’m not doing it for what I can get out of it. I’m doing it because I want to serve other people. There’s a by-product of knowing that you’re being used by God but the personal enrichment side of it is not why we utilize our spiritual gift.
 
Then the last point is that a person may have more than one gift. A person may have different proportions of those gifts. So some people may be richly given the gift of pastor-teacher or just have it in a smaller amount. He may have smaller gifts, such as mercy, such as helps, such as evangelism so no two pastors are going to be the same and God uses each individual in rich ways to minister to the body of Christ. That tells us we shouldn’t ever idolize a pastor because God has given many different pastors in the Church Age and they contribute many different things to the body of Christ. There are some wonderful pastors and there have been some great pastors and there have been some intellectual pastors and there have been some very caring pastors but every one of them are fulfilling God’s mission for them and God has provided many different pastors for the body of Christ and not just one.
 
We need to recognize that there are different pastors for different congregations. Sometimes the congregational needs shift and another pastor needs to come in. Think about the church at Ephesus during the 1st century. Paul was there. Timothy was there. Apollos was there. There were a number of different pastors. The last pastor they had was the Apostle John. So over a course of about forty years they have four or five great men in that congregation in Ephesus. They had other congregations there as well and in some of the other towns around Ephesus. Ephesus was sort of the Las Vegas playground of the ancient world and so they had a lot of distractions to deal with. But there were a lot of different pastors who just came and went. There wasn’t just one. Timothy was there for about twenty years. You didn’t hear people say, “Well, you can go listen to Timothy but I’m going to listen to the Apostle John. He was Jesus’ best friend.” You didn’t have that kind of nonsense going on there. We need to correct our attitude on some of these things. Next time we’ll come back and we’ll get into our final discussion on spiritual gifts in Romans12 and then we’ll go into the next section dealing with love in the body of Christ.

Romans 133b-Spiritual Gifts and Love

Romans 12:6 NASB95
Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith;
Romans 133b-Spiritual Gifts and Love Romans 12:6-9
 
Open your Bibles to Romans, chapter 12. We're going to begin in verse 4. Tonight we're going to be wrapping up on spiritual gifts and also looking primarily at a little more in-depth study of the gift of prophecy. We always have to be aware of some of the spasms that are going on in the contemporary environment. Sometimes some of you get a little bored with some of those digressions because it's not in your realm. But there are a lot of folks in this congregation physically and also who listen online who are dealing with family members who are involved in lots of strange things. Some of these family members have been squared away in the past but now some of them are confused and are raising questions. You never quite realize how many things people have questions about.
 
Some of you may even come from backgrounds where some of these things weren't very clear so it's important to clarify what the Word of God teaches on these things. To just pick up the context a little bit starting in Romans 12:3 Paul begins to develop what he means in the first two verses, first of all what he means about presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. In terms of what we're studying in Matthew that means to be a genuine disciple or learner or student of Jesus who is pursuing spiritual maturity through the study of God's Word. In contrast to presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice we're not to be conformed to the world. We're not to be pressed into the zeitgeist of the culture around us. We're not to think like the people around us. We're to think and act differently. Thinking should always precede action. We're not to be conformed to the world but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that our lives demonstrate that God's will is perfect and sufficient and complete.
 
Then Paul develops ideas in Romans 12:3-8 related to the body of Christ and the fact that we have all been given spiritual gifts and over the last several lessons I have gone through a basic introduction and summary of what the New Testament teaches on spiritual gifts. Romans 12:4-5 talks about the fact that the body of Christ is an organism. It is made up of every believer in Christ from the first day of the Church on the day of Pentecost in A.D. 33 until it is completed when Jesus Christ returns at the Rapture. All are members of the body of Christ and all the members don't have the same function. Each person is, as the Psalmist says, wonderfully made and God has gifted us uniquely.
 
I talked about this a little last week and we need to exploit the gifts that God has given us because each person has a role in the team. I believe that in the microcosm of the local church all of the gifts are going to be present if you have a group of more than a couple of dozen believers. Whether all gifts are present or not everyone needs to function in all of these areas, and it's important to do that, but not through the sort of contemporary approach to taking various spiritual gift tests to try to identify your spiritual gift but just to seek to serve the body of Christ in whatever way it needs, in whatever way you can serve it, but primarily focusing on spiritual growth and pursuing spiritual maturity.
 
And as we grow and as we pursue opportunities to serve in the local body then we will eventually maximize our efforts in the arena of wherever we're most effective which will turn out to be where we are gifted. So there's a unity in the body but there are differences in terms of how we are gifted and how we function within the body. In Romans 12:5 Paul says, "We, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another." Now that last phrase just runs counter to American thinking. American thinking and American exceptionalism is built on the concept of rugged individualism. In rugged individualism we don't always make good team players but that runs counter to what the Bible says here.
 
We're members of one another. That means there's an inter-dependency within the body of Christ. We're not Lone Rangers. We don't go out and operate on our own and we can't do that. Every ministry is dependent upon a vast number of people who usually work in the background in various volunteer capacities taking care of all the different functions that must be taken care of or a ministry can't just operate or go forward. I have recently been reading the third book in the trilogy called "The Liberation Trilogy" by Rick Atkinson who has written this trilogy on the war in Europe. It's exceptionally well written. It's just great fun to read it. He has great vocabulary and I've had to look up a word or two on about every two or three pages. It's not like I have a small vocabulary either so he's quite challenging in some areas.
 
He differs in his approach in talking about the war in that rather than focusing on the personalities where it's sort of a biographical account dealing with the different generals or dealing with the overall strategy of the war and the tactics on the battlefield, he deals a lot with the everyday nuts and bolts of every operation. He spends a lot of time talking about all the things that needed to be accomplished logistically just to engage in a battle. It has really impressed me. We could have probably made it into Berlin six months earlier but we didn't have gas or oil or food or all kinds of things, like bullets, grenades, and grenade launchers that needed to be pushed up to the front. The role of transportation and the role of all the quartermaster units and everything else just blows my mind how much was involved logistically in bringing about the end of the war. I was given the third volume for Christmas so I started off just before D-Day but I think I know the rest of the story so I can do that.
 
The body of Christ is like that. Often we look at the key figures, the names, the writers, the pastors, the big names, but just as you say in the military, behind every combat unit there are hundreds, if not thousands of people behind every single soldier on the front line allowing him to do what he's doing. The same thing is true for every pastor and every church. There are myriads of people who make that happen and they are unsung. I believe that many of them are going to be much, much closer to the throne of God when we get to heaven and they're going to have more reward at the Judgment Seat than the people we usually see on the frontlines today.
 
That's part of the whole operation of the body of Christ. Everyone needs to be encouraged to be a part of that. We are members of one another. We are interdependent. Romans 12:6 says, "Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, {each of us is to exercise them accordingly:} if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith." It's interesting when you get into looking at the grammar here that it is a fresh sentence not dependent on the previous sentence so there's a lot of discussion exactly how this should be understood. I think it probably should be understood as a causative adverbial participle starting off with the idea of "since" or "because" we have gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them. That's the general command in that sentence.
 
That command governs the next several verses. We are to use these gifts and the first gift he begins to talk about is prophecy. He's going to work through a list of several gifts here. It's not as extensive a list as in some of the other passages and he's going to describe how these gifts should function. I've broken the 1 Corinthians 12 list into two separate lists because they are distinct. One is given in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 early in the passage and the other is given later in the passage starting in 1 Corinthians 12:28.
 
Ephesians 4 gives the four foundational gifts for equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry: apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers. In Ephesians 4:11-12 the purpose for those gifts is to equip the saints to do the work of ministry. The word there for ministry is the same word for which we get our English word "deacon", DIAKONIA. This is the same word that is translated "service" in Romans 12 as a spiritual gift. So it is the role of apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers to train and equip all the saints to function in the realm of ministry. The term DIAKONIA has a broad general sense just related to service within the body of Christ and that can cover just about any function within the body of Christ.
 
Now apostles and prophets are mentioned again in 1 Corinthians 12:28 and the gift of prophecy is mentioned in Romans 12, as well. That's the first gift that's mentioned. As we've discussed some are temporary gifts. There are different designations you'll run across in talking about the temporary gifts. Some refer to them as "sign" gifts, some refer to them as "miraculous" gifts but the best term is temporary gifts because some were not revelatory or sign gifts but they are designated as the Scripture says in 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 as temporary gifts. 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 consists exclusively of temporary gifts.
 
1 Corinthians 12:28 mentions apostles, prophets, healings, and tongues which are temporary gifts and then talks about administrations or in some translations leadership or helps which is the Greek word ANTILEPSIS which means simply to assist or help someone. In our passage in Romans 12 prophecy is the first one mentioned, then teaching, leadership in the sense of management, service [similar to helps but a different word is used] mercy, exhortation, and giving.
 
Since prophecy is the first one that's mentioned, I want to talk tonight about this gift. I've talked about it before, that within the context of the modern charismatic movement, of course, the thinking was that all of the gifts were permanent. The idea was that if we just acted like the 1st century Church then everything would be wonderful. You often run into this sort of utopic idealism among certain Christians that if we were just like the early Church all would be well. Well, the early Church, pardon me, was a little bit ignorant. They didn't have a lot of the vocabulary we have. They didn't have words like "trinity". That wasn't coined until the middle of the 2nd century. They weren't talking about dispensations the way we do. They were confused about a lot of things. They weren't even that clear on salvation.
 
Once you drop off the cliff with the death of the last apostle, the doctrine of salvation gets incredibly murky. In fact, if you read through a lot of the early Church fathers between about A.D. 100 to 300, most of them think you have to be baptized by water in order to be saved. They're very confused about that. Some of them even think that physical water baptism literally washes away sin. This is why in the beginning of the 4th century after the Emperor Constantine became saved he would not get baptized until he was pretty close to death because he believed baptism took care of all your sins up to that point and afterwards they didn't quite know what to do with those sins that came after baptism. Post-salvation sins have been a problem for Christians ever since the early Church. That was just one manifestation of it.
 
So there was a certain amount of confusion. It wasn't an ideal period. There were conflicts. There were difficulties. There were problems and I guess that's just because we're all sinners and consequently we don't understand things. There was a lack of clarity even in the early Church. In terms of understanding the Word of God I would much rather live today than in the early Church period. In the 1st century under the apostles and prophets you were also dependent on extra-Biblical revelation because there wasn't a closed canon. There wasn't a sufficient revelation yet. It wasn't until God had completed giving all of the information in the New Testament through the Pauline, Petrine, and Johanine epistles that people in the New Testament Church really understood this unique spiritual life that we have.
 
In fact, as I pointed out previously, the first epistle is not written until about A.D. 47 or 48 which is about 14 or 15 years after the death of Christ. It's not until the 50s in the 1st century that you get most of Paul's epistles and a few into the 60s. The Johanine epistles are written quite late. Revelation is quite late. The Petrine epistles are written before the fall of Rome, probably in the 60s so we just recognize that they lacked a lot of information and so they were dependent upon people in the local church who had the Biblical gift of prophecy who could give guidance and correction.
 
Those who were prophets were a much larger group than those who were apostles. We studied the doctrine of apostleship before. To be an apostle you had to have been directly commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ and you had to be a witness of His resurrection. That limited it. There were some people who were called apostles in the New Testament who were not part of the original eleven plus the Apostle Paul. They were apostles in a derivative sense. An apostle is someone who has been commissioned to a particular task or mission. So you have to determine who commissioned them and what the task was. Jesus Christ only commissioned a limited number. Local churches commissioned Barnabas and Junius and four or five others and they were sent out from local churches to take the gospel to other places in terms of missionary activity. So they're apostles in a lower case "a" sense, not the gift of apostle.
 
But you also had prophets. You had many more. In our study of Acts we've looked at Agabus and we looked at the fact that Phillips's daughters prophesied and we looked at some of the issues related to the gift of prophecy. It's possible that when you look at the authorship of the New Testament that several of the New Testament authors were those who had the gift of prophecy because remember according to Ephesians 4:20 the apostles and prophets are the foundation of the church. Not all of the writers of the New Testament were Apostles. Mark was not an apostle. He was the amanuensis for Peter and wrote his gospel under the guidance and authorization of Peter. It's very possible Mark could have had the gift of prophecy. The same is true for Luke. Luke was arguably a Gentile with no Jewish background. If so, he was the only Gentile who wrote a New Testament book. He was not an apostle. He traveled with the Apostle Paul. It's possible he had the gift of prophecy.
 
It's the same with James who writes the epistle of James. James is the half-brother of our Lord Jesus Christ but this James was not an apostle. This is not James, the brother of John; this is James the half-brother of the humanity of Jesus. The same is true of Jude. Jude is also a half-brother of Jesus and a full brother to James. They weren't even saved until after the resurrection of Jesus, when He appeared to them. They're not apostles but they wrote under the authority of God the Holy Spirit and it's very likely they functioned under the terms of the gift of prophecy. They had authorization through their association with the Apostles. That's what gave credence and authority to their particular writings.
 
Nowadays, if you fast forward to the 20th century when you get the modern charismatic movement, they want to resurrect these temporary gifts. You have people I've mentioned before like Wayne Grudem who used to teach at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and wrote his PhD dissertation on the New Testament gift of prophecy. Now he's a president of Phoenix Seminary. He is involved with the Vineyard Association of Churches, which is part of what's called the "third wave of the Holy Spirit" that started back under John Wimber in the 1970s. I've gone through this before but I'll just hit a couple of his quotes.
 
According to Grudem, "Prophecy in the New Testament churches was not equal to Scripture in authority but was simply a very human and sometimes partially mistaken report of something the Holy Spirit brought to someone's mind." He goes on to say, "New Testament prophecy is telling something God has spontaneously brought to mind." You'll run into Christians who have been influenced by this type of thinking and they will talk very loosely about God speaking to them. This may be a soft form of mysticism but it's still mysticism.
 
God has quit speaking today. He stopped speaking at the end of the 1st century. There is no more direct revelation. The canon is closed, that's what we mean by the closing of the canon. Whether God revealed something to Paul and he wrote it down or He revealed it to Agabus and he didn't write it down, it still was breathed out by God [2 Timothy 3:16-17] and therefore it still has the authority of having come and originated from God and is equally authoritative and equally infallible. Now what happens in the modern sense is when people like Grudem come along and say that New Testament prophecy is different form Old Testament prophecy and as a result they are minimizing and diluting what's going on in the local church. It's a real source of error because people think the so-called prophets today are giving out accurate information.
 
There was a group in Kansas City that was a spin-off from the Vineyard Movement and they were called the Kansas City Prophets. One of their leaders was a guy named Mike Bickle who has gone on to head up an organization called IHOP, the International House of Prayer. They tend to bleed over and associate a lot with post-mils and reconstructionists. A few years ago, if you remember, there was a lot of controversy about the fact they were having a state-wide prayer meeting over at Reliant Stadium and a lot of the people that influenced Governor Perry in that were associated with Mike Bickle's group and some of these other groups.
 
It's because they had given rise to all of these really confusing ideas related to prophecy. A lot of times these ideas filter out into real time contemporary events and shake them. That's one of the reasons we need to study this. Grudem says, "Much more commonly, prophecy and prophets were used by ordinary Christians who spoke not with absolute Divine authority…" Now, where does he get that? Where in the Bible does it ever shift the definition of prophecy from what it was in the Old Testament? It's a word just like the kingdom of God that shows up at the very beginning of the New Testament and there's no re-definition of the term. Anyone who would read it or read of it would normally think of the Old Testament criterion as the framework for understanding the gift of prophecy. So Grudem says they don't have Divine authority but "they're simply reporting something God laid on their hearts or brought to their minds". There are many indications that this gift of prophecy had authority less than that of the Bible." Of course his examples don't exactly support that. So he just makes that contention.
 
On the other hand you have people like Bob Thomas who spoke here several years ago on hermeneutics at the Chafer conference and he says that "prophecy was speech inspired by the Spirit and therefore totally true and authoritative." It doesn't change its meaning from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Richard Gaffin who teaches at Westminster Seminary makes the statement that "prophecy is not the interpretation of an already existing inspired text…"
 
That addresses the problem that many of you have heard that's very popular in some Baptist circles that prophecy is preaching. Prophecy is not preaching. I've heard a lot of people say that. Prophecy is a channel of direct revelation of God to your audience. That's different from preaching. That's what Gaffin means when he says the interpretation of an already inspired text is preaching so he's saying prophecy is not preaching or oral tradition but is, itself the inspired non-derivative Word of God. That means it is fresh revelation from God. So that's how we should understand Biblical prophecy.
As I pointed out before the New Testament gift of prophecy is not redefined in the New Testament. New Testament prophets were seen as equal in divine authority as New Testament apostles [Ephesians 2:20]. Early Church writing from the late 1st century, about A.D. 60 or 70 into the early 2nd century understood that the gift of prophecy to be identical with the Old Testament gift of prophecy and still applied the same tests of authentication to New Testament prophetic claims and that New Testament prophecy died out with the closing of the canon of Scripture.
 
Now critical to understanding prophecy is the test for prophecy given in Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and Deuteronomy 18:9-22. So turn with me to Deuteronomy 13 to begin. We'll just cover a few of the important principles laid down here in Deuteronomy 13. First of all if you look at Deuteronomy 13:1 you should be making notes in the top margin of this chapter. You should write "tests for prophet". That way you can find it the next time the topic comes up. You should also write in the margin Deuteronomy 18:9-22 so the next time you look at Deuteronomy 13 you'll see that you're supposed to go to look at Deuteronomy 18 as well.
 
Moses starts off saying, "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams…" Notice he doesn't act as if this isn't going to happen. He doesn't say this is a pseudo-prophet or a pseudo-dreamer. He doesn't qualify anything. He recognizes that someone is going to come up with some sort of legitimate revelatory background. Legitimate not in the sense that it comes from God but in the sense that he's not just making it up out of whole cloth, either. He goes on to say, "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder…" 
 
Now a lot of what we see today in contemporary healing events is just fraudulent. They're just all kinds of things that go on that are just totally bogus but he's assuming for the sake of argument that there's some sort of revelation, maybe not from God but some sort of revelation from Satan or a demon or something and that he has the ability to perform a miracle. We would call it a pseudo-miracle because it's not from God but he's not denying that something miraculous occurs. This is the kind of thing that will happen in the Tribulation period under the authority of the false prophet. There will be true miracles that take place but the origin of that power doesn't come from God.
 
So there's a real healing or a real miracle that takes place. In Deuteronomy 13:2 he says, "and the sign or the wonder comes true…" See he's not questioning at all the legitimacy of what happens. That's what we would do. We'd say, "Well that really didn't happened." So he's assuming it did happen. Don't question the experience. We have to go back to two basic principles in life. Are you going to evaluate your experience from the Word of God or are you going to evaluate the Word of God on the basis of your experience? Now if you're evaluating it on the basis of your experience or you talk to people who are evaluating it on the basis of their experience you'll be confused. For example we have some of those books like Is Heaven Real? It's the story of a three-year old boy who had appendicitis and he went under surgery and while he was under surgery he saw a lot of things. Now we can't explain how he came to know some of the things he came to know.
 
What most people do is challenge his experience. You can't challenge someone's experience. If someone says, "Well, this happened to me." Great. Fine. I'm not going to say it didn't happen to you. I'm going to say maybe you didn't interpret it correctly. You can't challenge a person's experience. I remember a lady in my church in Irving about 30 years ago and she had gone to a faith healing thing the night before she was to have an operation on cancer, major surgery on stomach cancer. She felt some sort of power at the faith healing and when she went in the next day to the surgery they could find no evidence of the cancer. Now I can't explain that but I don't have to. The Word of God doesn't tell me I have to explain it. There are lots of things in this life I can't explain. I don't know enough information.
 
It's just like in marriage counseling. People come in and they tell you what's going on in their marriage but that's their rather limited view and interpretation of what's going on. They don't even have enough information to know what's actually going on between them and their spouse. If someone comes in and say they had a certain experience you get their interpretation of something that happened and you get less than one tenth of one percent of the facts. It's sometimes impossible to get the rest of the facts. We do live in the devil's world and we're in an invisible warfare. There are lots of things going on that we're unaware of. So I don't have to explain certain things that happened and what's going on. I just know what God's Word told me and what God told me is sufficient.
 
Therefore, whatever you think happened your interpretation is wrong if it's contrary to the Word of God, and that's all I need to know. So here's a case in point where there's someone who performs a miracle, claims to be a prophet, claims to be a dreamer of dreams and he claims the sign and wonder and it actually comes to pass. But the issue isn't his experience. The issue isn't his claim. The issue is what does he teach? It's the content of his message that determines if he's from God or not, not whether he performs a miracle.
 
Today we have people who think if someone performed a miracle they must be right. Don't get distracted by the miracle. Don't get distracted by the claim of a sign or a wonder. Don't get distracted by the experience. Focus on the Word of God. This is what Moses says about this person who comes along and they perform this miracle and they say, "Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them," See the message is false. That's how you know they're a false prophet: not because the miracle was screwy but because the message was screwy. It's the content that matters. Going after other gods is a direct contradiction of the Word of God. See you have to judge your experience by the Word of God, not judge the Word of God by your experience.
 
The command from Moses comes in Deuteronomy 13:4, "You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul." See, God is going to test you by having someone come into your life that performs something that you can evaluate. It's a real healing. It's a real miracle. God allowed that miracle to happen to test you. Are you going to put the Word of God first or are you going to put experience first?
 
Then comes the command in Deuteronomy 13:4-5, "You shall follow the LORD your God and fear Him; and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him, and cling to Him. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has counseled rebellion against the LORD your God who brought you from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, to seduce you from the way in which the LORD your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from among you."
 
That's a harsh penalty. It's a capital crime to claim to be speaking for God when you're not. Now there's nothing that seems to change that in the New Testament: that the prophet is the channel for direct revelation from God and is the most serious claim you can make because if you're wrong it would invoke the death penalty. Now in the New Testament you're not under the Mosaic Law but the principle of the seriousness of the claim to be a spokesman for God continues to be the same.
 
Now let's go to the second passage that gives us a test for genuine prophecy and that starts in Deuteronomy 18:9. In Deuteronomy 17 and 18 the broad context is that Moses is giving regulations for the leadership. Regulations related to kings, regulations related to the priests and the Levites and regulations related to prophets. In Deuteronomy 18:9, he says, "When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations." Don't fall into the trap of the false prophets and the false prophecies of the religions around you. "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead." These are all aspects of demonism. "For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD." So he's listing aspects related to some sort of revelation into the future or the dead that doesn't come from God.
 
Then we come to Deuteronomy 18:15. When we look at verses 15-22 we have to recognize that there are two divisions here. The first is Deuteronomy 18:15-19 and then Deuteronomy 18:20-22. In verses 15-19 we're talking about one of the greatest prophecies about the Messiah in the Old Testament. It says, "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me [Moses] from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him." This is a Messianic prophecy.
 
There are some people who deny that. You may have a study Bible that doesn't identify this as such but this is a Messianic prophecy. We know this first of all because of the wider context that I talked about because He's the head of all offices and authorities in surrounding passages. He's head of the priests, the kings, and the prophets. Secondly, the immediate context which I just read to you in Deuteronomy 18:9-14 talks about the negatives of rejecting paganism and divinations and that contrasts with the Messiah who is going to be the perfect and complete revelation of God. Third, the discussion of false prophets in Deuteronomy 18:18-22 is consistent with an individual prophet in Deuteronomy 18:15-19. This is important to understand.
 
In verses 15-19 he talks about [a] prophet. The word "prophet" is without the definite article so in the way he's describing this he's describing an individual. When you get into verses 20-22 he's talking about general principles relating to the prophets. So the definite article is used in verses 20-22 in terms of stating gnomic principles of discerning who's a prophet. So in verses 15-19 we're talking about a specific individual prophet using the singular noun.
 
We see this in a general contrast that occurs beginning in verse 20. The Hebrew word that is translated "but" is the Hebrew word ak which is sort of a soft word in contrast so it is contrasting these prophets who have the arrogance to speak the word in My name with the true Prophet mentioned in verses 15-19. The noun that's used in verses 15-19 is a singular noun defined as a specific individual, one who is like Moses. When you get into verses 20-22 it includes the article and it is the generic use of the article indicating anyone in this class who claims to be a prophet. So this just gives you a little bit of the framework here. It's a very important passage in terms of understanding its exegesis.
 
A young woman who graduated from Trinity Seminary wrote a PhD dissertation on this as a Messianic prophecy. She did a fabulous job on this and pointed out about six things that are important to understand. One is that the singular of nabiy here points to a specific individual. It's amazing how many so-called exegetes overlook that. They want to say that because it's singular it's a collective noun but when a collective noun is intended that's usually followed in the context with a mix of singular and plural pronouns. That doesn't occur here. All you have is singular pronouns so grammatically it points to a single individual.
 
The second thing which you get from the context is the prophet is compared to a single, exalted individual, Moses. So there's a comparison of kind to kind or apples to apples which means since he's compared to an individual the prophet here must be an individual as well. The individual future prophet is compared to the individual Moses. Third, in the history of the Old Testament period no ordinary prophet exercised all the authority Moses did. Moses had legislative authority, executive authority, priestly authority, and mediatorial authority and no other prophet in the Old Testament had that degree of authority.
 
Fourth, the prophet who is like Moses is so unique that only the Messiah could fulfill those qualifications. Numbers 12:6-8 after Moses had organized the elders and God said that he would speak to them and would speak to Miriam and to Aaron. But God said, "I don't speak to them mouth to mouth like I speak to you, Moses." Moses had a unique relationship with God and the revelation he received from God was unique form everyone else because of his intimacy with God. In Deuteronomy 34:10 at the conclusion of Deuteronomy written after Moses died the writer writes at the end that to the time that he wrote no prophet had arisen. That means it's not Joshua, not Nathan, not Gad, not Isaiah, and not Jeremiah. This unique prophet had not yet come by the time of the exile.
 
So this is a Messianic prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:15-19. "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him. This is according to all that you asked of the LORD your God in Horeb [Mt. Sinai] on the day of the assembly, saying, 'Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.' " Remember at Mt. Horeb when God began to speak to them they all cowered. They were afraid. The very voice of God just scared them to death and they just fell on their face and they said Moses had to talk to God because they couldn't stand to hear His voice. It's too much.
 
"The LORD said to me, 'They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require {it} of him.' " There will be judgment on those who reject Him. Then we have the contrast in verse 20. "But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die."
 
The Hebrew there means to speak arrogantly and to reject authority. It's saying if the prophet claims falsely that God spoke to him, he shall die. How many times I've heard people say that. That's presumption. Once again it's a death penalty to claim God spoke to you falsely.  This applies to anyone who claims to be a prophet.
 
Then we have a validation. "You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?' " They're asking how to evaluate a prophet. Anyone can come along and claim God said something to him. How do we know that God didn't speak to them? Well, that's Deuteronomy 18:22, "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him." Even though there were many prophets who gave long-term prophecies that wouldn't be fulfilled in their lifetime, they all gave numerous short-term prophecies that could validate that they were genuine prophets. You could test them to see if these things came to pass. If it doesn't come to pass then that's the thing the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. That's the criteria.
 
That goes directly again Grudem's assertion that the New Testament prophet isn't speaking with the authority of God and can make mistakes. Grudem says he's going to misidentify things and that's okay because he's a New Testament prophet and he just doesn't have God with him, really. That just destroys the authority of God's Word because these people are saying God told them. Well, either God told you or He didn't. So the punishment is death in Deuteronomy 18:22. So this gives us the primary test for being a prophet.
 
Now there's another thing that comes along that gives us a connection with the Old Testament. Turn to Joel 2. Joel is quoted by Peter on the Day of Pentecost. In Joel 2:28, Joel is predicting what will take place on the Day of the Lord. "It shall come to pass afterwards {after the Tribulation} that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind and your sons and daughters will prophesy." Now that's not the spiritual gift of prophecy that we have in the Church because there was a gift of prophecy in the Old Testament under Israel. There'll be a gift of prophecy in the Tribulation because we're back in the Age of Israel. But it's not the spiritual gift of prophecy which is designed as something unique for the Church, the body of Christ, but there's a contention here that your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
 
The meaning of prophecy here is the same as it's been all through the Old Testament so when Peter quotes it in Acts 2 he doesn't change the meaning of the word "prophecy". Prophecy is the same in the New Testament as it was in the Old Testament. That's the only point I'm making there. The way the word is used from the very beginning of the New Testament in Acts 2 it comes out of an Old Testament quote and means the same thing as it did in the Old Testament. It means divinely given revelation mediated through a prophet that's not based on any interpretation of an already given revelation or the Word of God.
 
That brings us up to a conclusion in Romans 12 that those who prophesy in "proportion to our faith" which means in accordance to the standard of faith have a check. Even in the Old Testament it had a check. Whatever the prophet said had to conform and could not contradict already accepted Divine revelation. So there was a standard. A prophet could just come along and say anything and you couldn't just take it for granted. You had to evaluate it on the basis of previously accepted truth. That's the same thing that Paul says here is that if you prophesy it's in proportion or according to the standard of faith.
 
Then he's going to go into other spiritual gifts which we'll look at next time related to ministry, teaching, exhorting, and giving, and then we'll get into the next section which talks about the foundation for utilizing everything, which is love.

Romans 134b-Standards for the Christian Life

Romans 12:10 NASB95
Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor;
Romans 134b-Standards for the Christian Life Romans 12:10-16
 
We’re in Romans, chapter 12, and last time we finished up looking at some of the gifts, primarily prophecy. In Romans 12:6 Paul says, "Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, {each of us is to exercise them accordingly:} if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith.” Probably the best understanding of that as I pointed out is "according to the standard of doctrine." Faith is a word that is often used to refer to not only the act of believing but to what is believed. We often talk about a person’s faith, that is what they believe, their religious affiliation, so that’s the idea here that prophecy was according to a standard.
 
And last time I looked at the passages in Deuteronomy 13 and 18 that describe the criteria in the Old Testament for evaluating Biblical prophecy. We looked at the lists of spiritual gifts. There are four basic lists. One in Ephesians 4:1-12 focuses on leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers. In 1 Corinthians 12:8-11, there’s another list given. These are all temporary gifts like apostles and prophets. In 1 Corinthians 12:28 we have another list that has five temporary gifts: apostles, prophets, healing, miracles, and tongues. And then in Romans 12:6-8 lists only prophecy as a temporary gift emphasizing gifts related to service in the body of Christ. We have the gift of teaching mentioned in Romans 12, leadership or management which is a different word from administration used in 1 Corinthians 12:28 but a similar concept there and then there’s service, mercy, exhortation, and giving. So in that first verse where we are to prophesy, the standard is the faith or doctrine according to truth. We might paraphrase it that way.
 
Then we come to Romans 12:28 "If service [ministry], in his serving [ministering]; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness." So we see certain repetitious words used there such as prophecy, service, teaching, and exhortation. These are the key words there.
Giving is defined in terms of liberality which is the Greek word HAPLOTES which has the idea that it’s is not just with generosity which some people suggest but the main idea is giving with no strings attached. Leading is described as being diligent. Mercy with cheerfulness or graciousness. We’ll go back over these terms as we go through the passage. In Romans 12:8 the New Testament word for ministering is the noun DIAKONIA. Now we get our word deacon from that word. It’s really a broad-based word. It has a general sense of any type of service, such as serving in the local church or doing any kind of thing serving the Lord in our life that comes under the category of service.  It’s also used to describe many different actions and activities in the local church performed by everyday believers as well as apostles in the book of Acts. Then it has a specific sense in which it is used to describe service to those who have some sort of special need. Maybe they are ill; maybe they are financially destitute; maybe they just need aid or help doing something but it is used in that sort of specific sense, not just in terms of Christian service but in terms of specific aid to someone who has a specific problem or specific difficulty.
 
This word as it is used as a spiritual gift can be applied a number of different ways in the local church. It can be someone who teaches in prep school, someone who works in the nursery, someone who supplies baked goods for fellowship and snacking and keeping us all round and healthy looking can all be a function of service. Serving on the deacon board in different capacities, all of these can be manifestations of someone’s spiritual gift of service. Singing in the choir combines with different talents, also, so it’s a broad-based word for serving in the body of Christ and ministering to others. The word often is translated with that English word ministering so in some way it’s just coming to the aid or helping someone is a broad use of that term.
 
In the latter part of that verse we read, "And the one in teaching, in his teaching." So it doesn’t give anything more specific than that although the word that is used there for teaching, DIDASKOLOS, indicates teaching or explanation. It’s not necessarily the same as pastor-teacher. The metaphor for a pastor really depicts leadership. Look at the role of a shepherd because the Greek word for pastor is the word that means a shepherd. What does a shepherd do in relation to his flock? He leads them to food. He leads them to that which sustains them, that which provides nourishment for them and he protects them. So the pastoral function is related to leadership and that leadership is defined narrowly in Scripture through teaching.
 
We can demonstrate that in a number of places. Paul talks about the pastor-teacher in Ephesians 4:11-12. But I think the more clear passage is in John 21 when Jesus is having his discussion with Peter around the breakfast campfire after they had a little trouble fishing. They were up all night and they didn’t catch anything. Jesus showed up on the bank. The disciples weren’t really sure who he was. He told them to throw their net over on the other side of the boat and when they did they hauled in a catch that was almost too great for the boat. At that point they realized who that must be on the shore and they came ashore and they ate breakfast.
 
Afterwards Jesus had a little lesson for Peter. This was the first time that the Lord had spoken to Peter since Peter had betrayed him. So the Lord turned to him and He asked him a question. It’s translated the same in English but he uses about four pairs of synonyms in that little interchange when Jesus is addressing Peter. It starts off, "Do you love me?" Now to understand that question you have to understand what Jesus taught in the upper room. His emphasis on love in the upper room was related to obedience. "If you love me, you will obey Me." Jesus is telling Peter what His ministry will be. He says, "Peter, do you love me?" Peter says, "Yes, Lord, you know what I love you." Jesus responded at that point three different ways in each of these interchanges saying, "Feed My sheep." "Take care of My lambs" and "Feed my sheep." He uses different words for feed and different words for sheep. But the point is the role and responsibility as an apostle is one who equips the saints, just like a pastor-teacher is to function through feeding, through providing spiritual nourishment for God’s people who are described by analogy as a flock. So it’s important to understand that this is what it means to be a pastor.
 
Sometimes you and I have heard that someone is just so "pastoral". We’ve got this evangelical culture that identifies pastor with some sort of care giving. Someone who more or less does not exhort but someone who seems to really connect with people and their problems and seems to have a certain kind of personality. I’ve heard that in several different venues where people think, "That’s what it means to be a pastor." Well, Biblically what it means to be a pastor is to be someone who is a good teacher, someone who clearly explains the Word of God so that people can understand it and it can be used in their life so they can grow to spiritual maturity.
 
So pastor-teacher is a leadership gift but there’s also a gift of teaching. We have people who have the gift of teaching. Some of them teach in prep school. They do an excellent job. There are others who just work at teaching. They may not be gifted in that area but we’re all to teach one another, Hebrews says. So there’s an area of responsibility for everyone there whether or not they’re gifted in that area. For the person who is gifted in that area he should labor in being able to properly and correctly handle the Scriptures and explain them. That can operate in a number of different venues or environments. It can be a home Bible study. It can be a Child Evangelism Fellowship Club.
 
By the way, our Child Evangelism Fellowship Club is doing well. I think that almost every week we discover another child who has trusted in the Lord. Those people who are working with them are doing a tremendous job. It takes an added effort, an added amount of time every week out of everybody’s schedule to do that but it is a tremendous ministry. How can you measure the things that we do on a day-to-day basis against the eternal destiny of a child? That’s what comes out of this. It’s just tremendous to see that. It’s not easy sometimes. The kids get to be a little rambunctious. You’re dealing with a lot of cross-cultural situations because most of these kids come out of a Hispanic background. Some of them are believers and some of them are not. We’ve had a number of the ones who aren’t come to know the Lord so that’s just a tremendous thing. That’s a great ministry this congregation is involved in so we need to continuously be in prayer for them. Each one of the folks that work with that work at teaching. So that’s the role of teaching. It’s just explaining what the Scripture means so that God the Holy Spirit can use it in the life of the people that we’re teaching so that they can grow spiritually.
 
Now the next verse, Romans 12:8 says, "Or he who exhorts, in his exhortation." Here we have the same word used twice. "The one who exhorts." This is the verb form of PARAKALEO and then we have the noun PARAKLESIS, but they mean the same thing. Exhortation is one of those words that may be a little fuzzy in the minds of some people. It basically means to challenge someone to a particular course of action. It’s to encourage someone, not just to challenge them in a strong way because they’re not doing it but to encourage them as they’re trying to do it. This is what we see in athletic performances. You’re cheering someone on and encouraging them to put forth every effort and to continue to put forth 120% and to continue to do well even though things may not be going well in terms of circumstances.
Last week I saw a great example of this. Several of us in the congregation who’ve had connections to Connecticut went with a few people that teach at the school where we’re having Child Evangelism Fellowship and are also pro-Yukon. When I first went to Connecticut I thought Yukon was in Alaska but Yukon is the University of Connecticut and their women’s basketball team which is number one again this year. That’s just like every year they’re number one. They just do an incredible job. They beat the U of H women’s team by fifty-one points. I’m thinking as I’m watching this how would I reach inside of me and give 120% when every fifteen minutes I’m down by another ten points and I’m not getting anywhere. Those girls on the U of H team never gave up. They just kept persevering. The coaches are encouraging them. People in the stands are encouraging them and that’s what encouragement is and how it relates. We aren’t supposed to give up. We have people who encourage us and challenge us.
That can be manifested in different ways. Encouragement isn’t giving someone a hug. That may be a part of it. I’m not saying to not give someone a hug when they’re having a hard time. That’s always nice but that’s only part of it. What gives comfort is like Paul says. At the time of death, we’re to comfort one another in 1 Thessalonians 4 by explaining the doctrine of the Rapture. When anyone who has died and believed in Jesus is with the Lord and they will go to be with the Lord and get their resurrection body when the Lord returns in the clouds. At the end of that discussion in 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18, Paul says to comfort one another with these words. That the same word for encouragement. We primarily comfort people with the Word of God reminding them of Scripture.
 
I know when I’ve gone through some challenges here and there in life there are always a host of truly good friends who often repeat back things to me things I have said in the pulpit. That’s just disgusting. That’s the last thing you want to hear as a pastor is someone saying that you taught me this or that. So you hear it again. That’s exhortation, challenging people with the word of God.
 
Then we have "he who gives with liberality." That’s the second clause in Romans 12:8. I mentioned this earlier. This is the spiritual gift of giving. Now I don’t want to make this as a blanket statement because I don’t think this is true. I’ve seen some people who are like the widow story where Jesus told about the widow who only had her two mites. A mite was worth about two or three cents, maybe. It may not be worth that now. She took one of them and put it in the offering at the temple. She gave freely. She gave of what she had in order to show her worship of God through giving. There are those who do that, who give just a small amount because that is all that they have. Those who work in ministry need to respect that these people have given of what the Lord has provided for them and for some of them it has been hard for them to give, others not so hard.
 
One area in giving that I’ve noticed is that God not only has given them the gift of giving. He’s given them the gift of making money. We know people like that. This church has benefitted from some people like that because the Lord has given them that ability to produce wealth in order to supply the needs of pastors and missionaries and churches. And they understand that. It’s remarkable to watch some people who are gifted in that area as well and to understand that that’s part of their responsibility. God hasn’t just given them the ability to make money so they can have a comfortable lifestyle but he’s given them that ability so that they can bless the church and bless other believers with the resources that God has given them. That is part of the doctrine of giving.
 
I think this second word, HAPLOTES should be translated in the sense of "no strings attached." That’s what we mean when we use the phrase “giving as unto the Lord."  We’re giving to the Lord. When we pass the plate on Saturday morning or some of you just regularly mail a check in or maybe you use PayPal in order to submit your donation to the church, you recognize that every dollar you make, whether you keep it or whether you give it, it really belongs to the Lord. He’s the one who supplied us with our jobs. He’s the one who supplies the financial resources that we have and we’re to use everything that we have to glorify God. Part of that is involved in taking care of our own needs, our own responsibilities, providing for our present and our future. Then we have resources that we can provide to help with the logistical needs of the local church as well as missionaries.
 
But we’re to give this as "unto the Lord." That means we’re giving this, whether to the missionary or the missionary organization, the church and we recognize that they’re going to use that as they see fit as unto the Lord. It’s not necessarily our responsibility to sit back and critically judge them. When I was about twenty or twenty one years old, I was at a church that was going through a bit of a split. There was a group of people that got upset and left. There was a man, an older gentlemen, who sat near where I sat, and I overheard a conversation where he made the point, "No, I’m not leaving. I’ve given a lot of money to this church and I want to make sure it’s spent well." Now a lot of people have that kind of mentality. That’s not giving as unto the Lord. Once that dollar bill or whatever leaves your hand that belongs to someone else. The Lord is going to take care of the organization that you give it to and they need to use it as unto the Lord and they’re responsible as unto the Lord for how they use that. So we don’t come along and second guess.
 
I’ve been involved with a number of different Christian organizations over the years and I’ve discovered that they all make mistakes. They all have problems with one thing or another because there are sinners involved in every single church. In fact, this last week I had the opportunity to sit down and have coffee with a long-time friend whom I had not seen in about ten years. She’s gone through many different challenges in her life over the last twenty or thirty years and we had worked together in a Christian ministry some forty years ago. We were just kind of catching up on how things were and she was commenting that one of the hardest things to do is to work in a Christian ministry. People have an idealistic idea that you’re serving the Lord if you’re working for a missionary organization or church and that things are just going to be better. Remember that a church or a missionary organization and the people that work there have a bulls-eye on their butt for the angelic conflict. The devil just loves to stir up a lot of trouble. I’ve been involved in some Christian organizations where there have just been some real nasty things going on simply because of people’s sin natures. That’s not any different from working at Exxon or Shell or working for the local school district or working in a grocery store or a police department or the military. People have problems and people don’t always make the wisest decisions or the decisions you think are the wisest in how they utilize their resources. But we have to deal with all of those organizations in grace and realize that ultimately, if we select our organizations to support, they’re the ones who are going to promote the Word so we’re going to do what we can financially to make that possible. So that’s what it means to give with no strings attached.
 
Now the next phrase Paul says, "He who ruleth [leads] with diligence." The word for ruleth [leading] is PROISTEMI which means to lead or to manage or to administer something and the word for diligence is SPOUDE which means zeal or diligence or exertion. SPUDAZO is the verb and is a cognate of SPOUDE. When you read in 1 Timothy where Paul says to "study to show thyself approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed." the American Standard Version or the NIV will translate that "be diligent". Well the context is related to study so I think study is an appropriate nuance of the term in the context that we have in Timothy. It means to be diligent as a student of the Word and that would be, by implication, to study.
 
But here it’s not related to study. It’s related to leadership, working hard at being a good leader, a good manager, or a good administrator in the local church. So the one who has the spiritual gift of leadership or administration should do so with diligence, should work hard at it, and should have a passion for it.
 
The verse continues, "He who shows mercy with cheerfulness." Remember I made a point of distinguishing between mercy and grace. We’ve often heard it said that mercy is grace in action. Grace is the foundation for mercy. If you’re not grace oriented you can’t exercise mercy very well. But mercy is not an emotional, sentimental, pseudo-compassion. Mercy is trying to help someone who has a genuine need because of the consequences of sin. Grace deals with the foundational problem of sin that we’re saved by grace through faith but mercy is the application of grace to specific situations where people are suffering the consequences of sin. Now it may be their sin. It may be the sin of the world, just a result of living in the cosmic system and living in a fallen environment.
 
For example, we may have mercy on someone. Jesus showed compassion to those who had leprosy, who were blind, who were lame. This was not necessarily their fault but it was because they lived in a fallen world and were suffering the consequences of sin. Just because the consequences that someone is suffering are the result of their bad decisions doesn’t mean we should say, "Well, you know if you’d just made a better decision things wouldn’t be so bad. You’re just suffering your own consequences." That’s not being very gracious. We all make mistakes. We all suffer the consequences and mercy is when we try to help and encourage one another when we’re going through those consequences whether they are directly related to bad decisions or not. Usually we make what we think are good decisions and they end up being bad. Of course there are other times when we know we’re being rebellious towards God and we suffer those consequences. So mercy should be applied in a certain way, the Greek word HILAROTES where we get our word hilarious. It has the idea not of cheerfulness in the sense of someone who’s just happy and carefree but in the sense of someone who is very gracious in what they are doing.
 
That’s why I translate it that way when I talk about giving, that God loves a generous, grace-oriented giver. The idea there is that someone who is grace-oriented is being very gracious and positive in their help for others. So that’s how we apply mercy in a very positive gracious manner. Don’t come up to someone and say, “Well you know this is your fault. If you hadn’t made that stupid decision then I wouldn’t need to help you and no one else would and life would be a lot better for you.” You’re not there to hammer them. You’re there to encourage them and to help them in a gracious manner. So Romans 12:8 gives us four different areas of operation and each of these is related to service within the local church.
 
Starting in Roman 12:9 the Apostle Paul changes direction a little bit to start talking about the foundation behind the use of these gifts. And that is related to love. It’s interesting that in 1 Corinthians 13 which we normally think as the "love chapter", at least the first seven verses describe the qualities of impersonal love. The noun that’s used there is AGAPE. It follows the lengthy discussion that Paul has in 1 Corinthians 12 on the use of the spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts are not to be used to benefit self. They are to be used to benefit other people.
 
Now the problem that everyone here has, uh, let me look around. There may be one or two exceptions but I think just about everyone here has a sin nature! The problem with our sin nature is that even under some of the best conditions we’re still pretty self-absorbed. We’re still pretty oriented to "it’s all about me" and "what’s best for me". It’s only when we’re walking by the Holy Spirit that we can genuinely deal with what’s best for other people.
 
I’ve searched long and hard for how to define love. I think the best definition I’ve been able to come up with is that love is "seeking to do the best for the object of your love." But there’s a problem with that definition because whenever you use a comparative or a superlative you’re implying a standard by which this is judged. So when someone says, "I love you", what they should be saying is, "I want the absolute best for you." The subtext we often hear is “I want what’s best for you because that’s going to be what’s best for me and I’m going to define what’s best for you in terms of what I think is best for you, not what is objectively best for you in terms of God’s plan and God’s purpose.
 
That’s what real love is, relating to people on the basis of God’s absolute standards and God’s absolute integrity and seeking the highest and best for them in terms of what truly is intrinsically the best. A lot of times people think, "Why are you doing this to me? This is mean. This is hard." A child being disciplined by his parents thinks this. Well the parents are discipling in love. It doesn’t mean they are being sentimental. It means they understand that if a child does not learn self-discipline between the ages of one and five, it will be extremely difficult for them to ever make it through life. Life demands discipline, self-discipline and self-control. So parents have to teach that and instill that into their children.
 
And that’s not always pleasant for parents. It’s not pleasant for parents, on occasions, to have to give their children a spanking. It may be illegal in some states to do that but it is still what’s mandated by the Word of God. We can’t let a silly thing like state laws interfere with good parenting. That doesn’t mean that you just walk around all the time spanking your kids. That should be the final resort for extremely bad behavior. But it’s done in love because it’s the best thing for the child. You have a long-term goal in mind and therefore it’s necessary to instill that discipline into them at a young age so that that pays off with benefits down the road.
 
Now if you want to have a selfish look at it, the more you discipline them when they’re one to five, the less problems you’re going to have when they’re adolescents. That’s ten years down the road. But if you don’t lay that groundwork in those first five years, then trust me, you’re more likely to have problems when they hit adolescence. Now that doesn’t mean that if you do an excellent job disciplining them when they’re one through five that you’re not going to have problems when they hit adolescence. We all know people that were maybe one child in three or four whose parents treated every child the same but because of individual volition there’s always the one that makes decisions counter and contrary to the disciplined upbringing they had at home. So when they hit thirteen something goes screwy, hormones or whatever, goes a little screwy and you wonder where in the world this little demon came from and how could that have anything to do with you or your husband’s genetics. Maybe you can understand how it has something to do with your spouse’s genetics but not yours. Then somewhere around the age of thirty or thirty-five they wake up and gain an ounce of maturity. All of a sudden they come back to be something close to what that loving child you knew when they were young. But that’s the result not of poor parental training but as a result of the child’s own volition. Hopefully with some training it won’t be quite as severe and the adolescent period won’t be quite as long.
 
But the point of love is that it seeks what is best according to an objective external standard, not what’s best for me but what’s best according to God’s standard which means that if you are a parent or if you are a husband who is mandated to love your wife you need to have a pretty good understanding of what the Word of God talks about so that you can understand what it means to truly, genuinely love your spouse or your children. So love is characterized here as not being without hypocrisy.
 
The love that we’re talking about here is AGAPE. This is going to be distinguished from the word that we find in Romans 12:10 which is brotherly love. That’s PHILADEPHIA. It’s not the city in Pennsylvania. It’s not the city in Turkey. It means brotherly or familial love. Familial love, based on the Greek word, PHILEO or the noun PHILOS has to do with a close, intimate type of love that is distinct from AGAPE. AGAPE is often called impersonal love, not because it’s detached, but because the two people don’t necessarily have to know each other personally in order to demonstrate this kind of love. It’s a love toward all mankind. God loves the world AGAPE. But God only has PHILOS love for believers. PHILOS is never used with God as the subject and unbelievers as the object so that distinguishes it. It’s a family love. Believers are in the family of God. We’re adopted into the family of God at the instant of salvation and so we are part of his family. This is a command to love all mankind and it should be without hypocrisy.
 
Now the word for hypocrisy is a compound word in the Greek. It is ANUPOKRITOS. It has a prefix AN there at the beginning like we would have happy versus unhappy. A bed that is made versus a bed that is unmade. The alpha privative as it’s called, privative indicates something that is negative. Now the idea of ANUPOKRITOS is that it’s unfeigned, it’s not a false love, it’s a genuine love with no ulterior motives, no selfish motives, and not self-centered motives. It’s not motivated by your sin nature. It’s motivated by your relationship with God.
 
This word is used to develop in the Greek for telling a lie, telling something that is not true so when we add the prefix AN it means someone who is unfeigned, someone who is genuine, and someone who is honest with no ulterior motives. What we see starting in Romans 12:9 is a series of commands that are related to the Christian life. They’re sort of like bullets. There have been some who have tried to make all of them relate to love. I don’t think that’s possible. I think the Apostle Paul came to this point and he’s just giving a list of standards for the Christian life for relating to other people and relating to life. These relate to believers and also some relate to unbelievers. These are just the protocols for everyone in the Christian life. These are the standards for the royal family of God.
 
We’re to have a love that is unfeigned, a love that is genuine with no self-centered motives. What goes along with that is an ethical standard in relation to good and evil. We’re told we are to "abhor what is evil and to cling to what is good." Those two clauses go together. The word for abhor means to detest, to despise something, and to reject it. It’s the Greek word APOSTUGEO used as a participle here. The grammar through this section is rather interesting if you like the intricacies of grammar because we frequently find these participles used as an imperative. Now just for those of you who like the minutiae of grammar, what is a participle?  A participle is a verbal adjective that is used at times in the idiom of Greek to relate a command. So we refer to these as imperatival participles. What’s interesting and as I got into the Greek of this I realized that it really doesn’t come across until we get into the next verse where it talks about “be kindly affectionate to one another”. Your English looks like there’s an imperatival verb there.
 
Actually you just have nouns and adjectives and there is an idiom in Greek where adjectives are used as imperatives. This probably is a result of something of a Semitic language influence on the writing of Scripture. It’s used in the New Testament. It’s used in some early Church father’s literature so it’s not just confined to the Apostle Paul. It’s a rare usage but what you start with is a verbal adjective which is a participle that’s used as an infinitive and then it just kind of slid over to where the adjective was used as an infinitive. And it took me a while to dig this out. I kept hitting this passage and reading it in the Greek.
 
I would read it in the Greek and translate it and then I would look at English translations and they all had these imperatival type translations. I kept looking and digging and everything and I finally dug it out of C.F.D. Moule’s Idioms of the New Testament which is an excellent New Testament grammar. He’s got a lot of good minutiae in there that you don’t find in other grammars. I was all excited about that because having worked through the Greek for a long time it’s unusual that I find something totally new. That was a fun thing to discover today.
 
But this says to abhor or reject what is evil, to completely detest what is evil. Now we need to have a pretty good understanding of what evil is and the word there translated evil is PONEROS which means something that’s in a poor condition. It can refer to someone who is in a poor condition in terms of their physical health, they’re sick or ill. It can refer to someone who is in a poor condition morally or ethically. It can refer to someone who’s in a poor condition spiritually so when it’s talking about spiritual issues it usually has the connotation of evil or wicked.
 
There have been different ways people have tried to utilize the concept of evil to communicate something more than just sin. In the Old Testament it’s often used of sin. The term PONEROS is used seventy-two times in the New Testament. It’s used of demons who are called evil spirits. It’s used of the devil, the evil one, in Matthew 13:19, John 17:15, Ephesians 6:17, and 1 John 2:13-4. It’s used to describe the Pharisees as being evil in Matthew 12:34 but lest you think that means they’re automatically unbelievers it’s also used to describe the inner corrupt nature, for example in Mark 7:23 where it’s talking about unbelievers "you, being evil." The same phrase is used in Luke 11:13 when Jesus is talking to his disciples, "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will {your} heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?"
 
See, this is one of the passages I like to go to because it shows that the evil, corrupt sin nature can do relatively good things. That’s still evil. So evil can refer to people who are doing morally good things like the Pharisees did but they are spiritually corrupt or evil. The world usually thinks of evil as someone who is doing criminal things, someone doing violent things, someone doing abusive things, or whatever the culture is identifying as socially unacceptable at that particular stage in history. But the Bible uses evil to refer to both areas of production in the sin nature.
 
 The Bible speaks of the darkness of sin. The sin nature is motivated by the lust pattern which is all about me, satisfying my drives, my desires, whatever I think I need right now. It produces in two areas. One is what we usually think of as personal sins, mental attitude sins, such as anger, resentment, jealousy, bitterness, a mentality of revenge and vindictiveness which are mental attitude sins, sins of lust. Then we have sins of the tongue such as gossip, slander, maligning, lying, and bearing false witness. Those are all related to sins of the tongue. Then we have overt sins such as murder, and violent assault, things of that nature.
 
That is what we would classify as sin or evil in one sense. But the sin nature also produces good, relative good, not good in an intrinsic, absolute sense but relative good. The Pharisees did a lot of moral, ethically good things but like all religion it still came out of the sin nature because it rejected the grace of God. Someone can be like the Pope, like Billy Graham, like me and be evil because we’ve slipped into sin nature controlled arrogance and we’re violating the principles of grace and love so that produces evil. It may look good but it’s still evil.
 
 If someone is walking according to the flesh, walking according to their sin nature, and they’re reading their Bible, is that good or evil? Isn’t that a good question? If you’re out of fellowship and you are witnessing to someone from selfish motives, is that good or evil? Yeah, that’s evil. See, we don’t think of it that way. If you’re the Pope, you can be evil. If you’re promoting any religious system that has ethical value for the entire human race on non-Biblical principles, if you’re operating on legalism and self-righteousness, that is evil. This is a problem we have today.
 
We see this often in the way people respond and react to some of these issues related to homosexuality and same sex marriage. We have to learn to hold a standard without being judgmental. Someone asked me this question this morning in an e-mail. They wanted to know because they’d been asked the question, that since Jesus stood for loving everyone [that’s a false assumption there] and He wasn’t judgmental [judge not that you be not judged] so how can you have this law like they were trying to pass in Arizona to protect freedom of religion? How is that consistent with Christianity? I responded because Christianity also says we’re to be discerning. It uses the same word that’s used for judging. We’re to be discerning. Christians are to abhor what is evil but we need to learn how to abhor what is evil without abhorring the person.
 
Now, in my personal opinion, the problem with the homosexual movement isn’t the sin of homosexuality. The problem with the modern homosexual movement is the arrogance that wants to impose their standard on everyone else and force everyone else to validate their system of values. They want to impose their system of values on everyone else. That’s arrogance and that’s the problem.
 
I tried to do a little research today on this bill in Arizona. I have some questions. I haven’t reached a conclusion on this. My gut reaction is that the law may have been written too vaguely. This could open the door to a lot of misapplication. You can see someone saying that they don’t want to serve someone for any reason because it violates their religious conscience. But the reality is that the freedom of conscience and the authority to act according to our freedom of conscience is the foundation in the history of law to the 1st Amendment. This is where we get into a very significant and very important issue related to this particular law because there have been cases, one of which was related to a bakery in Arizona where a homosexual couple wanted to have a Christian baker bake their wedding cake. That violated his conscience so he didn’t want to do it so they took him to court. He was being forced to violate his value system, his conscience in order to do that. This is where we get into some really difficult areas legislatively.
 
I heard an example on the radio the other day which I thought was an interesting analogy. What would they say if the case involved an African American bakery down in the Third Ward and a Ku Klux Klan wizard came in and asked if they would do the baking for a birthday party for the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? Would we expect the black baker to willingly provide the cakes and pastries and everything for the party under those conditions? I would suggest that in this country with its mental attitude that we would think he would be totally justified in refusing to bake the cakes for that event. These are the issues that are involved.
 
The court issue is a freedom of conscience issue and it would seem to me that a law that was going to address that would have to be written very, very carefully so that it avoids the abuse and misuse that could come that way. I haven’t had an opportunity to read the whole law. I read part of the legislation today but going through legislation like that sometimes can be very, very tricky. I’m still working my way through that in terms of trying to understand these particular issues.
 
So we have the sin nature here that produces good. Jesus said to his disciples who are believers, "You being evil…" They still have a corrupt nature. They still have a sin nature and they can still do relatively good things. We classify that as human good. It has no absolute eternal value. John 17:15 tells us about one of the uses where Satan is described as the evil one. Remember 2 Corinthians 12 talks about Satan and his ministers going around like ministers of righteousness. They’re disguised as serving God so there’s a deceptive value there. So evil is not always black and dark and a social reject. Often it looks to be very acceptable.
 
The first occurrence we have of evil is in Genesis 2:9 talking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The structure here in the Hebrew is the same kind of structure we have in Genesis1:1. It’s a merism. That means it uses two opposites to talk about a totality of something which, of course, would include that which is both good and evil. Evil here refers to sin in this context. They’re going to understand the distinction between righteousness and sin. Evil or ra in the Hebrew is often used to relate to sin in the Old Testament. So everything that proceeds from the sin nature, both counterfeit righteousness and human good as well as sin comes under the category of evil.
 
Religion is one of the greatest evils in the world. 2 Corinthians11:13-15 is pertinent here. Verse 14 says, “No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds” So this is talking about their works as relative righteousness or as human good.
 
So we are to abhor what is evil and cling to what is good Actually this word for cling, KALAIO, is the same word that is used in Ephesians 5 to translate the Hebrew word dibaq used in Genesis 2 where when a man and woman marry they are to leave mother and father and cleave to one another. It simply refers to clinging or holding on to one another. So we are to stick like Velcro to what is good. Good is AGATHOS which is different from KALOS, a synonym also translated good and it refers to that which is intrinsically good and that which has eternal value.
 
Now we’ll come back next time to get into the next points in Romans 12:10-16. So we’ve wrapped up the first part but the rest just continues to hit these standards for the Christian life.

Romans 135b-Standards for the Christian Life – Part 2

Romans 12:10 NASB95
Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor;
Romans 135b-Standards for the Christian Life – Part 2 Romans 12:10-16
 
We are in Romans, chapter 12 and this is actually part 2 on standards for the Christian life. It's very important to understand that the Christian life is not a life of libertinism or licentiousness which is the accusation against some people who believe in grace. After the Apostle Paul taught about grace in Romans 1-5 the very first objection to it that he dealt with comes at the beginning of Romans 6 where he said, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?" Of course the answer is no, not at all.
 
There are standards. We've now become members of God's royal family and just as in most human families there are standards, there are guidelines, there are protocols for the way in which you live as a member of your family so there are guidelines, rules, and protocols for members of the royal family of God. They're not rules to get into the family. They are not rules for gaining God's blessing because Scripture says we've already been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. They're rules that are guidelines so that we continue to walk in the truth, walk by the Spirit, and abide in Christ.
When we violate these standards, we're basically operating on the sin nature and we are out of fellowship. Now many people believe that you can summarize all the Christian life under the concept of love and there's a certain amount of truth to that. That's how Paul starts out as we saw last time, going back over a bit of a review of Romans 12:9 where he says, "Let love be without dissimulation [hypocrisy]. Then he has two other points. These are not necessarily related to each other.
 
As you go through these verses down through Romans 12:16, actually on down into verses 20 and 21, you could argue like some have tried that all of these say something about love. They certainly correlate to love. Love for one another is a primary mandate for the Christian toward others in the body of Christ. Paul begins with this in Romans 12:9, "{Let} love {be} without hypocrisy." That means without any ulterior motives. The only way we can do that as believers is to love on the basis of our relationship with God.
 
The Greek word that's used here AGAPE is one of two Greek words that are primarily used to express two different kinds of love in the Christian love. AGAPE is the word that's used to describe the kind of love that God the Father has toward all the inhabitants of planet earth, believer or unbeliever. It is a love that seeks their absolute best and always performs on the basis of righteousness and justice, totally consistent with God's righteousness and justice. It's a love based on integrity.
 
One of the things that we see in this is that love is always connected to an ethical standard. It's always related to a positive ethical absolute. It's not an emotion. It's not sentimentality. It's not based on feeling. It's based on a mental attitude that is grounded on the absolute righteousness of God. That gives us the stability because the righteousness of God never changes. It never fluctuates. It's never up one day and down the other. It's never a little more one day, a little more diluted the next day. It's a never changing standard. He is immutable and His immutability or the doctrine of immutability applies to every characteristic in the "essence box.
 
So our love here is manifested on that. It's a love we sometimes describe as being impersonal or unconditional, two adjectives describing love. What I mean by impersonal is not that it is somehow restrained or somehow distant or somehow not engaging with other people but it's a standard of behavior that is true whether or not we have a personal relationship with the person we love. That means it applies to the checker at the grocery store, applies to the person who's driving down the freeway texting on their cellphone and weaving in and out of lanes. It applies to everybody whether we know them personally or not. We treat them the same way. We treat them according to the standard of God's love. There's no ulterior motive. In other words, we're not trying to get something from somebody. We're not being nice to them in order to manipulate them in order to get something from them. We're doing it because that is the right thing to do and we should treat everyone the same.
 
We saw the next mandate, "Abhor what is evil" which is APOSTUGEO meaning to abhor or detest. We should have a revulsion toward that which is evil and on the other hand, we should cling to that which is good. We should be like Velcro to that which is good. We adhere to it.
 
Now I talked a little bit about evil last time and I got a couple of questions last time after class. Every now and then you see someone who's been sitting in the pew, listening for years, and a light goes off. They've heard this same doctrine for I don't know how many years and this is true for all of us. It happens to me. I'll look at a passage on something and say, "I just never saw that from that passage before." In fact, I'm going to reference a passage I probably read a hundred times this Sunday and never thought of it in a particular context, never thought about a particular application of it and we'll see that Sunday. The term evil is a term that describes those that are living in rebellion against God. Those who live in rebellion against God are not always performing what we think of as sins, negative actions, the kinds of things that are described in various passages of Scripture as the works of the flesh.
 
The term for evil is PONEROS and it's used of demons in terms of their evil spirits. Later in 2 Corinthians 11 evil spirits camouflage themselves and counterfeit righteousness and go about as if they are ministers of light. So that which is evil can also do that which appears to be good but it's a relative good. We use the term good in two senses. The Bible does as well. There's one word in the Greek KALOS and a different word AGATHOS. AGATHOS usually describes something that has an intrinsic value, something that is intrinsically good. KALOS on the other hand might refer to that which is relatively good. We know many people can do things that are relatively good in comparison with the behavior in other people. But if they are sinners, let me state that another way, if they're an unbeliever operating on the sin nature then what they are producing is evil. An unbeliever can only function in terms of his sin nature. He doesn't have any other nature. He only has that corrupt nature so no matter how nice, friendly, wonderful a person is, no matter how many relatively good things they do and there are many unbelievers who do many wonderful things, they are operating on their sin nature.
 
We often fall prey to thinking of unbelievers as only operating on wrong things. The Pharisees were very moral but they were evil. They were unbelievers. There are many people in cults who emphasize a self-righteousness, a righteousness by works, so they're always trying to be as best as they can be and yet, because they're not saved, then whatever they produce is just coming out of their sin nature. So evil is used of the demon and the devil, and the Pharisees. It's a synonym for disobedience in many passages and it describes the inner, corrupt nature that we usually refer to as the sin nature.
 
In Luke 11:13 Jesus, when addressing his disciples, says, "If you, then, being evil…" Now the disciples are regenerate and He's saying they're evil and even when they're evil they can do relatively good things for your children. He said the same thing to the Pharisees but they were unbelievers. We can chart the sin nature as being motivated by the lust pattern, whatever makes me happy. Self-absorption is the center of the sin nature but it can either produce sins such as sins of the tongue, mental attitude sins or overt sins or it can produce human good.
 
Now just because human good is a product of the sin nature doesn't mean it's wrong. Human good is what unbelievers produce when they're following establishment principles, when they're living a responsible life, when they're married, when they're teaching their children good behavior, when they're contributing to all manner of charitable institutions and causes. Those are wonderful things. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that this doesn't have any value in terms of the spiritual life or in terms of eternal life. But they're beneficial for society, for the culture, and for other people. There's nothing wrong with that.
 
Whenever we're out of fellowship and we're not walking by the Spirit we're producing human good. That means that in the middle of teaching a Bible class a pastor can get out of fellowship and then the rest of that Bible class he's walking by the flesh and it has no eternal value but he's still teaching truth from Scripture and God is still using it. I like to use examples that shake people up. You can witness to someone out of selfish motives. You're not walking according to the Spirit if you're doing that. We can read our Bible out of fellowship. There are many Christians who read their Bible out of fellowship. They don't know how to get back into fellowship but it's a work of the flesh. It's good in that they still learn something and if they get in fellowship, God the Holy Spirit can use some of that and transform it if they apply it into Divine good, when they're walking by the Spirit. Human good is not a bad thing in terms of relatively speaking. It has benefits for society, for the family, for people and that's good but it's not the kind of good that measures up to God's standard of righteousness so it has no eternal value.
 
The second thing I pointed out related to evil is that the first occurrence of the word goes back to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which indicates that now man would have an experiential awareness of both that which is good and also, of sin. In the Old Testament, evil is a word that is used a few times related to sin but the vast majority of its uses usually speak of idolatry. Now idolatry isn't simply the worship of gods that are made out of wood, stone, or some other sort of material. There are many sophisticated idols of the mind. We worship money. We're greedy and the Apostle Paul says in Colossians 3 that greed or covetousness is a form of idolatry. So there are many different forms of idolatry and they're usually identified as evil. Whenever we're operating on the sin nature, we're worshipping the self. We've replaced God as the focal point of our life and replaced Him with self. That is a form of idolatry.
 
Then the third point is that everything that proceeds from the sin nature, whether it is human good or counterfeit righteousness or overt sin, sins of the tongue, comes under the category of evil. That produces religion. And then the passage I alluded to, 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 talks about the fact that Satan himself transformed himself into an angel of light. He is the greatest counterfeiter in all of history and he is trying to counterfeit God. What makes Satan so devious is that he wants to produce good. When people are producing sin and the works of the flesh in terms of overt sin that leads to division and factions and violence and it tears apart society. It tears the world apart.
 
Now one of the greatest testimonies of the fact that Satan can't do what he wants to do is that he can't control human beings because when they operate on their sin nature it leads to all forms of violence and criminality. That is just the opposite of what Satan wants. He wants peace. There's no greater advocate in history of peace than Satan. He just doesn't want peace on the basis of God's plan. He wants peace on the basis of his plan and independence from God. So we're to abhor what is evil, everything produced from the sin nature and cling to that which is good. There's that word, AGATHOS, which means that which has intrinsic value.
 
So that takes us up to where we ended last time. Now in the next section, Romans 12:10-13 there are mostly bullets related to standards for the Christian life we lead, "Be devoted [kindly affectionate] to one another in brotherly love; in honor giving preference to one another." This is expanding on and giving a little more of a refinement to the command to "love without hypocrisy".  The last phrase further expands on the idea of what it means to be kindly affectionate.
 
The next command is in Romans 12:11, "Not lagging behind in diligence…" We are to be diligent. We are to be eager. We are to focus on the object at hand which is living the spiritual life, "Fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to [continuing steadfast in] prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing [given to] hospitality." So let's break this down. Beginning in Romans 12:10, we're to be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love. As we'll see in a minute "kindly affectionate" and "brotherly love" are different from the word AGAPE. They're based on the word PHILOS. PHILOS is the noun and PHILEO is the verb. This has to do with the more intimate love. AGAPE is not as intimate as PHILOS
 
PHILOS is more of a family love, more of an affectionate love so this is taking us to another level from what Jesus said in John 13:34-35. If you recall the context there Jesus is talking to His disciples the night before He went to the cross. They've already had the institution of the Lord's Table with the Passover meal. He's kicked Judas out of the room already which is a cleansing of the room from sin so that he's left with the eleven disciples and they are all believers. He gives them a new command. He says, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another."
 
Now in the Old Testament the command in the Mosaic Law is to love your neighbor as yourself. So what's the standard for loving your neighbor? It's how you love yourself. So the assumption of Scripture is that everyone loves themselves. This gives the lie to the whole doctrine of poor self-image that's dominated our whole culture. Because every sinner loves himself. That's the focus of the sin nature. Your sin nature is in love with you. Whenever you feel depressed it's because you're not living up the standard that's of your self love and you've disappointed yourself. If you really hated yourself you'd get up and say "I'm glad I'm a failure. Let's fail some more." So we need to learn that we already love ourselves and we need to love others like we love ourselves. That's the standard that God is saying here.
 
Now people like Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller and several other false teachers and heretics who came along utilizing psycho-babble back in the 20th century saying that before you can love others you first have to learn to love yourself. They just turned Scripture upside down. They said you need to have a good self-image. In fact, Robert Schuller was so arrogant that he wrote a book called, "Self-Image: The New Reformation". He sent a free copy of that book to every pastor in the country. I think I still have mine. In his opening he said that the document of substitutionary death and payment for sin was good for those backward people of the time of the Reformation but we're much more advanced now. We know that God isn't going to punish an innocent person for another's sins. In fact, he added, sin isn't really the problem. The problem is we have a low self-image and Jesus died so you could have a good self-image. That was his message. That was a message that just reverberated throughout American culture back in the 80's and 90's.
 
There are all kinds of ramifications from that but that's not what God was saying in the Old Testament. He said that everyone already loved themselves so quit being so self-centered and learn how to love other people like you love yourself. When Jesus came along he's going to ratchet the standard up just a little bit. He said He didn't want us to love others like we love ourselves. He wanted us to love others like He loved us. Totally different standard; a much higher standard; almost an impossible standard apart from the Holy Spirit.
 
The fruit of the Spirit is what? Love. The first thing Paul mentions. The fruit of the Spirit is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness…" It starts with love. So Jesus said, "I give you a new commandment to love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another. He repeats Himself here, several times. In John 13:35 He says, "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." In fact there are many who have argued, and they may be accurate, that the greatest apologetic of the Christian life is the believer who demonstrates the love of God in their life for all people. Because that can only happen as a result of God the Holy Spirit. It's a supernatural fruit of the Spirit. That's how we demonstrate the character of Christ in our lives. It's one of the greatest evidences we can give of the Christian life. We are to love one another.
 
Again, Paul Jesus repeats it in John 15, "This is My commandment that you love one another as I have loved you." And in John 15:17, "This I command you, that you love one another." Now all through here we have the verb AGAPAO. So this applies to people whether they're responsive, not responsive, walking according to the Spirit, not walking by the Spirit, doing what we want them to do, not doing what we want them to do, and doing what we don't want them to do. This relates to that principle we call impersonal love.
 
Jesus also said there is an ethical standard for love. It's not just going out and saying I love you and there's such shallowness to the typical Christian view of love. I've been in churches where you turn around and tell the person next to you that you love them and then turn to the next one and give them a hug. This is just so superficial. It just promotes a continuing shallowness in the Christian life.
 
But Scripture says that there's an ethical standard. Notice what Jesus says in John 14, "If you love Me keep my commandments." Love isn't just an emotion. It is expressed through obedience. There's an ethical standard there. In John 14:21 He says, "He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me." It's not the person who makes a show of it, not the person who talks about it, not the person who has picked up the latest Christian jargon talking about loving God. It's the person who quietly goes about ordering their life according to the standards of Scripture. That is the person who is showing that they truly love God. In John 14:23 we read, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him." I think this is more than just the indwelling of the Trinity. This is talking about an increasing personal relationship with the members of the Trinity for the believer who is walking in obedience.
 
Then the flip side in John 14:24, "He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me." John 14:15 is built off of the principle of the Old Testament. This idea of relating love to obedience didn't just pop up in John 14. In Exodus 20:6 we read, "But showing loving kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments." That combination of loving God and keeping His commandments is restated several times in the Mosaic Law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
 
Going on to the next chapter, in John 15 Jesus said if you keep My commands you will abide in My love." Now he threw in a new word here. Did you notice it? What's that new word? Earlier He said "if you love me you'll keep my commandments." What's the new word here? You will "abide" in my love. Abide is first introduced at the beginning of John 15 when Jesus says, "I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me, you will bear much fruit." Abiding is a key word meaning fellowship, meaning enjoying the fellowship we have with Christ. If we abide, which means stay in fellowship, then we abide in Christ's love. That is a richness of our relationship, our personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
In John 15:12, He says, "This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you." The command to love one another isn't divorced from the mandate to keep His commandments or the fellowship. They go together. In John 15:13 He then said, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." So that indicates that there is a sacrificial element to it. By sacrificial element what we simply mean is that rather than just do what we want to do out of self-absorption we want to do what's best for someone else. That's the idea in using the term sacrificial.
 
Then in 1 John 4:20-21, "If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also." Remember that 1 John is a commentary, as it were, by the Apostle John probably some 50 years after He heard the Upper Room discourse in about 33 A.D., the night before Jesus goes to the Cross and then some 50 to 60 years later the Apostle John writes the 1st epistle of 1 John which is basically a commentary or an expansion on what Jesus had taught them. You can't really understand 1 John unless you've gone through the Upper Room discourse and understood that.
So John says here that if someone says he loves God but hates his brother he's not going to be what is called a "Philadelphian", someone who loves his brother here in Romans 12. If you hate your brother you are a liar because he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom we he not seen? Loving God is related to obedience to God so if you're being disobedient and hating your brother then you don't have a relationship with God, you're out of fellowship. By relationship I mean fellowship, not salvation.
 
So we go back to Romans 12:10, "{Be} devoted [kindly affectionate] to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor." Now as I got into this it was difficult to deal with this in terms of the Greek. It appears in the English that there's a command. Every version translates this as a command but you'll notice that the word translated "kindly affectionate" is PHILOSTORGOS. The last part refers to a stork. A mother stork has a great motherly affection for their young and so STORGEO was a word used to describe motherly love in Greek. Now this is a compound noun based on that, meaning devoted to someone, loving them, having a tender affection, particularly a family affection. So that's the first word but notice that this word is an adjective. It's not a verb. It's not an imperative. The next word is ALLELONE, one another, which is not a verb, and then you have PHILOS for brotherly love. Where do you find a verb in that?
 
So last week I was scratching around, digging around, reading footnotes and all these heavy commentaries trying to find someone who'd give me a clue as to why everyone is translating this as a verb and I found a reference to a book that I went and grabbed out of my books in print. There's still a few books you need to have in print because they're not electronic yet and I found in a footnote [there's some great stuff buried in footnotes] which said there was an idiomatic use of the adjective in Greek that had an imperatival value. See you can express an imperative as we do in this section with a participle but a participle is a verbal adjective so apparently in the use of language they slipped over from using a participal in an adjectival sense to just using an adjective as an imperative. This is one of the few place in the New Testament where we have this kind of an idiom but it's expressing this as a command that we are to be devoted like a family-member, a loving family member.
 
I always have to qualify this because some people come out of really messed up families. This is a really good family where the family members really care and love each other and so we are to have that kind of care and concern for other believers. Even when they're not worth it. It's really hard to love the unlovely and there are unlovely people in every congregation. But there's not an asterisk that says you need to love them afar. That's not in any textual variant I've found. I haven't found anything in the margin. It's not qualified here. It says to be kindly affectionate or devoted in love to one another. It's simply there and it doesn't say except for that one person you don't really like, that one person who just fell off the watermelon truck yesterday. It doesn't have that. There's no exception. There's no qualification. We are to love everybody in the body of Christ the same way because our love isn't based on who they are. It's not based on who we are. It's based on the character of God that doesn't change. Sometimes we have to do it by the numbers and say, "Okay, I really don't like this person. There's something about them that just really grates on me but God loves them with an infinite stable unchanging love so I'm just going to focus on following God's pattern and just trip along on that."
 
So we're to be devoted to one another in terms of family love to one another with brotherly love, from PHILASTORGOS to PHILADELPHIA and then it's explained further in the last phrase, "in honor giving preference to one another." This is the opposite of self-absorption. You can't do this when you're operating on the sin nature. The sin nature is saying it's all about me and this command is saying it's all about the other person no matter how much you dislike them. We're to give preference to one another. The verb here is PROEGEOMAI which means to go before to give them preference, to elevate them, and to make them the focus of attention and not put that focus of attention on yourself. 
 
Paul goes on in Romans 12:11 saying, "Not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." There are three different principles here. Again he uses some different grammatical constructions. I point this out because whenever you go outside the norm in a grammatical construction it really strikes the reader in a different way and it catches their attention. In the ancient world they used these kinds of things to emphasize, to highlight, to boldface. They didn't have the ability to do those things so they did it with grammar.
 
The word for "not lagging" is the Greek word OKNEROS meaning that you shouldn't be hesitant; you shouldn't lag behind; you shouldn't be timid; you should be aggressive; you should be outgoing in other words in your diligence. You should make it a point to be diligent. The word for diligent here is SPOUDE. The verb is SPOUDAZO. This is the word translated in the KJV as "study to show yourself approved unto God." That word translated study really doesn't mean study. It means to be diligent in the NASB, the NIV, and the other modern translations. But the context in talking to Timothy was that he should be diligent in a particular area, which is his study of the Word so it's appropriately translated study but the verb form of this noun means to be diligent, to have a zealous pursuit of something, to exert yourself 150% in a certain direction. So we are not to be hesitant or timid in our diligence. We're to have a passion about our spiritual life and a passion about the Word of God. We should be excited about it, "not lagging or not hesitant or not timid in our diligence".
 
Then the next phrase says, "Fervent in the Spirit." Now this does not mean we're to be jumping pews and having some sort of Charismatic experience. It's talking about having a passion for our spiritual life. The word "fervent" is ZEO a word that is used literally to mean bringing something to a boil and figuratively it has the idea of being ardent, aggressive or passionate about something. Then it's followed by the phrase EN PNEUMATE, a phrase Paul used many, many times. Here in this passage, at least in the NKJ version the spirit is translated with a lower case "s". There is a lot of debate in this passage whether this really isn't the Holy Spirit but is the human spirit, that you should be passionate in your human spirit about the Word. I tend to favor the fact that since Paul uses the phrase in numerous places to describe doing something by means of the Spirit, in dependence upon God the Holy Spirit, being filled by the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, and a number of other passages that what he's talking about here is not just getting all worked up and being just passionate about something but it is a passion that comes from walking by the Spirit. It's again something produced in us through God the Holy Spirit. We have a passion, a desire to live the Christian life serving the Lord.
 
I didn't put the Greek word up for serving. It means in a broad sense of the term walking in obedience to the Lord, serving Him, and doing what it says to do in terms of the mandates for the Christian life. So notice that the "fervent" here is a present active participle. It's not an adjective used like an imperative here. It's a participle used like an imperative. That's what we're going to see in the next verse. You have three participles, all present active participles, rejoicing, being patient, and continuing steadfastly. So the first one is "rejoice in hope". Hope is a confident expectation of something. Every time you see the word hope you need to think of something in the future, because of a future reality we can have a present optimistic attitude that no matter how negative the circumstances are around us, no matter how difficult things may appear, because we have an expectation of knowing God has a plan for our life and God is taking us through trials and tests and difficulties to bring us to spiritual maturity we can rejoice now because of that future hope.
 
James 1: 2-4 says, "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have {its} perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." It's not the normal human reaction to be joyful over difficulties. The normal human reaction is anger or fear or anxiety but it's not joy. For Christians, we're not joyful because we're masochistic and we just want to revel in the negative. We're joyful because we know that God has a plan as James is pointing out. The testing of our faith is not necessarily fun or enjoyable but because we understand that this is how we grow and this is how the Lord has designed us to mature we can have a hope and joy now because we understand what the game plan is.
 
So that connects it to the next phrase in Romans 12:12 which is "persevering [being patient] in tribulation". Now the word here for patient is a word that is familiar to those who have gone through the James study, HUPOMENO and its noun HUPOMENE relate to endurance, to hang in there. HUPO is the prefix and MENO is the verb which means to abide or remain so it means to remain under, to stay in the circumstances. It doesn't mean to think that when things get tough you can bail out and go somewhere else. Sometimes the greatest growth that occurs in our Christian life is when we're going through really intense suffering, when we're going through intense difficulty and it just seems like things are hitting us left and right, one thing after another, and there's no letup and we're just ready to scream and yet that's when we're going through an intensified period of spiritual growth if we take advantage of it and walk by the Spirit and we keep on target so that's what HUPOMENO refers to.
 
1 Corinthians 10:13 says, "No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it." To escape it doesn't mean to avoid it but to escape the aversive consequences of the adversity so that we may handle it. Often you hear this little truism that God wouldn't let you go through it unless you could handle it. There's a certain amount of truth to that but too often I hear people saying that to people who haven't a clue and probably aren't even believers. If you're a member of God's royal family God does have a plan for you and He is taking you through things and if he's taking you through it He knows you have the resources. Why? Because you have the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit; you have the filling of the Holy Spirit; you have the Word of God, and you should have been taught at least the rudimentary principles of the faith-rest drill of trusting in God, claiming promises, to get through those difficult times. That's how we can bear it as believers.
 
Then the last phrase is being "devoted [continuing steadfastly] in prayer". That's PROSKARTEREO which means to persevere. It's a synonym for HUPOMENO but it means to continuously do something and that you're not going to get distracted from it. You're not going to get thrown off balance and off-target. It's the word used in Colossians 4:2 when Paul says to continue earnestly in prayer, being vigilant in it with thanksgiving. That's PROSKARTEREO. It means to hang in there, to be steadfast in prayer, day in and day out.
 
How many times have you had this experience? I'd had it and I think every Christian has when you say, "Okay I've got to set up a specific time every day where I'm going to pray and I'm going to read my Bible."? The next morning something happens. The next morning something happens. It's just anything to knock you off course. But the point is that we need to set up a regular disciplined schedule in our lives for prayer and to read the Word of God. That performs a personal foundation for us in our walk with God.
 
Christians need to read the Word. Every now and then someone asks me a question as I was asked in the Bible Study Methods class recently, "What is the role of personal Bible study in the life of the believer with reference to the pastor-teacher?" There are some people who get the idea that they shouldn't read their Bible. I've heard little timid Christians who think, "Oh if I read my Bible. I'll get confused." Let me tell you, if you don't read your Bible you will get confused even here on Tuesday night, Thursday night, and Sunday morning because you don't have a frame of reference. Every believer needs to read their Bible.
 
Now you're going to come across verses and say, "Now that really doesn't sound like what I've been taught." I run across verses like that and there's all kind of issues related to hermeneutics and related to language and related to the traditional way in which some verses have been translated. You just put a question mark there and move on. You don't let it cause you to stumble. We all grow at different rates and we learn and resolve problems at different times. I tell you, with all the years I've studied and if I live to be a hundred with a clear mind I will have a list 200 yards long with questions about the Bible to take to the Lord. We're going to be discussing some of these things for a long time.
 
Some passages are just difficult to understand. That's true for everybody. We need to be knowledgeable. We need to know the stories of the Bible. They need to be familiar. As you read through them, you'll underline passages that come across and see that it's a great promise that you need to remember. You ought to index things. If you see a great little verse related to the angelic conflict, make a note in the margin or top of the page and write a word. If it's about the omniscience of God, write omniscience in the margin so that the next time you wonder where you read a great passage you can thumb your way through and find the note. So you write down notes, you underline passages, you're reminded of promises and you memorize that. Let me see, "Jesus wept. Maybe I can remember that tomorrow." Or how about "pray without ceasing"? That's really the shortest verse in the Bible because it's only two words in the Greek. So we need to continue in prayer, focus on these basic things, pray, read your Bible every day. If you read five chapters a day, which takes about eight minutes, some are longer, some are shorter, and you'll read through the whole Bible in a year. It doesn't take long. Anyone can do it. You do that through three or four years and you're going to have a pretty good understanding of the flow of Scripture. You'll be surprised at what you know. All of a sudden things that are said on Sunday morning, or Tuesday or Thursday night, will make little light bulbs go off all the time as you remember. It'll start making sense.
 
We need knowledgeable congregations so you need to pray and you need to read your Bible every day. In Romans 12:13, Paul says, "Contributing [distributing] to the needs of the saints." It's the verb KOINONEO which means to have fellowship or to share or take part in something so you should share with the needs of the saints. This also relates to love being without hypocrisy and being kindly affectionate as you help one another, those who are having difficulties. Someone's having trouble with the job. It's not necessarily financial. Someone has trouble finding a babysitter. Someone is a young mother and they really don't know what to do with a kid. You can help them out. There are a lot of ways in which we can share in the needs of the saints.
 
Then it says, "Practicing [given to] hospitality." The pastor's conference is a great time for this. There are a couple of pastors I know that come to the conference that are great individuals but they work jobs that barely take care of their families and they come to a conference which is not inexpensive, which is one reason we don't charge. Someone has to pay. There are those that God has provided for who help with donations and that supplies the needs but some can't afford three nights at a hotel room which costs $300.00 plus their airfare and whatever. It's a great opportunity for folks to open up their homes and to provide a place for them to stay.
 
The word for given here is DIOKO. Now DIOKO has two meanings. Its core meaning is to pursue something rigorously but when you do it in a positive sense that's helping, and when you do it in a negative sense it's persecuting. The word can go either way. In fact, it's translated in Romans 12:14 as persecute. Here it's positive. It's not persecuting people when you open your home to be hospitable. That's not what it says. You're pursuing hospitality. You're looking for opportunity to help out those who are in need. They're strangers.
 
The word for hospitality is PHILOXENIA. That's PHILOS the noun for love and XENIA like xenophobia, someone who is fearful of a stranger or of someone of a different race, like the French are. I'm not making a nasty comment about the French. I just always thought it was interesting that in English we refer to foreigners as aliens. In French, they're strangers. I always thought that said a lot about the French mind-set. If you're not French you're a stranger. If you're English, if you're not English, you're an alien. So we should be given to hospitality, ready to open up our homes to others.
 
Then in Romans 12:14 Paul sums it up, "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse." Now this reminds us of what we covered just a couple of weeks ago in our passage on Sunday morning in Matthew 5. See this thread runs all the way through Scripture. Loving one another and loving others who are not believers doesn't necessarily refer to those who are being nice to you. We're to bless those who curse you.
 
Now the word here for bless is the word EULOGEO. This is where we get our English word eulogy. It means to say something nice. It's not the word MAKARIOS which is in Matthew 5 and means to be happy. It's translated blessed are those who are persecuted. Here it means to say something genuinely nice. Remember love is without hypocrisy. It means it doesn't have a hidden agenda. Here it's saying something good and meaning it to those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse. Say something positive to them and do not speak ill of them. So we're to speak well of those who persecute us.
 
Just to remind you of Matthew 5:43 and following. "You've heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy but I [Jesus] say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you." So Paul is saying the exact same thing that Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. Why? That you may be sons of your Father in Heaven. A mature son. You have to learn how to have impersonal love for all mankind, even those who hate you and persecute you if you're going to reach spiritual maturity and "be sons of your Father in Heaven."
 
Matthew 5:47, "For if you love those who love you, what reward is it?" How difficult it is to love people who love you, who treat you nice, who take care of you? But to love someone who spitefully uses you and ridicules you. Now that's where it's difficult. We'll stop at Romans 12:14 tonight and we'll come back with verse 15 and probably be able to finish the rest of this.

Romans 136b-Living in Peace

Romans 12:17 NASB95
Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men.
Romans 136b-Living in Peace Romans 12:17-18
 
Before we get started tonight in our study in Romans I wanted to just give you a little bit of an update or a review on some things that I learned over the last couple of days. I was invited by some friends to go to a JINSA Conference, which stands for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. It was founded by a Houstonian, I believe, Tom Neumann. He’s had some health problems and they’re transferring the baton of leadership to a younger man, Michael Makovsky. I’ve known Mike for four or five years because I picked up a book called Churchill’s Promised Land which he wrote. I highly recommend it as a study dealing with the whole history of Zionism. He was one of the speakers last night.
 
We met at a private home over in the Memorial area. There were about 80 people there. The two primary speakers were Ambassador John Bolton and Michael Makovsky. And then, because this was also done under the auspices of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, David Dewhurst spoke briefly. There were a couple of other notables there who have a foundation and background with JINSA. Apparently David Dewhurst was the assistant director back in the 80s and was very much involved with Tom Neumann when he started JINSA, as was former congressman, Tom Delay, who was also present last night. Some others that were there were the former chairman of the board for the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., several other very influential players in pro-Israel politics in this country and so it was a very significant crowd who had quite an education.
 
Yoram Ettinger was there also and he spoke at an event this morning. Yoram told me I needed to get the video from the event. There were two things last night apparently. There was a dinner and the host who had us in his home spoke a good bit about Ukraine. There were two things going on in the topic, the thread of conversation through last night’s events and today’s events that are near and dear to my heart and our hearts. Number one was Israel and Iran and number two, the intersection of this Ukrainian issue with Russia and how those things are somewhat intersecting. So it was very informative.
 
The views of all the speakers were fairly conservative. I’m just going to review without necessarily attributing to a speaker who said what because that’s not that important and I don’t know if I can properly sort out who said what. I wrote down some key basic observations just to give you some basic bullet points of what came out of the presentations. The first point I’ll emphasize was stated by both speakers and they supported each other and that is that after the way the U.S. has handled the situation in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine, we have learned that the U.S. cannot be trusted to carry out its word and to fulfill its obligations to its allies. The international community has learned this as well. No one can trust this government to do or to undergo its obligations.
 
One of the things that the host spoke about last night is interesting because he was originally from Kharkov in the Ukraine. He was a “refusnik” which meant a group of Jews that were trying to get out of Russia in the late 70s and early 80s but could not be granted exit visas so they were called “refusniks” and he was among that group before he and his wife finally made their way to Houston. He spoke a little about this. It goes back to the 1995 Budapest Memorandum which was affirmed by then Ukrainian present, Leonid Kuchma who was just as bad as Yanukovych, along with Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and John Major who was the Prime minister of Britain at the time. These countries agreed and promised to respect the independence of the then existing borders. That’s the exact wording of the Budapest Memorandum. That’s the then existing borders of Ukraine and it includes Crimea. And it said they would refrain from the threat and use of force against the territorial integrity and political independence of Ukraine. So when Putin sent his troops into Crimea he violated this.
 
It was on the basis of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that the Ukrainians gave up all their nuclear weapons. One of the things that has always come out of history if we learn anything from recent history is that you’re going to survive you must have nuclear weapons and you’re going to be a victim to be attacked if you don’t have nuclear weapons and this is the lesson that the Ukrainians have just recently learned. But what has happened because of this violation of international law by Russia and the West’s inability to do anything? They have been basically rendered impotent due to the economy and due to over commitment of military forces all around the world, especially the U.S. Now y’all need to get some maps and put them up and become familiar with this area. One of the problems Americans have is that we’re geographically impoverished and we don’t understand how these things relate and why they are significant. We don’t realize that everything’s global now and this impacts economics, impacts trade, and impacts many things that come right home to roost even though they’re not domestic policy. We cannot afford as Americans to be myopic and just focus on domestic policies. That’s the history of this country. We just want to sit around and worry about what’s in our checking account and make sure we have a good job and a paycheck and health care and nothing else matters.
 
All of those things I just mentioned that are domestic policy are really contingent upon where we sit in the world in terms of trade, the value of the dollar, and many other factors. The impotence of the U.S., and our failure to act, has basically rendered us a fool in the eyes of the world. In terms of relation to Iran this means that our enemies have no reason to fear us. We can draw red lines in the sand all day long but every time we let someone cross them and cross them and cross them, no one’s going to pay attention. So our enemies have no reason to fear us and our friends have no reason to trust us.
 
The second thing that came out of a very interesting speaker today. He’s an orthodox Jew, stands about six four, thin, long beard. He wears a bowler. I’ve seen all kinds of hats in the Old City. Those of you who have been there know what I’m talking about but I have never seen a bowler. Afterwards when I was introduced to him I said, “I’m really curious. I know that all the different hats indicate different Polish villages that different rebbis came from but I’ve never seen a rebbi wearing a bowler.” He took it off and spun it on the table and it was a riding bowler that’s a helmet. He said, “This way it doesn’t get crushed when I’m flying on the airplane.” How practical. It also looks distinctive. And this guy was just a brilliant security analyst, his specialty is on oil and energy security. He talked about all these other things because that’s what everyone else was talking about. He told us a little bit about his background. He was called in to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff on cyber security. Get that picture in your mind. The Joints Chiefs of Staff with their regalia of medals and their military uniforms and an orthodox Jew with his frock coat, his long beard, bowler, and prayer shawl, briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff on cyber security two weeks after 911. He was quite interesting and quite conservative. At least 3 times while he was speaking he affirmed that he was a social conservative, a fiscal conservative, and a political conservative. That’s the only way it works. You need to have all three.
 
His first point was that evil must be recognized. If we’re not dealing with our enemies on the basis of accepting reality of the existence of evil then we’re living in a fantasy world and we’re going to be destroyed. Then he built the rest of his case upon that. It was interesting that earlier the president of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, a retired major-general who had been responsible for carrying the atomic nuclear information missile launch codes for President Reagan gave a thirty minute talk about President Reagan. He pointed out that Ronald Reagan had identified the USSR, against the advice of all his advisors, as the “Evil Empire”. But it was the use of that term that really spoke to the heart of Gorbochov, and to the heart of numerous Russians and to a number of Americans who realized when he identified the USSR as an evil empire they knew there was someone in America who understood the real issue and the Soviet Union’s days were numbered. I believe and I’ve said this since 911 that when President Bush came out and identified the “Axis of Evil” that this is what caused the Left to hate him so much. As soon as you identify their actions as coming out of an absolute immoral position of evil which runs completely counter to their whole relativistic mentality then you have challenged everything in their world view. That’s why they hated him so much. It wasn’t just because of individual policies. They hated him because he challenged their core world view, their whole spiritual atheistic-secular outlook on life where there is no such thing as evil.
 
A third thing that came out of the talks is that since the brokered deal with Iran back in September that was for six months, that Iran has gained at least an extra twelve billion dollars in revenue they wouldn’t have had. Probably by the time it’s up in June it will be another five billion in income but just in case you missed it, it’s already been announced that it’s not enough time so we’re going to have to extend the deal by at least another six months, which gives the Iranians more and more time to get more and more money. We had them on the ropes in terms of the sanctions because they were beginning to starve to death because they didn’t have income. Now they’ve got plenty of income coming in.
The fourth point is that the twenty-eight nations in the EU are already fragmenting and the EU is on the ropes and we don’t know how much longer it’s going to last. Basically German and Austria are carrying the EU and they’re regretting it. There’s a lot of anger and resentment towards the rest of Europe. Southern Europe is in massive unemployment. Spain, Southern Italy, Greece, and a couple of other areas have 20-25% unemployment. They’re in deep depression and they’re losing businesses to the point where it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to ever recover. When we read about Lady Catherine Ashton negotiating with the Russians over Ukraine, it’s not good. Hers is a name you need to recognize. She’s gone to Israel several times. She’s a virulent anti-Semite. What is she bargaining with when she talks to Putin? Europe doesn’t have anything to threaten them with or to offer them. So when we hear that she’s gone to talk to Ukraine and the Russians, what’s her bargaining position? There is none.
 
Another point which I thought was interesting because I hadn’t thought of it in these terms but a couple of different speakers addressed it this way. Yoram was one who didn’t really think that Iran was that close to producing a bomb, a couple of others did as well. They used the analogy that in terms of enriching uranium you can refine gasoline all day long but that doesn’t mean you’re going to build a car. The Iranians are enriching uranium like crazy but unless they have help outside of Iran they don’t have the capacity to produce the weapon system needed to carry the weapon. Unless they can do that, they’re probably not a threat yet. But guess what, this morning or late yesterday the Russian foreign minister issued a veiled threat that if Obama continues the sanctions against Russia for the actions in Crimea then they might rethink their commitment to sanctions against Iran and everything else related to Iran. So if the Russians were to help Iran, then we would be in a world of hurt.
 
That leads to my next point which I think Henry LeHavre or something like that said that what’s going on right now is not that similar to 1938 as a lot of people think. The Nazis went into Sudetenland and then went into Czechoslovakia. He says it’s not 1938. In 1938 you had one major evil empire which was the Nazis. You had the Italians and you had the Japanese which were not big of a threat to the west at least. He said today Japan has been replaced by China which is much more to be feared than the Japanese. We have Iran and we have Russia. The connection of Iran, Russia, and China together is a much bigger threat than what we’ve faced before. So it’s not 1938. It’s much, much worse.
 
And then the seventh point is that I thought was also an interesting observation or opinion is that Putin is very likely to keep out of Eastern Ukraine. Despite the fact that due to our satellites we know they’ve amassed 80,000 troops on the border. They’re making a threat but if Putin goes in and he carves off those provinces in Eastern Ukraine, according to the speaker and leaves the rest of Ukraine then he’s going to leave a parliament in Ukraine that is purely anti-Russian. If he leaves it alone and the pro-Russian provinces are still part of Ukraine then they will elect pro-Russian parliament members and you contribute to more and more instability in Ukraine. Russia’s whole objective is for Ukraine to stay neutral and not as an ally of the west.
 
That goes to another point related to the problem with the United States policy is that at the end of Bush’s era there was a big move for the Baltic States, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to join NATO. There was a push for Ukraine to join NATO but Russia was making such a big stink about it that the Europeans backed off. This was the time Barack Obama was elected president. We should have gone back and continued to push that because the idea is that if we can pull Ukraine into the western orbit that pushes the borders of Russia back even further. They just completely dropped the ball. They have no interest in foreign affairs whatsoever because their whole objective is to remake American culture and to change Americans socially and they really don’t care what’s going on in the rest of the world. The inner sanctum that makes most of the decisions in the White House has very little foreign policy experience because it doesn’t really matter to them. What matters to them is irreversibly changing American culture. So what we’re left with is that the west is completely impotent. We can’t do anything even if we wanted to do anything. We think it’s too far away, Ukraine is right on Russia’s doorstep, the supply chain would be far too long and many other problems so there’s nothing we can actually do about Ukraine. Mother Russia is now on the rise. There’s nothing the west can do about it even if we wanted to and yet this is going to be the future that will challenge us.
 
Some of us remember that when the Soviet Union broke up in the early 90s we had a pastor that very clearly predicted that the Russian bear was wounded but not down and it would be back. And it’s coming back under Putin. The last thing to really lift your spirits this evening is that all these speakers agreed, a nuclear Iran is a foregone conclusion unless the Israelis do something. The Israelis recognize as does everybody else that if they’re going to do anything they’re going to do it without us. They’re not even going to tell us when they’re going to do it because they can’t trust the United States any more. That’s the only way we’re going to stop a nuclear Iran is if the Israelis do it. They’ve been working on it in lots of ways to see if they can possibly do it.
 
Now having brought all that to your attention, I want to bring a little Scripture to your attention related to this before we get into our Romans passage. We have an election coming up this year and it’s a vital election and it’s important for us to throw the Democrats out of office. That is my opinion. We need to throw the Democrats out of office because they fight lockstep. You don’t ever hear a Democrat calling another Democrat “DINOs”. Republicans need a leader, they need a strategy, and they need to pull together despite differences because party really does matter when you get into Washington. Party politics really does matter and as conservatives and Republicans if we continue to be fragmented then we will be rolled over once again by people who want to destroy this country and who are operating on evil belief systems and evil presuppositions.
 
Fortunately, history is controlled by the Lord Jesus Christ, who is God. We need to be involved in politics, not because we trust man but because that’s our responsibility under our Constitution. As citizens of the United States it is part of our responsibility to be knowledgeable voters and to be involved in this civic process to whatever degree we can. It doesn’t mean we’re trusting in man because the Scripture says in Jeremiah 17:5, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength.” We have to recognize that ultimately the only real permanent solution is a spiritual solution. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t secular decisions and secular solutions for secular problems because I believe that there are.
 
It’s just like if you have a problem at your bank and you have an overdraft the solution is to first of all pray about the situation and then get some money into the bank to correct the overdraft problem and if necessary, get a second job. That’s how it works. We pray to the Lord because we believe the Lord controls history but we also have to start the lawnmower and go out and cut the grass if we’re praying about the problem of overgrown grass to be solved.
 
So just because we get involved in politics doesn’t mean our ultimate trust is in man because this is what Scripture says. The contrast is "Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose hope (confidence) is in the Lord for he shall be like a tree planted by the waters which spreads out its roots by the river and will not fear when heat comes.” Heat there refers to adversity coming. We won’t be afraid because we know that no matter what happens God is going to take care of us even if that means He’s going to take us home. It finishes, “And will not be anxious in the year of drought nor will cease from yielding fruit.” We do not live in a good world.
 
When I was talking to this one speaker at the end I said, “You talked about so many different things in forty-five minutes that I’m trying to figure out how to summarize it.” He said, “It’s real simple. There is a hell and we’re living in it.” But there’s hope for the believer. Let me take you to one more passage before we get into Romans and that is at the end of Habakkuk. Habakkuk is one of the Minor Prophets coming after Nahum and just before Zephaniah. Habakkuk is a great book to preach through. I’ve gone through it in one shot before. It is the realization on the part of the prophet, Habakkuk, to focus on the Lord alone and that he will have joy no matter what the external circumstances will be. He begins by asking a qu3estion. He looks out on the scene of the culture in Judah in approximately 605 to 607 B.C. and he says, “Lord these people are pagan. They’re perverted. They’re twisted. They’re antagonistic to you. They’re idolatrous. Why won’t you punish them?” and the Lord said, “Guess what, Habakkuk. I’ve got these people over here, the Iranian…no, whoops, the Chaldeans, same part of the world, okay, the Chaldeans and they’re on the way and they’re going to take care of the problem.” And Habakkuk said, “What? How can you use those horrible people? They’re worse than we are? How can you use them to punish us?” So in the chapter you get a meditation on God’s answer to Habakkuk’s objection. Then Habakkuk, after meditating on it, recognizes that God has the right to rule His creation absolutely.
 
When it comes to the end of the book, like most of us if judgment is coming Habakkuk realizes he’s going to lose all of his security. He’s going to lose all his comfort. He’s going to lose everything he likes in life. What in the world am I going to do? Because if the Chaldeans come, he’s going to lose everything. And this is how he ends in Habakkuk 17:3, “Though the fig tree should not blossom…” In other words if there’s no food at the grocery store. “And there be no fruit on the vines,” There’s no paycheck.  “{Though} the yield of the olive should fail And the fields produce no food,” The grocery stores can’t get any food because there’s nothing being produced by the farmers. “Though the flock should be cut off from the fold And there be no cattle in the stalls…” Right now our beef supplies are the lowest they’ve been since the early 50’s and beef prices are about to skyrocket. It’s a good time to go on a diet where you’re not spending as much money on red meat. Basically what he’s summarizing in verse 17 is that even if he loses all the details of life, security, comfort, the house I want to live in, the car I want to drive, in fact, I don’t even have a car because everything’s been lost with the economy turned upside down. Though I lose everything near and dear to me, he continues in Habakkuk 3:18, “Yet I will exult in the LORD, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation”.
 
That is what we talk about when we talk about doctrinal orientation and grace orientation, when we talk about the problem-solving devices, that’s what we’re focusing on. It’s because we have a love for the Lord. Personal love for the Lord. All of those are mixed in with the application of that verse. Then comes the last of the problem-solving devices, sharing the happiness of God. Habakkuk 3:19 says, “The Lord GOD is my strength, And He has made my feet like hinds’ {feet,} And makes me walk on my high places. For the choir director, on my stringed instruments.” It’s not the military that’s our strength. The military was never the strong point in the Old Testament. They didn’t defeat the Canaanites because they had a superior technology. They didn’t defeat the Canaanites because they had a superior officer corps. They did not defeat the Canaanites because they had a superior non-commissioned officer corps. They did not defeat the Canaanites because they were superior in numbers. They defeated the Canaanites because they trusted in the Lord. “The battle is the Lord’s.”
 
Unless there is a spiritual solution all of these other solutions are simply temporary fixes on a flat tire. They’re just patches. You’ve got to replace the tire. There has to be a change in the culture or we are doomed. But as believers that’s not bad. Our joy is not in the culture. Our joy is in the Lord. Then Habakkuk concludes, "The Lord God is my strength. And He has made my feet like hinds’ feet and makes me walk on my high places [hills]. For the choir director on my stringed instruments.” If you’re a Texas you have to be careful about those high hills because you might want to pronounce that high heels but you have to articulate. Habakkuk recognizes that joy is not in the details of life, it’s not in the things we have. It’s not even in the people around us. It’s not in things going to way we would like things to go. Our joy needs to be oriented to the plan of God and when we’re oriented to the plan of God and understand that He rules history and when our mental attitude is aligned with His plan, we have joy no matter what the circumstances might be.
 
So, things aren’t rosy but that’s okay. We have a God who’s in control of everything and we can have an influence in this nation because we’re believers and we can be involved in the problem solving areas that have been established by the government and by our Constitution and we can have an impact. That’s part of our responsibility. But a greater part of our responsibility as believers is that we need to really know the Word because one of the things that’s coming out of Ukraine is this. If we ever get to the point where we’re like Ukraine it is a great opportunity for believers to know the Word. That’s one thing that’s coming out again and again is these people who have been trained by Jim Meyers and others in Ukraine are having an impact on the people. There is a great receptivity to the Gospel now and to the truth. And not only is there a great receptivity to the truth but these people who have come out of that ministry and have been studying the Word for the last ten, twelve, fifteen years have a stability of their souls in the midst of this Russian threat that is at their front door. That’s why we need to be in Bible class all the time. We need to be studying the Word, keeping our focus off the details of life and on to what really matters.
 
Okay, now, open your Bibles to Romans 12. We’re going through various principles here related to the Christian life. Romans 12:15 says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” Basically I think a lot of what is developed in verses 9 through 21 has to do with some form of the expression of love, either impersonal love for all mankind or personal love for God.
 
This is a tough subject for a lot of us to focus on. Loving one another is great when the one another’s we’re loving are lovable, when they’re nice, when they’re clean, when they’ve had a shower but it’s hard to love the unlovable. It’s hard to express this kind of love with people who are obnoxious, with people who are not physically attractive. By that I don’t mean simply looking good but there are people who have myriads of other problems because maybe they don’t bathe, or they don’t dress in clean clothes or any number of other factors. It’s easy to dismiss them. There’s not a qualification in these commands. We have to understand what it means to love because it doesn’t have that simplistic, superficial, shallow motive meaning that most people think.
 
Love means doing the right thing, the best thing for the object of love. But that presupposes that you’re able to understand that value. What is best? What is right? It’s not just what’s right for me. Too often what you see in marriage ceremonies when two people are declaring their love for another is a hidden text that says, “I love you and I’m going to give you the opportunity to love me back for the rest of my life and make me feel just the way you’ve always made me feel.” This is a great opportunity to do that.
 
We often come from a selfish set of standards, not an objective set of standards, which is what the Word of God gives us. When we do that we’re able to get out of ourselves. Remember, our basic problem is that we’re self-absorbed. That’s the orientation of the sin nature. We come into life thinking it’s all about me and unless the “rod of correction” drives that far from us through parental training and unless we are taught from establishment truth and the Word of God, the problem we’ll discover is that when we reach our adolescent years it’s all going to be “about me” and we’re going to get into a lot of trouble. Then when we get into our twenties and thirties we’re going to have a lot of problems in our marriages and in our jobs because we’re going to think it’s “all about me”. The only way we can truly, genuinely avoid doing everything in life out of the pursuit of self-interest is to understand God’s plan and purpose for our life as an individual believer and then to start living in light of that.
 
 In that sense we can have genuine true compassion for other people. We can understand with empathy what they’re going through. We can rejoice with them when there are wonderful things in their life and we can weep with them when there are terrible things in their life so we learn to “rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep”. The word there for weeping is not just being upset and crying a little bit but someone who is so overwhelmed by adversities and disasters in life that they are wailing in distress over the things that have taken place.
Then in Romans 12:16 we read, “Be of the same mind toward one another.”  This means that are to treat everyone from the same framework. That framework, of course, is the Word of God. We are to treat one another as a fellow believer in the royal family of God. We are not to prefer one over the other as though one has a higher value than the other. So we are to think the same way. This is the word PHRONEO which means to be wise or to think. We are to think objectively toward one another but the only way we can think objectively is if we have an objective standard in our soul and that comes from the Word of God.
 
Unfortunately, there are too many people in our culture today that because they do not have the Word of God the only thing they operate on is their own self-interest. They’re self-absorbed. They may disguise it in numerous ways but ultimately the only motivation in their life is their own self-interest. So they need to learn to think differently. Remember in Romans 12:2 Paul said not to be conformed to the world. The world operates on a self-centered, self-absorbed modus operandi so we are not to be pressed into the mold of the world. We are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, the renewing of our thinking. So in Romans 12:16 Paul is expressing one of the ways we do that. We are to have the same thinking toward one another. Now one another doesn’t refer to people outside the body of Christ. This is talking about how we are to relate to one another in the body of Christ, that is to fellow believers no matter what their relationship is to us. We’re of the same mind, a mind of objectively toward one another.
 
Paul often teaches by contrast. He will state positively what we should do and then the negative that we should not do. He does this in areas where he’s teaching what Christians believe and then negatively what pagans believe. So here he’s talking contrasting behavior and thought here. We’re to have the same mind toward one another. We’re not to set our minds on lofty or high things, HUPSELOS. This has to do with things that are unrealistic, operating out of pride and arrogance. We’re not to set our mind on arrogant goals and objectives.
 
Then he goes on to say we are to “associate with the lowly [humble]”. Now this is a difficult passage to interpret the word there, translated associate, SUNAPAGO, which has the idea of being carried off or associated with humility. Then Romans 12:16 continues, “Do not be wise in your own estimation [opinion]. Then we come to Romans 12:17. Here he continues to develop the idea which started in verse 9 talking about letting love be without hypocrisy, abhorring what is evil. Now he says in Romans 12:17, “Never pay back evil for evil to anyone.’ When people do bad things to us, when people do things that hurt us, when people disappoint us, when people betray us, we are not to react in kind. As my mother used to say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” A right thing done in a wrong way is wrong so often when we retaliate in any way, shape or form, it is wrong. It is operating out of our own vindictiveness, trying to gain justice instead of leaving it in the Lord’s hands.
 
This is not only stated here in Romans 12:17; it’s also stated in other passages, such as 1Thessalonians 5:15a where Paul says, “See that no one repays another with evil for evil.” So in the first case in Romans 12:17 we have a present active participle, another one of these independent participles used with an imperatival sense. In 1 Thessalonians 5:15 the imperative is in the word “see”. It is a present active imperative of HORAO and he’s directing them to observe and watch over the behavior in the congregation to make sure that no one repays another evil for evil. So that the verb there, same verb APODIDOMI is in an aorist subjunctive which is put there because that’s the correct Greek syntax after you have a purpose clause. So it’s still an imperative. We are not to repay evil for evil.
 
Instead, we are to “Respect [have regard for] what is right in the sight of all men.” The word there is PRONOEO which is the verb form of the word NOUS which means to think. So this word indicates we are to think about our actions ahead of time, to take care of things beforehand, to take care of something beforehand or to think about it. In other words don’t just go through life reacting but to think about things ahead of time. We are to have regard or to think ahead of time, planning a course of action related to good things in the sight of all men. That qualifies it there. It’s not just talking about believers. It’s not one another. This applies to how the believer should even treat unbelievers. We are to treat them well, with impersonal love, even when they are undeserving. That is an expression of God’s grace.
 
If you don’t understand grace, you can’t understand love. That’s something that ought to be pounded into every teenager before they ever get old enough to ever think they’re in love. If you don’t understand grace, you can never understand genuine love. Because, for love to function, it must function on grace. Within any relationship there are going to be good things and bad things. There are going to be successes and there are going to be failures and we have to forgive one another. The principle for forgiving one another flows out of grace. Undeserved merit. Undeserved favor. Now this principle of not doing evil to others in return for evil is also expressed in other verses such as 1 Corinthians 13:5 where we’re told, “[Love] does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong {suffered,}.”
 
We have a love crisis in this country. Some politicians love to talk about crises. The more we have a crisis of arrogance and self-absorption, according to the Scripture, the less people can love. True love doesn’t “seek its own”. It’s not self-oriented but the more we have a culture that is based on self-absorption and arrogance, the less it’s able to genuinely love so they substitute sex. They substitute drugs. They substitute all kinds of things. They substitute pleasure for love but they don’t truly understand what love is. They substitute emotion and sentimentality for love but they don’t understand what that is. All of that just feeds a person’s own self-aggrandizement and it feeds their lust patterns.
 
So love thinks no evil. When you’re operating on Biblical love you’re not thinking evil about anyone, no matter what they have done to you and no matter how much they might deserve it. Then in Romans 12:18, Paul develops this even more. Not only are we not to repay evil for evil but we are to live peaceably with all men. This is expressing the positive. The negative was “Do not repay evil with evil.” The positive is, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.” Now the point here is developed from the conditional clause. The Bible is realistic. There are some people that just will never want to have a relationship with us. There are some people that because you’re a Christian, they won’t have anything to do with you. There are some people who, because of your personality, won’t have anything to do with you. There are some people who for any variety of reasons don’t want to have anything to do with you and you can’t change that and I can’t change that.
Paul qualifies his statement with a first class condition by saying, “If it is possible…” Now a first class condition indicates that the assumption is of truth for the sake of argument. It indicates the idea that something is possible. It doesn’t always mean “if, and it’s true” but instead it means “if and it’s likely.” In fact, though each of the conditional clauses have certain primary meanings they can all express more or less a condition of uncertainty. But here he’s says, “if and it’s possible.” In some sense it can be possible if we are trusting in the Lord. It may not be possible right away but we have to remember that with God all things are possible. He’s the One who makes it possible.
 
It may take years to solve some personal conflicts that have occurred. This is especially true within certain situations within families. It may take years to resolve some of those conflicts because they’re so deep-seated and so personal and so emotional. The word here is DUNATOS which is translated possible and emphasizes volition. It’s up to our volition to try to make it possible, to try to resolve conflicts, but some people won’t resolve conflicts. Some people are unwilling to admit failure. Some people are unwilling to admit fault. Some people are unwilling to admit they have a problem.
 
See this is the whole principle underlying 1 John 1:9. “If we confess our sins…” In the resolution of a break that occurs with God, God didn’t do anything wrong. We did. So what do we have to do in order to resolve the conflict and restore peace with God? We have to admit our wrongdoing. There can’t be a resolution without that. God isn’t just going to say, “Well, you’re really a nice person. I know you’re just a baby believer. You’re really a stupid believer but that’s not your fault so I’m just going to overlook it this time.” God doesn’t do that. God says there’s a basis for resolution and that is that the sin has to be dealt with. The sin isn’t dealt with by overlooking it.
 
Now a lot of people like to live in a world of fantasy where they don’t really have to deal with the difficult conflict issues. They don’t want to talk about it. It’s messy and it’s emotional and it’s hard to do. Sometimes people just don’t want to admit their own failure. So, okay, let’s just go on and act like it never happened. But that is merely putting a band aid on the problem. Sooner or later it won’t heal and that scab that grows over the wound is just going to be pulled loose and you’re just going to have the problem all over again. So there’s a recognition here that sometimes it’s not possible because some people just don’t want to do what’s necessary to live in peace because they don’t want to deal with the sin that’s the cause of the problem.
 
Paul recognizes that. He says, “If it’s possible, as much as depends on you…” Don’t let it be your fault that there’s a breach here. Let it clearly be the other person’s fault. You’ve done everything you can but they’re the ones who have to take the next step and make the admission of guilt. The word for “peaceable” in this verse is the verb EIRENEUO which means to have peace. It’s a present active participle again. As we’ve seen in the Greek grammar in these verses Paul is using adjectives with an imperatival force and he’s using participles with an imperatival force. So there is a command here that we are to live peaceable with all men.
 
 The word there for men is ANTHROPOS, not ANER. ANER is the word that can mean mankind, it usually means just males and ANTHROPOS means mankind, humanity, with everyone. So live peaceably with everyone. Now how do we do that? This is what’s difficult. I’m going to review this a few times. I’ve had a couple of questions on this because I was covering this in the 1 Thessalonians series when I’m absent. We have to understand that God has given us certain problem solving devices.
 
That term “problem-solving devices” grew out of a military background and a military idiom. When you go on an FTX, a field training exercise, as a commander, whether an officer or a non-commissioned officer, you’ll be presented with a problem. That problem will mean you are faced with some sort of challenge or difficulty that you have to resolve using the tools you’ve been given in your training. So in the Christian life we’re going to face certain situations. It may be some guy that cuts us off in traffic. It may be a family member that rejects us. It might be a financial problem. It might be unemployment. It could be any number of different situations but we must face it on the basis of the Word of God. So it’s a test in terms of what we’ve learned in Bible class.
 
Now the Apostle John in 1 John uses three different terms to refer to different stages in spiritual growth. The first is spiritual childhood, TEKNON and I relate these to five basic spiritual skills we have to learn and become adept at in order to get past spiritual childhood. It starts with confession because if we’re out of fellowship, then we’re just going to be doing everything in the power of the sin nature. So the first thing we have to do is make sure we’re walking by the Spirit, we’re in fellowship with God, and so we confess our sins.
 
The next thing we have to do is that we have to start “walking by the Spirit”. The filling of the Spirit is a passive concept. We’re to be filled by the Spirit. It’s a passive verb in Ephesians 5:18. The positive active command is given in Galatians 5:16 that we are to walk by means of the Spirit. It’s active. The instant we’re restored to fellowship we have to start walking by the Spirit. The trouble is a lot of people trip right away and they’re back out of fellowship and all they do is they bounce in and out of fellowship. We have to stay in fellowship. That’s the whole concept of abiding in Christ that the Scripture uses. So we have to learn to walk in dependence on the Spirit at which time He fills us with His word.
 
We then have to learn to trust God and we depend on His Word. We claim those promises. We mix our faith with promises of God. 2 Peter 1:3-4. This is combined with grace orientation. We understand the grace of God As we learn promises we usually learn something about God’s grace and we have to learn that God protects us not on the basis of who we are or what we’ve done but on the basis of His unconditional love for us. And that is grace.
 
And then the last is doctrinal orientation. We have to align our thinking to the Word of God. Now the faith-rest drill, grace orientation, and doctrinal orientation all work together in tandem. The faith-rest drill focuses our attention upon God’s Word. Doctrinal orientation focuses our attention upon God’s Word. Grace orientation focuses our attention of upon God’s provision of every resource we need to face any and every problem in life. These are foundational to all of the advanced spiritual skills.
 
If you don’t master grace orientation, you can never learn to love. If you don’t master doctrinal orientation, you can never learn to love. This is foundational so in spiritual adolescence as we develop in the first five skills we begin to realize we are living for another reason other than personal pleasure. We are living for the destiny God has for us. That is an eternal destiny to rule and reign with Christ so that we’re living today in the light of eternity. That’s our personal sense of our eternal destiny.
 
When teenagers get out of adolescence, they begin to postpone gratification and that’s called maturity. They’re beginning to postpone things and not live just in light of what I’m going to do today but what’s going to come a year or two or ten or fifteen or twenty down the road. So this is where you start making that transition into maturity and this is where a lot of Christians fail and fall out.
 
Then we get into the advanced spiritual skills. Personal love for God is where we learn to love God because we’re oriented to His word. You can’t really love someone you don’t know. Now that doesn’t mean we can’t love Him the way a child loves a parent but in terms of a mature love that only comes as we grow to a certain point in our spiritual growth.
 
Then we have an impersonal love for all mankind which doesn’t mean it’s distant. It doesn’t mean it’s not passionate. It doesn’t mean it’s not personal. It means we don’t necessarily have a relationship with the person you’re loving. It can be the person at the check-out stand. It can be the other person driving down the highway. It can be just anyone we’re talking to on the telephone. We don’t have to have a personal relationship with them in order to love them.
 
Then the next is our occupation with Christ and these three go together and they feed off of each other and they interact with each other. When we’re truly occupied with Christ and have personal love for God then the result of that is going to be a sharing of the happiness of God which we find in James 1:2. 
 
I’m going to wrap up in just a minute but I wanted to discuss our positional truth, our position in Christ. This is an absolute truth. We’re filled by the Spirit, we walk by the Spirit but we can sin which are temporal realities when we go out of fellowship. When we go out of fellowship the only way to have restored fellowship is to confess our sin and then we’re back in fellowship. But the question comes, “how do we stay in fellowship?” Well that’s the purpose of those spiritual skills.
 
Remember these are dynamic. You don’t learn them one at a time in this order. You learn them in a messy, dynamic sequence in life but if you put them in a circle, you can see the connection. How do you stay in that circle? By using these spiritual skills. When you don’t use them, you’re going to go out of fellowship. You stay in fellowship, you continue to abide in Christ by using the spiritual skills. When you fail, you have to confess your sin and you’re back in fellowship. You’re back inside the circle. You’re continuing to walk in the light. So what we’re focusing on in this passage in Romans in terms of learning how to live peaceably with all men is learning how to function by utilizing personal love for God, impersonal love for all mankind, and occupation with Christ. So next time we’re going to come back and we’re going to develop the doctrine of what it means to live at peace with all mankind.

Romans 137b-Principles for Peaceful Living

Romans 12:18 NASB95
If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.
Romans 137b-Principles for Peaceful Living Romans 12:18
 
Open your Bibles to Romans 12. We're closing in on the end of this chapter as we go through a series of commands that all relate to basic core principles in the Christian life. A number of them relate to what we call and have defined as impersonal love and unconditional love. I know that some people have trouble with the term impersonal love. It simply stresses the fact that you don't have to have a personal relationship with the person you're showing love to in order to show love to them. It's not based on a personal relationship. It's based on a mental attitude and a relationship with God. We're directing it toward other people whether we know them or not. We're treating them with goodness and kindness. We're treating them the way we would want to be treated in the same situation and the same circumstances.
 
Even though this is not a section that is giving a development of impersonal love, many of these principles or exhortations that Paul is laying down here relate to impersonal love. As we come to the passage we're in today, Romans 12:17 says, "Repay no one evil for evil." That is part of impersonal love. Do not react to people. Do not respond in bitterness to bitter statements. Do not respond in anger to angry statements. Do not respond with vindictiveness or vengeance. In other words, seek what is best for them. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men, that is things that are good and are generally held to be good by all men.
 
Romans 12:18 says, "If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men," This is a first class condition, indicating that it is possible because with God all things are possible. Then there's the phrase, "as far as it depends on you". There are many circumstances when we can't control how other people respond to us. We can't control what they think, what their opinions are, and how they react to us. All you can control is your own actions, your own thoughts, and your own behavior. So "if possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men."
 
Now there's a lot of confusion about what the Bible teaches about peace, which is why I want to drill down on this a little tonight. It's important for us to understand that this is a prime directive as part of our Christian life. So the concept of possibility from the word DUNATOS, indicating that which is possible sometimes has the idea of strength or capability or possibility. It emphasizes the individual volition and it really depends on us and how we are going to choose to respond to that situation. The main verb is a present active participle that has an imperatival sense to us that we are to live sensibly and to live at peace with all men. The word for men is the word ANTHROPOS which we could also translate as all human beings and all mankind. So this introduces us to how we do this.
 
Last time I went back into the spiritual skills. I call them spiritual skills because anything we do that becomes a skill is something we have to practice over and over and over. It may to some degree come naturally but in order to mature that skill we have to practice it over and over again. As we implement these ten spiritual skills or stress busters it enables us to grow as Christians. These ten spiritual skills basically summarize what the Bible teaches about the spiritual life.
 
In 1 John, John breaks down three levels of spiritual growth: spiritual childhood, spiritual adolescence, and the spiritual adult. These problem solving devices or spiritual skills can be structured according to when they are mastered in the spiritual life. Now that doesn't mean that if you're a young believer that you're not beginning to learn how to implement more advanced skills. You are but you're not really going to perfect them or mature them until you become a more mature believer. Growth is not static. In other words we can lay down a logical flow to how to grow but we don't grow in just that manner. Life is messy. Growth is messy. Learning anything follows a dynamic path and we learn something one day, we learn something else another day.
 
Sometimes we come to Bible class and we're in a section where we're dealing with more advanced doctrine. Other times we're dealing with more basic doctrine so someone who's a brand new believer may come into Bible class where Hebrews is being taught. They're learning more advanced doctrine. They may not comprehend it too well but they can still take home a lot from those studies. So they're learning more advanced doctrine and then maybe two or three years later they're learning at other levels. This is one reason why I don't teach the same thing every night, one class after another, but I break it up and have different studies going. This way I'm hitting different areas of life at different time. If you just stay in one book and go night after night after night in one book then it reduces everyone to the same structure. There are too many areas of life where we're all dealing with to limit it to the problems that we might face in Corinthians, for example. The same is what Hebrews relates to or Revelation relates to. So by looking at different books and different topical studies, you have a greater chance of hitting people where they're living.
 
So in terms of spiritual childhood, these are the basic spiritual skills and we have five of them. The first is confession of sin which merely means to admit or acknowledge sin to God the Father. The second is walking by the Spirit. Being filled by the Spirit is a passive thing whereas walking by the Spirit is an active imperative. I'm trying to put these in terms that are used in an active voice because that addresses the volition of the individual believer more directly. We choose to walk by the Spirit. We choose to not walk by the Spirit and that is related to the filling of the Spirit in Ephesians 5:18 and Galatians 5:16.
 
Then we have the faith-rest drill where we're mixing promises with faith. Then we have grace orientation where we are learning to deal with every issue in life on the basis of God's grace. God deals with us all the time on the basis of His grace, not on the basis of works and we need to learn to relate everything in our life on the basis of grace and not of works. This is important at this level because if you don't get grace orientation down it's hard to develop the more mature areas of love for God and impersonal love for all mankind. Those are grounded upon grace and they're grounded upon doctrinal orientation. So without grace orientation and doctrinal orientation, it's really difficult to develop maturity in the Christian life.
 
Doctrinal orientation is when we're aligning our thoughts and actions to what the Word of God says. So those three really go together in tandem: the faith-rest drill, grace orientation, and doctrinal orientation. Then as we transition from spiritual infancy to spiritual adulthood we come to understand this thing we call our spiritual sense of destiny which is that we have an eternal destiny. We're in a training camp. It's like we're in boot camp. When we graduate from boot camp in the military, based on how you performed there, you get various assignments. The better you do in boot camp the more options you have. The less well you do, the fewer options you have. So if you do well, you can have your pick of better options, better opportunities, better job descriptions, and better training. That's what happens in the Christian life. We are on a training program to prepare us to rule and reign with Christ in the Messianic Kingdom.
When we are promoted from this life, we go to the Judgment seat of Christ and there we'll be evaluated. On the basis of those rewards then our future responsibilities will be determined. So this is really important. I find this is where many people fail in the Christian life. They start off thinking they just want to learn basic things about Christianity and the Bible. A lot of people come to Christianity just sort of looking at the Bible and Christ as a Santa Claus who's going to solve all their problems. Then when they get out of the problems they're in and they reach a level of stability they began to coast. If we're going to grow, according to James 1: 2-4, we're going to encounter various trials that test our faith. Often this is where people check out. They just fail when they hit those maturity testings so they never quite get beyond this. They just fade out and you don't see them anymore.
 
Then in spiritual adulthood, we have four skills we develop. One is personal love for God. This is what motivates us because the more we learn what God has done for us, the more we respond to His love with love for Him. That motivates us because on the basis of understanding His love we're then able to love others. That's impersonal love for all mankind or unconditional love. Then comes occupation with Christ when we focus on the Lord. So those three work together in tandem.
 
The reason I put those last is because when I went through James years ago I realized that when James starts off saying we should "count it all joy when we encounter various trials" the rest of the epistle is designed to teach us how to do that. That's not an easy thing to do. People sometimes flippantly will say, "Well you're going through a tough time so remember to count it all joy." Yes, that's true but it's not an easy thing to do. This is not an elementary skill. It's a more advanced skill because you have to know and understand a lot of reality and a lot of doctrine to have your mental attitude so focused so that no matter what you encounter in life you're able to relax and have joy even when everything you've hoped for and dreamed for is falling apart around you. So this is more of a linear, logical development of the skills that we develop as we grow to maturity.
 
But just because you've grown to maturity doesn't mean you've fully mastered some of the basic skills. There's a logical structure here so that the more advanced skills are based on the more basic skills but that doesn't mean that you learn them one after another. Some people have gotten that misconception, that first you learn and master one, and then you learn and master another, and then learn another and master it. But that's not how life works. That's not dynamic.
 
Next we need to see that we have our eternal realities, what we have in Christ that can never, ever be lost. At the moment we trust in Christ as Savior, we're immediately identified with His death, burial, and resurrection which is called the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. We're indwelt by the Spirit and many, many other things that are ours in Christ and we're always in Christ and can never lose that position. But there are also certain temporal realities. Some moments we're walking by means of the Spirit, then five minutes later we've gotten angry. We chose to act on our anger and we're out of fellowship and we're operating on the sin nature. We're out in carnality. The way to get back is to confess our sins, to admit and acknowledge our sins to God which is the first problem solving device. Then we're immediately back in fellowship.
 
Fellowship is also a dynamic reality. When you have fellowship, when you're enjoying your relationship with someone, that's a dynamic relationship. It's not something that's static. So that's why I emphasize walking by the Spirit. It's a life. It's a way of living. It's why we call it the Christian way of life. So when we're back in fellowship, we're to stay in fellowship. Too often people get in a cycle where they're just going in and out, in and out, in and out, and they're not even making a hamburger. You know, In and Out Hamburgers. Just trying to wake y'all up a little bit. I can tell we've got a slow crowd here tonight. They're just going in and out, in and out, and they're never getting back into fellowship. They're never growing, never maturing and they think that the sum total of the Christian life is confessing sin.
 
Confessing sin is like getting in your car with a full tank of gas and now you have the key. You can go somewhere. But they spend all their time getting out of the car and then getting back in the car. They may put the key in the ignition. Then they get out of the car and then they get back in the car. They're never going anywhere. They're just getting out of fellowship and then back in fellowship. The whole point is to get in the car, start the ignition, and then drive by means of the Holy Spirit and go somewhere.
 
These different spiritual skills enable us to stay in fellowship. When we're using these skills we won't use the human viewpoint skills to solve problems which are related to self-centeredness, the sin nature, anger, manipulation, and all these other things we may use in order to make life work. And so we need to stay in fellowship and when we choose to use the spiritual skills we can. When we choose not to use them we're out of fellowship and we're in the realm of carnality and the control of the flesh.
 
While we're in fellowship that's called abiding in Christ. It's called walking in the light. It's called walking by the Spirit and it all depends upon our volition and we have to trust in the Lord and use these different skills as application techniques in order to stay in fellowship. A part of the whole issue related to the challenge in the Christian life and related to impersonal love for all mankind is to maintain peace in relationships. There are some relationships where maintaining peace and harmony is very difficult. It's not always our fault. It's the other person's fault. We can't control other people. You can only control what you do. They may choose not to value what you value. They may choose not to want what you want. They may choose another course in life but you have no control over that. When they choose those things that are contrary to what you choose, the result is going to be friction, and conflict, and difficulty.
Now a passage that is very close to the one we're looking at in Romans 12:18, we find in Hebrews 12:14, "Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord." This is a much more dynamic challenge and command than what we have in Romans 12:18. There the verb does not have a strong connotation, where here you have the word pursue which is the Greek word DIOKO which is a direct imperative that is used. A direct imperative indicates something that should be a habit. This is something that should always be a dynamic in your life, something you always do. Something that is the standard operating procedure in the Christian life. The word DIOKO has the connotation of moving rapidly and decisively toward an objective. In the military it's when the commander yells, "Charge!" It's a priority and you're pursuing something aggressively. You're not just waiting for things to happen saying, "Well, we'll work out that relationship later."
 
It's true that sometimes you have to wait for the right time because of certain circumstances beyond our control. But on our part as far as it's possible for us we should make peace in relationships a priority. So the verb DIOKO has the idea of pursuing something, striving for it, seeking after it, or aspiring to something. It's used in 1 Thessalonians 5:15, "See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people." This is a parallel passage very much like what we have in Romans 12.  One another always refers to other believers and all people refers to those outside the body of Christ. So we're to seek or pursue that which is good for all people.
 
The word translated peace in Hebrews 12:14 is the noun EIRENE whereas we had the participial form in Romans 12:18 which has the idea of peace, tranquility, stability, or something that's calm. Often when people think of peace in the Bible they think that it has something to do with the absence of violence or the absence of war. There are a few places in the Old Testament where the word shalom relates to the concept of a lack of warfare or a lack of violence but usually the word indicates a mental attitude of stability and calm that results in harmonious relationships. It's usually focused on something internal that's the result of that. So it's also used as the opposite of chaos and disorder or violence.
 
The primary verb that EIRENE translates from the Hebrew Old Testament is shalom and shalom is another one of those words that just has a huge range of meanings. It can be health. It can be tranquility. It can be prosperity. It can be safety or security so peace in the New Testament overlaps with the Old Testament. Remember, many terms in the Old Testament were written by men who their first language was Hebrew or Aramaic and they are using Greek words to communicate Hebrew concepts and Hebrew vocabulary so it's often important that we go back and understand how these words were originally used in the Old Testament before we lock into a meaning in the New Testament. You don't just lock into how it's used in 1st Century Greek. That wasn't the context of their thinking.
 
So peace has this idea that emphasizes an absence of strife. This can be peace in terms of your own mindset, an absence of worry, anxiety, and strife in your thinking, when you're all tied into knots and it's difficult to sleep. That happens to all of us at time. We get very focused sometimes and we need to take our focus off the issue and put it on to Christ. 1 Peter 5:7, "Casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you."
 
That was our memory verse yesterday at the Good News Club and they were tying it back to the story of Joseph. Joseph's brothers became very jealous of Jacob's favoritism toward Joseph, giving him a coat of many colors. Joseph sort of exacerbated the situation by telling his brothers by about his dreams which indicated they were going to bow down to him at some time in the future. That didn't sit well with his older brothers. So they became very jealous of him and they decided that the best solution from a human viewpoint was to kill him. But Reuben came along and said, "No, we're not going to kill him. Let's just sell him into slavery." Of course I just love the whole story of Joseph because when it's all done and Joseph has gone through all of these horrible things and he ends up finally as the number two in command in all of Egypt and his brothers come back there's a reconciliation. There hasn't been peace with the brothers and they're afraid that he's going to repay evil for evil. Instead, because of Divine viewpoint, Joseph says, "You may have meant it for evil but God meant it for good." He saw the hand of God in what had happened that even though things happened that were painful for him to go through God was working behind the scenes. Joseph was in prison for several years. He was falsely accused which is why he was put into prison. His family had rejected him and sold him into slavery. None of these are fun things that you like to reminisce about at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Passover. You have to recognize that the only way to have harmony in these relationships is oriented to God.
 
That's the great principle of the Joseph story that the only reason they can have harmony at the end is that there's a recognition on their part, the brothers' part, of their sin. They recognize where they were wrong and as a result, there can be a restoration of harmony. But until that happened there would still be problems with guilt and other things of that nature. So we're to pursue peace with all people. How do we do that? How do we live peaceably with all? Well, we have to start with God. In the Christian life, in studying any issue or problem in life, we always have to start with God, or almost always. How do we ground this doctrine in the person, the attributes, and the character of God?
 
We start by seeing that God is identified in the Scripture, both the Hebrew Scripture of the Old Testament and the Greek Scriptures of the New Testament as the God of peace. This is a genitive. It could be taken as an attributive genitive that peace is a characteristic of God but I think that it's probably a genitive of source that not only is peace a characteristic of God but true, genuine peace only comes from God. That, then, becomes a foundation. The peace that comes from God is a distinct kind. There are a lot of ways we can try to restore harmony in our world in our relationships. Most of the time it's by ignoring problems, overlooking problems, minimizing problems, acting as if someone's behavior if really acceptable when it's not acceptable, and things of this nature.
 
This is something by way of application that's a tough issue that a lot of Christian families are having to deal with when all of a sudden you have a child who comes out of the closet and they say they are homosexual. Now you have something else in your life to test your Christian faith. How you handle that is going to test your maturity. On the one hand, you need to avoid overreacting and being judgmental and hostile but on the other hand you don't want to minimize your own beliefs and absolutes. You have to walk that narrow path between those two opposites. This is where many Christians fall apart. This is how many people who look at Christianity misconstrue Christianity because they think Christians are going to be judgmental on the one hand and that the only solution is to change your values. Christians have to learn in an application of impersonal love how to show love to a family member and accept them as an individual without compromising the parents' absolute values. Sometimes when you have a child or a sibling or some other relative who is militant about their behavior and this could apply from anything to drugs, to alcohol, and who knows what, that they have to recognize that you have your rules and they have to respect your beliefs just as you may not offend them and get in their face and argue with them about it all the time and make an issue about it all the time so that you can restore the issue to Christ and the cross.
 
The cross is always the issue, either for salvation or for forgiveness for sin and not to let the sin become the issue. The sin is not the issue. We can look at numerous examples in the life of Christ where he didn't make the individual sin of the sinner the issue or the focal point. He made the issue always the grace of God going back to the character of God. So we have to understand how to do that. Trust me, there are people here who may not be facing it now but they may face it at some point. There's hardly a person here I would guess that doesn't have a situation where you're dealing with this in your own family. I know that's true for me. I know it's true for other people so we have to always exhibit the grace of God. Going back to the discussion of impersonal love for all mankind, you can't show unconditional love for someone if you haven't mastered grace orientation. If you can't deal with someone whose behavior is disagreeable to you and is wrong, you can't deal with them in impersonal love if you can't treat them in grace. So we have to learn to treat people in grace.
 
Okay, our point is that God is a God of peace. He alone is the source of real peace. We have numerous passages that describe God as the God of peace. For example, in Judges 6:24 after Gideon has recognized that the angel of the Lord that has appeared to him and commissioned him to be a judge and to give the Israelites a victory over the Midianites, he built an altar and called it Yahweh Shalom, the Lord is peace. The writer then inserts this little editorial comment. See, I don't get too many verses like this where the writer will tell a story and then insert his own sort of editorial observation that he's communicating to his readers. He's saying you can still go by and see this altar for yourself. You can reach out and touch it because the event that happened isn't just some myth or legend. It's an historical reality. So often in the Old Testament you have little comments like this as you read through the text.
 
Romans 15:33 says, "Now the God of peace be with you all."  2 Corinthians 13:11 says, "Finally, brethren, rejoice, be made complete, be comforted, be like-minded, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you." Again, this says God is the source of love and peace. If you want to know what love is or peace is, you go to God to find out what that is. Philippians 4:9, "May the God of peace be with you." Hebrews 13:20, "Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, the Great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant." So peace here is also connected to the death of Christ which established the New Covenant which is the everlasting covenant mentioned here. So again we see that dealing with sin at the cross is foundational to what created peace between God and man. 1 Thessalonians 5:23, "The God of peace Himself sanctify you completely." In all of these examples the attribute of peace is God's but He is the source of peace.
 
Now we come to the second point. The God of peace is the one who blesses those who follow Him with peace. He's the One who blesses us with peace. If we walk with the Lord, if we're obedient, if we stay in fellowship, if we walk by the Holy Spirit, then God is going to bless us with peace. That's verbiage that comes out of the Old Testament. But in the New Testament we come to Galatians 5:21-22, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law." What is the third fruit of the Spirit? Peace. That's a production in our life. It's not something we can manufacture on our own. It's something that is a result of spiritual growth, walking by means of the Spirit and then He produces that fruit.
 
Here are more of the passages that we find in the Old Testament, Psalm 29:11, "The LORD will give strength to His people; The LORD will bless His people with peace." This is in relationship to their internal character, not an external situation where it's being contrasted with war. Leviticus 26:6 is contrasted partially with war but it's a broader context. It's not just talking about war versus peace. "I shall also grant peace in the land, so that you may lie down with no one making {you} tremble." So it's not only dealing with peace in a domestic sense, that there are no external or internal enemies, but it goes beyond that. There aren't going to be these sources of problems. God is promising here that if the Jews are obedient to God He's going to make them prosperous.
 
One of the problems is that if you've got sheep and goats out in the field and you have wild, ravenous animals such as lions, bears, and wolves, then it's not going to be very peaceful for your flock. But God promised that if you are obedient to His Word then God is going to take care of these problems. The wolves and the lions and the bears are going to disappear. God also promised under the five cycles of discipline that if Israel became disobedient that God would bring those ravenous animals back and they would be less protected. Now you can go to the laboratory all day long and you can work on a computer all day long and create all kinds of models but you can't find an empirical cause/effect relationship between obeying Torah and the number of ravenous animals in the land but there are connections. Some connections are even human.
 
It's interesting that the more our country gets immersed in the religion of the environment and the more we get all concerned about restoring animals and all the different species the worse it seems to be. Now I love the outdoors and I love the fact that people have re-introduced moose and other animals into Colorado that haven't been seen in many, many years. But introducing grizzly bears into places like that or wolves into pasture lands in Wyoming or Montana is a totally different issue. Last year when I was up at Camp Arete, I was driving down the road, went around a hairpin turn, and just as I went around that turn where the brush grew right down to the road, there was a moose just stepping out into the road. We almost had a close encounter. Fortunately we didn't because they're big and that would have messed up the car. But you have people who are restoring and they think it's so wonderful that we have bears and wolves again. It's having a tremendous effect on cattle herds and sheep and goat flocks up in Wyoming and Montana and places like that.
 
When I was in Preston City there were a couple of instances where there was one lady whose two little kids were out in the back yard playing. She brought them into the house and went to the kitchen sink and looked outside the window and a bear went across the back yard. If she'd been five minutes later a bear would have been in the backyard with her kids. There was another guy not far from where I lived. He went out and heard a commotion near where he was raising rabbits. There was a bear on the rabbit hutch. He couldn't do anything about it. You can't go out and shoot them. You have to call the animal or wildlife officer. He came out and he can't do anything either. He flashed his lights and turned on his siren. The bear looked at him like he was a nuisance and just kept trying to get to the rabbits. Now we're in Texas. You know how we would handle it. It's a totally different dynamic down here. But that's the way it was there. In many states it's just that way.
 
What we're doing is we're putting ourselves in harm's way in the foolishness of so-called human wisdom as we reintroduce animals that were removed in the past by people who had a Biblical worldview and understood that for you to be prosperous and productive in raising animals you have to remove the threat of these dangerous animals. So God will give peace, not just the removal of external enemies or the removal of domestic enemies, but even the removal of threatening animals.
 
Psalm 119:165, "Those who love Your law have great peace, And nothing causes them to stumble." This is referring to an internal peace, a mental attitude peace. Proverbs 16:7, "When a man's ways are pleasing to the LORD, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him." This could be enemies of a personal nature or enemies of a national nature. Galatians 6:16, "And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy {be} upon them, and upon the Israel of God." Psalm 34:14 states the same principle, "Depart from evil and do good; Seek peace and pursue it."  This is the same principle we have in our passage and in Hebrews 12 to seek peace and pursue it. Romans 14:19, "So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another."
 
Our third point is that God commands us to seek peace with everyone. Other passages, 1 Corinthians 7:15, "But God has called us to peace." So this is a standard that God expects of us. This is what we are to be identified by. That's the principle in calling us to peace. 2 Corinthians 13:11, "Finally, brethren, rejoice, be made complete, be comforted, be like-minded, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you." Don't live creating disharmony with other people. Colossians 3:15, "Let the peace of God rule in your hearts." As I pointed out, this isn't a subjective thing. This is letting the reality of our reconciliation with God, which is also called peace, control our relationships with other people because we are at harmony with God, we need to let that principle be applied in our relationships with other people. 1 Thessalonians 5:13, "Live in peace with one another."
 
The next point is that God describes the New Covenant as a covenant of peace. It's called an eternal covenant. It's called the New Covenant and the covenant of peace. In Isaiah 54:10 God says, "And My covenant of peace will not be shaken." It's an eternal covenant. Once the New Covenant is implemented when Jesus returns and establishes the Kingdom then there will be peace on the earth, not until then. Ezekiel 34:25 states, "I will make a covenant of peace with them and eliminate harmful beasts from the land so that they may live securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods" Notice this again connects it to wild beasts in the land. I think we can build a whole doctrine of environmentalism, Biblical environmentalism right out of these verses and it would rattle the cage of current environmentalists. But of course they wouldn't pay attention to it because we're basing it on the Bible. Ezekiel 37:26 again says, "I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will place them and multiply them, and will set My sanctuary in their midst forever."
 
Now, I've talked about point five already is that shalom in the Hebrew and EIRENE in the Greek indicate the same concept. Passages like Judges 6:23, "The LORD said to him, "Peace to you, do not fear; you shall not die." Here the context has to do with a mental attitude where peace is contrasted with fear, worry, and anxiety. 1 Samuel 16:5, "In peace; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD. Consecrate yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice." Notice that peace here is related to sanctification. Luke 24:36, "While they were telling these things, He Himself stood in their midst and said to them, "Peace be to you." This is a greeting but Jesus is telling them to have God's peace present in their lives.
 
Point number six is that peace with God is the foundational message of the Gospel. It's related to the whole doctrine of reconciliation. We are born at enmity with God. We are born in hostility with God. At the Cross Jesus Christ removes that certificate of debt so that peace can be restored. Now one of the first places we see this mentioned in the New Testament is in Luke 2:14 with the announcement of the angels. "Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased." If you have a King James Version or NKJ version it reads "to men of good will." But there is an alternate view that I don't believe is accurate is all. It's the view that older makes it better which is not accurate. It's either EUDOKEIA as a nominative singular which refers to a state or condition of being kindly disposed or as a genitive singular. If it's the nominative singular you're saying "good will to men." If it's the genitive singular it's saying to men of good will. So in the first case the angels are announcing that the Savior who was called "the Prince of Peace" in the Old Testament is saying there is peace because God has come and it's God's message of good will to fallen men. He's going to provide peace.
That's a view that confuses some people which probably explains why the word was changed to a genitive. They thought it meant God would only send peace to men of good will. Now think about this. Put your little theological thinking caps on. If God is sending peace only to men of good will, then peace wouldn't be intended for all mankind. Some of you got it. This is a limited versus unlimited atonement issue. If peace is only intended for men of good will, then God has a limited atonement message here. The angels would be announcing that the Savior has come only for a restricted number. But the majority text should read, peace, good will toward men. God is announcing through the angels that the Savior has come and the potential is for good will or a blessing for all mankind which comes through the cross. Just a little added insight there.
 
Point seven, the only basis for achieving peace is to understand the dynamics of understanding the dynamics of resolving the most extreme conflict of history, which is the rebellion of man, the creature, against God. This is the doctrine of reconciliation. Man has revolted against God and God is going to solve the problem and re-establish peace. We are reconciled to God. God isn't reconciled to us. Passages like Romans 5:1-2, "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God." Our present position is to have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
 
It's a present reality whether you're in fellowship or out of fellowship there's a state of peace between the believer and God. Colossians 1:19-20, "For it was the {Father's} good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, {I say,} whether things on earth or things in heaven." Now when was that peace accomplished? At the cross. Not when a person believes in Christ but there is a dimension of it that was accomplished at the cross once that sin penalty is paid. That's why sin isn't the issue any more. The issue is faith in Christ. We'll see a little bit more of that in the next point. Peace with God is accomplished and we realize it in our present life only because the sin problem was dealt with at the cross. A harmonious relationship legally has been established between the human race and God by Christ's death on the cross.
 
When someone puts their faith in Christ this harmonious relationship is established individually. Colossians 2:13-14, "When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross." How did God forgive us of all trespasses? By having wiped out the certificate of debt. When did He wipe this out? At the cross or when you believe? A lot of people think it happens when you believe but that's not what this text says. It says in the past tense that He has taken our debt out of the way having nailed it to the cross. It happened historically in A.D. 33. It doesn't happen when you believe. When you believe it is applied to you. It happened at the cross. That is what give us peace.
 
So this is the basis for how we have peace with others. Passages like Psalm 133:1, "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is For brothers to dwell together in unity [peace]!" Understanding God's work of reconciliation is the basis for our peace. In reconciliation we see there are two key elements: grace which solves the sin problem and love which is the source of God's gracious acts towards undeserving humanity as seen in Romans 5:8, "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." What's the context of Romans 5? Reconciliation and peace. God demonstrated His love so that we could have peace.
 
In Matthew 5:44, we learn that, love is a volitional act and a mental attitude. We choose to love others. We set our minds on loving. That's a decision we make. We are to love our enemies. We have to make that decision. It's not just a sentiment or a feeling. In Luke 6:27 and Luke 6:32 we're commanded to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. John 13:34 says it's a new commandment that is given to us that we're to love one another as Christ has loved us. That's how we have peace with one another. Then as we finish, the result of this is that we can have inner peace, inner tranquility, inner stability, even in the midst of turmoil, chaos in our lives when we don't know what's going to happen next, we can relax because God is going to keep us in perfect peace. Isaiah 26:3 which I quote quite a lot, "Thou will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee because he trusted in Thee." Other passages. John 14:27, Jesus said, "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful." We have the peace of God. Okay, next time we'll come back and finish up our chapter in Romans 12 and then get into Romans 13 dealing with submission to government. Time for politics as we go into our run-off season here in Texas.

Romans 138b-Vengeance, Justice, and Impersonal Love

Romans 12:19 NASB95
Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.
Romans 138b-Vengeance, Justice, and Impersonal Love Romans 12:19-20
 
We are in Romans 12, beginning in verse 19. Tonight we'll finish up Romans 12. Next week we'll get into Romans 13 dealing with some other issues. We're coming back again to the topic of love as it runs as a thread through the next two or three chapters. It's mentioned again in the 13th chapter. Then the 14th chapter deals with the issue of doubtful things and it talks about the law of liberty and the law of love. Then in chapter 15 it's talking about bearing one another's burdens. Of course that's related to loving one another. So in the next three chapters this is the thread that runs through and ties them together in a lot of ways.
 
Romans 12:19 says, "Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath {of God,} for it is written, "VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY," says the Lord." As we look at Romans 12:19 it connects back to verse 17 where Paul had challenged them by telling them to repay no one evil for evil. This thread dealing with how we react when people do bad things to us or we are victims from other people's bad decisions, in some case intentional decisions, is one that runs through this section. As I pointed out when we started in Romans 12:9 that even though love is in the background of several of these verses it's still there. This passage is not really an exposition but this is more bullets of different mandates, different principles that should govern the behavior of any believer.
 
So we come to Romans 12:19 we have this challenge to believers telling us not to avenge ourselves. The key idea here that's mentioned twice is translated as the word avenge in the beginning of the verse and then vengeance is mine which is a quote that comes from the Old Testament in Deuteronomy also uses the same verb EKDIKEO. Now vengeance is one of those words we need to talk about a little bit. For most of us we think of vengeance as personal vindictiveness, that an individual has been treated or believes they have been treated poorly so they want to get back at the person who has somehow insulted them, somehow offended them, and somehow maltreated them. Whether it's justifiable or not, it's motivated by a self-centered desire out of the sin nature and a mental attitude sin with a desire to be the one to inflict justice on this person who has done something egregiously unjust.
 
We need to look at these words because that's not exactly the sense we have in the passage we're talking about. The verb EKDIKEO in the Greek means first of all to procure justice for someone or to grant or to give justice. So it is a word related to the application of justice, whether human or divine. It's not necessarily a concept of personal vendetta. Second to inflict an appropriate penalty for wrong done, to punish or to take vengeance for someone. ARomans-138b.mp3nd then the third meaning is to carry out one's obligations in a worthy manner or to do justice to someone. Those are the meanings of the word EKDIKEO.
 
Some of you are thinking that's certainly seems far removed from the concept of vengeance and I think part of this is because we don't really have a good clear understanding of the concept of vengeance. So I looked this up in the Oxford English dictionary and vengeance means a punishment that is inflicted or retribution that is exacted for an injury or wrong. Now that can relate to either something done by the judicial system or by the individual. When it's done by an individual out of a motive of subverting or going around the judicial system that's when it's the wrong kind of vengeance. When in the right sense, i.e. what is exacted by courts it is not a negative word, although I think in everyday usage I think that's what we normally think of when we use the term vengeance.
 
I looked it up in four or five dictionaries and that's basically the meaning, depending upon the context of how we use it. So we have to think about it. We're not to avenge ourselves. The idea there is that we're not to take justice into our own hands and subvert the normal processes of the judicial procedure of police investigations, charges in court, and trial before a jury. We shouldn't take justice into our own hands as opposed to the Lords' hands.
 
But you see the next phrase is a contrast and says, "But rather give place to wrath." Now what does that mean? The word wrath is the Greek word ORGE, which is commonly used to refer to God's executing justice in time in human history. This is exactly what we've seen in the book of Romans when we look at how this word is used. If we turn back to the very first chapter of Romans in Romans 1:18 we read, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness."
 
Now if we think of wrath in sort of a way in which people use it in everyday sense, we think of wrath as an emotional outburst, an emotion-driven anger. But that's not really the sense that it's used when it's used in a judicial context. We don't have a picture of God throwing an emotional tantrum in heaven. Now there are a lot of theologians and some pastors who will look at the phrase "the wrath of God" and they will try to use this to demonstrate that God has emotion. This is a problem. I think it's a two-fold problem. First of all we're trying to impute to God human emotion, which is a real problem. And the second problem is that we don't understand the figure of speech when we talk about wrath in terms of justice.
 
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to think of some idioms we use when we talk about going to court. Someone gets arrested for speeding, doing ninety miles an hour in a forty mile an hour zone and they appear before the judge and they get a $2,000.00 fine and they have to do a number of hours of community service. The person will say that judge threw the book at them. That's an emotive metaphor. The judge may have been extremely dispassionate. He may have been objective. He may not have gotten emotional whatsoever. He certainly didn't literally pick up a book and throw it at the speeder. It is simply an idiom to express the intensity of the punishment. It really says nothing about the literal nature of the emotional status of the judge.
 
We might also hear someone say that the "anger or wrath of the court was felt" by the speeder. Again, it doesn't necessarily mean that the judge was angry. It doesn't mean the judge was emotional. It doesn't indicate that at all. It is simply a figure of speech that we use to express the extreme nature of the penalty against the offending party. This is the way the wrath of God is used in Scripture.
 
 I remember a scholar we all know and love had written a paper to try to defend emotion in God. I challenged him in this because I told him that the wrath of God is simply an anthropomorphism. He said, "How can you say that?" I said, "It's worse than that. You didn't look at the Hebrew. The Hebrew is actually an anthropopathism." Now an anthropomorphism is when you attribute something about human physiognomy to God in order to communicate something. We talk about the eyes of God going to and fro on the earth, or being held in the hand of God. God doesn't have eyes like we have eyes. He doesn't have a hand. We have other phrases, such as the arm of God. Well, arm represents strength. Hand represents strength as well as grip so that's what these figures of speech are expressing. They're using a human form to express something about God. It doesn't mean God has a hand, an arm, a head, eyes, and nose but they're used to express something. In the Hebrew, for example in Hebrew thought, emotions are often expressed by references to bodily parts.
 
The Greek were the same way. The word in Greek for mercy is SPLANCHNON which has to do with the bowels. The same kind of thing is going on in Hebrew, having to do with the bowels when someone is upset or angry or something like that. The literal meaning of the idiom that's used in Hebrew if someone gets angry is that their nose burns. So when you read in the Hebrew that God was wrathful with Israel it doesn't have a literal word for wrath in the text. It says that God's nose burned against the Israelites. See that's an anthropomorphism. An anthropopathism is when you ascribe a human emotion to God that He doesn't actually possess in order to express or teach something about God. So an anthropomorphism is to use a human body part which God doesn't actually possess in order to communicate something about God's plan or purpose and an anthropopathism is to use a human emotion that God doesn't possess in order to again communicate about God's plan and purpose. So from the Old Testament we read that God's nose burned.
 
Well, God doesn't have a nose so right away we know it's not literal. He doesn't have a nose that burns. A burning nose means that someone is getting emotional and upset and losing their temper and they're getting red in the face and their nose is getting red and so that's the meaning of anger or wrath. So God is not a God who looks up and when someone does something sinful He doesn't just get all upset. First of all, God is omniscient so for billions and billions of years into eternity past God has always known that Israel would commit idolatry at the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses was up getting the Ten Commandments. God didn't just learn about this when the event happened in time. He's known about this forever. So, question. If God has known about it forever, has God been eternally angry with Israel for that event? No. It's an expression of His justice, the outworking of His justice.
 
It's the same as we have in Romans 1:18. I covered this back when we went through Romans 1. This expresses the justice of God, the outworking of God's judgment on sinful human beings. It doesn't mean God is literally losing His temper and is angry but He is giving full expression to His judicial condemnation of a particular event. So that's what has happened here. We're not to have revenge but we are to allow God to work out the judgment. That's what is written and the verse explains the principle from the Old Testament, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay," says the Lord."
 
The word for vengeance is the same word we saw just a minute ago from EKDIKEO and it means the ultimate execution of justice belongs to God. He is the One who repays. The word for repay there is ANTAPODIDOMI which means to pay back or recompense or in a judicial sense it means to bring about the penalty for someone's actions that are disobedient to the law. Now this is very similar to what we find in the Old Testament passage. The quote here in Romans 12:19 comes from Deuteronomy 32:35 where God says, "Vengeance is Mine, and retribution, in due time their foot will slip; For the day of their calamity is near, And the impending things are hastening upon them."
 
The Hebrew word here for vengeance is naqam which again is defined or translated as take vengeance, avenge one's self, be avenged and be punished. Actually it has the same connotation ad the Greek word. This is how it's translated. It's again the concept of taking a judicial action from the justice of God. So it's not a personal vendetta or personal vindictiveness. This is one of those areas where someone reading the Scripture here could easily get the wrong idea and come to a wrong conclusion that God is just this vindictive God. That's because of a failure to understand either the meanings of the English word in the dictionary where its primary meaning is bringing about punishment or bringing about justice for disobedience. That's the same idea in the Hebrew word.
 
So let's look at a couple of examples from the Old Testament. Most often what we see in the Old Testament is that vengeance or naqam is an execution of the justice of God. God is the One who rules the universe. He is the judge who oversees human history and we're to, as Peter says, "cast all our care on Him." We're to put it in the Lord's hands.
 
Now a question that may come up is, "Well, what about when someone does wrong? When someone commits a crime? Do we just pray about it?" God established government. He established law and of course, that's the procedure we're to utilize. We're to utilize the structure and the format that God has set up for handling these kinds of things. Beyond that, we put it in the Lord's hands. So if someone commits a crime against us, or someone defrauds us, or someone commits other act against us, if it's not possible to take this into a courtroom to find justice, then we have to put it into the Lord's hands and let the Lord take care of it. It's not up to us to go out and execute justice on someone who has committed a crime or some sort of offense against us.
 
When we look at a couple of Old Testament examples, even though most of the time in the Old Testament, it is God who is the One who is executing justice, or naqam, we do have a couple of passages where God delegates that responsibility to individuals. Let's look at Numbers 31 where we're dealing with a problem that has come up with the conflict between the Israelites and the Midianites. Numbers 31:1 says, "Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, Take full vengeance for the sons of Israel on the Midianites; afterward you will be gathered to your people." This was right before Moses departed at Mount Nebo. Then Numbers 31:3 says, "Moses spoke to the people, saying, "Arm men from among you for the war, that they may go against Midian to execute the LORD'S vengeance on Midian." Then he goes through and describes what they're to do.
 
In Numbers 31:7 we read, "So they made war against Midian, just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed every male. They killed the kings of Midian along with the {rest of} their slain: Evi and Rekem and Zur and Hur and Reba, the five kings of Midian; they also killed." This is at the tail end of the episode where the Midianites were using Balaam to try to bring a curse against Israel. But the point that we're seeing here is that this is an execution of justice that is directed by God.
 
 It's not petty vindictiveness which springs from an attitude of selfishness where an individual has been personally offended or hurt. We're going to see more about this as we go through the Sermon on the Mount on Sunday mornings. We're going to come to a passage in a couple of weeks where the Lord talks about turning the other cheek. That is, that if someone slaps you on the cheek you should turn the other cheek. That's another one of the verses in the Sermon on the Mount that's been used as a justification for pacifism. The problem is that as we go through the Sermon on the Mount we're discovering that a lot of these things are related to figures of speech.
 
Slapping someone on the cheek? What in the world do you think that means? Do you think there was a problem in Israel of people walking around and slapping other people on the cheek? Just walk up to some, like Jeff, and just slap him on the face? You think that's what's going on? No. Slapping someone on the face was an idiom for being offended and so what the Lord is talking about is that if someone offends you, turn the other cheek. In other words, don't be someone who is easily offended and whenever you think you're being slighted you use that as an excuse to get back at someone else. It's not a problem of violence. That's not what the issue was at all. It was a problem of mental attitude. That's what's going on here.
 
There's a petty or personal vindictiveness that people get into because they think that so-and-so is taking advantage of them and their whole issue is not in doing what's right. The issue is on getting back at someone and taking care of self and protecting self to the point where I'm making sure that I'm going to be sure that everything right will be done with regards to my own possessions and my own reputation.
 
But vengeance here has to do with the execution of justice in war. Because the Midianites had violated Israel's sanctity at this point Israel needed to engage them in war. This was the just action that God commanded against them. When we get to the end tonight, we're talking about impersonal love where I ended last time. This is love. Love always works in conjunction and in conformity with God's justice and His righteousness. We have such a twisted view of love today, a view that says love is always kind. We define it narrowly in sentimental ways. Yet God recognizes that if you love the victim, you will punish the criminal. Now some people will say, "That's not being very loving to the criminal." But it is showing love to society at large to punish the criminal and it is showing love to the victim to punish the criminal. We distort things too easily and we come out with a shallow, distorted concept of what love is.
 
Sometimes you'll hear liberals come along who say that the God of the Old Testament is just a mean old vindictive God. He just wants the Jews to kill everybody. It's not like the loving God of the New Testament. Well, the loving God of the New Testament is the same God as the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament recognized that love punishes as well as embraces. There's a time for one and a time for the other. Knowing the difference is wisdom.
 
Taking vengeance on the Midianites is an expression of God's love for Israel. They needed to execute punishment on the offending party. That's something this country doesn't factor in whenever it thinks about any kind of military action, or even judicial action. It never thinks of it that way. Another passage comes out of Joshua 10:13 where we see the battle with the Amorites and the sun stood still. This is the long battle that's taking place. It's gone on all day long and the sun is setting and so Joshua has prayed to the Lord to do something in order to allow them to have victory over their enemies. They're battling with Amorites. The Lord caused a miracle to take place, for the sun to stand still over Gibeon and as the sun stood still, it gave the people time to finish the battle and completely destroy the enemy. And so we read in Joshua 10:13, "So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies." So they were executing justice upon their enemies. That's what the word means. It was a just battle. So again we see that God delegates responsibility and delegates authority for justice to various human institutions.
 
Now there are two passages that bear on what is being said in Romans in terms of the prohibition against personally taking the law in one's own hand. Leviticus 19:18, "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORomans-138b.mp3RD." Notice how the focus is really on the mental attitude. Let me connect this back to the Sermon on the Mount. At the end of Matthew 5 we're focusing on this section where Jesus is contrasting God's view of righteousness which goes to the root of the issue in terms of the mental attitude behind an action. It's not just the superficial action. So Jesus addresses this is saying, "You have heard it said that you shall not commit murder but I say to you that you should not have hatred in your heart towards someone." See the Pharisees had created a superficial view of murder, that murder was simply a prohibition against the physical act of murder but you could commit all kinds of mental attitude sins of hatred and thinking about revenge and other things, and that was just fine. They created a superficial view of the application of the Law. But even in the Old Testament, it wasn't to be a superficial approach. The Pharisaical interpretation of the Law was not correct and Jesus contrasts His view with the Pharisaical view. This is what happens when Jesus says, "You have heard it said". And then He gives what the Pharisees have said and then he points out what He says which is the correct interpretation of the Mosaic Law.
 
So here in Leviticus 19:18 we read, "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD." The grudge there is the mental attitude sin that lies behind the overt sin. The worst sins are not the overt sins. They may have worse consequences but the worst sins are the mental attitude sins that motivate the external sins. But that doesn't mean that the mental attitude sin is not a sin and just as wrong or destructive to the soul of the individual. If someone thinks about murder all day long but they never act on it, in terms of society that's a great thing because nobody is being killed. But in terms of sin, it has a horrible effect on the soul of the individual and will have terrible consequences in his own life and in his own mental attitude and his own spiritual state. But it's better in a relative sense to have the mental attitude sin than to have the overt sin but in terms of its sinfulness in relation to the righteousness of God, it's just as much a sin.
 
See the contrast in Leviticus 19:18 as a positive command: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." So the neighbor is the one who has done something wrong to you. This is the person who has done something that has offended you, something that has insulted you, or something that has injured you terribly. Maybe it has caused great damage in your life. It could be any kind of abuse. It could be the kind of abuse of a parent to a child. This could include emotional abuse. It could include sexual abuse. It could include all manner of terrible things that one human being can do to another but the command is that you should not take vengeance. Take it before the courts. Put is before the throne of grace and God's justice and let Him deal with it but don't you try to enact vengeance on your own.
 
 Instead, what's your personal responsibility to the person who has injured you so terribly? Your responsibility and my responsibility is to love them as I love myself. That can't be done apart from God the Holy Spirit. This is why when we look at the passage dealing with the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5:20-22, the first fruit of the Spirit is love because five verses earlier you have a quotation from Leviticus 19:18 that we're to love our neighbor as yourself. How do we do that? Then in the next verse in Galatians Paul says walk by means of the Spirit and you won't fulfill the lust of the flesh. If you walk by the Spirit you won't fulfill the lust of the flesh which in context dealing with Leviticus 19:18 is to enact vengeance on someone. Now that doesn't mean you don't want justice. It means you're going to initiate justice in a court of law and you're going to let a court of law handle it. If the court of law fails, then you're going to let God handle it and put it in His hands. Now let's skip to Deuteronomy 32:35 where God says, "Vengeance is Mine, and retribution," So God is the One who is ultimately going to bring that about. But God doesn't always bring that about in the way we like or in our timing. Sometimes it won't be brought to final justice until the end times.
 
Turn with me now to Isaiah where we're going to look at a couple of passages that also deal with God's vengeance, or God's justice, but in these passages we're going to see that they don't take place until the ultimate fulfillment of the wrath of God which is at the end of the Tribulation period. Isaiah 63:1, "Who is this who comes from Edom…" Edom is the area that is west of the Jordan River. Today it's part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Edom is an ancient kingdom. Herod the Great was an Edomite. They're descendants of Esau who was apparently ruddy complexioned with red hair so he was named Edom which has a connotation of red. "Who is this who comes from Edom with garments of glowing colors from Bozrah?" Now this is the Lord Jesus Christ as the conquering Messiah coming back from having rescued the Jews in the area around Petra.
 
The next trip I take to Israel we're going to go to Petra and spend a whole day hiking around being able to see all the things there. It's an enormous, enormous area and it's protected by all of these rock formations and all of these hills. This is a place where tens of thousands of people can hide. What's interesting is in the ancient Nabatean Kingdom that was there built all of these various buildings out of the rock of the mountains and then in order to capture rain, they hollowed out the inside of the mountains into huge cisterns, huge caverns that will hold a hundred or two hundred thousand gallons of water. When you go down into the souk which if you've seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade you saw the picture at the end when they get on their horses and ride up the souk as they leave. That exterior was taken going into Petra. Down both sides of that canyon wall they carved out what I would describe as basically a gutter that's about 18 inches wide and it's scooped out and it runs the entire length of the souk which is a couple of miles to capture the water runoff so if they get a half or even a quarter inch of rain all that rain that would run down would be captured in those gutters and would run all the way down to the base and then into the cisterns inside the mountains. So with a very small amount of rain they could capture several hundred gallons of water. And because modern man likes to restore some of these antiquities they have been restoring these water channels and cisterns in Petra. I think that God is probably just chuckling about that because this is preparing things for the end times because when you see the survivors of Israel escape to that area all of these water systems are going to have been rebuilt and reconstructed so they'll hold water. Pardon the pun. This will be an area where God will protect them.
 
So that's what this passage in Isaiah 63:1 is talking about, that the Messiah comes back to rescue the Jews who have been hiding in the mountains in the wilderness of Edom. He destroys one army of the Antichrist there. That's why His garments are dyed with blood. There are other passages that also indicate His blood-soaked garments. This verse continues, "This One who is majestic in His apparel, Marching in the greatness of His strength? It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save." So he is coming to bring about vengeance.
 
 In Isaiah 63:2 we read, "Why is Your apparel red, and Your garments like the one who treads in the wine press?" These are blood-soaked garments. He says in Isaiah 63:3-4, "I have trodden the wine trough alone, And from the peoples there was no man with Me. I also trod them in My anger And trampled them in My wrath; And their lifeblood is sprinkled on My garments, And I stained all My raiment. For the day of vengeance was in My heart, And My year of redemption has come." "Peoples" here refers to the Gentiles, the army of the Antichrist. The day of vengeance is when God brings about His final judgment on the Gentile nations, the Antichrist, the False Prophet, and on Satan. The phrase, {"And My year of redemption has come" is talking about Israel when this is finalized.
 
Isaiah 63:5 says, ""I looked, and there was no one to help, And I was astonished and there was no one to uphold; So My own arm brought salvation to Me, And My wrath upheld Me. I trod down the peoples in My anger And made them drunk in My wrath, And I poured out their lifeblood on the earth." All of this is hyperbolic imagery to express the extent and the severity of the judgment that falls upon the Gentiles when the Messiah comes back when He brings about justice. There's that word we're looking for, "the day of vengeance [naqam]." Now another passage we can go to is in Isaiah 61:2. This is a well-known passage quoted in Luke's Gospel by the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 4:17-21. The Lord is asked to read from the Parashah which is the Scripture reading that day in the synagogue.
 
It's no coincidence that the Lord shows up that day. In every Sabbath in every synagogue in the world they're reading from the same portion of Scripture. So He read there this section in Isaiah and the Lord only read down to the first line of verse two. He stopped there. Isaiah 61:2, "The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, Because the LORD has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to captives And freedom to prisoners; To proclaim the favorable year of the LORD" He rolled up the scroll and He sat down. Look at the next verse. He did that because up to 2a, that fulfillment is at the 1st Advent. The rest of it is fulfilled in the 2nd Advent.
 
The next line in Isaiah 61:2 reads, "And the Day of vengeance of our God." What day is that? That's the day we just read about in Isaiah 63 when the Messiah comes to rescue Israel and the final execution of God's judgment against all evil in human history. So vengeance is the domain of God. It's the execution of His justice against evil. Sometimes this happens in our life when we can see it. Most of the time it will not happen until the Lord's 2nd coming and then later at the Great White Throne which executes judgment.
 
Now in Romans 12:20 we get an application from this. If we are not to avenge ourselves, if we are not to take it out on the party which has offended us, if we're to let God execute His judgment, His wrath, and His timing in His place, then what are we supposed to do? This is where it gets difficult. "BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS HUNGRY, FEED HIM, AND IF HE IS THIRSTY, GIVE HIM A DRINK; FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL HEAP BURNING COALS ON HIS HEAD." You have to be nice to that sorry son of a whatever! Now this is another very interesting passage. This is a quote from Proverbs 25:22-22, "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; For you will heap burning coals on his head, And the LORD will reward you."
 
Now how in the world are we to do this? Let's think about some illustrations of Scripture that might apply. Again, we find one in the Old Testament. So let's go back and turn to 2 Kings 6, which focuses on the ministry of Elisha. Elijah was toward the end of 1 Kings. Elisha's ministry covers the first part of 2 Kings. Chapter 6 has to do with the military threat of the Syrians against the Northern kingdom of Israel. We read in 2 Kings 6:8, "Now the king of Aram [Syria] was warring against Israel; and he counseled with his servants saying, "In such and such a place shall be my camp. The man of God [Elisha] sent {word} to the king of Israel saying, 'Beware that you do not pass this place, for the Arameans [Syrians] are coming down there.' The king of Israel sent to the place about which the man of God had told him; thus he warned him, so that he guarded himself there, more than once or twice."
 
It's nice having a prophet who has a direct ear to God so he can find out what the enemy is doing and warn you not to go into an area where there will be an ambush. This really bothered the King of Syria because he thought someone in his camp had betrayed him and warned off the King of Israel. He had had this perfect ambush set up and all of a sudden, the King of Israel doesn't take his troops that way. "Now the heart of the king of Aram was enraged over this thing; and he called his servants and said to them, 'Will you tell me which of us is for the king of Israel?'" He's asking where the traitor in their midst is. "One of his servants said, 'No, my lord, O king; but Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom'." You can't hide from God. God's telling Elisha what you're saying and that's the leak. "So he said, 'Go and see where he is, that I may send and take him'."
 
At this point the Syrians surround the area at Dothan where Elisha and his servant are located and the servant looks out and sees they're just surrounded by the armies of Syria. Now things look really bad at that point. There are a lot of times in our lives when we look out and whatever our problems are they're insurmountable, they're overwhelming, and we're just surrounded by them. We don't look at things from God's viewpoint. This is what happened with Elisha's servant. He's just not looking at it with the eyes of faith. He doesn't understand that this is God's plan and God's purpose.
 
Just because it looks like they're outnumbered when God is on your side, you're never outnumbered. The servant is pushing the panic button and in 2 Kings 6:15 he says, "Now when the attendant of the man of God had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, 'Alas, my master! What shall we do?"" In 2 Kings 6:16-17 Elisha says, "So he answered, 'Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.' Then Elisha prayed and said, 'O LORD, I pray, open his eyes that he may see. And the LORD opened the servant's eyes and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha'."
 
When the servant looked out he saw the armies of the Syrians and he also saw the armies of the angels, the hosts of God, which were surrounding the armies of the Syrians. So he realized that the angels of God outnumbered the Syrians about 10,000 to 1 and there really wasn't much of a problem anymore. 2 Kings 6:18 continues, "When they came down to him, Elisha prayed to the LORD and said, 'Strike this people with blindness, I pray.' So He struck them with blindness according to the word of Elisha…" After they were blind Elisha told the Syrians that this wasn't the way to go. This wasn't the right place. '… Follow me and I will take you to the person you seek.' So Elisha led the Syrian army into the heart of the Northern kingdom of Israel at the ancient city of Samaria, later rebuilt by King Herod. It's a remarkably huge, huge kingdom, capital of the Northern kingdom and then all of a sudden God took the blinders off of the Syrian army, they were now surrounded by the army of Israel.
 
Now look at what happens in 2 Kings 6:21, "Then the king of Israel when he saw them, said to Elisha, "My father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?" Here's a situation. Your enemy is now in your grip. You, under every law of warfare that's ever been devised have a great opportunity to wipe them out and to completely annihilate the army of Syria. What does Elisha say in 2 Kings 6:22, "He answered, 'You shall not kill {them}. Would you kill those you have taken captive with your sword and with your bow? Set bread and water before them that they may eat and drink and go to their master'."
 
Elisha is following the principle that if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he's thirsty, give him something to drink. This is Israel's lifelong enemy, the army of Syria. Constantly they've been seeking to destroy and control the Northern kingdom. There's always been a state of hostility between the northern kingdom and Syria, just as today you have this situation in Israel where there's continuous antagonism and war and hostility and terrorisms from the Arabs toward the Jews. This would be comparable today to bringing all the worst terrorists together into the heart of Jerusalem. It would be the great idea to slaughter them and the prophet says not to slaughter them but to feed them and send them home in safety.
 
This is one reason why the Israeli army holds themselves to a higher standard of accountability. Not that they haven't made mistakes. They're sinners and there have been problems here and there. But the standard they hold themselves accountable to is this kind of standard: that they want to go the extra step to protect their adversary. This comes from the ethic they derive from the Old Testament.
 
This is the same ethic that's for us. We have the Holy Spirit. We are to do the same thing. Now the explanation that's given at the end of Romans 12:20 is where we get into some interesting and uncertain hermeneutics. There's almost universal agreement what this means but we just don't know exactly how we get there in terms of the idiom. The first time I ever heard this verse quoted it was quoted out of maliciousness. If someone has really treated us badly we need to treat them good so they'll feel really bad about it. We'll heap coals of fire on them. You want to make someone feel bad, if they've treated you badly, you just treat them nicely and then they'll feel bad. It catches the thrust of this to bring the enemy to repentance. But the idea is not the sense of just being nice to someone so they'll really feel bad about being mean to me.
 
This may refer to an Egyptian ritual in which a person showed repentance by carrying a pan of burning charcoal on his head. This was mirrored in some of the other cultures so this would again be talking about an idiom that carrying coals of fire on your head was something a penitent would do in order to show they have repented of their hostile attitude. So that is just the point that if you're kind to someone it may bring them to a change of mind, and that's better than killing your enemy. So that would be the point. Treat them in goodness and kindness even though they do not deserve it.
 
So that brings us to the last verse in Romans 12:21, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." The word for overcome is that word we studied many times before in Revelation and many passages, the word from NIKE, the noun where we get the brand name Nike meaning victory. It was the name of the Greek goddess of victory so this verb NIKAO indicates having victory or being conquered by something, so it should be translated to not be conquered by evil. Don't let your sin nature conquer you but instead conquer evil with good. It's pretty straight forward but it's just difficult to do. When someone does evil to you as Paul says earlier, "Do not repay evil with evil". We see the same things quoted in the Old Testament.
 
Proverbs 20:22 says, "Do not say, 'I will repay evil; Wait for the LORD, and He will save you'." It's not our responsibility to take justice into our own hands. We are to put it before the Throne of God in prayer, cast all of our cares before Him, and He will sustain us.
 
Proverbs 24:29 says, "Do not say, 'Thus I shall do to him as he has done to me; I will render to the man according to his work'." We have a higher standard. We're going to treat that person in terms of what's best for them. That's what the Bible speaks of when it talks about loving your neighbor as yourself.
 
Proverbs 24:17 states, "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles." So this gets to the heart of the matter (no pun intended); it gets to the real issue which is mental attitude.
 
We can take our enemy to task. We can take him to court and have him thrown in jail. We can go into battle with the enemy and kill the enemy but we are not to do it with an attitude of personal joy and vindictiveness. We are not to let our heart be glad when an enemy stumbles. It would be better for him not to stumble but to come to repentance. We are not to take joy in the pain of others. Why? Proverbs 24:18 "Or the LORD will see {it} and be displeased, And turn His anger away from him." That attitude of personal vengeance displeases the Lord because it is counter to His justice. If we get in the way by trying to execute our idea of repayment and justice then the Lord might, according to this verse, relinquish the wrath He would bring upon that person for what they have done. So by getting involved and getting in God's way rather than intensifying the misery on the person who has offended us, it might cause God to relinquish His punishment on the individual and they end up getting off scot free because we have failed to stay out of the situation and leave it in the hands of the Lord.
 
Okay, next time we're going to come back to Romans chapter 13 and we're going to deal with the important issue related to government and the role of the Christian to the government. This is important, especially today, because we are faced with a government that through its bureaucracy becoming more and more antagonistic and hostile to Christians. So how are we to handle that? Again we need to look at what Paul says in Romans 13 and we'll look at some other passages such as Daniel 1 and how Daniel and his friends handled it when they were living in a pagan, hostile environment. That's how we are. We need to think more in terms like Daniel and his friends and less in terms of some sort of posse that's sent out to right all the wrongs and to change the government with some sort of overthrow. That is not the focal point of chapter 13. So we'll come back and begin Romans 13 next time.

Romans 139b-Submission to Governing Authority

Romans 13:1 NASB95
Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
Romans 139b-Submission to Governing Authority Romans 13:1-7
 
The passage this evening takes us into a little bit of a shift, starting in Romans 13:1. Now some commentators, usually of a liberal persuasion and by liberal I mean they don't take the Word of God to be inerrant or infallible, question whether this was originally written by the Apostle Paul because it doesn't seem to fit the context. However that has been demonstrated to be false by a number of other scholarly studies. One issue here, though, is why does Paul suddenly shift his thinking to government and submission to governing authorities? I think it grows out of what he has just said at the end of chapter 12 where he has been dealing with specific issues related to Christians and how they relate to other Christians.
 
The last part of chapter 12 deals with seeking vengeance or justice for those who have treated them in an unjust or disrespectful manner. I think the segue here is to deal with the proper role of government. That is covered in just the first seven verses of chapter 13 before he returns to the theme of loving one another when we get to verse 8. So the focus tonight, and this will take us several weeks to go through this section, is having to do with submission to governing authorities. Let me just read through and point out a few things on the first seven verses. This is a nice interrelated section here.
 
 "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil." Notice that picks up that theme of vengeance from the last three verses of chapter 12. Romans 13:5 continues "Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For because of this you also pay taxes…" I thought that was a timely verse to focus on since April 15 is next Tuesday. Let me read that again in case you missed it, "For because of this you also pay taxes, for {rulers} are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax {is due;} custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor is due."
 
Let's just make a couple of observations as we go through this particular passage. This passage has become somewhat debated, especially among certain branches of conservative politics in recent years because a lot of conservatives and the conservative wing of the Libertarian Party have a problem with a fact that the administration now in place seems to be off the rails in terms of its constitutional mandates. They are violating the U.S. Constitution. This has led to some very interesting and wrong exegesis of this particular passage. But we have to work through this very carefully to see what the Scriptures are teaching and what they are not teaching.
 
Unfortunately, there are in some circles too many Christians who are so bent on justifying their own political theory that they read their political theory into the Scripture instead of actually doing the kind of work they need to, to study the text and let the text tell them what their political theory should be. I have one of two acquaintances who just absolutely drive me nuts because they are typically spiritually blind Christians. They are so well read on political history and political theory that they do not know how to read the Bible and derive from the text what the principles of government should be. All they want to do is use the Bible to validate their political theory. They read their political views into the Scripture.
 
What I find to be consistent with people of this kind is that they have a real hard time submitting to the authority of a pastor who develops an exegetical theology from the Scripture. I have watched some of these individuals over years that I have known them church hop because as soon as a pastor starts teaching something that challenges their basic presupposition in these areas they decide he doesn't really know what he's talking about so they go to the next church. This becomes a pattern for them. What it shows is that not only do they have a problem with the authority of a pastor but it shows they basically have a problem with authority in general. Their problem is with the authority of the government when they disagree with it. The problem is with their pastor when they disagree with him and this brings us to the real problem in this whole issue.
 
That is when the Scripture teaches us and talks about submitting to an authority, whether it's as individual believers submitting to Christ or whether it's wives submitting to their husbands or whether it's church members submitting to the leaders in the church. When it comes to submission it's easy to submit to someone when we agree with them. When the authority is asking us to do what we want to do and it doesn't really challenge us in terms of our own agenda, it's really easy. But where submission becomes real submission is when the person or the institution in authority is asking us to do something we disagree with. If the person, the individual, or the institution that is in authority over us is asking something we don't think is right, then we have problems.
I'm making a distinction between what the Scriptures says to be right. We all understand when any authority asks us to do something that violates the direct command of Scripture then that, as Peter says in Acts 5, "We obey God rather than men." But we have too many people who think that their opinion is Scriptural and therefore they don't think the person in authority can ask them to do something because in their opinion that violates their Christian ethic. It probably doesn't. It just violates their opinion. It comes down to humility.
 
I think this is one of the most difficult areas of all Scripture. The last couple of weeks when we were talking about impersonal love we saw that's a really hard topic for most of us, to treat other believers in genuine impersonal love. Or just to treat other people with whom we disagree or dislike with genuine impersonal love. But I think another area that rally challenges every one of us when you come right down to it is when someone in authority over us demands that we do something that we really disagree with and we really don't want to do it. I'm not talking about an absolute disagreement over eternal truth. When somebody wants us to do something that we don't want to do, an employer, the government and that's what real submission is, when we humble ourselves and submit to that authority. So that's the real issue underlying this.
 
I find that this happens in politics. I know most people in this room and I know where most of us think politically. Most of us are pretty much in agreement on most things. We understand there are many things happening under this administration but they're been happening for the last thirty or forty years under various other administrations that have eroded the authority of the Constitution as we understand it. This creates a great problem for us and this isn't going to change. So the question we have to understand is, "How does this apply to us in terms of our own thinking?" So as we look at this passage I just want to point out some structural things in the whole paragraph that helps us see how it hangs together.
 
First of all, there's a command: that every person [every soul] be subject to the governing authorities. Then there's an explanation. Whenever you see a "for" it's usually a reason or a cause for what was just said. So the reason he makes this command is that there is no authority except from God. The authorities that exist are appointed by God. Now I read someone at some time who said the ultimate authority of government in the United States is the Constitution. So he read this as if it were written this way, "Let every soul be subject to the Constitution for there is no Constitution except from God and the Constitution that exists was appointed by God."
 
Now that is just such an aberration of the text. The word authority is plural in places. It not only relates to the ultimate authority in any national entity but to the whole chain of command from the highest authority all the way down to the lowest. From Federal government all the way to down the local precinct government. Every authority is involved in this, not just the ultimate authority. That was an example of someone reading their political philosophy into the text to try to make the text validate their view rather than let their view be shaped by Scripture.
 
Romans 13:2 reads, "Therefore whoever resists authority resists the authority of God." So there's a conclusion from that. If the authority is established from God and you're resisting that authority then you're resisting God Himself and God's ordinance or command. Then there's another explanation for why this would be true. Romans 13:3 says, "For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior." I can see some of you saying, "Now wait a minute. We've got a lot of court cases going on right now because there are different people, different levels of government such as individuals in the military, individuals in other institutions in our country that are specifically going after Christians.
 
There's a case going on right now that involved a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy who had written a Bible verse on the dry erase board on his room. He was ordered to take it down. They came in and forcibly erased it and immediately the lawyers from Liberty Institute went out there to take this case for him. So what do you mean that the rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior when that kind of thing is going on? Well this is the kind of thing we have to work through because this is written as a universal principle. It was also written at a time when Nero who was evil and wicked was Caesar in Rome. So it's not written under an ideal form of government.
 
Romans 13:4 goes on, "For it is a minister [the authority] of God for good." Then Romans 13:5 draws another conclusion, "Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection…" This takes us right back to the original command so the structure is that when Paul gives the command, he gives the implication of the command in verse 2. He explains what is really going on ultimately in terms of universal principles in verses 3 and 4 and then he gives a conclusion that takes us back to the original command. In verses 6 and 7 he applies this to the payment of taxes. Where did that come from? Well, I've got a suggestion for this. So this gives us an overview of the passage.
 
Now the issue that's raised here is one that's becoming more and more of a significant issue in American politics. We're a little myopic, though. If you go to other areas of the world where they have much more tyrannical and corrupt governments, what we're getting our panties in a knot over, is not quite as severe as what you have in other places. Take Ukraine for example. I've spent some time going over there in the last ten or eleven years and have seen how corrupt that government is. Of course all of this came boiling to a head about ten years ago, in 2004-2005 in what they call the Orange Revolution which was a precursor to what just happened. In the Orange Revolution there was one man running for president by the name of Yushchenko and his opponent was Yanukovych, the man who just was thrown out of power. Yanukovych rigged that election in 2004.
 
He had also probably been responsible for poisoning Yushchenko. I don't know if you remember that but he was slipped something and they showed a lot of pictures by him side-by-side where his face was all scarred from the effect of this poison. The people took to the streets because they knew that this was a corrupt election. They called for a new election and Yushchenko won that election. But Yushchenko is saddled with a totally corrupt bureaucracy, one that is influenced by these obscenely wealthy oligarchs who are using their money to influence what is going on. You really couldn't change anything.
 
So the people out of frustration that if Yushchenko can't change anything then the next election in 2008-2009, they voted for Yanukovych. You know if you go with one side and he can't solve your problems then go to the other side. But Yanukovych was worse. You're basically choosing between one form of evil and another form of evil. Neither side is really good. There's not a culture in Ukraine that understands what we would think of as divine institutions. It's a totally corrupt culture that goes back through a century of corruption under the Soviet block or Empire and before that you had all the horrors of corruption under the Czars. There's never been a solid biblical foundation for thinking through the institutions of government.
 
So Yanukovych became president and corruption just went on steroids and he spent billions and billions of dollars on his own personal real estate purchase and he built a mansion worth several billion dollars and many other things clearly outside of the law. Finally the economy gets so bad that the people took to the streets again and last November when he broke the treaty with the EU, but he was being blackmailed by Russia. Putin was saying if you don't break your relations with the EU and join with us I'm going to triple the cost of natural gas. All of their natural gas comes from Russia so Yanukovych was being blackmailed. It's just an absolutely obscene web of corruption and blackmail and personal power politics, as bad as it can get.
 
So what should a Christian do when you're looking down at almost 100,000 people down in the Maidan Square and they're setting up this demonstration against the government? Where should you be? That was a tough question. When I was over there in January this was a topic that Jim was teaching from the pulpit of the church. It was a topic I touched on in what I was teaching. There were many Christians in the church who recognized that it wasn't their responsibility to overthrow the government. But it was their responsibility to evangelize and to pray and they were involved with various Christian groups that were camped out down in the Maidan. They were passing out tracts and other things like that.
 
It really hit me when I was there that I hear a lot of conservative Christians in America thinking that theoretically what if the government becomes more and more tyrannical. What's the breaking point? I was watching a scenario in real time when I was in Ukraine where that was exactly where they had arrived. Let me tell you that we're about a hundred miles in the air above the depths where they had gone to. We think we have it bad. Let me tell you. We only think we have it bad. You may disagree with me. You may think it's terrible but it's so much worse in Ukraine. When you have people who on the average can only make about four or five or six hundred dollars a month and they're living in government subsidized housing, then you see the problem.
 
The government is in such debt. I read a report this morning that they're going to have to default on all their loans. That's just going to plunge them into an even worse case scenario. So if we keep doing what we're doing we're heading in the same direction. We're just not nearly as far down the road as I think some people think we are. But we have to think through our role as citizens. This is another factor I think it's important to think through, that the government that we have and the Constitution we have is a totally different scenario than the one in Ukraine. It's a totally different scenario than the one in the Roman Empire.
 
What we are legally permitted to do, what our legal rights are in the United States enables us to do things that citizens in other nations can't do because it's prohibited by their law. A lot of these applications are relative to what is legal, what is constitutional in these different situations and different governments. First of all, what we have to do is understand what Paul is saying to the Roman believers who are a mix of Messianic Jews who have accepted Jesus as Messiah and Gentiles. So we have to work our way through this particular question, which is obedience to government authority.
 
Some of the questions we need to address include the following. Does the believer have the right to disobey government authority at any point? How do we define that point? If we are able to disobey government, what are the parameters, the guidelines for determining when it is right for the individual to disobey a legitimate governing authority? This applies not only to civil authority but it applies across the board to any authority, whether it's the authority of a coach over an athletic team, the authority of a commissioned or non-commissioned officer in the military, the authority of a teacher or a professor in the classroom, the authority of a husband over a family, the authority of parents over children. The fundamental principle here is the governing authority and the role of submission to that authority.
 
This is a problem that is not just limited to us but was very much a problem at that time. As I said just a moment ago, the Roman church was comprised of both Gentile believers and Jewish believers. Now Jewish believers had a particular problem with a Gentile governor. Deuteronomy 17:15 says, "When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, and you possess it and live in it, and you say, 'I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around me,' you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses, {one} from among your countrymen you shall set as king over yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman." So there was a large segment of Jews who refused to give any submission to a Gentile government. They thought that was wrong based on that particular passage.
 
Sometimes it's argued that the Jews in Rome were particularly disobedient. There were riots about eight or nine years earlier due to conflicts in the Jewish community over the identity of one "Crestes". Many people believe this was a fraternal battle and fight among the Jews that became violent over the issue of Jesus Christ. Claudius expelled all of the Jews from Rome according to Acts 18:2. That took place about four years before they began to come back.
We also have the example of the Zealots in Judea who would recognize no king but God and they would not pay taxes. They did not think it was right for any Jew to pay a tax to a Gentile government. The people who thought like that were also in Rome so this was part of the background. I believe that's one of the reasons why Paul addresses the issue of taxation in Romans 13: 6-7. But this isn't the only passage that addresses this. There are a number of passages which address the mandate of the Christians submission to government.
 
In Mark 12:17 the religious leaders tried to corner Jesus and they asked him about the tax to Caesar. He said, "Well whose image is on the coin?" Of course they were trapped and they said, "Caesar." "Well, render to Caesar what is Caesar's," Jesus answered. Jesus validated the taxes. He doesn't question whether it is just or unjust, whether it's an overburdening system. He doesn't address the percentages. He just said they were to give to Caesar what is Caesar's. He validates the authority of the Roman Empire's laws regarding taxation.
 
In 1 Timothy 2:1-3 we're told, "First of all, then, I urge that entreaties {and} prayers, petitions {and} thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior," We are to pray for our political leaders so that we may have peace, so we may go about evangelism and the training of believers without government interference. In Titus 3:1, "Remind them to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed," It's the same verb used here as in Romans 13:1.
 
In 1 Peter 2:13-17 using again the same verb Peter says, "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right.  For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men. {Act} as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but {use it} as bondslaves of God. Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king." There are other passages that give examples in relation to how believers are to handle the situation when they are under the authority of a corrupt, pagan government. So we're going to go into some of the examples, especially in Daniel.
 
Let's begin by just breaking down Romans 13:1-2. It's just one sentence in the Greek as opposed to three sentences that you'll see in your KJV or NKJV. Verses 1 and 2 represent one sentence in the original Greek. So Paul begins with a command addressed to every soul which means every person. This is a typical Jewish form of expression. "Let everyone be submissive to the governing authorities." The Greek word for be subject is HUPOTASSO. It's a present middle imperative. One of the uses of the middle voice is that it adds emphasis. This is a present imperative so that indicates this is to be a normal operating procedure in every believer's life. You can either restate it as a present imperative or an aorist imperative. The aorist imperative would say, "Make this a priority." Present imperative emphasizes to make it a standard operating procedure in your life. The verb HUPOTASSO means to subject yourself to an authority, to submit to an authority.
 
The word for governing here is actually a present participle used as an adjective and it means something that excels or something that is higher than something or something that is superior to something else. So Paul is saying to let every person submit themselves, or subject themselves, or be subject to the governing authorities. I like using it in the active sense of subjecting yourselves. It picks up that middle voice nuance. It's up to your volition to be submissive to the government and to submit to government authorities. The word for authority here is EXOUSIA which means authority or power. It refers ultimately to authority that is God-given. "So be subject to governing authorities" means to those who rule over the people. Now we have TASSO which is the idea that the authorities are all appointed by God so we see that there is a relationship there to something that is appointed and we are be subordinate and submit to that which is appointed.
 
Paul explains that the reason he makes the command is that there is no authority except from God and that the authorities that exist are appointed by God. That's making a pretty strong point here. As we read this we have lots of questions. What Paul is basically teaching is that God controls history and that no one secures a position of authority or rises to a position of leadership in government, whether it's lower or higher, apart from God. It may be God's permissive will but no one gets there apart from God's governance. The institution of government is not something just developed by mankind but it is a divine institution established by God. Therefore, human government, in and of itself, is good.
 
Now some of my acquaintances that tend to be of a more libertarian persuasion have really surprised me. They ought to know better; they've been taught better. I've heard them say that government is bad or government is evil. Well, you just called God a liar. Government in and of itself exists in the Trinity. There is a governing relationship of authority there. God established human government in order to restrain and restrict evil. Government in and of itself is not evil. There can be evil people who govern who have positions of authority and can make government abusive. But government is a righteous institution having been established by God.
 
 As a result of that, what Paul is saying is that the servants of God, those who are believers, should submit to its laws. He doesn't regard rulers as some kind of autonomous groups that just takes power apart from governance of God. Now that's a strong position. There are a number of people who want to challenge that because they see this as some sort of blank check for any tyrant to come along and say that no one has a right to check the authority of any tyrant. In answer to that we have to remember several things. First of all, Paul is writing in terms of general principles. He is not writing to deal with every particular situation that a person might find himself in. He doesn't address or resolve the problem of is it ever right to rebel against unjust tyranny. Or to what degree do you allow tyranny to be unjust before you do something? He doesn't address the issue of what to do when there are rival claimants to the crown or when there are conflicts between civil and religious authorities. He doesn't distinguish between legitimate and usurped authority nor does he go into when a successful rebel may be held to have become the legitimate ruler.
 
Paul doesn't talk about the situation when the state demands the citizen do something against the law of God. These are something we have to work out comparing Scripture with Scripture and evaluating different examples in the Scripture. The one thing that is clear is that all the New Testament writers are clear that we must obey God rather than man. God's Word has more authority than any human government. We get into the sticky wicket of "what does the Scripture actually mean?" You see it's that bothersome thing of hermeneutics that I talk about so much.
 
We have the same problem on the political side of the fence. What does the Constitution actually mean? You may not agree with a ruling from the Supreme Court but according to the law of our land the Supreme Court's ruling on how something is to be interpreted is the last and final say on that. You may even disagree that that's true but that's the way things are. That's what's accepted in the legal community today and whether we like it or not, that's where the structure it is, and that's what the authority says. That's why submission is difficult. Someone is asking you to do something you don't like. You think they're wrong and you disagree with them. If submission were easy, it wouldn't be a real conflict. But that's where the real problem lies. So we have to spend a lot of time talking about this.
 
Now in the next verse which continues the thought of the first Paul works out the implications of it when he says in Romans 13:2, "Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed [resists] the ordinance of God…" The word translated resists is the Greek word ANTITASSO. Notice the word is from TASSO and now ANTITASSO to resist or to oppose. What does it mean to oppose the authority? Does that mean to go marching against the government and throw Molotov cocktails at government forces or does that mean you can't even speak out against them in the public square? See we have to define what these concepts mean.
 
"Whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God." The word translated resists the second time is the Greek word ANTHISTEMI, which is a different verb. In the English here they don't vary the verb, which they should have so you understand that a different word is used in the Greek. This word also means to oppose or to withstand. "Therefore whoever resists the ordinance of God…" The Greek word for ordinance is DIATAGE meaning a decree or an ordinance or a command. This is how God has established things. So this is saying that whoever resists the institutions of God, that is the divine institution of government, and those who resist will bring judgment or condemnation upon themselves. This is referring to divine discipline brought upon themselves.
 
Now as we see going through these first two verses the fundamental issue here that we have to wrestle with is the issue of submission. Whether it's the government or whether in the family or the place of employment, it's still submission. Let me tell you, if you have a problem with authority in one area it's going to show up in other areas of life. People who have problems submitting to authority don't just have trouble submitting to authority in one area. They have problems in other areas.
 
There are many people who lack the humility to submit to authority because they always know what's right. Now that's an extreme view. There are a lot of people in the contemporary political arena who are trying to figure out where does the submission stop and where does holding people accountable begin? That's a legitimate question but some people just basically have problems with authority. So let's start with understanding what the Scriptures teach about submission.
 
First of all, God is the ultimate authority over His creation. Therefore, we are all as God's creatures required to submit to God's authority. This is seen in passages like Hebrews 12:9, "Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?" This is teaching authority orientation in the home. This passage is drawing a correlation between a submission to a human father and submission to God the Father.
 
James 4:7 states it very briefly: "Submit therefore to God, resist the Devil and he will flee from you." He goes on to say we are to submit to God and humble ourselves. Now as the ultimate authority in the universe God the Father will bring all things in subjection to Himself. There's the issue of rebellion here, which ties us back to the angelic conflict that Satan has rebelled against God so the ultimate and fundamental sin in the universe is rebellion against authority. Now that's what's important for us to pay attention to. That's why authority is such an important issue because the sin of rebellion is the sin of Satan.
 
That's why all through the Scripture an issue is made out of obedience to authority. It's not ultimately what we think about the authority but it's whether we are willing to obey that authority. If you have a problem with authority orientation in the home, in the workplace, the changes are you've got a problem with authority orientation to God. And it works both ways. So God will bring all things into submission to Himself, which is His working through history. 1 Corinthians 15:28, "When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all." The first "Him" here is God the Father. The second "Him" is God the Son. See, even Jesus Christ who was perfect is in a position of submission to God the Father. So this issue of submission, whatever sphere you're in, is related to the attitude of the individual and not always to the righteousness or the authority over them.
 
Jesus has to be subordinate to the Father. Another verse is in 1 Corinthians 15:27, "For HE HAS PUT ALL THINGS IN SUBJECTION UNDER HIS FEET." This is also indicated in Hebrews, that the Father not only brings all of creation to submission to His authority but then He places that under the authority of the Son. It goes on to say that the Father is the exception. He is not placed under the authority of the Son. All of the words about subjection in these verses are the Greek word HUPOTASSO here. In verse 28 we again see that God the Son is subordinate to the authority of God the Father. The third point is that Christ, Himself, submits Himself to the authority of the Father.
 
So being submissive to an authority over you is not making yourself into a doormat. It's not somehow reducing your personhood. It's not somehow giving up something. This is sort of the mantra of the feminist movement and every other revolutionary movement in the twentieth century is that submission somehow makes the person who is submissive less equal to the authority. But Jesus is never less equal to the Father. He is equal in every aspect to the Father. He has equal attributes of Deity. When He submits to the Father it doesn't make Him less of a person, less significant. That's the line of the whole women's equal rights movement. It's to submit to a husband makes you less of a person. That's such a crock of biblical SKUBALON, or horse manure, in the Greek.
 
Point four is that all things will be subject to Christ and brought into His authority. This is seen in passages like Philippians 3:21, "That He is able to subdue all things unto Himself." Hebrews 2:8, "YOU HAVE PUT ALL THINGS IN SUBJECTION UNDER HIS FEET." For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him." 1 Peter 3: 22 talking about the Ascension, "Who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, after angels and authorities and powers had been subjected to Him". So everything is brought under the authority of the Son eventually. Now that's in terms of subordination to the authority of God.
 
Point five is submission in relation to being a believer. Believers are to submit to the authority of human governing authorities. This isn't just in Romans 13. We see this all through the epistles from numerous writers. In Titus 3:1 Paul is writing to Titus and says, "Remind them to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed," That's the same verbiage. The same verb there, HUPOTASSO to be subject to rulers and authorities.
 
Notice both words are in the plural. So it's not just restricted to the ultimate authority, just the American Constitution. We all know that the ultimate body of law in the U.S. is the Constitution. Everyone from the president down to the lowest citizen is accountable to the Constitution but the Constitution delegates and defines the role and authority of each member of government and limits their authority. But we are to submit to rulers and authorities. They're multiple. There are many different rulers and many different authorities. Not just the ultimate authority but everyone that is established by the Constitution. We are under local government all the way up to federal government. 1 Peter 2:13 says, "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority."
 
We have to remember here that there are exceptions. This is what happens when Peter and John are told not to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. They say, "We can't do that because we have to obey God rather than men." So there are exceptions so even though this passage looks like we ought to obey every law, that's not right. We don't. There are exceptions and we're going to see how to handle that as we go through this study.
 
Point six says we're supposed to submit to the authority of Jesus Christ. Our ultimate authority is Jesus Christ. If you're a believer your ultimate authority isn't the U.S. Constitution, as near and dear as that is to us. Our authority is to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. We're here as an ambassador for Christ to serve with a mission. That doesn't negate our individual citizenship. We have responsibilities as citizens that we have to perform. We have to be involved with government at every level and to whatever degree we can.
 
There's nothing wrong with political activism. Daniel and his friends were politically active to the degree that they could. We'll see that when we get to Daniel one and Daniel two. They didn't just sit on their hands and pray. That's what a lot of Christians think, "All we have to do is just pray about it." Well, you don't just sit and pray that your car will get repaired. You don't just sit and pray that the grass will get cut. We pray and then we have to act. We have to do what we're expected to do. We don't just fold our hands and pray and expect something to happen.
 
Daniel and his three friends when they were told they had to eat a diet that violated the Mosaic Law didn't say, "Okay we're going to hold a sit-in and we're not going to do anything." That's not the option they took. They didn't say, "Okay, we're going to pray about it and just let God handle it." No, they didn't take that action. Because they were slaves, and of course, U.S. citizens are not slaves so it's a different situation, but there are principles here we can apply. Because they were slaves their options were very limited and they had to think creatively about how to handle the situation. So they handled it by going to the authority and presenting them with a proposal that would allow them to violate the diet the Babylonians king wanted them to be on. So they challenged the law and they were active, by analogy politically active. They just didn't sit on their folded hands. They got involved within the system trying to change the system.
 
Our system's different. It allows a lot more action than they were allowed. But the authority that governs all of that is going to be the authority of God as Church Age believers subject to Christ. We're also to be subject to one another. Ephesians 5:21, "And be subject to one another in the fear of Christ." That doesn't mean we spend all of our time just being obsequious and saying, "Oh we'll do it your way." But we don't try to fight to get our own way all the time. It's not about us. We understand it's ultimately about glorifying God and so we're not out just to get our own way.
 
Point eight is that slaves are to be submissive to their masters. There's application there. It's not a one-to-one scenario but there's application there to employees and employers. I know there are some employees who feel like they're slaves but each employment situation is a different culture. Slaves in those days were to submit to their master. It doesn't say, "Submit to your master when they're good. " It doesn't say, "Submit to your master when you agree with them." It doesn't say, "Submit to your master when they're nice and when they treat you right." It just says to submit to your masters. Titus 2:9, "{Urge} bondslaves to be subject to their own masters in everything, to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith so that they will adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect." This means not to be a problem or a smart mouth. Don't always verbally challenge the authority of your boss. 1 Peter 2:18 says, "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable."
 
Now that has great application to understanding submission when it comes to marriage. That's tough for a lot of wives to submit to their husbands. The other side of it is that it's really hard for some husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. It's not dependent upon the individual. Wives are to submit to their husbands. Ephesians 5:24 says, "But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives {ought to be} to their husbands in everything." If you look around us today on a scale of one to ten, one being completely rebellious, and ten being completely submissive, how submissive is the Church to Christ? Probably about a four or three. Guess what? That's probably about the same number I would give to Christian wives being submissive to Christian husbands. Do you think there's a relationship? If you can't submit to Christ you're not going to submit to your husband.
 
We've got a real problem in marriages and authority in marriages in the Church today but it's just a manifestation of the fact that women can't submit to authority. I'm not picking on women. The men can't submit to authority either. They've got their own authority sphere. So Colossians 3:18, "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord." 1 Peter 3:1, "In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any {of them} are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior." It doesn't promise that they will be won. It's the old saying that "you attract more flies with sugar than with vinegar". Wives, if you're not submissive to your husband, you're going to have a much more difficult time ever communicating the gospel to them than if you are submissive. Titus 2:4-5, "So that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, {to be} sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored."
 
Then finally in 1 Peter 5:5, "You younger men, likewise, be subject to {your} elders; and all of you, clothe yourselves with humility. That's the real bottom line issue, "For GOD IS OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE". If you can't learn to submit to the right sphere of authority around you then that's because you've got a problem with humility and you think you know more than the person in authority. You think you know more than God because you're going to say, "God that's great for everybody to obey authority but you didn't really mean it in my case because if you knew what a loser this person is you wouldn't be asking me to submit to him. If you really understood how evil this Obama administration is you wouldn't be telling me to submit to it. If you really understood the horrible things that happened under the Bush administration, you wouldn't be telling me to submit to that authority." But these commands are not qualified. We're to be an example of authority orientation and humility to the angels and to man. We'll come back and look at his more in the coming weeks.

Romans 140b-Obey? Even When They are Wrong?

Romans 13:1 NASB95
Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
Romans 140b-Obey? Even When They are Wrong? Romans 13:1-7
 
Okay, we're back in Romans 13 looking at the question of obedience to authority. This is not always easy. One of the things that always comes up when we start talking about this topic is how does this apply to the American War for Independence, especially in relation to government which has come up at least the forty-five years I've been conscientiously looking at this question. This takes me back to pretty much times when I was in high school. We got a question the last time that came in towards the end of class from Paul Yost. I know who Paul is. He's a professor with Tyndale Seminary and I think that's up in the Pittsburgh area.
 
He asked a question which I think is important. Let me read this to you. He says, "Sometimes a situation appears to be the same kind of issue that faced the founding fathers of this country. One could very well wonder at which point we pick up arms." That's a question many people have thought about and I know I've been asked that question. Many at the time of the War for Independence, had such concerns and were addressing it Biblically. "It can be said that we went to war with a foreign government at that time." I don't think we can put it that way but we did go to war with a government and were seeking independence from the authority of Britain over us. So what about the justification to take up arms?
 
I'm not an expert on all the things that went on with the American War for Independence. I've read a lot on it on both sides. Paul goes on to comment, "Apparently a pastor in Oklahoma believes that since we were founded as a Christian nation that therefore our Constitution makes us different than Rome." Yes, but it depends on what he means by a Christian nation and our Constitution does make us different from Rome but authority is authority and it's not any different whether it's the authority of Nero, the authority of George Washington or the authority of "fill-in-the blank", whichever president you despise the most. Okay, it doesn't matter because the Scripture says that the authorities are established by God. Whether that's involving His directive will or whether that's involving His permissive will, He is still the One who establishes those authorities.
 
We'll look at examples historically as we go through this study that God raised up authorities such as the Chaldeans. Habakkuk just gets his knickers all in a knot when he found out that God has raised up such an unrighteous authority to bring discipline upon Israel. Even though he was praying for God to bring discipline on Israel and their disobedience, he just couldn't understand how God had raised up such an unrighteous authority as the Chaldeans. That's within the sovereign prerogative of God. God has His purposes and we have to factor all these things in.
 
When we look at passages like Romans 13 and we'll look at some others, no passage in Scripture says everything there is to say about the particular topic or the particular issue. So we have to put together these different passages and understand what they are saying. Paul Yost went on to write, "I'm just wondering what your apologetics are regarding someone who believes we were founded as a Christian nation so therefore we are justified to go to war with anyone who they believe threatens that status." Although Dr. John Hanna, head of Historical Theology Department at Dallas Seminary under whom I did my doctoral work, said that we were founded as a synergy between seculars and Christians. Yes, that was Hanna's position and that's one of the positions that's out there.
 
You can read one segment of the historical scholarly view and they look at what the situation in the colonies was in the mid-eighteenth century. They say they were primarily influenced by secular philosophy. Then you look at some other people who countered that. One is David Barton who has become a favorite of a lot of people on the right and the Tea Party. David Barton disagrees with Hanna and says the founding fathers were coming at it from a Christian perspective. He will cite a number of people such as Charles Chauncey and Jonathan Mayhew. You ought to look their names up in Wikipedia sometimes. They're not orthodox Christian theologians. They're some of the early American Unitarian pastors in New England. They're not orthodox. They're Christian only in a broad sense of the term. Barton has been challenged many times on how he uses the term Christian.
 
Really we're founded on a Judeo-Christian heritage. The precise way to say this is that we're a country founded on Judeo-Christian values which is how I've always stated this. The primary worldview that governed the colonies in the 18th century was a Judeo-Christian theistic worldview. Having said that, that's a pretty broad concept. Just as today you have a lot of Christians who hold to a lot of Judeo-Christian worldview, they've also been influenced by other ideas in the culture. I can name you some theologians I know who are generally conservative but the way they use history shows they've been influenced by post-modern ideas. I can point out some Greek professors in the way they use language in their linguistic theory they've picked up here and there that shows elements of how they've been influenced by post-modern views of language and language theory. That affects how they exegete and how they interpret. So just because the founders and leaders of this country were primarily influenced by Judeo-Christian worldview there were other influences.
 
Now I disagree with Hanna. I came up under John when I did my Th.M. work. He's changed a lot over the years and I'm told that lately everything about him is about Jonathan Edwards. Well I did an entire doctoral program under him and he hardly ever mentioned Jonathan Edwards. So he's changed a lot of his views over the years and moved a little bit more toward what I would consider to be a mainstream evangelical position. John's done a lot of research. He's done a lot that's very valuable but the truth is closer to Barton than it is to the other side but that doesn't mean Barton is always right. As I mentioned earlier, one example is that he says that the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and a number of phrases were frequently found in the writings and the sermons of the pastors for the previous hundred years, going back into England, even in the mid-1600s. Yes, he's correct.
 
We have to go back and look at our chronology It's important to understand that perhaps the most formative political document to come out of Puritan Christianity in England was Samuel Rutherford's book, Lex Rex: The Law is King. Its premise is that the king, even in England, is under the law, that he cannot make the law and he is not a law unto himself. Lex Rex influenced a whole generation of philosophers and political thinkers and theologians including John Locke, who was formative in the thinking of many of the American founding fathers. John Locke is a mixed bag. I remember studying him when I did my Masters work in philosophy here at the University of St. Thomas back in the 80s. Don't ask me to pull all of that back up off the memory bank because it's buried pretty deep on the hard drive and I don't know if I can pull it up. I've read a lot since then. I've read some things that Locke said that were good. That's because he was brought up in a very strict Puritan home and in a lot of ways John Locke has a lot of right things to say. But if you look at his broad, philosophical framework he is considered one of the founding fathers of empiricism.
 
Beginning with the Enlightenment you have Rene Descartes who's a Jesuit mathematician who emphasizes rationalism His very famous statement was "I think; therefore I am." He used the principle that maybe everything around him was an illusion. Maybe God is just playing a big cosmic joke on me and He's making me think that all this stuff I see and everything around me is just an illusion. There's nothing real, nothing exists. I don't even exist." Then he thought, "Well, if I'm thinking then I must exist so he came to the conclusion that 'I think; therefore I am'. That's what he meant by that because since he had self-conscious thinking he must exist. He never could get out of his head. That was called Solipsism which means you're just alone. You never could get from the existence of yourself thinking logically on the principles of logic and reason alone to the existence of other things outside your head.
 
Now that's a heavy thought for some of you tonight. That may be a heavy thought for your whole life. That's where Descartes was. Eventually the weakness in that system of Solipsism brought out the empiricists. John Locke was one of the foremost empiricists. Now we've studied "how we know what we know" many times. We have three basic ways that human philosophy has come up with how you know truth. The first is rationalism whether you're talking about Plato in the ancient world or Descartes in the modern world which began the modern Enlightenment. Or whether you're talking about Empiricism which would be Aristotle in the ancient world and John Locke and others in the modern world.  
 
But rationalism and empiricism always go bankrupt because no matter how clear your thinking is, you don't have revelation to give you the bits and pieces of important data that you can't get from thinking alone. You're going to run into a brick wall. The same thing happens with empiricism. There's some things you just can't get to. The greatest example is to remember that if Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden and they were the most brilliant human beings ever created, that no matter how well they thought in perfection and no matter how profound their observation skills were they never could have figured out by looking at that one tree in the middle of the Garden that if they ate from it they would die. The only way they could learn that was through revelation.
Revelation gives us the key data we need in order to interpret thinking and in order to interpret the data of sense experience. Without revelation, it's just data. We have to guess at what the unifying principles are in order to get anywhere. But as Christians with a Judeo-Christian heritage we know that is the only way we can ultimately understand absolute truth is if we start with the revelation of God. So the problem with Locke is that Locke starts with human experience in the good sense, the sense data from what we see, what we feel, what we taste, what we touch and what we smell. This is what forms the basis.
The combination of rationalism and empiricism is what we often think of as the scientific method. It's good as far as it goes but it can't get you beyond a certain point. There are a lot of things that Adam and Eve could learn, could discover, and could reason to while they were in the Garden but apart from revelation from God they just couldn't get to universal, ultimate truth and ultimate reality. So the weakness with Locke's political theory is that he came to his position that government is from the consent of the governed. That's not what we find in the Scripture.
 
In Romans 13:1, "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by the people?" Is that what it says? No, that's not what it says. It says there's no authority except from God. Now it may be mediated through the voting booth where the people make choices but ultimately whoever they choose and whoever becomes president, whether you agree with them or not, or whether you like them or not, or whether there was massive voter fraud that was overlooked, the person that gets elected is the person that God in His permissive will has placed in authority. Now you may not like it and I may not like it but that's the way it is.
 
Another thing that happened with the American War for Independence is that it was preceded by at least a decade, maybe fifteen years, of intense political negotiations with England. It was a last resort and it may have been a mistake that flared and caused the shooting at Lexington and Concord. When did it occur? Anyone know the date? April 19th and 20th is the anniversary. It's a big holiday in Boston. That's the reason they picked the day for the Boston Marathon. It's close to Patriot's Day and so this is right before San Jacinto Day. Y'all can remember San Jacinto Day, can't you? So just remember that. San Jacinto Day's date is just one day off from Lexington and Concord. The reason you had the battles at Lexington and Concord, the reason the Redcoats were coming, and the reason Paul Revere warned about the Redcoats coming was that the Redcoats were seeking to arrest John Adams and John Hancock who were hiding out in Lexington at the home of the pastor of the Lexington Church. His name was Jonas Clark. When the alarm went out that the British were coming Jonas Clark put the word out to the militia men who were members of his congregation. They came out and stood in the Town Square to protect the life and the property of Adams and Hancock.
 
We don't know who fired the first shot. The ultimate goal of those British troops was to go and confiscate arms that were being stored at Concord. These arms were for the protection of the colonies. They still had Indian raids and other threats and problems so this was important. Some of this was in violation of accepted British law. Before the first shot was fired they were still making moves in the courts to solve the problem. And that continued. That happened in April of what year? 1775. When's the Declaration of Independence signed? 1776. So for the next fourteen or fifteen months the leaders in the colonies are still working through the legal process with England to try to resolve it.
 
What we find is that people get impatient. We're hearing questions today and for five or so years about when is this justified? We shouldn't even be thinking the question yet. I made the statement that we're a long way from that. I don't mean that just in a time sense. I mean that in a legal sense. There are thousands of legal and court cases that need to be adjudicated and are being adjudicated. We've got a major election coming up in the fall, mostly Congressional election. It has the potential of turning the tide. There's another major election coming in two years. The sad thing is that people who believe like most of you believe or even who are conservative evangelical Christians who are so "freaking arrogant" [my opinion' in this last election because the Republican candidate was a Mormon and some in their self-righteous haughtiness refused to even vote]. And whether you like it or not, my opinion is that if you didn't vote you voted for Barack Obama.
 
That's the same thing I've said to every friend of mine who voted for Ross Perot and stuck their nose up in the air and said they couldn't vote for someone who's not right. They claim they're voting their conscience. Well, they don't even understand reality. They're as divorced from reality as any flako-liberal I've ever met because you don't understand the fact that this is a two-party country and when you vote for the third party, whether it's on the left or on the right, you're basically throwing your vote away to the other major party. That's what always happens, like it or not. I don't like it and you may disagree with me and that's fine, but we have to learn to work smarter.
 
The conservatives are so fragmented we're just like the Jews in the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 66-70. They were so busy fighting each other that they couldn't present a united front against the Romans who were literally besieging the walls and coming over the walls to Jerusalem. The various Zealot and Right Wing parties among the Jews were shooting each other and killing each other as much as they were killing the Romans. How many Democrats talk about Democrats who are Democrats in name only? You don't hear it. Whether they agree or disagree with each other, they present a united front but we have Republicans and conservatives who are shooting each other all the time.
 
Now there are a whole lot of Republicans that I really don't like. And I don't think they are very conservative at all but one of the things about this nation is that the party swings the vote in Washington. The speaker of the House pulls people in line. We don't like that. That's the nasty side of politics but that's what happens and if you don't get a majority of Republicans in Congress it isn't going to matter because we're going to continue to slide in the direction we're going. The same thing applies in Texas. We've had about ten years of a great Texas administration and we have to be very careful who we vote in this time to continue that because there's a lot of people on the right, myself included, who were very impatient. We have to be careful we're not too impatient. You can be impatient for change and push things and create a calamity. We have to be very cautious about what we're going to do.
 
Anyway, I tried to answer that question and we'll talk about the War for Independence a little more as we go along. The second question that came in has to do with this Bundy situation going on right now. I think this is a great application. How do we take the Word of God and apply it to real world situations because these are real world situations and they're not clear? They're messy. I think Lexington and Concord weren't as clean as some people would like it to be. Real life is messy because people have mixed motives and people come from mixed backgrounds.
 
Now if you're not familiar with this situation it's that you have about a 65-year old Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy who apparently he and his family's ranch have had grazing rights on federal land for a long time. About 85-90% of Nevada is federal land. That's the most of any state in the Union. Can you believe that? That much of Nevada is actually owned and administered by the Federal government. Now the reason that happened apparently is that when Nevada became a state this land that was owned by the state became property of the federal government.
 
Now the core situation with Cliven Bundy isn't about the little guy versus the Bureau of Land Management, trust me. The Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies have overreacted and intimidated and bullied Americans so much that this is created this scenario. But the reality in this situation is that Bundy hasn't paid his bill to the federal government in twenty years. The reason he hasn't paid his bill is that he doesn't think the federal government has a right to that land. Now that's a problem that goes back to Nevada state law and what happened when Nevada became a state, as far as I understand it. I read the transcript of Bundy's interview with Glen Beck last week and I listened to Bundy's wife interviewed by Greta Van Sustern last night and they both were making the same case. They said they'd be glad to pay the money but the federal government has no right to it. They offered to pay it to Clark County or to the sovereign state of Nevada but they don't believe they should pay it to the federal government.
 
Now the background to this is that Americans are really frustrated because they view the federal government is becoming increasingly an enemy to them and to their personal freedom. We have examples of the IRS targeting conservative groups seeking a tax exempt status and the IRS seeking not to treat them fairly. Several times its been reported that not a single progressive organization seeking tax exempt status is subject to any sort of analysis or delay by the IRS but conservative causes were. Not only that but according to e-mails released just this last week employees of the IRS and Justice Department were trying to figure out ways they could bring criminal charges against these conservative groups. So an environment of hostility has been created, especially in this administration for individual citizens trying to put down conservatives. As a result people are fed up, frustrated, anxious, and there's going to be a spark that ignites something. 
 
Unfortunately a lot of people showed up in Nevada with firearms. This should not have happened. If you're going to do this, pick a case where the guy you're fighting for is in the right. Like the old adage, "Be sure you're right and then go ahead." It's not clear at all who is right here although it's probably the federal government who has the legal case on their side. Bundy has not paid his bill so legally the federal government has the right to manage its land. Even if the government has other motives, it's irrelevant because he hasn't paid his bill in twenty years. You know what would happen to you or me if we hadn't paid our electric bill in twenty years. We would have been really cold this morning and really cold all winter long. We would've been hot last summer. That electricity would have been turned off for a long, long time so I think in some ways the federal government has been patient.
 
There are a lot of other cases where the federal government has come down really hard and they're more likely to have been in the wrong. So we really have to look at each case and make sure we know all the facts. I should have started this by giving you a little caveat. When we're this close to a situation in history a lot of times we don't have enough historical distance to know all the facts and every day new information is coming out. We have to be very cautious in jumping to a conclusion simply because there are things that are going on that sound like things we would be sympathetic to. We have to rally make sure we have all of the facts.
 
I think more has come out lately in listening to both Cliven Bundy and his wife that indicate that the reason they are fighting the government on this is not the reason I hear from a lot of the other people who are supporting them so we have to be cautious. As Christians we have to recognize we have a higher standard and that standard is the Scripture. We have to recognize that on the one hand we have to be involved and be responsible citizens. We have to be very active as citizens in the political process. From the grass roots up. That means getting involved at the local precinct level, all the way up to the state level, being knowledgeable and informed about every race. If we're not we're just abdicating our responsibility but now's the time when things are really serious. We really need to stand up and be counted and be involved. That's the legal process.
 
People say "What can we do? How can we resist the government?" By getting involved politically. By supporting positive candidates. By finding out more and more information about legal cases. There was a case that came out just a week ago. In fact the e-mail came in during Bible class last week that Charlie Clough sent me about a professor that had been fired at some university in southern California. He took his case to the courts and the court reinstated him. He had an excellent record of doing his job as unto the Lord. He had an excellent track record but because he disagreed with the politically correct views of the establishment of the university they had found some trumped-up reason to let him go when he already had tenure. So the courts forced the university to back his tenure.
 
So when right is on our side, it may take longer and the process is slower but we have to work through the system. As long as there are legal avenues available, that's what we need to be involved in. And it takes time. Unfortunately, a lot of us, myself included, happen to be just a little too impatient to take the time to go through the process. But when we look at the other side, we see that they have worked for forty or fifty years to build their structure. They've been following the "Rules for Radicals". They've been building things. They've been working. That's what conservatives need to do. They need to take their own action. We didn't get here overnight. We're not going to change it overnight and violence is not going to bring that about.
 
So we need to work very, very smart and recognize that we are a nation governed by a rule of law. Because of that, because of law, we haven't nearly exhausted all of the options. That's why it's important to teach authority orientation to children in the home. There's been a rather humorous little thing going around through e-mail recently that says, "Yes, I have a basic psychological problem. My parents spanked me regularly when I was a child. Then they grounded me and they disciplined me. Now that that I'm an adult I suffer from psychological disorder called "respect for other people's property." If you want to see an example of what is happening to kids that are not disciplined, you go into classrooms in many public schools and they're absolute chaos because the teachers can't really do anything and there's no discipline in the homes. It's been going on for a couple of generations. We have to recognize we have a systemic problem here. Until we recognize the real problem which needs a spiritual solution, we're not getting anywhere.
 
Until people shift away from relativism and start thinking about life in terms of the absolute, the political solution isn't going to go very far. Because many conservatives are just as self-absorbed and just as arrogant as many liberals. They're not grounded on Divine viewpoint any more than liberals. Just because a lot of their opinions may align with ours a little more consistently doesn't mean they're really right. Often we can get caught up in making a selection between one form of arrogance versus another form of arrogance. The only way to really change this country is what made it to begin with and that's the influence of Biblical Christianity and a Judeo-Christian worldview. Until that changes, nothing else will change.
 
I've got unfortunate news for you. Apart from a massive work of God, not that He can't do it, it's not going to change. It's just going to get worse first, a lot worse. People have been saying that for forty years and if you look back since World War II there are a few places where the progression slowed. It didn't stop though and it didn't pause and it didn't reverse. It just declined less rapidly for a few years. What happened during those times is that progressives reorganized and regained strength. For some reason conservatives don't do that. I saw this little cartoon today and thought it was amusing about the Bundy thing. The sign says "Federal Land. Grazing by Permit Only." The cow in the middle is the Bundy ranch with hundreds of guns pointed at him. He's saying, "I should have disguised myself as an illegal immigrant."
 
The federal government's response on this was such a problem because they sent in Special Forces. They sent in snipers and troops. Their reaction has been horrible. Their action has been unacceptable. It hasn't been warranted at all. It is typical of the way the federal government has been handling a lot of things recently so it's no wonder people want to react to it because they resent having a federal government that is so opposed to their property rights and their freedom.
 
Now as we go on what we have to remember is that it was through God's use of unjust authority, a tyrannical authority that accomplished salvation. Tyrannical authority both on the part of the Sanhedrin and especially on the part of Rome. Jesus' crucifixion was the result of unjust rulers who were forcing their politics upon the population in Judea. What was Jesus' response as He was being forced to an illegal execution by the unjust powers? Did He react? Did He assert His rights? Not at all. Philippians 2:8 tells us that, "He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." He was perfectly righteous. He was totally without sin but He refused to assert His just rights against the unjust authority of Rome and the unjust authority of the religious leaders in Jerusalem. What that tells us is something we don't like to hear. It's not comfortable. In many cases it is more Christ-like to submit to injustice and to put the situation in God's hand than to rebel and to disobey because we know that God has a greater plan and we have to learn to trust in Him.
 
So in the U.S. we're ruled by constitutional law. We're proud to say we're a country based on the rule of law. Sadly too many people who say that are breaking the law out the other side of their mouth but we are a nation of laws. Under our constitution we're a republican form of government. That's a representative republic. As conservatives like to remind everyone, we're not a democracy. Democracy means mob rule. We are a representative republic. That means we elect representatives and senators to go to the legislature and to represent us as a body politic, we the people, to vote and to make laws.
The problem with that is that the laws that they make may not be the laws that we want them to make. Whether your representative represents you or not, whatever they do, represents you legally. They're your representatives. Some of you may live in a district where you have a liberal democrat. And that representative always votes ways you wish they wouldn't. But guess what? That's your vote whether you like it or not. That's your vote. Just last week I heard a speaker at a Republican Women's meeting and in the midst of his message he did something that is typical rhetoric of someone trying to rouse the crowd to action. He asked three questions. He said, "Did you vote for the IRS to investigate conservative organizations for tax exempt status? Well, did you, what's your answer? Did you vote for the IRS to investigate conservative groups?" Everyone said "No.". He went on, "Did you vote for the Bureau of Land Management to round up the cattle belonging to Cliven Bundy?" "Did you vote for Congress to socialize our economy by voting in Obamacare?" They all screamed no but the reality is that all of those people live in one of the most conservative congressional districts in the state and in the country. Their congressional representative voted against all those things and is opposed to all those things. But the reality is that if we believe in majority rule which we do then under that principle we all voted for this.
 
That's what representative republics do. That's what our representatives do. You don't like it? Change them. My frustration is that I like my congressman. He votes just the way I would vote. I like my senators. For the most part they vote just the way I would vote. The problem is I can't go change those idiots who get voted in from New York and Maryland and Virginia and Connecticut and Massachusetts. We're outnumbered, especially in the senate but not in the House. If we want to change things we've got to be involved somehow in effecting this change. So we have to recognize we operate on the rule of law and when we don't win the elections we don't get to make the rules.
 
It's sad when there are certain people on the other side they use that to try to completely eradicate any future use of power by the opposing position. It really is bad when their gamesmanship is better than ours. And what happens? We get frustrated, very frustrated. We have this state that's the best state in the union. We have a state that is the most conservative, well, not quite, I think Oklahoma is more conservative than we are. But we're pretty conservative. But we could do better. It's only going to happen when we vote.
 
Now the problem we have is this aspect in Romans 13:1 that says that everyone should be subject to governing authorities for there's no authority except from God and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Right now I want to look at that word authority. That word is EXOUSIA and it means an authority and a power. Now that word is used in a very interesting context. What Paul is saying in Romans 13 is that there's no authority except from God. You may think it's a bad authority. You may think it's a corrupt authority. Guess what? Jesus had a conversation with one of the most corrupt authority figures around and that was Pontius Pilate. John 19:10, "So Pilate said to Him, 'You do not speak to me? Do You not know that I have authority to release You, and I have authority to crucify You?' " Authority there is the same word. "I have the authority to crucify You and I have the authority to release You." Jesus answered in John 19:11, "You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above." Jesus affirms that the power that Pontius Pilate wielded wrongly was power that was delegated to him through the permissive will of God.
 
These are difficult things to grapple with when we're the one who get put between a rock and a hard place by a federal government that isn't doing what we think is right and when we believe that the Constitution of the U.S. is totally against them. One of the problems we have is that for the last 150 years the legal entities have all agreed in all of the cases that go against what we believe to be the correct interpretation, strict constructive interpretation of the law. Maybe not all of them because they change.
 
But we have to realize that the tide of history is going out. It came in before 1850. It's been going out since 1850. You know there's not a whole lot we can do to change that. These things have happened. We can fight some battles but I don't think we can win this war because we're living in the devil's world. We have to remember that and that's not a pleasant thing to remember. It was much worse for Christians who lived under the Roman Empire. God appoints every ruler, though, even when they're unjust. He allows them to rule for His purposes. So in Romans 13:1-5 Paul says, "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake."
 
Now there's several things we're going to look at here as I continue this study. There are some who take this word in Romans 13:1 "governing authority" and argue that the core meaning is to excel, to exceed, and to be better than. They then argue from that a logical fallacy and a linguistic fallacy that citizens should only obey those authorities who possess a higher standard or a higher value. But that's not what this word implies. As the article in the Bauer, Gingrich, and Arndt lexicon goes on to demonstrate, a word's meaning is determined by its context.
 
This word is used in the context of governing authorities and talking about higher authorities versus of lower authorities. There's a hierarchy of authorities in every country from your highest authority in the land, whether it's a king or a prime minister or a president to the lowest authority in the land. We have local city government, then we have county government, state government, and then federal government. There's a hierarchy of power there so what this is talking about is higher governing authorities. That's how the word is used when in a context of talking about government positions.
 
This is a reference to a book that was originally published in 1853 by James Wilson, called The Establishment and Limits of Civil Government: An Exposition of Romans 13:1-7. This book was republished by the American Vision Press. Now this publishing company also publishes a lot of home-school material. Those of you who homeschool need to be very much aware of this because these folks are reconstructionists. They're post-millennialists and reconstructionists. What is hidden behind a lot of their political theory and their activism is their desire to change American into their version of a Christian nation.
 
Now this wing of evangelical Christianity is extremely small but they have a publishing house and they influence a lot of people through their publishing house and they've influenced a lot of families through the way they promote their political theory in homeschool material. I know people whose families have been disrupted because they had people in their families who have changed to become hyper Calvinists because that's the position of these post-Mil, theocratic reconstructionists. We have to be careful. This is a very popular book promoted by a lot of conservatives because it's promoting the idea that the U.S. is a Christian country and out of frustration, a lot of evangelicals gravitate to these kinds of things because they're looking for information. They're trying to understand the influence of Christianity in the history of this country and especially the background during the American War for Independence so they go for books like this.
 
Unfortunately Wilson's arguments and his Biblical exposition doesn't stand up to accurate Biblical analysis and understanding the language of the text. He will interpret these references to government authorities to mean only the institution of government. But that's not what the text goes on to say. When you compare it with other passages in the New Testament, Paul is not just talking about authority in the abstract or the institution of government in the abstract. He's talking about individuals who hold positions of authority. We'll see this brought out in other passages. He makes the point that whoever resists the authority. That means whatever the authority is. He's not just talking about the king but any authority, whoever resists that authority is resisting the authority of God and those who resist that government will bring judgment upon themselves. So this is talking about opposition.
 
I know there are some of you who are saying, "Well, wait a minute, we're not just puppets under a tyranny." No, we're not. Whether you're talking about children to parents, wives to husbands, students to the authority in the classroom, or soldiers to officers over them, this is not a carte blanche check. There are exceptions in Scripture. We have to pay attention to those exceptions.
 
The reason I'm teaching it this way is because the default position of your sin nature is to rebel. That's what you got from Adam. We are inherently rebels against authority. I don't have to teach you to oppose authority if you don't like it. You're going to figure that out all by yourself. My problem is getting you to really understand how firm the Scripture is on obedience to authority. We live in a nation, especially from those who are baby boomers and younger, who have been influenced by a society whose mantra is to question authority, no matter what. We think that's good because that makes us independent thinkers. Well, there's an aspect of that that's true but if we're questioning authority in the sense of always rebelling, never accepting it, it leads to chaos. Only under authority orientation can we have order and can we operate as a team and achieve an end.
 
The Scriptures are very clear. Remember the very first sin was one that was in opposition to authority, the sin of Satan. The sin of man in the Garden wasn't an egregious sin but it was disobedience to a command by God. Eve just sat there and said, "Well it doesn't look all that bad. It looks pretty good. It might even taste good. That's what the snake said." The snake also said that God was just trying to keep good things from them. So there was a whole rationale behind that. She said, "I'm just going to eat it and find out for myself." That's the pattern. It's not so bad for me just to disobey my parent this one time but it sets a precedent. It sets a pattern. It happens in marriages. It happens in the work force. That's why the Bible is emphasizing again and again this whole issue of submission.
 
Now one of the things that Wilson and others today do is come along and look at a passage like Hosea 8:4. God is speaking to Hosea approximately the time of Isaiah and he's pointing out the spiritual failures and flaws in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. In God's critique he says that they set up kings but not by me. Now this is taken out of the whole Biblical context of Biblical history. Number one, if there's no authority established except from God [Romans 13:1] then you have to reconcile Hosea 8:4.
 
Were the Jews in such autonomous rebellion that they could put up a king that's not from God? No. What God is saying through Hosea is they set up kings that weren't according to God's desired will, His revealed will, but He allowed them to do this because they have volition. And they chose wicked rulers. They chose bad rulers that weren't righteous according to God's standard but God allowed them to do that because they have volition. They made princes but God did not acknowledge them. From their silver and gold they made idols for themselves that they might be cut off.
 
The people chose leaders that reflected the values of the people, the spiritual rebellion of the people and if we've got a problem with the leaders in this country, then we [and I'm using this collectively not in terms of us individually but as a nation] we just have to look in the mirror to see what the problem is. We're electing leaders that reflect the values of the majority of the people in this country. Whether that's actually true I don't know because there's a lot of people who won't get involved in the political process. They think that since they're Christians, well, that's too secular. John Nelson Darby was like that. He thought that it was carnal for Christians to vote or for Christians to even be involved in the political process. That's the secular world. We're ambassadors from the eternal kingdom so we shouldn't be involved at all.
 
Have you ever wondered why you've heard pastors say you shouldn't be involved in political activism and have taken a strong stand that way and then the next night they're railing about how awful the political system is? It's almost like they've got a split personality or multiple personalities. It's because within our tradition as dispensationalists and evangelicals, half of our spiritual fathers were saying that you didn't need to know anything about the political process because it's all carnal. The other half is saying that you need to be involved up to your eyebrows. So you get pastors coming out of seminaries who one day they're one way and the next day they're the other way.
 
They don't really define terms for us like Christian activism. On the one hand they say it's okay for people to get involved in politics as a career but don't go down and demonstrate legally and constitutionally for a just cause. Don't lobby Congress. That's activism. That's insane. It's not Biblical. It's not constitutional. Under the principle, "the squeaky wheel gets the most grease", Christians have only squeaked to God. And they should squeak to God but the people who are representing you need to hear your thoughts also. Legally and constitutionally.
 
Not by going and grabbing your AR off the wall and marching on Washington in something like a Bonus March in the 1920's but by writing letters, finding out what's the most effective way to communicate to a congressman. I wonder how many people in this congregation have their congressmen and their two senators on speed dial on their phone other than me? One or two. That's very good. We all should. Every hand should have gone up. Every time I hear of something or read about some legislation I'm calling John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, and Ted Poe and letting them know what I think. It doesn't take long to make your voice heard. They figure that for every person that lets them know something, there's a hundred or two hundred who feel the same way but don't have the time to call them. So the voice of one person has a tremendous impact.
 
It's too bad that whenever I try to send letters to some of those other folks that are representative sin the area, you can't get through because you're not in their district so you can't ever say anything to them. But, anyway, God has a permissive will and He allows rulers that are going to rule but not according to the way you and I would like them to. That's when it gets tough. That's when you have to address the issue.
 
Now there's another situation which occurs in the Old Testament related to permissive will and that's seen in Psalm 94:20-23, "Can a throne of destruction be allied with You, One which devises mischief by decree?" Anyone want to put a name on that? Don't say it out loud. We'd probably all say the same name. "They band themselves together against the life of the righteous." In other words the governing leaders are evil and they seek to destroy the influence of the righteous. "And condemn the innocent to death. But the LORD has been my stronghold." Notice it hasn't been the political action committee. Not that that's wrong in our system. The system under the Hebrew kings didn't have the constitutional setup that we have. The system under Rome didn't have the constitutional setup we have. The constitution we have gives us the responsibility to be involved in the system. It's a representative democracy so we need to be involved. It's not an either/or. We need to be involved but recognize that ultimately the real significant issue is spiritual and the protector is God, not the political process and the political emphasis. The psalmist goes on to say, "And my God the rock of my refuge. He has brought back their wickedness upon them And will destroy them in their evil; The LORD our God will destroy them."
 
We need to be taking this before the throne of Heaven all the time. What the psalmist is saying there is that, even though we submit to authority, it doesn't mean we agree with them and it doesn't mean that we don't do everything we can within legal bounds to oppose them. Now we'll get into the topic of legitimate civil disobedience later. There are clearly examples in Scripture for legitimate civil disobedience and we understand that. But first we must establish the principle of submission to authority and who establishes the authority and then we can understand better how to apply the issues of civil disobedience.
 
No authority has a right to tell anyone to do anything that violates the direct, specific revelation of God. No authority has the right to tell anyone to do something that harms their life, that is immoral, that is unconstitutional, or unbiblical. No one has the right to do that. But when it comes to issues like no one having the right to tell me what is unconstitutional, you and I have to recognize that what is determined to be constitutional is determined by Congress and the Supreme Court, whether we like it or not. I understand the historical issues there but since the early 19th century the reality is that the Supreme Court has been accepted as the arbiter, whether you agree with it or not. They are the hermeneutical absolute for determining the meaning of the Constitution. Do they have that right constitutionally? I don't think so but that doesn't matter anymore because that's not accepted.
 
This isn't easy to hear because most of us believe that our country is on the skids and we just want to scream for people to wake up. That's not the reality in which we live. If you had the privilege and the fun of living in one of the dominant blue states, your frustration level would really be high. We live in Texas and because we live in Texas we often recognize problems that the rest of the country just doesn't see. Conversations I've had with many people on the Eastern seaboard who are not conservative is that they think we have absolutely lost our minds and that we are nuttier than fruitcakes and that we are absolutely dangerous to the future of this country. They believe that down to the marrow of their bones. And you believe just as strongly the opposite. The only hope is the grace of God. That's why we have to be in Bible class and we have to be learning spiritual truth as our highest priority. Because I don't think it's going to get better. If it does, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Romans 141b-The Intended Role of Government

Romans 13:3 NASB95
For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same;
Romans 141b-The Intended Role of Government Romans 13:3-5
 
We're in Romans 13 and tonight as we look at verses three through five we'll also look at comparisons in 1 Peter to see the intended role of government as well as deal with some issues of what happens when government oversteps its bounds. One of the things I want to impress on everyone is the importance of the Biblical command to be submissive to government. Submission applies to every sphere of authority. We talked about different spheres. A couple of weeks back we went through all the different passages where the mandate to submit occurs: wives being submissive to their husbands, slaves being submissive to their masters, citizens being submissive to government and all of us being submissive to God and all believers being submissive to one another. Whatever applies in one area applies in another.
 
One reason I said that is that if you're in a situation and you think about civil disobedience and civil issues such as we talked about the Cliven Bundy issue that's getting headlines, you need to be aware. But there are a lot of more important behind-the-scenes situations that we need to be aware of. Some of these are very subtle and they may affect you. Remember in Genesis 3 we're told that the serpent was the most subtle of all the creatures. So there's a subtlety to these that often you're almost entrapped in the situation before you realize that you got sucked into a trap. So we have to learn to think very clearly and we need to pray for a lot of discernment in different issues.
 
There are circumstances that affect high school kids. In fact, I think the younger you are, the more you come into some of these problems. If you're in school, for example, this last week something happened I'm going to reference. Just two days ago I heard on the news a local school district where a young girl in the second grade was told she couldn't read her Bible. It was a reading period. Pam immediately said, "That's just dead wrong. If it's a free reading period, a child can read whatever they want to as long as it's something they can read and something that may challenge them a little bit in terms of their reading skill." This child was told she could not read her Bible that she had brought to school to read during the reading period. Immediately someone alerted the Liberty Institute which is one of several conservative constitutional groups that are out there doing excellent work defending people's First Amendment rights. They immediately had a discussion with the administration in the Cy-Fair school district and they were very responsive to what the Liberty Institute lawyers were informing them about.
 
A lot of this happens, especially in Texas not because we have an anti-Christian culture but that a lot of teachers just aren't well informed as to what role religion can have in the classroom and in public schools. They err on the side of excessive caution and they just want to get everything out and not have anything about religion there. That is not what the law says. So you have to be educated and informed so you can take a stand for your constitutional rights. That situation was immediately corrected but that is one example of how we legitimately deal with assaults by authority. Unfortunately some of these situations don't get resolved but according to the e-mail I received from Liberty Institute nearly all of these situations do get resolved in favor of the person who's trying to get their rights.
 
For example, there have been valedictorians who wanted to reference the Bible in their valedictorian speech. A case that occurred over in Jasper or somewhere in East Texas where the high school had a Bible verse on a banner. The students had been using this. They got challenged by one of these antibody, antichurch, anti-religion organizations and that got resolved in their favor although part of it is still in court. So we have to understand what our rights are and what the avenues are that are available to us when we believe that we are becoming a victim in these areas.
 
It's not about physical armed resistance. There's something about the conservative mindset that makes them immediately want to jump to 1776. I think there's a lot of frustrated Revolutionary soldiers around masquerading as conservatives today. But as I pointed out last time in terms of legal options we've got a long way to go between where we are where some people think we are. In some cases, like the Cliven Bundy situation I talked about last week, the big problem there was the overreaching power of the federal government. As I pointed out, Bundy is taking a very difficult legal position which I don't think is a cause that should be generating a response but the fact that the federal government came in with snipers and Special forces and all these other tactical units and everything was totally unacceptable and totally unprovoked response to this situation but legally the federal government probably may have the stronger case.
 
I may comment some more on that. That's a moving target. As I pointed out last time, when you're sitting on top of a historically developing situation it's very difficult to do good analysis because you're not always sure you have all the facts. That's definitely a moving target. There have been other things revealed since last week and so on but if you're going to go and make a case against unacceptable or illegal federal incursion on state power you need to make sure that the case you're dealing with is right and you've got legal strength on your side.
 
For example, you'll be reading about a situation with land on the Texas/Oklahoma border. This is a very different case than what's been going on in Nevada. Both Governor Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott are on top of the situation, giving us an example of what the Nevada state government and the county sheriff in Clark County, Nevada should have been doing in terms of protecting their citizens from an overreaching federal government.
 
So anyway, that's all I'm going to say about that this evening. We need to get into the Word and continue to understand what the Scriptures teach. One of the problems that we have in terms of where some evangelical teaching is today is to take passages, such as Romans 13:1-7 as if there are no exceptions. The passages in the Scripture that talk about submission, whether it's submission in the home or elsewhere have exceptions. The Scriptures, as we'll see, are filled with exceptions. One thing you should think about where you think the federal government is mandating something and you don't think it's right try to draw a parallel within the home. Try to draw a parallel between what's going on there in the home because the idea of children submitting to parents is there.
 
Sometimes parents are not always wise. See the Scripture says there are two kinds of ways to talk about wrong. I can be foolish or unwise and I can ask my children to do something that is foolish or unwise. That's not unbiblical, immoral, or illegal. Foolish is not necessarily sinful, unwise, or a violation of Scripture. It's foolish. It's not wise. There's a difference and it may not be the best thing to do but it's not telling them or expecting them to do something that violates what the Word of God says. We can think about drawing a parallel between times when we as a parent may not be making the best decision or the wisest course of action but we expect the family to obey and follow on. And the family should obey and follow along because that's not one of the times in the Scripture when we can disobey the authority. So as we look at how the Scripture talks about obedience in one arena of authority, try to draw a parallel to another arena of authority. Maybe that will help you with this issue of submission.
 
Okay, as we look at the passage the first two verses of Romans 13 lay out the point. In fact, Romans 13:5 comes back to repeat the principle of verse 1. The basic command is to "let every soul or person be subject to the governing authorities." This is picked up in verse 5 when it says, "Therefore you must be subject…" There's not an option there in terms of submission to authority. I find that the way you understand if you're submissive is if the person in authority, teacher, commanding officer, husband, or parent, is asking you to do something you really don't want to do but it's not illegal, immoral, or unbiblical but it's just something you think is stupid or you just don't want to do and you fight it, you're not submissive. That's when we learn if we're submissive when the person in authority is asking us to do something we don't want to do and we fight it. That's when we discover that we're not submissive.
 
It's real easy to be submissive when the people asking us to do something we don't mind doing. It's when they're asking us to do something that we really don't want to do or we really don't think it's in our best interests that we find out whether we're really submissive or not. So submission isn't obeying the authority because you think they're right or you agree with them or it's comfortable with them, or you like what they're asking you to do. Those qualifications aren't there. Why would someone tell you to be submissive when someone is telling you to do things you want to do? You don't need to hear that. That's an irrelevant command. Submission is only relevant if the authority is asking you to do something you really don't want to do like pay taxes. I thought I'd get a chuckle or two out of that.
 
Now as we look at the verses I want to focus on tonight, Romans 13:3-5 says, "For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake." Now these three verses or at least verses two and four are really a parentheses in the flow of Paul's thought.
 
The main idea is stated in verse one and repeated in verse five and in between you have some general principles expressing an ideal situation, but we'll get to that in a minute. So in the first command we're told to be subject to governing authorities three times for "there's no authority except from God and the authorities that exist are appointed by God." Now immediately what comes to a lot of people's mind is whether that means that an unjust ruler is appointed by God. Does that mean that Nero was appointed by God? Well, yes, Nero was ruling when Paul was writing. Was Adolph Hitler an authority appointed by God? Yes, he was. Was Stalin appointed by God? Yes, he was. There are no exceptions here. Now some people want to bring their rational philosophy into it but those are the people who don't accept the Scripture as their absolute authority.
 
I'm going to give you examples of Scripture where God appointed leaders who were not good and righteous and wonderful. As Romans 13:1 says that no one can rule except God allows it, even Pilate. I pointed that out from a passage in John 19 that when Jesus is talking to Pilate, Jesus pointed out that Pilate's authority came from God. The authority to violate the law and execute an innocent man is the authority and that came from God because there is no authority that exists apart from God.
 
Habakkuk in the Old Testament had this problem. We don't have to turn to it but the situation with Habakkuk is that he's a little bit self-righteous. He's a prophet. And he's really concerned about the fact that the Jews in the Southern Kingdom are really unrighteous. They're idolatrous. They're unfaithful to God. They're disobedient to the law. They're immoral, unethical, and self-centered. Habakkuk just wonders why God is not bringing a punishment on these people. He points out that they are breaking the Law every day and it seemed to him that God was just sitting in heaven and letting them get away with it, year after year after year. He pleaded, "God, bring a punishment. Judge these people."
 
In the first chapter God says, "Yes, I am going to judge them." In Habakkuk 1:6-11 He gives Habakkuk a little lesson on how God raises up rulers that aren't necessarily righteous and kind and good. In Habakkuk 1:6 we read God saying, "For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans." God raised up Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan king that was not righteous at all. A pagan king that was going to come in and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Jews and take many who survived back as captives to Babylon. And God told this to Habakkuk by telling him He was going to take care of the situation by raising up the Chaldeans. Basically Habakkuk's reaction is going to be, "God, how can you do that? They are worse than the Jews are. How in the world can a just God raise up such an unholy people and use an unholy people to accomplish His purposes?" And God tells Him it's because He's sovereign that He can do that.
 
So sometimes unjust rulers are put in place by God in order to bring discipline upon their subjects because of their unfaithfulness to God and their paganism, and because of their immorality. So God raises ungodly rulers and puts them in place for certain reasons. Look at the description we have of the Chaldeans in Habakkuk 1: 6-11, they're called a "bitter and hasty nation". They're angry. They don't have righteous motivation. They're terrible and dreadful. They're more fierce than the evening wolves. They all come for violence. He commits offenses and he ascribes the power to his own god. He's an idolater. He's terrible. Yet God raised up Nebuchadnezzar for this very purpose.
 
We see this same kind of purpose later on in the book of Daniel. In Daniel chapter 4 God is going to bring judgment upon Nebuchadnezzar who is ruling one of the greatest empires of the ancient world and has become excessively self-absorbed and arrogant. In the previous chapter he built an enormous idol and mandated that everybody in the kingdom worship him. That threatened the lives of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and we know the story of the fiery furnace. So in Daniel 4 God warns Nebuchadnezzar that He's going to judge him for his arrogance and teach him a lesson in humility.
 
In Daniel 4:17 as Daniel is giving the interpretation of the dream he says the decision is by the decree of the watchers. That's a reference to angels who are assigned to different empires and different territories. "This sentence is by the decree of the {angelic} watchers and the decision is a command of the holy ones, in order that the living may know that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind, and bestows it on whom He wishes and sets over it the lowliest of men." God rules over the affairs of mankind. He raises up rulers and He destroys rulers. You may not like the rulers that he's raising up over you at any given point in time but then we're not privy to all the reasons why. So God is in control of who rulers.
 
So back to Romans 13. We're to submit to the governing authorities because he is God's ministers. One of the points I keep reiterating because there's a tendency in some of the analysis of the passage here to try to make the authorities relate to an abstract authority like the Constitution. But it's not just talking about abstract authorities. It's talking about the people who are holding the various authority offices. So in Romans 13:4 it says that the one in the office is God's minister. I'm just going to say, "Fill in the blank and realize that you can put whatever politician you want in that sentence. Put the presidents or the vice-president's name in there. He is God's minister over you." Don't squirm. That's what Paul is saying, and this is the inerrant Word of God so we have to understand what Paul is talking about. God has a reason.
 
It said in verse 2 that when we resist authority, we're resisting the ordinance of God. This is one of the problems. When we resist the authority that God has established in any way, we are resisting God. But remember when I say "in any way" I don't mean that in an exclusive sense because there are legitimate reasons we'll look at for genuine civil disobedience—disobedience to any authority. We're going to look at some of the Biblical examples of that later. The emphasis of Scripture is on submission. It's not on the exceptions. But there are exceptions.
 
What we learn from this is that God has established government. Now I have heard some people make some unguarded statements like "Government is evil." In the sense "government is evil" government is an abstract entity. But all government is not evil. God governs the universe. That government is not evil. So government in principle cannot be evil. First of all, in terms of divine government. Secondly, because God instituted government in human history as part of what we refer to as the divine institutions.
 
Now the Divine institutions are important to understand because God established these as universal principles or social laws within the framework of His creation. They were designed for the purpose of the preservation and protection and stability of the human race. Three of these were instituted before there was ever sin. So the first three are not related to controlling evil. They are related to producing prosperity and happiness and stability. We've gone through these many times before. The first is individual responsibility. The second is marriage. And the third is family. All of these were instituted even though there was no family. That doesn't mean it wasn't instituted prior to the first conception and birth. It's instituted in the command to "be fruitful and multiply" that God stated back in Genesis 1:26-28 and the design for God's plan was for the human race to perpetuate itself before the fall.
 
Now this is one of the reasons I don't believe that a lot of time went by before the fall occurred. I don't think a lot of time occurred before Satan fell. The only reason a lot of people want to insert a lot of time is that they bought into some sort of evolutionary lie to begin with that there had to be long periods of time at the beginning. So you have individual responsibility, marriage, and family. Besides the hermeneutical blunder that you have to accept if you think that when God told Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply" that it really didn't mean, "you can't do this until after you sin". God says the same thing to the animals. No one puts an asterisk there. You have to treat them as the same thing. When God said to be fruitful it meant to get started. That's the impact of the grammar. It doesn't mean, "well, you can't really do it." Now it may not have been in God's permissive will to allow it to fructify but that doesn't mean the command wasn't to go into effect immediately.
 
There are a lot of us that would like to do a lot of things God commanded. We would like to give a lot of money to support certain ministries. But God has not given us permission by giving us the wealth needed in order to do that. But that doesn't mean the command is irrelevant or isn't to be applied if necessary. Just a lesson in total irrational logic to think that Adam and Eve were told to do something that God really meant they weren't supposed to do it when He said to do it but to wait until after you sin.
 
So then you have two more Divine institutions that are set up after the fall. The first three are designed to promote productivity and advance civilization and the last two are designed to restrain evil. Now the fourth one is the one we're talking about: government. It's the establishment of judicial authority. Someone once asked me how you could have government if you didn't have nations. Easy. You have city government, county government, and state government. There are all sorts of small social entities that have some form of government. So that doesn't necessitate nations or nationalism.
 
So the fourth Divine institution was established by the covenant with Noah where judicial authority to take the life of a human being who had committed murder was delegated to the human race. It's the principle that if the most significant or serious responsibility is delegated then all other lesser judicial responsibilities are also delegated. And that God is the One who oversees and is the authority to whom these national leaders are responsible. This is seen in Psalm 82. "God stands in the congregation of the mighty. He judges among the gods." Now the word there translated "gods" is the word Elohim which as a term was often used to apply to rulers as it is in this passage. Obviously God is not talking about other gods because there's only one God. The term is used again down in Psalm 82:6, "I said, 'You are gods'…"
 
He is addressing these rulers. Why? Because He is delegating this judicial responsibility that was previously His alone. He's delegating that to human magistrates or human leaders. So in this passage we see that God is the One who holds the political leaders accountable. In Romans 13:1 He judges among these rulers. We see the criteria listed in verses Romans 13:2-5, talking about how they are accused of judging unjustly so a judge should judge justly. He should not show partiality to the wicked. He should defend the poor and the fatherless and He should do justice to the afflicted and the needy.  He should not allow people to take advantage because of their power and wealth of those who don't. Justice should be purely objectively and should apply equally to those who have wealth and those who do not, those who are in need as well as those who have great possessions.
 
In Romans 13:3 we're told, "For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil." Here Paul is explaining the principle or what is the intended role of the ruler. The ruler is to not be a "terror to good works" [NKJV] but is to be a terror to evil. He is to bring order into society so that those who seek to do evil will not go unpunished. Then Paul asks the question, "Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good…" How many times have we all [maybe there's someone here who's so perfect] gone down the highway doing 80 in a 65 or 60 or doing 90 in a 70 MPH speed zone. What are we doing? We are watching everywhere to make sure there's not a speed trap somewhere where we're going to get caught. But if we were going the speed limit, or in Texas what we call the "Texas ten", as long as we're not going more than ten miles over the speed limit we're given a little grace so that if we're going reasonably close to the speed limit we just don't think about it. You're not worried about it. But if you're going somewhere in a hurry and you know you're going through an area where there might be a speed trap you're going to be more alert. If you're doing the right thing then you don't have to be afraid. If you have a good record, you will have praise from the same.
 
A couple of years ago, true confession time, I was driving up to Abilene. I usually go up about this time of year. I'll be going up in a couple of weeks to go fishing and hang out with an old buddy of mine from college, ROTC from college, and we usually hunt or fish or shoot or whatever. We just have a good time for a couple of days. I take off after church on Sunday and I drive up there. But this time I got pulled over for doing, I don't know, 80 something in a 75 zone. I wasn't watching it. So this highway patrol pulled me over. He came up on the right side of the car.
 
This was back when if you had a CHL you still had to inform the officer if you had a weapon in the car. It's almost like that joke that comes up. I put my hands on the steering wheel and he said, "Where are you going?" I answered, "Well I want to let you know that I have a CHL and I have a weapon in the car. He said, "What do you have?" I said, "Well I've got a 9 mm in the glove compartment." He said, "Okay, anything else?" I said, "Yeah, I've got a 40SMW in the console." He kept asking "You got anything else?" I said, "Yeah I've got an AR in the trunk." "Anything else?" he asked. I answered, "Yeah, there's a 45 in the backseat."
 
So after that he said, "Well I figured that. You've got an NRA cap on and you've got your bumper stickers indicating that. So that's no problem." He asked for my driver's license. He went to check and when he came back he asked, "What do you do?" "I'm a pastor." I learned that a long time ago, to play the pastor card. I told him this was my weekend to go visit a friend from ROTC in college and we're just going to hunt and fish." Well," he said, "You've got a clean record. I don't want to mess it up. Just slow down and have a great time." See, if you have a clean record then you will have praise from the authority. So, that worked out very well and I breathed a sigh of relief and drove on just a little bit slower.
 
So Romans 13:4 says, "For it [authority] is a minister of God to you for good." It is the authority, whether local gendarme, local police or sheriff's department, or whether it is the federal government, it's purpose is to keep order and peace so we can go about our business so we can have success and prosperity and we can do well in life's endeavor. This is one of the reasons Paul says we're to pray for our government and rulers is to we can have peace to go about the proclamation of the gospel and teaching God's word without government interference. It's telling us that the authority, whatever sphere it's in, is God's minister to you for good. That is their purpose.
 
Then he goes on to say, " But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil." This means if you break the law, if you're doing that which is illegal you should be afraid. "He does not bear the sword for nothing" is a very important phrase that Paul uses here because bearing the sword in vain indicates the power of life and death. It indicates the government has the right to take life under certain circumstances. This is a veiled reference to the right of capital punishment that every government should have and should utilize. So once again not only does the Old Testament teach about capital punishment but it is alluded to positively in the New Testament.
 
The word for avenger is the same word we saw back in Romans 12:19 and it has to do with executing justice. It's not talking about personal vindictiveness. It is to bring about a righteous judgment and enact the sentence. So the authority is an avenger to execute wrath. Now wrath, as I keep pointing out, doesn't have an emotive context. It has a judicial context. Wrath is a term, a use of a hyperbole, in order to express the seriousness or the extremity of the judgment.
 
Now as we look at this back in verse three we were asked if we wanted to be unafraid of the authority. It's a singular noun. That means it's no longer talking about authorities in an abstract sense. It's talking about the individuals who hold that office. That's affirmed in verse 4 when it uses the word minister, the individual in that office: that he has been appointed to that individually by God.
 
Now the Scriptures mention various authorities using that same word to describe their authority. It's used of Israel's high priest in Acts 23:5 in relation to Paul's arrest in Jerusalem. It's used about those in charge of the synagogue in Matthew 9:18 and 23 and Luke 8:41. It's used to describe the members of the Sanhedrin. Remember these were people who brought unjust charges against Jesus Christ so He would be executed. It's used of a judge in Luke 12:58. It's used of pagan officials in Acts 16:19 so even those who are not Christian still have delegated authority from God. Also it's a term used of demons in terms of their hierarchy of authority in several gospel passages like Matthew 9:34, Matthew 12:24, Mark 3:22, and Luke 11:15.
 
Now in a parallel passage, echoing the same language and the same thoughts that is here in Romans 13:3-4 we have the passage in 1 Peter 2:13-16. It uses the same word HUPOTASSO Peter says, "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority." Where Paul calls the authority the ordinance of God Peter refers to it as the ordinance of man, every human institution. Why do we submit to the ordinance of man? We do it for the Lord's sake. It may not feel good for us. It may not be the right thing to do in our opinion, but we submit for the Lord's sake.
 
That's the same rationale that Paul expresses when he talks about wives submitting to their own husbands as unto the Lord. Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. He always brings in this relationship to God as a fundamental reason for why we are to relate to others the way we do. And Peter goes on, "Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right. For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men."
 
I'm introducing some words we'll come back to. The higher magistrate is the king and the lower magistrate are the lesser authorities and those who are sent by him are delegated by the governor. That would be not only the state government but county and city government. Their divinely authorized purpose is to restrain evil and to praise those who are doing good. Doing good here is being subordinate to the authorities over you, not being rabble-rousers or troublemakers.
 
There's a place and a way to disagree. Remember, a right thing done in a wrong way is wrong and unfortunately, too often, you get people who come up with the wrong way to accomplish their goal. I think I've mentioned that when I was in Kiev I was somewhat skeptical of what was happening down in Independence Square when I first got there but as I learned more I realized that some of the leaders of those who were demonstrating were really trying to do right, not create property damage even though some took place. The most outstanding example I saw was when the police were forced to evacuate a cultural building, when the demonstrators went in, they took pictures of how the police had just trashed the place and the demonstrators made a contract with the owners of the building to pay rent and utilities while they occupied the building. They were showing they were trying to be law-abiding citizens and they weren't just being a rebellious trouble-makers for their own ends. I've learned that the acting president of Ukraine is an evangelical Christian. I don't know anything more than that. That's a broad term but that is certainly an interesting fact to be aware of. So he's trying to do the right thing and he has some Biblical background at least.
 
1 Peter 2:1-5 tells us this is God's will that by doing good you can put to silence foolish men. Now in 1 Peter 2:18 we have a passage that talks about some of the extent of obedience that we need to apply to governing authorities. In 1 Peter 2:18 the issue is related to servants and master. "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable." Listen to this. It's not only because they're good and gentle or you like them or they're nice to you but also to the harsh. The word there for the harsh is the Greek word SKOLIOS where we get the medical term scoliosis for someone who has a medical condition where their spine is crooked or bent. So we could translate that also as "those who are crooked or bent, those who are harsh and dealing with you in an unjust manner." You think you're being mistreated, maltreated, and they're being hard on you. Peter is saying not to just be obedient to the ones who are nice. So this is important to understand that when submission is mandated by Scripture there's not a qualification, other than when it comes to those who are telling you to disobey Scripture.
 
There's a parallel in 1 Peter 3:1, "In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any {of them} are disobedient to the Word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior." Notice they're not even believers. It's not telling you when you're to be disobedient to the Word. They just are disobedient. They're unbelievers. They're immoral, amoral, unethical, or whatever. Just because they are a loser doesn't give you justification to be disobedient to them. There are reasons, perhaps, to not follow their authority but that's not what's being covered here. Notice it doesn't say they will be won by the conduct of their wives. They might be won by the conduct of their wives. If their wife is a rebellious, cantankerous, resistant, whatever, I'll tell you what. You're not going to win them.
 
Submissive doesn't mean you're a doormat. If you're an American woman and you've heard doormat you've been brainwashed by the ERA, by the feminist movement in America. I've learned in thirty years of being a pastor that when women hear the word "obey" they think it means they're supposed to be a doormat. The only reason you think that in the post-World War II generation is because you had the feminist movement tell you that that's what that meant. But Biblically that doesn't mean that. The most submissive man in the Bible is Moses. Was Moses a doormat? Not at all. We started this section in Romans telling us not to be conformed to this world and if you think being submissive is being a doormat you have let the world dictate the meaning of that term to you. That is not what the Biblical concept talks about.
 
It doesn't mean to be a weak, wimpy milquetoast woman. It doesn't. Not at all. It doesn't mean to be a weak, wimpy, milquetoast man. It doesn't mean to let people run all over you. It's not so much what a lot of people are doing, it's how they're doing it. They don't know how to be assertive and stand up for themselves without being nasty, arrogant, angry and self-centered. They don't know how to do that. You have to learn how to do that and how to be firm and strong but submissive at the same time. Those are not contradictive terms.
 
Look at the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the perfect example. He's submissive to the unethical treatment He received before He went to the cross but He never reacts. There's no anger, no sense of personal retribution or bitterness that come out of His mouth. But He's certainly not a doormat. So we have to rethink how we understand these terms. In fact, I think that a very strong woman who understands biblically the concept can be an incredible testimony to her husband. She's not going to let the guy roll over her but then she's not going to be rebellious either.
 
Now Scripture talks about the fact that God uses and establishes unjust rulers a lot of the time. That's one of the objections you often hear when you teach about the fact God establishes the authority. People say, "Well, that guy's not good. He's unjust. He's a liberal. He's a Marxist. He's not really a constitutionalist." Was he duly elected? Yes. Was there fraud in the election? Yes, but it doesn't matter because no one called him on it. It's been legalized. "But I don't like it." So? This is the devil's world. There's a lot of things we don't like. You have to grow up and get over it.
 
God uses unjust rulers. God raised up Assyria and Isaiah called Assyria "the rod of God's anger." The Assyrians were arguably worse than the Nazis. They loved to torture their enemies. They got great pleasure in seeing how long they could torture an enemy before they would die. They tried to keep them alive as long as possible. They were comparable to the Comanche Indians on the High Plains. They loved that. Many of the Native Americans, the American Indians, were so influenced by the demonic that it's just unbelievable. I think that's one of the reasons God brought judgment. That's not politically correct but if you go back and you study the cultures they were immersed in demonism, in all kinds of occult and evil things.
 
Anyway, the Assyrians were like that but God raised up that evil power, that evil empire, in order to execute His righteous judgment on the Northern kingdom. Later on Isaiah called Cyrus, "His anointed." Now some people think that because of that Cyrus must have been a believer. I don't think so. The word "anointed" simply means "appointed to a task." God appointed Cyrus to a task. Cyrus when he became the emperor of the Persian Empire issued a decree to allow the Jews to return to their native homeland. That fit his policy. His policy was to send these people who had been resettled under the Babylonians to send them back to their native territories to rebuild the temples for their gods. This was not just in Jerusalem but many other peoples so their gods could pray to his god to be merciful to Cyrus. So he's not a believer but God appointed him to the task to be used by God to restore the Jewish people back to their land. He did this in A.D. 538 sending the first group back under Zerubbabel to reestablish their presence in the land God had given them. Jeremiah in Jeremiah 25:9 said that evil, wicked Nebuchadnezzar which had just astounded Habbakuk, was God's servant.
 
So now a couple of interesting quotes about how to handle magistrates. This is from Matthew Henry. I thought this was interesting because Matthew Henry is one generation removed from the Puritans and the Presbyterians that beheaded Charles I. He's in the generation, I believe, but he may have been a teenager when the Glorious Revolution took place after Cromwell's Protectorate ended. James II was installed as king, and then all of a sudden, all of the lords and earls recognized that "Oops, we put this Roman Catholic in and he's worse than we thought so let's figure out a way to get rid of him."
 
They had what was called the Glorious Revolution to bring in William of Orange. So a lot of thought went in to the relationship of the people to the king by Christian theologians and lawyers during the middle part of the 17th century, the1600s. Matthew Henry is a Presbyterian pastor and he writes in regard to Romans 13: "In the administration of public justice, the deterring of quarrels, the protection of the innocent, the righting of the wrong, the punishing of offenders, the preserving of national peace and order, that every man may not do what is right in his own eyes." That's the theme of Judges. You can't do what's right in your eyes. You have to submit to governing authorities.
 
"In these things it is that magistrates act as God's ministers." He certainly had experience with unjust magistrates. "As the killing of an inferior magistrate while he is doing his duty is counted treason against the prince." So the prince sends out some low level bureaucrat to take up the taxes and you don't like him so you kill him, that's considered an act of treason against the king. He uses that analogy. "So the resisting of any magistrate in the discharge of these duties is the resisting of an ordinance of God." A very clear statement that the magistrate is God's minister to you for good so we are to be in obedience to him.
 
Now the last verse I'm looking at is Romans 13:5, Therefore you must be subject not only because of wrath but because of conscience sake." I'm going to remember this because often I hear people arguing that the term wrath of God is a term that indicates that God has emotion. This is a great use of the term wrath in a judicial context in Romans where emotion is not present. You don't want an emotional judge. You want a judge who is going to execute the law and the term wrath is often used as a hyperbolic expression, which means an exaggeration to show the full extent of the law is being applied. The fullest extent of the penalty is being applied.
 
There are two motivations given here for why we want to be obedient. First of all because we don't want to feel the full effects of the courtroom. We don't want to feel the legal punishment brought against us but it's also for conscience sake. As believers we have a conscience based on Scripture that tells us what is right or wrong. We don't want to offend that conscience. James says that once you start offending your conscience then you set up a precedent where even if your conscience is wrong by violating your conscience you begin to train yourself and rationalize disobedience to your set of norms and standards. James 1 says that sets a precedent that when your conscience is right you've already set a habit pattern of rationalizing disobedience. So you don't want to violate your conscience. Your conscience tells you it's right to obey the Word and the authorities so for those two reasons we want to obey Scripture.
 
I'm going to stop here. I thought I would get to the point where we could talk about what happens when the government is wrong. What happens when the government is telling us to do things that are truly wrong, that violate Scripture and violates God's express will? We'll come back to look at that next time and we'll also bring in some other important features of that that have been applied down through church history.

Romans 142b-Legitimate Disobedience to Authority

Romans 13:3 NASB95
For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same;
Romans 142b-Legitimate Disobedience to Authority Romans 13:3-5
 
One of the challenges that we see lurking on the horizon in our culture and one that many other Christians in other cultures face on a regular basis is a government whose policies are hostile to Christianity. One example that has come up in the last forty years or so has been the example that has been often used in literature dealing with civil disobedience and that's the issue of abortion. But as we'll see tonight abortion is one of those ambiguous areas because the decision of Roe v. Wade was not mandating that anyone get an abortion. That's what's tricky. Now back in the late 1980s you had people like Randall Terry who put together an organization called Operation Rescue who used twisted logic to try to show that what Christians should do is intervene, even violently, to stop abortions from taking place.
 
We live in a time today with the rise of various movements and situations and laws in this country, not just the issues related to the homosexual, lesbian, gay, transgender and confused gender, whatever, that's putting pressure on the whole culture to validate and recognize their legitimacy. We're going to see an increasing pressure come from the Muslim quarter. It's already felt politically. We can see how things have changed in the last ten years and the attitudes of legislators toward Islam. We can see people being called Islamaphobics now and things of that nature. As the Islamic population in the U.S. grows, so too is their electoral power. I've heard it said that in another twenty years that there will be enough Moslems in the United States to elect an Islamic congress. Just think about that. I'm not saying that's true. Often these kinds of statistics and these kinds of projections don't come true. Part of the reason is because we have a sovereign God who has His own purposes and another is that there are various other factors that intervene and change historical circumstances. But we do definitely live in a world where there is proposed legislation and there is enacted legislation that is more and more hostile or negative or at least less favorable to Christians and Christianity than what we have seen in the previous two hundred years of this republic.
 
This republic is founded upon Judeo-Christian principles of freedom that come from a study of God's word. So as Christians we're going to be faced more and more with profound questions as to whether or not we are going to engage in some sort of opposition or disobedience to the government. We have examples that have come out in recent years of people who have businesses that cater to weddings and other things where now you have the legitimization of same-sex marriage and so you have homosexuals going to target Christen business such as photographers and bakers and others who are engaged in the peripheral industries that support weddings. Then if they don't want to provide a cake or be a photographer they're taken to court. So you have Christians who are being excluded from the possibility of engaging in certain businesses because the government is pressuring them that they have to recognize the legitimacy of same sex marriage and you have to treat them all the same, even if it's a private business.
 
And, of course, recently here in Houston, currently going on we have this "equal rights" ordinance that is being foisted on the Houston citizenry by our lesbian mayor and it's redundant in everything except the equality in terms of those who are sexually confused. That is the real thrust of this piece of legislation which is to get something, no matter how mild it may be, enacted. That is the proverbial camel's nose under the tent so that that can then be exploited over the coming legislative season. It may take two, three or four years before we actually see legislations that mandates that every business do something. This week pressure was put on the city council by churches and Christians that forced the legislation to be postponed. They're not going to vote on it for another two weeks but they're going to keep pressure on it. One of the amendments that changed was that it had applied to all small businesses of fifty employees or more. Now that's been reduced to two or three years that it's going to go down to any small business or ten employees or more. That's how this is going to come in gradually. The amendment isn't just to have equal rights. It's not just a recognition of civil rights issues. It's bringing this along and we have to think a lot more intelligently on this.
 
One of the things we need to do, I think, is to put into the hands of city council links to organizations that have done a lot of work and have good, well thought out medically and psychologically sound studied demonstrating that homosexuality is not something one is born with but is a choice and a product of one's own volition and own decision. That goes against everything that is out there. I'm going to research those studies and see if I can put some links together to e-mail out because one of the ways we approach this is by showing the fallacy in the assumptions underlying their desire to promote this. We're not just coming at it from a judgmental or condemnatory fashion which is sadly the way too many Christians approach this. "This isn't what the Bible says. I'm a Christian, blah, blah, blah." Yes, you're right but we're going to see tonight that's not how you handle those kinds of circumstances. That's not how wise examples form the Old Testament handled those kinds of situations. You avoid the head-on confrontation with the authority.
 
There are too many conservatives who have the idea that the only kind of assault that wins battles is the head-on assault. The result of a head-on assault usually is a loss or a failure. You have so many causalities that it's called a Pyrrhic victory because it's causing you too much to accomplish the end. We have to avoid that. We have to think wisely and not just in terms of throwing our fist in someone's face and telling them they're wrong. That may all be true, but we need to win them graciously and not just engage in hostilities and argumentation because that doesn't do anything more than to aggravate an already contentious situation. We have to deal and we're going to have to deal more and more with authorities and with leaders who do not think anything like us. We have to learn how to think like they think and we have to learn how to appeal to them in terms of a value that they hold to.
 
Now just in way of review because we're going through Romans 13 we recognize the principle that Christians are mandated to submit to government authorities. This is not an absolute or unequivocal mandate. It's not a mandate without exceptions because tonight we're going to look at Biblical examples where believers violated or disobeyed the authority of governing powers with God's blessing. The second thing we've seen from our studies is that government authority, whether saved or unsaved, are appointed by God. Paul is writing under the ungodly administration of Nero even if he is writing during the early part of Nero's administration when he wasn't as openly hostile against Christians. Peter clearly says the same thing in the passages we've studied in 1 Peter and Peter is writing during the second half of Nero's administration.
 
Third, we see that resisting government authority is the same as resisting against God because God is the one who put that authority in place. Even Jesus recognized that in His interchange with Pontus Pilate. The fourth thing we see is that the governing authority is God's servant even though that governing authority may be an atheist or a pagan. God demonstrates that to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4 which we'll see. Just a reminder as we go through this that the basis for government authority is God.
 
We have the Divine institutions, the three that were instituted before the fall which are individual responsibility, marriage, and family. Then the fourth after the worldwide Noahic flood we have the establishment of government which is the delegation of judicial authority to Noah and his descendants in the most extreme example of judicial power which is to make a judgment in relation to murder and to take the life of a murderer. Then the fifth Divine institution is that of nations. So we've gone through this a couple of times in the last few weeks so I won't spend a lot of time on it.
 
The first case I want to look at is the case of the tardy midwives in Exodus 1. These are the disobedient midwives who've been ordered by Pharaoh to take the life of a male Jewish baby every time one is born. Just for a little background see that the first six verses sort of bring us up to date in a quick summary fashion of the events that had taken place at the end of Genesis with the movement of Jacob, Israel, with his sons to Egypt approximately 70 of them. Joseph is one of his sons. He is the second most powerful person in the Egyptian Empire. That's saying a lot because in the Egyptian kingdom the Pharaoh was considered the embodiment of the god. So he held absolute power. There's no one in our world that we're aware of that even dreams about having the kind of power that the Pharaoh had over the Egyptians.
 
Now we read there's been a shift in terms of administration that's just covered briefly in Exodus 1:8, "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." I have problems with a lot of the Egyptian chronologies, especially what is considered the traditional chronology which puts this after the rise of the Hyksos. That may very well be. There are a number of problems with the Egyptian chronologies. I prefer not to try to identify any of this with a historical figure because the problem is our understanding of ancient history is not that clear. You can find people who will state it dogmatically but it really isn't. I've heard a number of Biblically conservative archaeologists and chronologists who will argue at least ten different pharaohs and ten different dynasties for identifying the "Egyptian pharaohs. I think it's a problem because if I stand up here and dogmatically say this pharaoh is "so-and-so" and then something is discovered ten years later and changes that, then we've got a problem and my credibility is shot because I've identified it with the wrong one. I think there are certain traditionally accepted chronologies that do have problems.
 
All the Holy Spirit thought we needed to know was that a new administration came into power. It may be that this administration is a family or dynasty that has a particular hostility towards anyone who is not Egyptians. There may be a strong xenophobic nature to this new dynasty. It may be a desire to unite Egypt. During the second intermediate period of chronology was a time when there was a lot of disorder and a lot of problems so this may be an attempt by one of the pharaohs to pull everyone together and to reunite them based on ethnic heritage. What we do know is that the Scriptures make clear is that he didn't know Joseph and he doesn't have a regard for Joseph or a respect for Joseph. Consequently he doesn't have a respect for Joseph's kinfolk, the Jewish people, who are now living within the borders of Egypt. In fact he views them in a rather paranoid manner and believes they are a threat to Egyptian sovereignty and Egyptian prosperity.
 
So he comes up with various strategies to try to destroy the power of the Jewish people. God has blessed them and they have grown over a period of approximately 350 years from 70 people who came with Jacob to approximately two and a half to three million if we're to take the numbers given in Leviticus and Numbers accurately. So there's a huge number of Jews living there. They have become enslaved to the Egyptians who were using them for various construction tasks. Many people believe that they were involved in constructing the pyramids and that may be true to some degree. I believe that many of those monuments were built prior to this. Nevertheless there were various ways in which the Pharaohs sought to control the number of Israelites.
In Exodus 1:15 we read, "Then the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other was named Puah." Now when you have a group of two and a half million people you're going to have a lot more women pregnant than two midwives could handle. These would have been the two heads of the midwife union, as it were, so by calling them in the Pharaoh was giving instructions to them that would have gone to all of the midwives. So he says in Exodus 1:16-17, "When you are helping the Hebrew women to give birth and see {them} upon the birth stool, if it is a son, then you shall put him to death; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, but let the boys live."
 
So what you see here is an understanding of their thinking. They recognize the principle that Peter articulates in Acts 4 and that is that they're to obey God rather than man. Now what we see here is Pharaoh as the embodiment of god and embodiment of the state of Egypt. He is articulating and mandating a course of behavior to the midwives. The midwives disobey his order to them. He is not telling a third party to do something and they're getting involved or interfering with it. That was the problem with the "Operation Rescue" scenario. Also it doesn't fit with some of the scenarios going on with the gay/lesbian/transgender issues because they have put out laws just allowing these things to take place. They're not mandating that you, as a Christian, necessarily break any law.
 
Now this is where it's beginning to shift because in the examples I gave earlier when you have people involved in certain businesses that are related to weddings and they choose on the basis of their own beliefs to not be involved because it's a same-sex wedding, then you're going to have a problem because they're being told to do something that violates their conscience and violates their religious beliefs of what is right or wrong. That is what is embedded in your conscience. You have norms and standards and those norms and standards come from somewhere. They're going to come from either God or they're going to come from the creation. When they come from God then you have to conduct your business life, your commercial life, in accordance with what the Bible says is right or wrong.
 
Now in certain kinds of law you're not being forced to do anything. It's just allowing certain kinds of behavior. That's the way it is in Roe v. Wade. It allows people to have an abortion. It's not forcing anyone to do that. The examples that we see in Scripture all fit this pattern where you have a king or authority telling someone under their authority to do something that violates the revealed will of God. I want to emphasize that again. They're violating the revealed will of God, not an extrapolated theological principle but something where God has specifically told them not to do something. In Genesis chapter 4 we have the recognition that murder is sin. We're told not to sin. In the Ten Commandments where it says "thou shalt not kill" it becomes clear also from Genesis 9 in the Noahic covenant that it is wrong to commit murder and that those who commit murder should have their life forfeited because they're taking the life of someone who is equally in the image and likeness of God.
 
Now the rationale that God gives for capital punishment isn't as a deterrent. It's because you have so fragmented your own soul and your own soul has become so malignant from sin that you are willing to compromise the life of another Divine image bearer. So the midwives understand this. According to Exodus 1:17 they recognize that God has mandated that they should not commit murder and because they fear God, that is they respect God, and God is a higher authority, they disobey the Pharaoh. So this gives them their basis for doing it.
 
They're not going to go and walk into the courtroom of the Pharaoh and say they're not going to do it. Notice they're not going to engage in a direct confrontation. They're smarter than that. They're going to handle it in a wise or skillful fashion. Remember that Hebrew word for wisdom isn't a word that relates to something that's an absolute right versus something that's an absolute wrong such as sin or unrighteousness. But wisdom has to do with taking righteous principles and then living them skillfully in your life and applying them skillfully in your life. So they're going to use a skillful way in order to handle the situation.
 
In Exodus 1:18 we read, "So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this thing, and let the boys live?" After a while he noticed there's not a lot of funerals for male infants out in the Israelite community. In Exodus 1:19 the midwives replied. It's interesting how they do this. They say, "Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can get to them." Now this passage is often treated as if they are lying or shading the truth a little bit. But that's not necessarily so. It could be that the instructions Shiphrah and Puah gave to the other midwives was to just show up late. Drag your feet. Get there late. Don't show up on time so you're not put into a position to obey the Pharaoh. So that very well could be the situation. There's never definitely anything said about this in the Scripture.
 
Nevertheless we also have the basis for understanding where there may be circumstances where it is acceptable Biblically to engage in some sort of covert activity in opposition to an evil king when it is specifically or directly related to the mandates of that king. Now this gets into a real sticky situation and I'm not going to go off into that but I'm going to make a comment about it. This situation is possibly a lie. You have a clear situation with Rahab where she lies in order to protect the lives of the spies. In both cases if it's a lie then they are in engaged in deception in order to preserve life which is a Divine mandate. What's interesting in Joshua is that there is a theme running all the way through Joshua related to deception. Not only does Rahab engage in deception, but God engages in deception and militarily God has the Israelites engage in deception. For example when they're outside Ai they set up an ambush and they send out a small troop to engage in combat with the soldiers from Ai and then as they began to feign defeat and fall back then the men from Ai come running out to attack them and then they fall back and run as if they're in full retreat. They're luring the soldiers from Ai into the ambush. This is just pure deception and then the ambush is sprung and the soldiers from Ai are completely annihilated.
 
That is a form of deception. So the question that needs to be raised is when is it Biblically viable to engage in deception? That's an important question. I'm not going to get into it now but if you are a believer and you're involved in undercover work in drug work or if you're involved in undercover work in regards to the military, covert operations in any kind of law enforcement, then you have to have a Biblically thought out basis for this. Now I've heard people talk about this in one way and I've heard others talk about it with another viewpoint. I have a friend who is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, both his masters and his doctoral. And he has another doctorate and two other masters' degrees. He's just brilliant and he's been teaching military ethics at the War College up in Rhode Island for about the last fifteen years. I called him up one day about six or seven years ago and I said, "Tim, have you ever thought this through?" There was just this dead silence and I thought, "How can anyone as brilliant as he is and all the background he has never thought this through?" He knew of no one who was using the Old Testament to try to develop a Biblical theology of deception in relation to law enforcement or the military.
 
God uses deception several times in the Old Testament in order to accomplish his ends. For example in 1 Kings 22 He uses the prophet Machiah and the deception of the false prophet. But this is another thing that can be left to another time but here the main point is that you have an authority that is promoting a law that is an unjust law. It's an unrighteous law because it violates the direct commandment of God. God's direct command is the issue always. It's not just thinking "This isn't right. A forty percent or fifty percent or sixty percent income tax just isn't right. I'm not going to pay because that's not right." Well, the Scriptures don't give a standard on that so if you're going to violate that it's not that kind of righteous disobedience. It may not be right in a relative sense in your opinion or my opinion but nowhere in God's Word does it say, "Thou shalt not pay more than ten percent income tax." We don't have a Divine standard there so we can't violate it.
 
This is important in other areas. When you're dealing with any area of authority, whether it's the classroom, the military, the home, or marriage, there are a lot of things the person in authority is going to push you to do that may be really stupid. You may really disagree with. Maybe it's not stupid. Maybe it's just a mistake because they're human. Maybe you had parents who did that. Maybe you have a husband who does that. Maybe you had teachers who did that. But the Bible never puts a qualification on those things. They may be foolish but they're not unrighteous. They're not violating a specific, righteous command of God and so we as believers are to go the extra mile in order to obey that law or that commandment or that mandate from the authority over us in order to be a good testimony before the angels and other human beings because authority is the central problem in sin and within the angelic conflict. So the midwives are a good testimony. And the result of this is that God blessed them. Exodus 1:22-23, "So God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied, and became very mighty because the midwives feared God, He established households for them."
 
Now Exodus 2 gives us a second example and this is the case of the disobedient parents because the parents of Moses are going to violate the mandate of Pharaoh. We read in Exodus 2:1, "Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got him a wicker basket and covered it over with tar and pitch. Then she put the child into it and set {it} among the reeds by the bank of the Nile." So she is disobeying the law of Pharaoh here. She knows it. That's why she has to hide the child because they know if a male child is known to be born, Pharaoh is going to take its life.
 
In the New Testament we get the comment by the writer of Hebrews in Hebrews 11:23, "By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child; and they were not afraid of the king's edict." It wasn't Moses' faith. It was the faith of his parents. It's a passive verb there. The ones who performed the action of hiding him were his parents. So they are trusting God to take care of him and to provide for this life. Once again we see another example where they're not going in the face of the authority. They're not shaking their fists in the face of the Pharaoh. They're going to trust God and do the right thing even though it may cost them. There's a willingness on the part of each of these individuals to take the legal punishment. They're not engaged in an overt campaign against the Pharaoh. See, that wouldn't work in that culture.
 
Now, in our culture, we can engage in press conferences like we had the other day. It was on the city steps and it was very calm and very peaceful. We can engage in letter writing. We can engage in all manner of legal opposition to ordinances that are being proposed because that's the legal system that we have set up. So as part of our citizenship, as part of what it means to be a citizen of the United States, we need to be active and involved as much as we can. Otherwise we just let evil take its course.
 
So the result of the parents' of Moses disobedience is that God honors them and we see that his sister stood afar off and then the daughter of Pharaoh came along to bathe and she sent her maid to get the basket and when she opened it she saw the child and of course, you know the rest of the story. The child is taken out and adopted into her family. So this is another example of disobedience to authority.
 
Now the next example I want to go to is in Daniel. Most of the rest of these examples all come out of the book of Daniel. Daniel is one of my favorite books to go through and to teach. One of these days I'll repeat it because I went through Daniel back before we had video and everything else. Daniel is a tremendous book. It's never classified in the Old Testament among the prophecies. There's a lot of prophecy in Daniel. Remember the Old Testament was divided into three sections: the law, the prophets, and the writings. The law is the Torah. The prophets are the Neviim and the writings are the Kethuvim. Now the prophets were written by prophets who had an official position in the Jewish culture as prophets and were recognized as prophets. But you can have the gift of prophecy and not be a prophet. King David had the gift of prophecy but he was not considered a prophet. Daniel is not operating in the land of Israel. He was taken as a prisoner to Babylon where he was educated. Then he worked his way up due to God's grace to the position of second most powerful position in a Gentile pagan kingdom.
 
There are a lot of parallels for us here. Here you have believers who were living in a pagan kingdom. That's why it's part of the writings section because it's showing believers how to live wisely within a pagan culture. So Daniel and his friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego are a part of this example which we see especially in the first part of Daniel 1. We see here the third example which is the case of the wise students. We learn a number of different things from this example and we see how Daniel thinks about the situation. He doesn't just react to the situation. He doesn't just fly off halfcocked. He thinks it through. He's going to present an argument that is based on an understanding of what is valued by the person in authority.
 
So as we start reading we meet four of the young men who were taken to Babylon in 603 B.C. They are going to be re-educated and re-trained and brainwashed to the education system of the Babylonians so they can be totally assimilated within the pagan culture. Now we have to understand that the role of the pagan culture in the devil's world is to put pressure on believers to get them to conform to the world. This is Romans 12:2 where God says we're not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. But the world does not want us to be a non-conformist. The world wants us to conform to its values and its standards so it's going to do everything it can to put pressure on us to conform to its values.
 
When we were living in a country that was dominated by a majority that held to a Judeo-Christian worldview, then we were not in this kind of overt opposition. But the days of the dominant Judeo-Christian view are long gone. Many scholars see that its last waning year of influence was in 1963 or 1964 when the last light of the residual influence of God's Word finally winked out and we had a major shift that occurred for a number of reasons in 1963-64. This was about the time that you had the Supreme Court decision that took prayer out of the schools. It was when the Beetles came to America. The rise of the hippie movement. The anti-war movement against the Vietnam War. A number of things happened that the groundwork had been laid for 75 to 100 years but that's when you saw the real shift take place.
 
So we live in a world that is dominated by human viewpoint and it's trying to pressure us into it. That's no different from the circumstances with Daniel and his three friends. They're living in an environment where they are expected to look and act and be and think like Babylonians. So the way they began that we see in Daniel 1:3, "Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, the chief of his officials, to bring in some of the sons of Israel, including some of the royal family and of the nobles," Ashpenaz was the master appointed to train the eunuchs. Now eunuch may not refer literally to someone who has been emasculated. It could be but it was a term that was generally used for those who were the upper echelons of bureaucrats within the palace. He was instructed to bring some of the Israelites as a way of testing them to see who were the best and the brightest and they brought them into a training school. Daniel 1:4-5 continues that these were "Youths in whom was no defect, who were good-looking, showing intelligence in every {branch of} wisdom, endowed with understanding and discerning knowledge, and who had ability for serving in the king's court; and {he ordered him} to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans. The king appointed for them a daily ration from the king's choice food and from the wine which he drank." So they were given the best food.
 
All of you foodies out there and I know there's a lot in this church, well, this is the best of the best food that you could get in the ancient world. You would just love all of this food but it was non-kosher according to the Laws of the Torah.  We read it was going to be for three years of training and at the end of this time they're to serve before the king.  In Daniel 1:6 the four are identified, " Now among them from the sons of Judah were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah." These were their real names, not their pagan names given to them identified in Daniel 1:7, "Then the commander of the officials assigned {new} names to them; and to Daniel he assigned {the name} Belteshazzar, to Hananiah Shadrach, to Mishael Meshach and to Azariah Abed-nego."  That was part of how the state wanted to control the individuals but you'll notice they didn't make an issue out of that.
 
That's one of the first things we should note. They were choosing their battle. They were given pagan names and each of those names in one way or another honored one of the pagan deities that was worshipped by the Babylonians. That's how they were known. They were no longer known by their Israelite names but by the new names. But they don't fight over that. We have people who want to fight over every microscopic hill. You can't do that. You have to choose your battles. You have to make wise valued judgments as to what the battle is going to be and how determinative it is going to be. So they don't fight over the fact they were given a name change. There were probably many other areas where they did not fight.
 
But what we see in Daniel 1:8 is the mental attitude of Daniel. Daniel really shows himself to be the leader of the four here and we read, "But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself with the king's choice food or with the wine which he drank; so he sought {permission} from the commander of the officials that he might not defile himself." Now there's a lot that's going on here that is summarized in this particular verse. It reminds me of a verse related to Ezra 7:10. Now Ezra lived later than Daniel. Ezra was born during the captivity and he probably either knew Daniel as an old man when Ezra was a young boy or he knew of Daniel. In Ezra 7:10 it says, "For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the LORD and to practice {it,} and to teach {His} statutes and ordinances in Israel." So that is the same idea of Daniel purposing in his heart, making a decision emphasizing his volitional responsibility to Divine institution #1 that he would not violate the Law.
 
Now being named a different name is not forbidden in Scripture. Scripture doesn't say that you shall not have the name of a pagan god, so he's choosing to draw the battle line where there's a direct commandment of God in terms of what should be eaten. So he makes that decision and he's going to go to the chief of the eunuchs in order to have a meeting with him. He's not going to call him out in public. He's not going to make it a personality conflict. He's not going to challenge his pride of position. He's going to keep it private so he can appeal to him in a way that can win the situation over and not aggravate a situation.
 
Now in Daniel 1:9 we see, "Now God granted Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the commander of the officials." This is a great example of Proverbs 3:5-6, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart (which Daniel is doing) and lean not on your own understanding (he's in a foreign culture with foreign ways and he's not going to let that intimidate him) and God will direct your paths." So he's going to commit it to the Lord. He's going to do the right thing and he's going to let God handle the rest of the situation.
 
So he meets with Ashpenaz and they have a conversation in Daniel 1:10, "And the commander of the officials said to Daniel, "I am afraid of my lord the king, who has appointed your food and your drink; for why should he see your faces looking more haggard than the youths who are your own age?" In other words he was saying that we've determined on what the FDA says and all the requirements of good nutrition according to the government that you need to eat this way in order to be strong, healthy and smart young men. This is what the king and government's diet program is so he asks why should they let Daniel and his friends eat according to a different diet because then you're going to be weak and sickly and this is going to be a problem. And Ashpenaz is worried it's going to be his head.
 
So in Daniel 1:11, " But Daniel said to the overseer whom the commander of the officials had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, an "Please test your servants for ten days, and let us be given some vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance be observed in your presence and the appearance of the youths who are eating the king's choice food; and deal with your servants according to what you see." You see here that Daniel recognizes the man's authority and he doesn't challenge it. Instead he comes up with a solution that shows he's thought this through.
 
We know of Daniel's later life that he was a prayer warrior. So he prayed through this and he thought about it and he reasoned out what the real aim of the steward, what he really wants to get out of this. He realized they needed a win/win situation. He can't lose any prestige. He can't appear to have given us some kind of break and then we don't perform well or look well. So Daniel came up with a test. Now anyone who is familiar with dieting or exercise clearly recognizes that in ten days you may not see much of a difference but remember these are probably 14-year-old teenagers so their metabolism was a little bit different than older people so they would see a response to this diet change pretty rapidly. So he said just to give them vegetables to eat and water to drink and then after ten days let us be examined and have an evaluation and you can look at us and see how we look and how we perform, to see if we look sicker or we're thinner or emaciated or are we underperforming.
 
So he makes a deal with him. He does it in such a way as to win him over, not to create or to aggravate the conflict. That's something we need to learn in these kinds of political situations. We need to learn how to engage the opposition in a way that doesn't aggravate or enflame the situation. So in Daniel 1:15, "At the end of ten days their appearance seemed better and they were fatter than all the youths who had been eating the king's choice food." Now that's the hand of God. That's trusting in God and then God is going to bring the increase, bring the results. So as a result of that in Daniel 1:16 "So the overseer continued to withhold their choice food and the wine they were to drink, and kept giving them vegetables. As for these four youths, God gave them knowledge and intelligence in every {branch of} literature and wisdom; Daniel even understood all {kinds of} visions and dreams". So at the end of the three years these are the ones that are at the top of the class because they not only focused on God's priorities but they continued to act well, study well, and perform well so they would not be accused of having problems because they didn't have the right diet.
 
What we see here in terms of some basic principles in relation to handling some opposition from the authorities is that first of all, they chose their battle which we've already talked about. Secondly, Daniel exhibits authority orientation and humility all the way through the situation. He never lets his pride get engaged. He never gets angry. He doesn't get emotional. He remains relaxed and respectful and is polite in dealing with the person in authority. He is not engaged in a personal assault. Third, he's thought the situation through and he's anticipated the objections that his opponent might have. He's already got an answer prepared so when Ashpenaz present his objection, Daniel is prepared and then when Daniel gives his case he gets an opportunity to move on it.
Our fourth observation is that he understands the values the opponent hold personally and in terms of his pagan system and Daniel appeals to him on the basis of what Ashpenaz values, not on the basis of what Daniel values. In other words he's not going in there and throwing a Torah scroll down and says, "This violates my rights as a believer and it violates what God has said so I'm not going to do this and you're just a stupid pagan." He's going to win more with honey than with vinegar. Our fifth point is that once they have won that first stage then it put them in a very positive light and we see in the coming chapters that it's going to give them more and more opportunities to be a witness and a testimony to God and to His grace and provision.
 
Now when we come to Daniel 3 we're going to come to the next situation which we'll close with. We'll probably look at the rest next week. This is the case of the deified statue covered in Daniel chapter 3.  So now there's going to be a direct confrontation with Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel 3:1 we read, "Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, the height of which {was} sixty cubits {and} its width six cubits; he set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon." He builds this huge image of himself because he is so arrogant he thinks he is god and he's going to make himself god and everyone in the kingdom has to worship him. So he sets it outside of Babylon.
 
This is large enough so that hundreds of thousands of people can all gather together in one huge ceremony in order to bow down and worship this idol. So he brings out all the government employees, all the government officials, all the princes, everybody involved with the government, and all the citizens. Then he announces what they're going to do. They have an orchestra there or a band which is going to play and when they play the sound then everyone is to fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar has set up.
 
Then there's a penalty in Daniel 3:6, "But whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be cast into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire." So once again we have the same kind of setup. You have a person in authority who is telling the believers directly that they are to worship an idol. This is again a direct violation of the command in the Torah that they should not worship anything other than the Lord God. They should not bow down and worship any idol. So it is a command that is in direct violation of a specific, precise statement of revelation from God in terms of their behavior.
 
So this is set up and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego are there. We don't know where Daniel was. He's not mentioned here but the other three were there. They have made enemies by now. Anyone who is successful is going to eventually develop enemies. There are those who are jealous of them and wish to get them out of the way so they can advance. That's exactly what has happened here. This is also an example of an early form of anti-Semitism because they are being targeted because they are Jews. In Daniel 3:12, "There are certain Jews whom you have appointed over the administration of the province of Babylon, {namely} Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego. These men, O king, have disregarded you; they do not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up."
 
So when the orchestra played, when the band played, they refused to bow down and this has been noted and observed so an indictment is brought against them before Nebuchadnezzar. So he calls them before him and explains the situation and warns them of the penalty again in Daniel 3:15, "Now if you are ready, at the moment you hear the sound of the horn, flute, lyre, trigon, psaltery and bagpipe and all kinds of music, to fall down and worship the image that I have made, {very well.} But if you do not worship, you will immediately be cast into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire; and what god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?"
 
So Nebuchadnezzar makes this the issue, a challenge with their god. All of these issues ultimately come down to a challenge to your belief system. We were talking the other day about how to handle certain situations that might come up going down to City Hall and I told the other guys there may be people down there who want to get involved in some sort of confrontation. You never know what news media are going to do. I've certainly learned over the last ten years or so to never give an interview to anyone in the media. You never know what they're going to do with it no matter what kind of controls you may put on it. You have to be very careful so it's better just to keep your mouth shut. What happens is that when we engage in a lot of political argumentation we're basically arguing that if you think of the image of an iceberg where ten percent is above the water and the rest is below the water. You have two icebergs and they're arguing back and forth in terms of that ten percent that's above the water. But the real battle is what's not being talked about and not being observed which is below the water.
 
Yours and mine and everyone's political beliefs are an outgrowth of their ethics. But we're not engaged in a debate nationally over ethics and what is the right ethical system. Ethics in turn are an outgrowth of your view of knowledge, your view of what truth is. That's know in philosophy as epistemology. So that is below the level of ethics. Your ethics reveal your epistemology. As a Christian your epistemology is that "Yes, there is actually truth and I know what it is because God, the Creator of the Heavens and the earth has revealed it to me. So I believe in absolute truth." Whereas the pagan has a view of relative truth because there's no eternal absolute and if he's a secular evolutionist there's nothing eternal except for matter so truth is always relative. There's no absolute. Everything is going to be negotiable and everything is changeable.
 
But your knowledge is predicated upon something even more basic and that is your view of God. This is what philosophy identifies as metaphysics, that which is beyond the physical. So it's metaphysics that is the domain of the study of the existence of God. So underneath everything else the subterranean level is really your belief in God. That's exactly what Nebuchadnezzar says when he asks "Who is the God that will deliver you from my hand?" He understands that the issue isn't whether you're going to bow down or whether you're going to accept his religious beliefs or whether you're just going to go through the motions. The issue is his god or the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Aged-nego.
 
Listen to their answers in Daniel 3:16 - 18, "Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego replied to the king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter. If it be {so,} our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But {even} if {He does} not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up." So they take a firm stand on the absolutes. They're not being disrespectful. They're not trying to make it a personal confrontation with Nebuchadnezzar but they understand and they make it clear that the issue is between their God and his god. They state that even if their God doesn't deliver them, He's capable of delivering them. They're not taking their stand on any belief that somehow God is going to perform a miracle. They're not going to "name it and claim it and take dominion in the name of Jesus" or any of the other nonsense we usually hear from Christians today. They're just going to take their stand for what's right. They're not enflaming the situation.
 
So of course, because they take a stand quietly and firmly against the king, he just flies into a rage and in Daniel 3:19 it states, "Then Nebuchadnezzar was filled with wrath, and his facial expression was altered toward Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego. He answered by giving orders to heat the furnace seven times more than it was usually heated." It becomes so hot that it even kills the men who are trying to put Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego into the fire. Eventually they are cast bound into the fire but they are delivered miraculously by God and when the men who are attending the fire look in, they can see that instead of three men, there are four. In Daniel 3:25 we read, "Look I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire and they are not hurt and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God." This, I believe is a pre-incarnate manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ who delivered them in the midst of this great test.
 
This is again where they exercise wisdom. They stood their ground. They didn't make a federal case out of it. But when others brought the charge against them then they had to take their stand and they did so willingly. Now next time we're going to come back and look at a couple of more examples from the Scripture to wrap this up. We'll also talk briefly about the Magdeburg Confession that came out of the Reformation and the doctrine of the "Lesser Magistrate" which is used and has been used since the Protestant Reformation to justify a certain form of civil disobedience. We'll talk about that after we go through a couple more Biblical examples so we understand clearly what the Bible teaches and have that framework to evaluate these other thoughts.

Romans 143b-Patterns of Disobedience

Romans 13:3 NASB95
For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same;
Romans 143b-Patterns of Disobedience Romans 13:3-7
 
We're continuing to study the issue of authority in Romans 13 where Paul says all authorities are from God and that we are to obey all authority. Looking at other Scriptures, we understand that to disobey authority is to disobey God because all of the authorities come from God. Unfortunately I think there are some people who take those statements in an absolute sort of way that is not intended. The Bible does not say to obey the authority when they're wrong. And wrong is defined against a standard. That standard, of course, is the Word of God. So we've been looking the last time and will be looking this time at examples where believers disobeyed an authority over them because the law or mandate that was being set forth was contrary to the Word of God.
 
We've seen several principles and will see more in the last two examples we're going to look at this evening. In each of these cases the command or the mandate or the order or the law was specifically in contradiction to a revealed mandate from God. It wasn't just that we might think that wasn't the right principles. We'll see when we get to the end of this section in Romans 13:6-7 there are some people who think that the tax system in the United States is extremely unfair. They may or may not be right. There are people who think the property tax system is extremely unfair and is not consistent with a Biblical pattern. That's a good example to use because I think there's something to the argument that property tax is really a tax that is not wise and is destructive of the accumulation of wealth. In the Old Testament, in the Mosaic Law, which we're not under but is a pattern for us of wise government, there's no property tax. There are tithes which are basically the taxes which were based on a percentage and that were applied equally to every person whether you were wealthy or whether you were poor. You still paid 10% every year for one tithe, 10% for the other tithe. Every third year there was another 10%. It was a flat rate tax. There was no property tax.
 
Therefore, there would be no threat of a loss of property to a family. Property was wealth and it could be accumulated and passed on within the family and the clan from one generation to another. So we'll take that as an example because there's a Biblical pattern there that is violated today. So does that give me the right to say, "I'm not going to pay my property taxes because that doesn't fit the Biblical pattern"? No, it doesn't. Now if the government comes along and mandates me to do something that God tells me not to do or tells me not to do something God has told me to do, then I have the right to disobey that. That's the difference between disobeying a direct command and this idea that it doesn't fit a Biblical pattern or a Biblical principle. All the examples we have in Scripture are addressed to specific situations and issues.
 
We looked last time at Exodus 1:6 and then Exodus 1:15-22 in the case of the disobedient midwives. We looked at Exodus 2:1-6 along with Hebrews 11:23 for the case of the disobedient parents. Now both of those were involved with the Exodus generation. In the first case you had the midwives that were told by Pharaoh to let him know whenever a male baby was born so he could kill the baby. Now they already arrived too late for them to do anything. He had asked them to just say they were born dead or to make some excuse. In the case of the disobedient parents this was Moses' parents. Moses was born under threat of death from the Pharaoh so they hid the child, thus violating the law of Pharaoh. But God was in control and provided for protection for Moses.
 
Then we went to Daniel. In Daniel we looked at the case of the wise students in the first chapter which is the story of the Jewish young men who were probably around 14 or 15 years of age who had been taken back to Babylon as captives to be retrained and they were all given the same diet. This was not a kosher diet and so Daniel and his three friends, Azariah, Hananiah, and Mishael, who had all been given Babylonian names that reflected the Babylonian deities. Remember, I pointed out that they didn't make an issue out of that. That's like trying to make an issue out of a principle as opposed to a command. They didn't fight on that hill. They waited and focused on an issue where they were being required to eat food that God had told them not to eat.
 
Daniel went privately to the administrator who was over the program, the chief eunuch, and appealed to him and gave him a wise test to evaluate their diet in contrast to the diet of the other students and they came out a winner. So that gives us a good example. Daniel is written as a book of wisdom for how believers are to live in a pagan environment. That's important for us and will be more and more so as the world around us becomes more and more hostile to Biblical Christianity. We need to learn how to live in the world around us without constantly butting heads but operating on wisdom.
 
Sometimes there are going to be direct head-on confrontations as we saw in Daniel 3 where Nebuchadnezzar erected a huge gold statue that they were to bow down and worship. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego refused to bow down and worship. The penalty was that they would be thrown into a fiery furnace. In their confrontation with Nebuchadnezzar they were very polite and respectfully declined to obey the order. They said, "God will save us but if He doesn't that's okay, He's still God." So they trusted in God and God delivered them uniquely to make a point to Nebuchadnezzar.
 
We ended there last time and we'll look at a third example in Daniel which is in Daniel 6. This is the episode related to Daniel and the lions' den. Now as we look at this, there are four basic points we need to remember here. First of all, as I've already said, Christians are to subject themselves to government authority. So Daniel is to submit himself to the authority of the law of the Medes and the Persians. Second this government authority, whether it's saved or unsaved and in this case we have an unsaved authority, Daniel has to submit himself to that. Now that has implications for us and for many Christians who live outside the United States. We have a tendency to just focus so narrowly on our own circumstances in our own culture, but if you're a Christian living in a Moslem country then you've got a whole other issue to deal with. If you're a Christian living in Russia, living in Ukraine, living in purely secularized countries with no strong history of Biblical traditions behind them, then that too is a different circumstance and a different situation. And so we have to recognize that even though authorities that are placed over us, such as if you're in Russia that means Putin, in you're in Saudi Arabia or Iran then that has to do with either the House of Saud or the Ayatollahs who are running Iran. They are the authorities that are appointed by God. Wrestle with that a little bit. All authorities are appointed by God. It means Nero and whomever you think was a wonderful Christian ruler.
 
So the third thing we will see in this is that when you resist government authority you do it because it relates specifically to a command of God. Then finally we see that the person who is the governing authority is going to be given a testimony. Whether they accept it or not is another story. In this case he's positive to it but that's not always the case.
 
Now the situation we find in Daniel 6 is that the governing power has now shifted. It was the Chaldean Empire in the first four chapters. In the middle of chapter 5 it shifts to the Medes and the Persians. The Persians conquered the Babylonian Empire and that's the story of chapter 5 and then the ruler over Babylon in Daniel 6 is Darius. "And it pleased Darius to set over the Kingdom 120 satraps to be over the whole kingdom." This is his administration. He didn't have states. He set up these satraps in regional areas of administration and each one had a ruler or an administrator over that area. And over those 120 satraps there were three governors who oversaw the administration of those 120 satraps. So each governor would basically oversee 40 of them. Daniel was one of those three governors.
 
Daniel now is not the young Daniel that we read about in the first three chapters but now Daniel is probably close to 81 years of age. If he was 14 or 15 when he was first taken to Babylon that was in 605 BC. This is now 540 BC. So about 65 years have gone by and if you add 15 to that then you've got 80 or 81 years of age, depending upon whether this is 540 or 539 BC and he is not young anymore. He had gone into retirement but he's been called out toward the end when they had the big feast with Belshazzar and the handwriting on the wall. Someone remembered that Daniel could interpret dreams. He was no longer part of the administration at that point but they called him back. He had been retired for some time. He probably spent that time in ministry in the Jewish community reading, studying, and continuing with his spiritual life and his spiritual growth.
 
Word got to Darius about Daniel's background and Darius wisely elevated him to a position of authority in the Persian Empire. Now anyone who is a success at anything is going to come under a lot of scrutiny from their peers. If you're working in any form of bureaucracy, whether it's in the military or any other form of bureaucracy such a school district or whatever it may be, if you are a standout, there are probably going to have people who become jealous of you. This is especially true in areas of bureaucracy in our government. You take for example what's going on with this scandal in the Veteran's Administration. One of the problems with the federal bureaucracy is the need to "go along and get along". If you do that, everyone has a secure job and nothing is being threatened, but if you exercise initiative and if you do things differently and you operate according to a different standard, then you're going to be a threat to everyone else. They're just operating at minimal expectation. If you rise above those minimal expectations, you're going to make yourself a target and they will try to do something out of jealousy and envy to take you out because you're a threat to them.
 
That's the kind of thing that happened with Daniel. In Daniel 6:3 we read, "Then this Daniel began distinguishing himself among the commissioners and satraps because he possessed an extraordinary spirit, and the king planned to appoint him over the entire kingdom." Now this just irritated and angered all of those petty little minds that were part of the bureaucracy. So they were trying to come up with a plan to take Daniel out. In Daniel 6:5 we see the thinking of these men, "Then these men said, 'We will not find any ground of accusation against this Daniel unless we find {it} against him with regard to the law of his God.' " So he's got a strong public testimony. They knew who he was and they knew what his habits were, so they decided that his weak spot was going to be something related to his worship of God and they would have to come up with a law that would make what Daniel was doing illegal, knowing that Daniel wouldn't change and Daniel wouldn't compromise.
 
So they came up with the idea of having the king sign a law or a decree that no one in the kingdom could present a request or a petition before any god or any man for a period of thirty days except to the king. The penalty would be that they would be cast into a den of lions. I'm sure that this is a summary version of what was going on. It probably took them time to come up with this kind of a trap and also they would have to put it the right way and pick the right time in order to catch Darius off guard. Anyone who is a good leader would immediately realize that this would be a problem. If you have such a large empire and such a huge administration and every petition, every request has to come to you, and you alone, that's going to create an extremely narrow bottleneck, extremely tight bottleneck. So you'd have to pick a time when it would be expected that not a whole lot would be going on. Sort of like in the old days before they invented air conditioning, once it started getting hot and humid in D.C. not a lot was going on. In fact, the argument has been made by someone that the greatest threat to American liberty was the invention of the air conditioner because once Congress was air-conditioned, they could stay longer and come up with more laws and take away more freedom.
 
So they came up with a time and way in which they could present this to Darius so that he would go along with it. It was only for thirty days. So in Daniel 6:8 we read, "Now, O king, establish the injunction and sign the document so that it may not be changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which may not be revoked." Once the ruler signed something into law even the ruler couldn't change it. It was irreversible. There was no appeal. There was no way to turn it back. There was no way to reverse himself. It was permanent and binding to everyone, including the king.
 
Now this had probably gone on for some time because we see in verse 10 Daniel seems to know what is going on. Daniel 6:10 begins, "Now when Daniel knew that the document was signed…" So he was aware of this decree. He was aware of the conspiracy. It almost seems as if he was biding his time. He knew this was going to happen. He knew it was a foregone conclusion and once he knew that, he waited until it was signed.
 
And then he went home and we're told that "He entered his house (now in his roof chamber he had windows open toward Jerusalem), and he continued kneeling on his knees three times a day praying and giving thanks before his God, as he had been doing previously." Now that last phrase is important to note. He's not going in there to rub Darius's nose in the law. He's not making up a situation to create a violation of the law. He's not operating out of anger saying, "I'm totally against this law. I'm going to go out and break the law in order to make a court case about it so we can get this handled."
 
Different culture. Different situation. We can handle it a different way in the U.S. where someone breaks the law and takes it to court and get it tested. That's how we can do things. That's not how they could do things because even the king couldn't change the law. So he recognized he's going to do exactly what he's always done since he was a young man.
 
This is an important principle to train children. If you're a parent or a grandparent, this is a great lesson. You need to train your children in prayer from the earliest age. Make this a habit along with many other things that they need to make a part of their life, such as giving them responsibilities for cleaning up their room, and various other chores around the house, develop maturity. As soon as they begin to read, have them read Bible stories. You read them to them and then let them read them. Pick a time every single day so you build a pattern and habit into their life from the earliest possible age. Same thing with prayer. Every single day, make a time of prayer where there's an appointment with God that they're going to keep every single day.
 
That's what we see with Daniel. Now I'm not going to say it should be three times a day but it should be at least one time a day when you have a set appointment with God when you are going to take time to pray. Now Daniel we know from other passages is familiar with other Old Testament writings, even contemporary writings, such as Jeremiah. In the beginning of Daniel 9 we know he has been reading in the prophet Jeremiah's book. In Jeremiah 29:11 there is a promise from God that says, " 'For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.' " That is a great promise. It is a promise made to Israel in light of the plan God has for them but it reflects a universal principle. It has an implication for us. That God is a God who orders history and orders our life and we know that He has a plan for us as well. So there's an implication there for us.
 
For Daniel there's a clear application, because as a Jew, God had a specific plan for him and for his country. In Jeremiah 29:12-13, God says, "Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find {Me} when you search for Me with all your heart." So God is calling upon His people to pray and be dependent upon Him. Daniel understood how important this was as part of his relationship with God. From the time he was young he had made it a point to pray to God. So he's not just choosing this as an opportunity to disobey this law.
 
Daniel would be aware of a statement in 1 Kings 8:29-30 which states, "Yet have regard to the prayer of Your servant and to his supplication, O LORD my God, to listen to the cry and to the prayer which Your servant prays before You today; that Your eyes may be open toward this house night and day, toward the place of which You have said, 'My name shall be there,' to listen to the prayer which Your servant shall pray toward this place." This house in this context refers to the Temple and that God is indicating that the people would pray toward the Temple in Jerusalem which is the place of the dwelling of God in the Old Testament. So God established His presence in the Temple and they would pray in that direction.
 
Another important prayer statement is from David. This time in Psalm 55:17, "Evening and morning and at noon, I will complain and murmur, And He will hear my voice." See, I bet most of you don't ever complain to God in your prayers. When you read through the Psalms David is constantly complaining to God in His prayers. Then, as he goes through the problem in complaint, he's thinking about God's provisions and His promises and by the time he gets to the end of that lament psalm, David's mental attitude has been straightened out and he's focused on the eternal provision of God. But how often is he praying? Evening, morning, and noon. So this is a pattern that we see in Scripture so this was the pattern that Daniel had adopted. He understood that and he's praying three times a day and he has for most of his life.
 
But he also is aware that this is probably a trap. He's not going to hide. He could easily have gone home and said, "Well, I know that if I do what I normally do, I can still pray. It's really not going to make any difference to God. I'm still going to pray three times a day. I'll just close the curtains and pull the blinds and that way no one is going to know what I'm doing in here." But Daniel is not going to change a single thing. He's going to continue to do what he's always done and even though he knows that his enemies are sitting outside the window, paying attention to exactly what is going on, he still prays.
 
As soon as they spot him praying they immediately ran back to the king and they reminded him of what he'd done and told him he had made this law and it couldn't be altered. These men just set the king up, the way they're handling him. They had him going as he remembered the law and emphasized that it couldn't be changed and then they sprung the trap. In Daniel 6:13 we read, "Then they answered and spoke before the king, 'Daniel, who is one of the exiles from Judah, pays no attention to you, O king, or to the injunction which you signed, but keeps making his petition three times a day.' " Notice how long they've been pointing out that he was one of the captives from Judah. It's been 65 years or more. It shows how hostile they are to the Jews, an incipient anti-Semitism.
 
When the king heard this he was just mortified. He probably realized at that point how he had been set up and how Daniel had been set up and he was extremely distressed because he cared a lot for Daniel. He relied upon him. He realized he had more integrity probably than all the other administrators in the kingdom combined and so he tried to figure out some way to deliver Daniel. But they kept reminding him that he couldn't violate the law, so he ordered Daniel's arrest and had Daniel brought to him in preparation for executing the penalty of having him sent to the lions' den.
 
Then the king made it clear to Daniel and showed he understood Daniel's testimony. Whether Darius was a believer or not we'll never know but he says, in Daniel 6:16, "Your God whom you constantly serve will Himself deliver you." So he had some sense that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Daniel was the true God. So they go through the whole episode where they put Daniel inside the lions' den. What has happened so far is that we see the same pattern fits here that we've seen already. There's an unjust law from the king that is mandating a believer. The believer doesn't make a public issue out of it.
I would say that in our environment it's different because we don't live under the kind of totalitarian state that they lived under. We live in a world where we have a right to publicly assemble, to challenge the laws in the courtroom, and to make a challenge of the administrators of the law. This is much like what happened last week with regard to this city ordinance in Houston. This is in contrast to some of the riots or some of the things that have gotten out of control that you've seen with other issues in "civil disobedience". There was an assembly of believers down at City Hall last week. There was another gathering at Grace Community Church on Sunday night of over 2,500 people from different churches and pastors for the purpose of being educated on this city ordinance. The press was out there. This was just showing a public unity that they were standing against the foolishness of this city ordinance. It's making an impact upon the people on city council. They've never seen this many people get together and communicate this much over anything they've done. Which is sad. They're really hearing from the citizens of Houston about this particular ordinance.
 
We can speak up because that's our form of government. If you tried to speak up in an Egyptian environment or in a Persian environment, you were just going to be summarily executed. So it all depends on the governing situation you might have. But always follow the principles of following the law and showing respect for those who are in authority, which is exactly what Daniel has done. Daniel has refused to obey the law but he doesn't make an exceptional show about it. He goes home and continues to do that which was right, trusting in the Lord to handle the situation, which is exactly what happened.
 
This is one of many people's favorite stories from the Old Testament that Daniel was put into the lions' den. The king spends his night in torment. He can't eat. He can't sleep. His regular entertainment, whether he would bring in a group of musicians or one of the wives from his harem, whatever it was, he sends everybody away, and stays by himself. He can't sleep. He tosses and turns and cannot wait until dawn so he can come down and see if Daniel is still there.
Then in Daniel 6:20 we read, "The king cried out with a lamenting voice…" He knows Daniel is going to be dead but there's something that gives him a little bit of hope. His voice is just shaky as he cries out, "Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you constantly serve, been able to deliver you from the lions?" Then in Daniel 6:21-22, Daniel said to the king, "O king, live forever! My God sent His angel and shut the lions' mouths and they have not harmed me, inasmuch as I was found innocent before Him." That's the only court of appeal that ultimately matters for eternity.
 
So the king exulted and in his place he sent those who had arrested him. He even had their whole families, including their children and their wives thrown into the lions' den where they were devoured by the lions. So he then issued a decree praising God, the living God, who is steadfast forever. His kingdom is the One that shall not be destroyed and His dominion shall endure to the end. He delivers and rescues and works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth and He has delivered Daniel from the power of the lions. And it very well could be that because of that statement that at this point Darius became a believer. It's not clear but I would lean toward thinking he did.
 
Now what we've seen is the same pattern. Let's turn to Acts where we'll look at a situation we studied very recently in Acts 5 which is the case of prohibited preaching. Acts 4 is where a very clear statement is made by Peter in relation to the obedience to authority. Now this is the same Peter who is going to write what we're going to read in 1 Peter. In Acts Peter and John have been arrested by the Sanhedrin and they're tried by the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:18 "And when they had summoned them, they commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus." It's interesting that it adds that phrase "to teach in the name of Jesus" because in the Great Commission part of what Jesus specifically commanded the disciples to do is to teach all men. So now they're commanded not to teach in the name of Jesus. In Acts 4:19 we see their answer, "But Peter and John answered and said to them, 'Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge.' " In Acts 5:28-29 they're challenged again when they're arrested again. This time the Sanhedrin reminds them they commanded them not to preach in this name. Peter responded by saying, "We ought to obey God, rather than men." So in these two episodes that are connected, Peter states it very succinctly that we ought to obey God rather than men. Then he gave them the gospel in Acts 5:30-32, "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you had put to death by hanging Him on a cross. He is the one whom God exalted to His right hand as a Prince and a Savior, to grant repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses of these things; and {so is} the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey Him." So he disobeys them right in front of them right there in the courtroom.
 
We see again a command from people in authority that tells Peter and John to do exactly the opposite of what Jesus told them to do. It's not a matter of principle. It's a matter of a specific mandate from God. So they resist that. That is the pattern for resistance.
 
Now one other thing I want to address before we wrap this up has to do with something that's called The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate. Now the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate is something that is derived from Scripture. I think we sort of see some examples of it in what we have been studying. It's an expansion of it somewhat. We have to go back to its historical background. It's a document that was written by a group of Lutheran pastors following the Protestant Reformation. So we have to understand a little bit about that particular background.
 
This was called the Magdeburg Confession and this was written in about 1548. Now the Protestant Reformation began in 1517 by Martin Luther who was a Roman Catholic Augustinian monk. He had no idea that what he was doing was going to split the Roman Catholic Church in two. Up to that point there was only one church. There had been various sects that popped up here and there but basically there was only one church. The Roman Catholic Church had deteriorated into a tremendous amount of apostasy and perversion at this point. And Martin Luther wanted to reform it.
 
There had been several periods of reformation from within the Roman Catholic Church over the years. That's pretty much the pattern he was following. He had no idea of what he was beginning. He was from a town in what is now eastern Germany called Wittenberg, Germany. On October 31, the eve before a holiday, the Eve of All Saints, he nailed 99 debating points on the door of the church at Wittenberg. The door of the church was a place like a community bulletin board. If you had a horse for sale or an ox for sale or you wanted to buy something, that's where you would put a notice. So he tacks this up that this is something that needs to be debated because these are serious flaws within the Roman Catholic Church.
 
This is what led to the split in the Roman Catholic Church among those who were called Protestants. That came because they were protesting the theology and the practices of the church. One of the fundamental issues that Luther wanted to debate was the issue of how a man became righteous before God. Was it through the work of the Sacraments or was it through faith alone in Christ alone? That's what began the break.
 
Now this caused a huge wave of separation to occur among the different states in what is now modern Germany. There was no unified Germany at that time. It caused a tremendous fissure to occur in Germany and Germany was under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, not roman, and it really wasn't an empire but that's what it was called. The Holy Roman Emperor at this time is Charles V which in 1521 on May 25 called the Edict of Worms and in that he stated "For this reason we forbid anyone from this time forward to dare either by words or by deeds to receive, defend, sustain, or favor the said Martin Luther. On the contrary we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic as he deserves and to be brought personally before us or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us. Thereupon we will order a proceeding against the said Luther. Those who help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work."
 
Well Luther was basically kidnapped and protected by Prince Frederick III of Saxony who had come to Protestant convictions. So what we see here is the beginning of this Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate. Prince Frederick is supposedly under the authority of Charles V. Charles V had issued an edict or law to arrest Luther for preaching the gospel but Frederick comes along and says that if that happens Luther will be killed. He said, "That's wrong so I'm going to hide him." That's what happened. So Luther was put into hiding and that's what protected him.
 
The Law of the Lesser Magistrate is the idea that when a higher authority enacts an unjust law which fits the Biblical pattern of an unjust law telling citizens to do something that was unjust and would be a violation of God's Word, then to arrest someone for their proclamation of the gospel then a lower authority has the right and the responsibility to act and to interpose himself between the higher authority and the citizen to protect the citizen from the unjust law and penalties of it. So Frederick III's act saved Luther's life.
 
Now Charles was never able to enforce the Edict of Worms. The purpose of the Edict of Worms was to completely outlaw Protestant belief. He was involved in wars with France and others at the time so by 1530, some eight years later, he convened a Diet, which is a meeting with all the heads of states in the empire. They met in Augsburg to handle the business of the Empire, sort of like Congress. By 1530 there was a major threat facing Europe, much like today. The Muslims were at the gates of Vienna. So Charles was more concerned about unifying all the Christians in Europe so they wouldn't be fighting with each other and could face a common enemy. He was willing to sort of call for a little bit of truce in a war against the protestants. So things calmed down.
 
Luther at this time wrote a treatise or book that went out to the German people called "The Warning to my Dear German People" published in 1531. It was broken into three parts which was later the same outline as the later Magdeburg Confession and then also in 1531 there was a group of princes, Prince Phillip of Hesse and Prince John Frederick of Saxony who were the two most powerful Protestant rulers at the time who organized themselves in a religious alliance called the Schmalkald League and the member of this league pledged themselves to defend each other in case Charles V attacked their territories. So they're making a stand for religious liberty and belief in the gospel because Charles V wants to stamp out the gospel of justification by faith alone.
So this fits the same pattern in Scripture where you have a king who is seeking to prevent believers from doing what God has told them to do. They're not engaged in offensive action against the king but if he's going to attack them they're going to band together to protect each other. Well, this went on for another fifteen years or so before Luther died. Luther dies in 1546 and it's not long before Charles V seizes the opportunity. He's thinking that now with Luther gone he can destroy the Protestant movement.
 
So he entered into an agreement with Pope Paul III to stop the Reformation and in 1548 Charles imposed a law called the Augsburg Interim which demanded a lot. Listen to this law, the edict coming down from the Emperor. He said that Lutherans were to restore the number of sacraments from two, the same two we believe in, baptism and the Lord's Table, back to seven which is what the Roman Catholic Church has. The churches were to restore many of the Roman Catholic rituals and ceremonies and practices, including the belief in transubstantiation, which is that the elements of the Lord's Table actually transubstantiated into the blood and the body of Christ.
 
Third, the decree called for the rejection of the doctrine of justification by faith alone and fourth it required everyone to acknowledge the Pope as the head of the Church. Fifth, it stated the churches must respect the authority of the Roman bishops. So this is a direct confrontation against the Scripture and a contradiction to the Scriptures. So then with this now as law, the Pope came along and issued an edict authorizing Charles V to raise an army in order to attack those who would not conform to the edict and to destroy them and to force them into submission.
 
The only city in Germany to resist the Augsburg Interim was the city of Magdeburg. Every other city in Germany just caved in. They said, "Okay, the king's in authority. That means we do whatever the king says to do." The magistrates and the pastors in Magdeburg said, "Wait a minute. This is an unjust law. We need to stand and protect our people." So they stood on the basis of Scripture. They refused to obey the edict from Charles. They fortified the city and in 1550 Charles brought his army to attack them. The people burned everything outside the walls of the city, closed the gates, and were under siege for a year.
 
During that time the pastors of Magdeburg wrote a defense of their position, which is called The Magdeburg Confession. It was a defense of their actions. They also wrote and published 228 tracts and pamphlets. See they didn't get distracted by Facebook and e-mail and television and all that other stuff. So they published 228 tracts and pamphlets that were printed and distributed throughout Germany. These taught the gospel as well as gave a rationale in defense of what they were doing.
 
At the end of the year, Charles V had lost 4,000 soldiers, killed, and 468 Magdeburgers had died, almost 10 to one. The siege ended on November 4, 1551 with favorable terms granted to the Magdeburgers by the Emperor. He just gave up. As a result of their resistance, the other territories in Germany got a backbone. They gathered together and they began to resist Charles. They refused to obey the edict and eventually they were able to push Charles' army out of Germany. So it seems to fit the pattern for disobeying authority.
 
The Magdeburg Confession was basically unknown until a couple of years ago at which time it was translated into English. Then another book was published about two or three years ago dealing with an explanation of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate. There is a problem in the Reformation age. They didn't handle Scripture always in the way we would handle Scripture. It's a mixed bag, but they have a fairly good point and I think what they did fit the pattern in Scripture. In this book about the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate there's only one chapter that deals with the Scriptural justification for it. All of the other examples that are given are examples that are given historically.
 
It may be recognition of an establishment principle. I'll accept that, but the examples we have in the book come out of the writings of John Knox. John Knox was the leader of the Reformation in Scotland. He lived at approximately the same time as what was taking place in Magdeburg. He had a copy of the Magdeburg Confession and he has a Biblical justification. The only place I found this really works is that he quotes from Jeremiah 26:10-16 and he also refers to Jeremiah 36:9-31 and in both cases you have Jeremiah under attack from the King Joachim who is an apostate king of the southern Kingdom. Jeremiah is speaking God's Word to Joachim and he is seeking to take the life of Jeremiah. The princes of Judah protect Jeremiah. That fits the pattern, so that's the only Biblical example. But there's no sort of Biblical injunction or Biblical mandate or anything more than that.
 
But you see something similar to that in the Bible. If I am in a position of authority to protect someone else and a higher authority comes along mandating something wrong for them to do, then as a leader and as a person responsible, I need to stand in the gap and protect him. Again, the examples that we see, the example at Magdeburg, the example that we see in Jeremiah are examples where we have a king who is trying to implement a command or a law or an ordinance that directly assaults the command of Scripture. That gives you the right of justification to step in and to disobey that law for that purpose.
Now going back to Romans 13, we looked at these other passages dealing with the whole issue of subordination from Romans 13:1 where it says we're to submit to the governing authorities because there's no authority except from God and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Now Paul is writing when Nero is emperor. It's the first part of Nero's reign when he's not as crazy, not as bad as he was at the end. But guess what? Peter writes in 1 Peter during the second half of Nero's reign and Peter says basically the same thing. "Therefore submit yourself to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake."
Now this is the same Peter that disobeys the Sanhedrin in Acts 5 saying we should obey God rather than man. What Peter is saying here in 1 Peter 2 is not a contradiction. He is saying we are to obey the government. Whenever you're under authority you're to obey that authority unless that authority is in violation of the highest authority, which is God. He uses the same verb here that Paul uses in Romans 13:1. It's the same verb that's used in every other submission passage whether it's talking about children to parents or wives to husbands or slaves to masters.
 
Peter goes on to say in 1 Peter 2:14-15, "Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right for such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men by doing good, even if we suffer for doing good." That's going to be part of what Peter says because he recognizes that by doing good we will suffer. But he says it's better to suffer for doing good than for doing bad. If you suffer when you've done wrong, you expect to suffer. But when you suffer for doing what's right, that honors God. It's part of our testimony.
 
Then he goes on to say in 1 Peter 2:18 to slaves to be good to their masters and not only to the good ones but to the one who is a mean, harsh, irascible so-and-so that you don't want to do anything for. Now your boss may be harsh, but he's not telling you to do anything that violates Scripture. He may be hard to get along with. He may be mean and ugly and nasty and vile and loathsome, but he's not telling you to do something that violates the Word of God. So unless he's telling you to do something that violates the Word of God, you're to honor that authority with all fear.
 
This applies to every area of authority, whether we're talking about government, the family, whatever the environment for authority is, it's not about the personality of the person in authority. They can be stupid. They can be foolish. They can be making mistakes, but guess what? They're the one in authority. They're the one God has established. 1 Peter 3:1 says, "In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any {of them} are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior." This means it's just like all authority. Even if your husband is not a believer and he's crude, he's rude and he's socially unacceptable. He makes stupid decisions, but they're not violating the Scripture.
 
Now there are exceptions to this. If the guy's abusive. If he's physically threatening, it's time to get out. If he's threatening the children, it's time to get out. That may not allow for remarriage. We'll get into divorce and remarriage later in Matthew. I think there are legitimate grounds for separation. In our culture that basically means divorce in order to protect assets. That doesn't mean that the right to separate or divorce always allows the right to remarriage. In most cases, unless it's immorality or desertion it doesn't allow for the right to remarry. But God does not expect anyone to put themselves in harm's way unless it's for the sake of the gospel. So there are times when it's necessary for self-defense, which is a Biblical principle. Leave and bring the children out. In some cases it may be the wife's who's the one being abusive and then the husband needs to get out for self-defense.
 
Now just to wrap up this first part of Romans 13:6-7 in the last minute or so, Paul concludes by saying, "For because of this you also pay taxes, for {rulers} are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax {is due;} custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor." The word for taxes in verse 6 and 7 is the word PHOROS. It means a tribute from a vassal nation to an overlord nation. From a nation that's been conquered and brought into the empire. That's what that word means. The Jews did not like to hear that they had to pay tribute to Rome, but Paul says that's legitimate. Customs is the word TELOS which means a tax in the sense we think of a tax, a civil tax, in order to take care of the administration of the country. If they're in a position of authority, even if you don't like them, even if you disagree with them, even if they're from the party you don't like, even if they have ideas you think threaten democracy, we are to respect the office, even if the person in the office is not that respectable. We're to show them respect because they hold the office.
 
All of this always goes back to the original sin. The original sin of Lucifer in eternity past was when he disobeyed the authority of God. That's why the Scriptures make such an issue out of respect for authority all the way through the Scriptures in every area. That's the original sin. Someone who is in a lesser position thinks that he can judge the person whom God has placed over him. So next time we'll come back as we get into Romans 13:8 and we'll continue with that.

Romans 144b-Love One Another

Romans 13:6 NASB95
For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.
Romans 144b-Love One Another Romans 13:6-10
 
Tomorrow is June 6, the 70th anniversary of the Allied offensive that turned the tide of the war in Europe in the invasion known as D-Day. I had the privilege about twelve years ago to walk the beaches of Normandy and to visit some of the museums and to walk through the cemeteries of the men who gave their lives for our liberty on the beaches of Normandy. That was a very moving experience. If you've never done that, I hope you get a chance to do that. I think it's something that every American should be required to do before they exercise their voting privilege.
 
In Israel they, of course, have mandatory military service for everyone at the age of 18 in the IDF. If for some reason you are a conscientious objector you can serve your nation in the ambulance corps or medical corps or for something else of that nature. But if you go into your national service at the age of 18 one of the things that's part of your basic training is that they take you to all of the battlefields, all of the significant sites in the history of that nation, so that you understand the background of the nation, the history of the nation and an understanding of what makes Israel as a nation important. Israel is a young enough nation where they can go to these battlefields and have men and women who fought in those battles be there to tell them what they went through on those battlefields. It draws a connection for them. They understand that if they're going to put their life on the line for their country they know what they are fighting for and what they might be called upon to give their life for. I think that's important.
 
Another thing they do that's interesting but I'm not thinking that we should do this but their Memorial Day is the day before their Independence Day. I've heard this from American young Jewish men who've gone over and served in the IDF and it's a jarring thing for them to watch what happens here on Memorial Day. Memorial Day isn't Veteran's Day. Memorial Day is to remember those who have given their life for their country. In Israel it's a day of reflection, a day to focus on those who have given their lives for the independence of the nation and the freedom of the citizens. They don't have 2-for-1 sales. They don't have appliance sales and car sales. They don't have all of that. They just focus on the reality of the day and at midnight someone rings a bell and they go from Memorial Day to Independence Day and the mood in the nation changes from a time of somber reflection to a time of rejoicing and exhilaration. Independence Day then becomes a great national celebration. So this is a meaningful juxtaposition for them.
 
Let's open our Bibles to Romans 13. Our focus tonight is on the title for this section which covers basically three verses from Romans 13:8–10 on love one another. Now remember the context. It's always important to remember the context. As Paul comes to this section of Romans he's dealing with a lot of application. Romans 1 – 11 dealt with a lot of what people would mistakenly call just theology. But theology is always applicational and any theology that is sound Biblical theology is always applicational. If it's not, it's not good theology.
 
Just think about it. Paul spends eleven chapters on theology. In most churches today people say just skip the theology. They just want to be told what to do. But Paul takes painstaking effort to go through eleven chapters to help us understand the nature of sin and our justification. He points out it's by faith alone and that all we have to do to be saved is to believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. We just need to trust Him. At the instant we trust in Christ as Savior we have eternal life because Christ paid the penalty for our sin. You can't add to it. You can't take away from it. Jesus paid it all. All that's required of us is just faith or trust in Him and Him alone.
 
In the first two and a half chapters Paul explains that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Following that is justification by faith. Then he goes by that into now that we are justified how do we live? Romans 6, 7, and 8 deal with the issues of the Christian life. Then in chapters 9 -11 he talks about God's righteousness in relation to Israel. After those eleven chapters he begins to transition to key points of application.
 
Romans 12: 1-2 sets the framework. Paul gives the command, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your body…" He says body because it's not just the physical person but your soul and your spirit.  "That you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world." So what we're seeing in the last part of Romans, there's a contrast between how the world does it and how Christians should live. We're not to be pressured into the modus operandi of the world around us. We're not to be conformed to the ways of the world or the actions of the world but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. That means studying the Scripture, reflecting upon it, giving time in our lives not for just going to Bible class but for reflecting upon we've learned, reading through the Scriptures daily and thinking about what that means in terms of our own thinking and in terms of our own lives. The result will be that we can prove or demonstrate in our own lives that God is good and acceptable and perfect.
 
As part of this we dealt with government and issues related to authority in Romans 13:1-7. Now at the end of that sections in Romans 13: 6-7 he comes to the application of the authority principle of government to paying taxes. He makes it clear hat all citizens are required to pay taxes and it doesn't matter what the percentage is or whether you think the tax code is fair or balanced. What matters is that this is the law. So he says in Romans 13:6, "They, (the government leaders) are God's ministers attending continuously to this very thing." That means it's for our good as indicated in the first two verses of this chapters. The command is to give to all their due, "taxes to whom taxes are due." That word actually refers to giving tribute to the empire. Then comes "custom to whom custom is due". The word there for customs is the word that we would relate to as taxes. Then he goes on to say to give "fear to whom fear is due and honor to whom honor."
 
Obviously that context is saying something about money. For that reason a lot of people think that this first phrase in Romans 13:8 "owe no one anything except to love one another" is talking about money. In fact, you've probably heard that. I've heard that from lots of Bible teachers over the course of my life. In fact there was one some of you may have heard or been to one of his conferences, a guy by the name of Bill Gotthard who had a two-day conference called "Basic Youth Conflicts." A lot of people went to that and he built a whole financial policy off of this one clause that this teaches us to pay cash for everything and not to use a credit card or go into debt. He didn't believe churches should get a mortgage or you shouldn't personally get a mortgage because it's not God's will.
 
In fact, there are not only people like that but there are some well-recognized scholars and exegetes who try to make that connection. All my life I've heard different people make that statement but it doesn't fit the context. I've always had a sense of what this said but I couldn't demonstrate it until I just happened to run into something, some information, as I was reading in a totally different passage, totally different context. I was working through the Sunday morning material in the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 where there's a similar vocabulary. The material I was reading was for last Sunday and this Sunday and it directly correlated with the vocabulary here. It was some of those things you read and it's just a great blinding flash of the obvious. As soon as you read it you know that's absolutely right. This is the issue in terms of talking about owing no one anything except to love one another.
 
Is this talking about money? As we get into these three verses I want us to just do a little flyover of these verses. I want to just point out a few things to you in terms of its organization. Let me read through the three verses and then we'll look at some of these observations. Romans 13:8-10, "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled {the} law. For this, 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, YOU SHALL NOT MURDER, YOU SHALL NOT STEAL, YOU SHALL NOT COVET,' and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of {the} law."
 
One of the first things we note is that twice in this passage you have the phrase related to fulfilling the law. In Romans 13:8 Paul says that when you love another you have fulfilled the law. In verse 10 he says that love is the fulfillment of the law. So what do you think these three verses are all about? It's how love fulfills the law. He states it at the beginning. He states it at the end. He's very clear that this is what he's talking about.
 
At the beginning in verse 8 he says not to owe anyone anything and then he says that he who loves another fulfills the law. That verse is parallel to verse 10 which says that love doesn't do any harm to anyone so therefore love fulfills the law. The phrase "love does no harm to a neighbor" is expressing a parallel or synonymous concept to "owe no one anything". Whatever "owe no one anything" means it's parallel with not doing something evil or bad to a neighbor. From the context we can see that it seems that "owing no one anything" isn't really talking about financial indebtedness.
 
Now what sandwiched in between Romans 13:8 and Romans 13:10 is verse 9. It talks about the Mosaic Law. The five commandments he lists here in verse 9 are the second half of the Ten Commandments. So that tells us right away that when he says law in verses 8 and 9 he's not talking about something in the New Testament. He's referencing the Mosaic Law, specifically the Ten Commandments which are the prelude or the beginning of the Torah, and the Mosaic Law which actually contains 613 commandments. That's 603 commandments beyond the 10 in the introduction. So that's sandwiched in between there.
 
Let's look at Romans 13:8 in detail. Notice that it says not to owe anyone anything except to love one another. Now the main thing he's driving toward here is that loving one another fulfills the Mosaic Law. The standard explanation of this verse is one that is given in a commentary by Rene Lopez called "Unlocking Romans".  I've known Rene for many years. He's a guy involved in the Free Grace Society. I've heard him speak. He has a doctorate from Dallas Seminary and he now teaches at Dallas. He takes a pretty standard view of this passage. He says, "Still thinking of the Christian's obligations to fear and honor the state, verses 1-7 focused on our response to the authority of the state."
 
The problem with this explanation is that there's a shift that takes place in verse 8. Now in the original Greek I've told you there's no verse breakdown. There's no sentence breakdown; there's no commas or semicolons or paragraph breaks. In fact, in your Unctual documents which have all the letters in upper case, there's not even a space between the letters. You wonder if you see something like that how in the world you would ever be able to break it down to sentences and paragraphs. That's the brilliance of Greek in that the grammar is used to identify all these things so there's not a matter of dispute as to where the sentences should be in the Greek.
 
Every now and then someone will break a long sentence in a Greek text into two sentences. Pretty much, though, the Greek text according to the editors and translators who handle it are consistent in where they see the sentences and where they break the paragraphs. Now that's important because in all the Greek texts I consulted they all break the paragraphs between verse 7 and verse 8. The grammar indicates there's a shift that takes place because of the way the language is structured in the Greek. Paul is closing out one topic and he's shifting to another topic. The new topic starting in verse 8 is very clear that this is a new subject.. The focal part of this sentence when you compare it with verse 10 introduces the new topic.
 
So, just in terms of the language, we know we're not talking about submission to authority anyone. We're now talking about loving one another. So owing no one anything doesn't belong with the previous section. It's part of the new topic, not the old topic. Rene Lopez says, "What happens here is that Paul is still talking about the Christian's obligation to fear and honor the state and he transitions with this command to owe no man anything. Instead the translation saying let no debt remain outstanding in the NIV captures the correct meaning."
 
They try to make this work. This idea they say is that there's some obligation there of not letting any physical debt or financial obligation remain. He explains, "One must repay all financial debts, not that one should never borrow." Of course, that's true, but that's not what this passage is saying. Sometimes we hear pastors teach true things but you look at the passage but that's not there. That thought is in Proverbs and Psalms but that's not necessarily in that passage.
 
So when Rene is saying we should pay our financials debts it's not saying that one should never borrow. And he's accurate there. Some people get the idea that the Bible says we should never borrow. Many times it's based on this verse. The Bible never says that. In fact, if you study the history of economics you learn that a sound economy is driven by credit. You don't want to get overextended in your credit. You don't want to get into deficit spending like our federal government because you can never get out of it and you become a slave to your debt. But credit is important to build and grow the economy. You had this sort of hypocritical two-faced attitude about this topic in the Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic Church taught that no one should charge usury or interest, period. But they couldn't live like that. You needed to be able to have credit for an economy to function. You had to borrow from someone and if you couldn't borrow from a Christian, who did you go to? You went to the Jewish community and borrowed there.
 
The point that I'm making is that the idea that you don't borrow at all is not a Biblical concept. It's not even reflected in good economics. Look at these two passages. Psalm 37:21 says, "The wicked borrows and does not pay back, But the righteous is gracious and gives." This is the type of parallelism called an emblematic parallelism. The first line isn't synonymous to the second line like a synonymous parallelism. The second line isn't the opposite of the first line. That's an antithetical parallelism where you have opposites. The second line here is an expansion of the idea in the first line. The idea in the first line isn't that it's wrong to borrow. It's wrong to not repay the loan. The wicked borrows and the reason he's wicked is that he doesn't pay you back. The second line shows that the righteous is generous and not only pays back but he's also generous and gives. This second line assumes there's repayment but it expands on that.
 
Matthew 5:42, a passage we studied not long ago, says, "Give to him who asks you and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away." Jesus is not saying it's wrong to borrow. So the idea that "owe no one anything" means that you can't borrow and that's it's wrong Biblically to borrow is not correct. To teach that is bad exegesis and bad economics. What's interesting is this word "to owe". Owe no one anything is the verb OPHEILO. It means to be obligated or to be indebted to someone financially. Here it's a present active imperative which means it's a command which should characterize your life at all times.
 
The word OPHEILO is the verb cognate or the verb form that we find in Matthew 6:12. In the Lord's Prayer Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who have a debt against us or our debtors." So the word for debt or debtors is based off this noun OPHEILEMA. This noun and this verb are just cognates. One's the verb form of the noun. Now I'm building an important point here. So when we look at this in Matthew 6 we wonder why in the world this is talking about debts.
 
Turn over to Matthew 6:12. After the prayer is over with Jesus makes a teaching point in Matthew 6: 14–15. Is this talking about financial debt or something else? Jesus says, "For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions." See, the word here is transgressions. This is used here as a synonym for debt.
In the Luke account we read, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." So obviously in both Matthew and Luke the word for obligation or debt is parallel to the word for sin. Now this is backed up by understanding language. What I read briefly in one source last week is that the concept in Judaism of sin was that you sinned against God. You are now indebted to God. If you sin against your brother you have created a spiritual debt to your brother.
 
Now this was built off of an Aramaic word that was used. Remember Jesus taught in Aramaic as well as Greek. I believe he taught in Greek here but in Rabbinical thought they used this idea meaning debt to communicate sin. You created this obligation against another. Don Carson who is a Greek professor at Trinity University School with whom I have many disagreements in terms of his theology in his commentary on Matthew in the Expository Commentary writes, "More important the Aramaic word HOVA…" This is a broad word encompassing both spiritual and financial debt. "…is often used in the Rabbinical literature as sin or transgression. Then he quotes Adolf Deissman, a Greek scholar at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Carson says, "Deissman makes the point in his analysis of Greek that HORMATIUM OPHEILO means "I owe sin", Probably Matthew has provided a literal meaning of the Aramaic Jesus commonly used in his preaching. Even Luke uses the cognate participle in "everyone who sins against us". There is therefore no reason to take debts as meaning anything other than sins. It's a synonym. This is how the rabbis talked about sin as something owed God."
 
Now I thought that was an interesting thing and I went back and found the original quote by Adolf Deissman in his Biblical Studies. This guy was absolutely brilliant. He knew Greek, knew the Koine Greek, knew the earlier forms of Greek and really was a breakthrough scholar in showing that the Koine Greek of the New Testament wasn't some Holy Spirit language but was common, everyday Greek. His studies published in the late 19th century and early 20th century were breakthrough studies. These guys just breathed classical literature and they could quote lengthy passages from just about any ancient Greek document verbatim upon request. He says that "In the directions (preserved in a duplicated inscription) of the Lycian Xanthus for the sanctuary, of Men Tyranos, a deity of Asia Minor…" He cites the source and says it was found near Sunium which is in modern Turkey saying it was not older than the imperial period roughly during probably the Greek Empire rather than the Roman Empire. He says "there occurs the peculiar passage which he quotes in Greek. At the end he says that the phrase "I owe sin" in this passage is also very interesting. It is manifestly used like I owe debt."
 
I'm going into detail on this because you can read commentary after commentary where they talk about this passage Romans 13:8 as focusing on financial obligations. It doesn't even fit the context. Paul is telling us not to become spiritually indebted to another. In other words don't sin against your fellow man, which is parallel to the idea that love does no harm to a neighbor. What's important here is that here you have the verb used whereas in Matthew it's the noun that's used. I'm just showing that you have documentation that both the noun and the verb were both used to show spiritual debt, not financial debt.
So "owing no one anything" is an idiom for don't sin against your brother. Don't create a spiritual obligation of sin in regard to your brother. And that parallels to the idea that love does not harm which is a Greek word meaning sin or evil. Love does no evil to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law.
 
Now when we look at Romans13:8 and compare it to Romans 13:10, both talk about a fulfillment. In 13:8 it uses the word in the Greek for fulfillment. That's the same word that's used in Ephesians 5:18 for being filled by means of the Spirit. That's a little bit different concept. The word group for PLEROO has a broad range of meaning so you really have to look at how it's used each time. We've studied this before so I'm not going to go through it again but we've talked about the four different ways you have the word fulfillment used in the New Testament.
 
In Matthew 2 we have Matthew reciting four different Old Testament passages and he says "it is fulfilled". Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem. It is fulfilled in Micah 5:2 that this was a literal prophecy with a literal fulfillment. You have three other uses that aren't literal prophecy. This word was used in a comparison mode, as a depiction of typology and they also used it to sort of summarize New Testament teaching. I've gone through all of that in detail. What we have here is a verb in the perfect tense which indicates completed action. When you love one another you have completed what the Law says to do. You have obeyed the Law.
 
The Law has been fulfilled. In Romans 13:10, though we have the noun form PLEROMA. PLEROMA also has a broad range of meaning. You can't come along and say that every time you see the word PLEROMA that it always means the same thing because it doesn't. It has a lot of different meanings and you have to look at the context each time to see what it means. PLEROMA means a fullness in the sense of that which is brought to fullness or completion. So Paul is saying that since love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore, love is the completion, the fulfillment or the full application of the Law.
 
Now what does he mean by that? In between verse 8 and verse 10 we have verse 9. Romans 13:9 lists five commandments: you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, and you shall not covet. Those are all taken out of the prelude to the Mosaic Law which we call the Ten Commandments. So it's clear that what Paul is saying here is how to fulfill the law in terms of your love for one another.
 
 It goes back to an interchange had in Matthew 22:36. Before we get there, though, I want to make one other comment about this phrase fulfillment of the Law. Does that sound familiar to anybody about what we've studied on Sunday morning? In Matthew 5 as Jesus was shifting from talking about the Beatitudes to talking about the correct way to interpret the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law, He says to his disciples to not think He came to destroy the Law or the prophets but that He came to fulfill the Law. What he's showing is that He fulfills the Law. It's the same verb, the same language that Paul is using here.
 
Jesus brought the Mosaic Law to complete application. He's not talking about a fulfillment of prophecy. He's talking about the full application which he then contrasts with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were those who broke the least of the Law in Matthew 5:19. Jesus says He didn't come to teach them that it was okay to violate some of the laws in contrast to some of the Pharisees. He says He came not to destroy the Law but to completely fulfill it in terms of application.
 
Now later on in Matthew he's got a little confrontation here with the young man who comes to challenge him. To pick up the context, this is a lawyer who comes. That means he's an expert in the Mosaic Law so he's probably a Pharisee. Mathew 22:36-40 says, "One of them, a lawyer, asked Him {a question,} testing Him, "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And He said to him, "YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.' This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."
 
The first five commandments and the Ten Commandments all relate to our obedience to God. Things like having no other gods before God, not worshipping idols, observing the Sabbath, and all of those all relate to our obedience to God. The second five have to do with loving our neighbor. This was just a way of referring to the Old Testament Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. They refer to it as the Law and the Prophets.
 
In other words He's saying that everything else in the Old Testament depends and develops these two basic commandments, to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself. So what Paul is talking about in Romans is that loving one another fulfills those five commandments. If we're loving one another, then we're not going to be committing adultery, we're not going to be committing murder, or stealing, or bearing false witness, or coveting. That would be excluded if we're loving our neighbor. So that's the focal point of Romans 13:10. And this is a foundational command in the New Testament. Now the New Testament develops this in terms of a new commandment.
Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ." What was the law of Christ? That takes us back to what Jesus said in John 13. The word fulfill here is a form of the word PLEROMA. It has a prefix in front of it, ANAPHEROO, and it basically has that same idea that you'll certainly bring to completion the law of Christ.
 
I'm going to run through sixteen passages. We have one already in Romans 13. This is the impact of Scripture. Sixteen times in addition to the one we're looking out for a total of seventeen we have these commands. In John 13: 34-35, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."  Now this is just one passage but it states it three times.
 
In John 15 Jesus repeated it. In Romans 12:10 Paul said, "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love." This is the only time he uses a different verb. He uses PHILOSTORGOS instead of AGAPE but it communicates the same principle. In Galatians 5:13 he says "Through love serve one another."
 
In Ephesians 4:2 he says "With all lowliness and gentleness with longsuffering bearing with one another in love." In 1 Thessalonians 3:12 he says, "May the Lord make you increase and abound in love toward one another and to all just as we do to you." In 1 Thessalonians 4:9 he says, "But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I should write to you for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another." 2 Thessalonians 1:3, "We're bound to thank God always for you brethren as it is fitting because your faith grows exceedingly and your love for one another abounds towards each other."
 
1 Peter 1:22, "Since you purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart." Then again in 1 Peter 4:8, "Above all things have a fervent love for one another for love will cover a multitude of sins." In 1 John 2:7-8, "Brethren, I write no new commandment to you but an old commandment which you've had from the beginning. I write to you because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. He who says he's in the light and hates his brother is in darkness until now. He who loves his brother abides in the light [fellowship]."
 
1 John 3:11, "For this is the message you have heard from the beginning that you should love one another." Then 1 John 3:23, "We're to love another as He gave us commandment." Then in 2 John 5 he says, "And now I plead with you, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment to you but that which we have had from the beginning that we love one another."
 
So we have this command to love one another coming out of the Old Testament commandment in Leviticus 19:18 which is quoted in Romans 13:8–10. "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord." This quote is quoted in Matthew 5:43, 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31, Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:124, and James 2:8.
 
So you add these eight references to what we've had in the "love one another" passages and we have an overwhelming emphasis in the Scripture on what it means to love one another. James 2:8 says, "If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you do well." This takes us up through Romans 13:10. We'll come back next time to finish Romans 13 with some more key principles on living the spiritual life in the last part of Romans 13.

Romans 145b-Living in Light of the Rapture

Romans 13:11 NASB95
Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.
Romans 145b-Living in Light of the Rapture Romans 13:11
 
We are in the last paragraph here of Romans 13. This is one of those paragraphs that is just loaded with important doctrines. So as we get into it, we need to address a couple of basic topics. I want to cover the whole paragraph tonight even though I don’t think we’ll get much beyond our understanding of verse 11. Verses 12 through 14 are loaded with some key terms and because of what Paul says here, in comparison with similar passages in Ephesians 4 and 5 and Galatians 4 and Colossians 3, as well as James 1, Hebrews 12 and 1 Peter 2 we have a lot of work to do in just putting that together because it’s crucial for understanding the spiritual life.
 
The first verse is as far as we’ll get today but I want us to understand the context. Paul begins by saying in the New King James Version, Romans 13: 11- 14, “And do this, knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in licentiousness and lewdness, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts.”
 
All right, let’s start with Romans 13:11, “And do this…” Notice in your English text that the “do” is in italics. That means it’s not in the original and it’s supplied by a translator because according to the translator’s understanding of the text, that’s what makes sense to him in terms of trying to make the passage read a little more clearly and understandably to the reader. “And do this, knowing the time for now it is high time to awake out of sleep for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.”
 
This is a motivational verse. It’s to challenge us to realize that we’re living in a period of time that is going to disappear at some point. The doctrine of imminency is clearly behind this passage. Jesus could come at any moment. So we need to be prepared and ready and we need to recognize that as each day goes by and almost two thousand years have gone by since Paul wrote this, but as each day goes by we do get closer to the Rapture. We don’t know when it will be. It could be tonight. It could be next week. It could be in twenty years. It could be in one hundred or two hundred years. Personally I think it’s a bit closer than that but we don’t know.
 
There have been a lot of people who have studied prophecy over the years, especially over the last 150 years who believed they were in the Rapture generation. Hal Lindsey wrote a book called The Terminal Generation when he was about forty years younger thinking he would be in the Rapture generation. He might be because he hasn’t been taken to be with the Lord yet but people like Dwight Pentecost who died a little over a month ago, people like Dr. John Walvoord, certainly the previous generation like Lewis Sperry Chafer, many people thought they were seeing various things being fulfilled in their lifetime and that the return of the Lord was very, very near. They thought they would probably live to see the Rapture.
 
We can’t get distracted by that. Just because it seems that way doesn’t mean it is that way. I’ve heard this comment from a lot of people. I think there are some people, maybe we’ll call it a senior syndrome, who know that as they get more mature and older they realize that the things of this life aren’t as significant as the things that continue into eternity. I think this is a good thing. We all yearn for the fact that it’s not long and we’ll leave all of these mortal things behind us and we’ll be in heaven with the Lord.
 
But we need to realize that as much as we might wish for the Rapture to occur tomorrow, it probably won’t. It might but we need to be prepared. Think about this. If you knew because of something your doctor said that you had three years to live, plus or minus, but that you were terminal, what would you be thinking? Of course we’re all terminal but we just don’t know it’s that short. But if you knew you just had a short time, how would you live your life differently?
 
Now if you have an answer to that, that is significant, that you would truly live your life differently, then you need to really take that before the Lord. We should live each day as if the Lord’s going to come back tomorrow. Live each day in preparation for that, knowing that we have to be ready if the Lord comes tomorrow but that we have to plan and still live our lives as if he will not come until long after our passing.
 
Some people have made the mistake of not saving for their retirement or the future because they’re so convinced the Lord’s going to come back. But then wait a minute, all of a sudden the Lord didn’t come back and they don’t have anything saved to take care of them in their retirement. So there’s a certain bit of tension that’s there for us.
 
So we’re living as this passage says in a time of darkness. We’re to live as children of light and our ultimate salvation which comes at the end of this life is nearer each day than it’s ever been before. Now Paul uses this to motivate us. We need to be aware of this and this should spur us on to greater obedience today and to a greater sense of intensity about our spiritual life and our spiritual growth.
 
Now he starts off and he says literally as it reads in the Greek, “And this…” So he’s adding something to what he’s said before. In Romans 13:8-9 which we looked at last time the focus was on loving one another. Romans 13:8 as we saw isn’t talking about money when it says “owe no one anything”. It’s an idiom meaning don’t create a spiritual indebtedness with someone. In other words, don’t sin against another but instead we’re to love one another. It says that “he who loves another has fulfilled the Law. That’s reflected in Romans 13:10, “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law.
 
And this…” So he’s adding something to love one another. But he doesn’t really give a command here until we get a little further on in this section so the sense of “ought to” is possibly there but really he’s just adding a next exhortation, “And this…” We have the word “knowing” which is the Greek word eido and it’s in a perfect tense which means this is a completed action so it means that it’s something that they’ve known for a while They’ve already known this, they’ve been taught this. They understand these principles fully and he’s reminding them of this.
 
 As a participle it would be a causal participle and should be translated with the sense “because you already know the time.” The word there translated “time” is a word we ran into on Tuesday night in the Dispensation series. It’s one of the key words related to dispensations. It’s the word kairos which has to do with demarcating a time or a season in God’s plan for the ages. It indicates an age or an era that is marked out by certain boundaries.
 
What Paul is saying here is that because you know the time we’re in. You understand God’s plan for the ages. You understand where you are in that plan, that we’re in the Church Age and that there’s no specific prophecy which needs to be fulfilled in the Church Age in order for the Rapture to come. We need to be ready at any moment. And so he’s referring in general to the imminent return of the Lord as a motivation for the spiritual life.
 
He says, “Because you know the time it is time [not really high time which is more of an editorial or interpretation of this phrase] to awake out of sleep.” This indicates priority. The word translated “to awake” is the aorist passive infinitive of egeiro and it means to wake up and to become alert out of a time of sleep. The term for sleep in the New Testament is usually used as an idiom. There are times where it is used literally for those who have fallen asleep, such as Eutychus who’s famous because he fell asleep in one of the Apostle Paul’s sermons and he fell out of a window. He may have been killed. It’s not sure in the text but Paul certainly revived him one way or the other.
 
So you have sleep referring to literal sleep. You have sleep as a euphemism for when a believer dies. It’s not that he goes into soul sleep which is a Jehovah Witness doctrine and maybe a few others hold to that. It’s not that you go through a period of soul sleep because we know at the time of death we’re “absent from the body and immediately face-to-face with the Lord” but the body is as it is waiting. It’s not over with. That’s the importance of Christian doctrine is that which remains of our corporeal body is going to be brought back together and is going to be the foundation for our resurrection body. That’s the pattern.
 
When the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and Mary and Martha, Peter and James, ran into the tomb, they didn’t see a past body and then Jesus had a new body. The body that he had had in His mortal flesh was what was transformed into His immortal body.
 
Now there are some people, just in case you’ve never run into them which I didn’t until about ten years ago, there are some Christians who believe that the implication of that, the key word is implication which is not a command or an imperative but possibly a suggestion, is that in Christianity the body is valued. In other beliefs the body is not valued, such as Platonism. Some people believe that because the body is valued in Christianity that you should not be cremated. I don’t believe that’s true but I base my argument on what happens at death.
 
When we look over history, when you think of the tens of thousands of Christians who were killed in battles, Christian settlers who were pushing west in the American frontier who were slaughtered by Indians and just left out on the plains for their bodies to deteriorate and eventually the winds and the animals just took their remains to the four corners of the earth then you have to realize that burials were not always possible. When you think of those who have been lost at sea and their bodies just deteriorated within the oceans. When you think of those who have been blown literally to atoms in warfare you’re faced with the fact that there are all kinds of people whose bodies have gone from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust, and they are atomized. Their molecules are scattered all over the earth.
 
We have an omnipotent, omniscient God who can pull all of that back together again. When you think about how many people whose bodies have been in the ground for three, four, five, thousand years who are believers and there’s nothing left of those bodies in those graves, everything is decomposed and has disappeared. This idea that if you’re cremated somehow that is dishonoring the body isn’t convincing to me that that is a valid argument. For some people that may fit the area of doubtful things. If that’s something someone believes is important, then it’s fine. But I don’t think it’s something that should be imposed upon others.
 
The first time I ran across this a friend of mine was going through seminary about twelve years ago and he had a theology professor who actually taught that it was sinful to be cremated. I understand his theological argument and that burial is a way of honoring the body God created. Christianity teaches that this mortal flesh becomes transformed into our immortal body. How that happens, I don’t know. But there is some sort of continuum between this body and the next body. I don’t know how that happens but that’s the pattern that we see with the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. The term “sleep” is used as a euphemism for that body until it is resurrected. We see the picture of that resurrection in 1 Thessalonians 4 when the Lord returns from heaven and even though the immaterial soul and the interim body is with the Lord this material or corporeal body gets transformed into his resurrection body. It says, “For the dead in Christ will rise first.” That’s talking about that corporeal body. It will be resurrected and it will be transformed into a new body, a resurrection body, an immortal body that is then joined with the soul of the believer with the body. That is then those who have died in Christ will receive their resurrection body at the point of the Rapture. So there’s a specific continuity that’s emphasized in Scripture between our present mortal body and our future immortal body.
 
And that interim period is referred to as “sleep.” Paul uses that same terminology in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, “We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.” It’s a verse taken out of context and put over a lot of baby nurseries. “We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.” So this is important. So the word “sleep” here is not used as a euphemism for those who have died physically or for literal physical sleep but it is used as a figure of speech for those who are not actively engaged in living their spiritual life today. They are just going through the motions and perhaps they are living in carnality. They need to awaken spiritually. They need to get back in fellowship and they need to move forward because you don’t know how much time is left. And even if the Rapture doesn’t occur tomorrow, a massive automobile accident might occur tomorrow. A massive cardiac arrest might occur tomorrow. A major stroke might occur tomorrow. Any number of things may occur tomorrow that are the end of this particular life so we always have to be ready.
 
This is the background for Paul’s motivation here. “Because you know the time (referring to the Church Age and this dispensation) that now it is time to awake out of sleep…” This is the same metaphor used in Ephesians 5:14 where Paul says, “Awake, you who sleep.” He’s saying wake up, focus on your spiritual life, and grow to spiritual maturity. He’s not talking about unbelievers. He’s talking about believers who have slipped into carnality and that’s one way in which the term “dead” is used in Scripture to refer to those who are no longer living their spiritual life.
 
There are seven different ways in which the Bible talks about death. The first three are fairly obvious. Physical death. Spiritual death. Eternal death. Those are obvious. The ones that aren’t obvious are positional death when we become a believer and are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. There is sexual death which takes place as someone gets older. It is used this way to refer to Abraham when he was older. We also have a phrase “carnal death” which just means that you’re out of fellowship and you’re living as if you’re an unbeliever and then there’s death that is a result of the sin unto death which is a longer period of carnality that ends with death.
 
So Paul is using the term in Ephesians 5:14 like one who is saved but acting like they have no new life in Christ. Someone once called them facetiously as the “dead in Christ.” So we have “Arise from the dead and Christ will give you life.” In 1 Peter 5:8 Peter uses a different vocabulary. Instead of saying “awake” he says to be sober and vigilant which has the same idea. Wake up and be alert; think clearly and objectively which is what be sober means. It doesn’t mean to dry out and quit being drunk. It means to think objectively and be vigilant. Peter tells us to be vigilant and watchful because our adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. So there are continuous injunctions in Scripture to wake up and be alert and to be watchful because the time is short.
 
Then in the next phrase of Romans 13:11 Paul goes on to explain “for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.” The word translated “salvation” here is the noun form soteria which refers often to physical deliverance and preservation from some sort of physical disaster. It indicates rescue and deliverance in the sense of averting some danger that’s threatening life. In a lot of passages it’s not referring to justification, instead it’s referring to the final process of salvation, our glorification.
 
Passages such as Hebrews 9:28 say, “So Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.” That means the first time he appeared with reference to sin and paying the penalty of sin. That’s clearly talking about our future final salvation. 1 Peter uses it this way in two passages. In 1 Peter 1 he says, “Who are kept by the power of God for salvation.” Present tense means we’re being kept by the power of God. It’s God’s power that keeps us saved. We can’t lose our salvation because God is the One who saved us.
If God saved us, then we can’t do anything to lose it. If you can do anything to keep your salvation, then somehow you thought there was something you did to get your salvation. Anyone who teaches that you can lose your salvation, somewhere, hidden away, they have a presupposition that you’re doing something to get your salvation. Works is always hiding somewhere in the background if someone can do something to lose their salvation because God did everything for us. He sent His Son to die on the cross for us, paid the penalty for our sins, and once we believe, He is the One who saves us, regenerates us, and justifies us. He’s the One who does all these things.
 
We believe but it is not our belief that saves us. It is God who regenerates. It’s God who imputes righteousness. It’s God who saves. He’s the One who keeps us for a future event known as salvation. 1 Peter 1:9 says, “Receiving the end of your faith…” This means you trust in Christ in faith and the end result is salvation of your soul. It’s applied to something future after justification.
 
So just a reminder and reflection here of the three different phases of salvation. Phase one takes place in a moment of time when you believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins. You’re saved from the penalty of sin and this is called positional sanctification at this point. You are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection and set apart to Him forever.
 
In phase 2 which starts immediately after the point of our new birth, we have a new life. We begin to grow. This is called progressive sanctification or experiential sanctification and saved is used in this sense to be saved from the power of sin. So some of us were saved ten years, twenty, and so on years ago. All of us are being saved. You were being saved this morning. You’re being saved now. You’re going to be saved tomorrow. We’re being saved over and over again in this second sense.
 
In the third sense or phase in terms of our ultimate sanctification, we haven’t been saved yet but we will be saved eventually, when we’re absent from the body and face-to-face with the Lord in glorification. That is how Paul is using the term salvation here. He’s saying that our future salvation, that is our phase three glorification, is nearer than when we first believed. Notice that the word “first” is in italics. That means it’s not in the original. It is supplied by the translator to make the verse make more sense in the English.
 
It’s clear from the grammar of the verb, an aorist active indicative of pisteuo, and it means to believe or to trust. Aorist tense simply means it occurred at some time in the past without reference to its duration, its length or any other factor. It’s just stating it simply as an event that took place in past time. So for all of us, I as look around the room, we’ve all been saved. We’ve all trusted Christ as our Savior at some time in the past.
 
And so with each second the return of Christ is nearer than it was yesterday. In the morning it will be nearer than it is today. It’s always getting nearer. This is all that Paul is saying and this relates to the doctrine of imminency. Let me explain something simple about imminency. It means that Jesus’ return can be at any moment. It can be today, tomorrow, next week, whenever. Imminent does not mean soon coming. There’s a difference.
 
If it meant soon coming then Paul was in trouble because it’s been almost 2,000 years. Paul thought it could happen in his life time. He had no sense that the Church Age would last for 2,000 years. He had no indication of that. Many of us think, as I said earlier, that it could happen in our lifetime. And that’s certainly is possible. We’re getting closer every single day. But imminency tells us that there’s no specific prophecy that must be fulfilled before Jesus Christ returns for the Church.
 
I want you to pay attention to what I’m going to say. There’s a difference between saying no prophecy needs to be fulfilled for the Rapture to occur and the statement that no prophecy will occur before the Rapture. Because no prophecy needs to occur for the Rapture to take place doesn’t mean that no prophecy will be fulfilled because subsequent to the Rapture there’ll be a transition period. It could be a few days, a few weeks, a few months before the final period of the Age of Israel known as Daniel’s 70th Week, a seven year period known as the Tribulation.
 
What starts the Tribulation is the signing of a peace treaty between the Antichrist and Israel as identified in Daniel 9:24-28. It’s that signing of the peace treaty that starts the countdown for that last seven year period. But there are certain things that seem to need to be in place for Daniel’s 70th Week to transpire. If the Antichrist is going to enter into a covenant with God’s people there needs to be some sort of governmental body of the Jewish people who can sign this peace treaty and enter into this peace treaty. That suggests that there will be some sort of nation that is restored that can sign that peace treaty.
Now the fact that there is a nation back in Israel today suggests that this is a fulfillment of prophecy. God said that He would restore them to the land. But if we’re going to say (and I’m not saying this) that the return of the Jews to the land is the fulfillment of prophecy, that doesn’t have anything to do with the nearness of the Rapture. It’s a fulfillment of prophecy in terms of setting the stage for the seven years of the Tribulation.
 
Just because the stage is starting to get set doesn’t mean that Christ’s return is soon coming. It just means that the stage is being set and we’re seeing the things come into place that need to be in place for the events that transpire after the Rapture. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the timing of the Rapture. They’re two separate things. There is prophecy related to the Tribulation. Whether or not the fulfillment of any of those prophecies takes place before the Rapture does not determine the timing of the Rapture is what I’m trying to say. So there’s no prophecy that needs to be fulfilled in relation to the Rapture but some prophecy related to what happens to after the Rapture might come to pass before the Rapture. We have to keep in mind that it has nothing to do with the timing of the Rapture.
 
In Isaiah 11:11 it says that God is going to restore the Jewish people to Israel a second time and this in context, refers at the end of the Tribulation. He’s going to restore them all over the earth, the four corners of the earth. Now that indicates that there are going to be no more than two worldwide restorations of the Jewish people. The second worldwide restoration is a restoration of Jews who are saved at the end of the Tribulation.
 
But the first worldwide return occurred when? When might that be? Was that in 538 B.C. when about 40,000 to 45,000 returned with Zerubbabel from Persia? No. That wasn’t a worldwide return and it was small. Even at the time of Christ you didn’t have a majority of Jews living in Israel. Today we have about 48% to 49% of Jews in the world who live in Israel. There hasn’t been that large a group of Jews living in the land since before the Northern Kingdom was taken out in 722 B.C. So this is clearly unique and clearly distinct. It has prophetic significance because never before has this happened. It’s a worldwide return.
 
The returns that we saw in the Old Testament leading up to the 1st century and the coming of Jesus as Messiah was not a worldwide return. It was a partial return that never really amounted to more than about 25% of worldwide Jewry. So at that time it was a small return. It was necessary so there could be a nation that Messiah could come to. So what we see is that it certainly seems like prophecy related to the events after the Rapture are being fulfilled. But some people you’ll hear say, “See that means the Rapture is around the corner.” It doesn’t mean that. It just means that things are getting ready for what’s going to happen after the Rapture but that may not come about.
 
Some people have said, “Well, the Jews could be driven back into the end of the ocean fifty or a hundred times before the end times. Well, not according to Isaiah 11:11. It says there’s only going to be two returns. What the Scripture teaches is that there are two returns. One is in apostasy. That’s what’s necessary to set up a nation at the beginning of the Tribulation. And one return will be when the Jews are spiritually regenerate which is what occurs at the end of that Tribulation period. So we understand from this verse that our salvation is nearer than when we first believed but we don’t know when that will occur. It will occur at any moment so we need to be ready.
 
Now the last thing that we read here in this verse is the word “believe”. I want to take the rest of the time tonight to talk about the word “believe”. There’s a lot of confusion about the nature of belief. There’s a lot of debate about the nature of belief so I just want to cover this in about 10 points that you need to think about. In terms of some introductory history, what you’ll often hear from people is that there are different kinds of faith. They say there’s saving faith and there’s non-saving faith. What they mean by this is that you can believe in Jesus but you’re not saved because it’s not a saving faith. They treat saving faith as a special kind of faith that is different from all other faith.
 
You and I express faith in many things every day. We have faith in our spouses. We have faith in our children. We have faith that when we get up in the morning we’ll go out and sit in our cars and we’ll put the keys in the ignition and the car will start. Now and then we’re a little disappointed when it doesn’t but we believe that when we get out of bed that everything’s going to work out all right. That’s faith. It’s the object of faith, we believe, that makes a difference between saving faith and non-saving faith.
 
There are many Christians that believe that the faith that saves is a supernatural faith. It’s a faith that’s given to us by God and it’s not the same as everyday faith. So we need to address the question whether there’s a faith in Christ that saves and a faith in Christ that doesn’t save.
 
Another issue in faith is whether faith is rational or irrational. You often hear people say, “Well that’s a matter of faith and we’re going to separate religion into one sphere but this is a matter of science.” As if knowledge of science is categorically different from the knowledge of faith. The Bible says that the knowledge of faith is inherent to everything. It’s what you believe. You may believe wrong things but faith is a form of knowledge. It’s not antithetical to knowledge. Neither is it antithetical to reason. So we have to address that issue.
 
Also, it’s not infrequent for pastors and theologians and others to talk about the difference between a so-called “head faith” and a “heart faith”. What they usually try to do is say, “Well, you can’t just assent to the gospel. You have to commit. You have to repent of your sins. You have to do all of these other things.” They’re saying real faith is commitment. But faith doesn’t mean commitment. Faith means belief. Commitment may be something secondary but it’s not the main idea.
 
If you are adding up a column of numbers and you have added that column of numbers and you reach your sum and you go back and you double check your figures and you believe you have reached an accurate answer, you believe that. You haven’t necessarily made a commitment to it but you believe it, you agree that it’s true. That’s what faith mean. Heart faith is simply another way, a figure of speech, the Bible uses to talk about belief with your head. Your head is where your brain is located. You believe with your brain and heart is just a synonym for the brain.
 
Now we get into this issue related to faith as we’re talking about in this passage when we’re saved, especially in the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John is a great place to go to for this because the Gospel of John uses this verb for believe, never the noun, 98 times in the Greek text that I used. So 98 times you have the verb believe. It’s never qualified by an adverb. You never have the Scripture says if you genuinely believe, if you truly believe, if you believe with a whole heart, if you believe with your heart and not your head. There’s no qualification in this 98 uses in John that adds something to faith to separate it from a faith that doesn’t save.
 
In John 20:30-31, “Truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples.” Now there are eight signs that John records in the Gospel of John. The eighth and final sign is the resurrection. There was one disciple who said, “I’m not sure Jesus rose from the dead. I’ll believe it when I see it, when I can put my hand on the wounds and I can feel the holes in his wrist where the nails were and feel the wounds in his side, then I’ll believe He was raised from the dead.” That was Thomas. That’s the context of this remark by Thomas. It’s a classic example of “foot in mouth”.
 
Immediately the Lord Jesus Christ in His resurrection body appeared to Thomas and I’m sure he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The Lord said, “Okay, Thomas. Here I am. Put your hand in my side. I want you to make sure that you know that I’m here in a body that is physical, not just spiritual. It’s not corporeal. It’s incorporeal but you can feel it. You can see the evidences there.”
 
See a lot of people in modernism believe that faith is irrational and you don’t believe on the basis of evidence. But Biblically faith is always based on evidence. Jesus came along and gave us evidence. Luke records in Acts 1 that Jesus appeared to his disciples and gave many convincing proofs. That’s part of apologetics. That’s something Jesus believed in and He gave many convincing proofs. He’s showing that faith is not apart from evidence or apart from reason and that it is completely compatible and it is always evidenced in the real world. So that’s the real world.
 
So after John describes this in John 20, he points out that Jesus did many other signs, other than the eight he’s given in the gospel. Then in John 20:31 he says, “But these [signs] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name.” John is saying that he’s given us eight signs, eight miracles that Jesus performed that is more than convincing proof that Jesus is who we claim Him to be, that He is the Messiah. In this verse you have the classic phrase that John uses many times combining the verb believe with the prepositional phrase “in him” which is en autos. You believe in Him. You believe in His name, which usually refers to His character, his identity as Jesus the Messiah.
So salvation is based on belief, not inviting Jesus into your heart. There were lots of people, I believe, who were saved because God in His grace saves people even when they misinterpret Scripture. In their mind they’re still trusting Christ. They may be all confused in their vocabulary but they are believing in Christ.
 
For example, in the passage we’re studying when we get to Romans 6:14, we’ll hear about a famous church father that Protestants call Augustine and Catholics pronounce it Augustine (with different pronunciations) and he was the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and he was quite a rebellious, immoral person before he was saved. He went through a period of searching, looking for truth about God. One day he was outside of a church in, I believe, Milan and he heard a voice that said “Pick up and read”. There was Scripture there and he picked it up like a lot of Christians and said, “Where shall I read.” So he opened it and looked at the first verse which was Romans 13:14 “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.” It has nothing to do with salvation but that’s how Augustine got saved. He read that verse. That was the verse that got him saved.
 
Sometimes I’ve thought about teaching a whole series on verses that have nothing to do with salvation that God used to bring very famous believers, theologians, and pastors to salvation because they didn’t interpret it correctly. But that’s no justification for misusing and misinterpreting Scripture. The key is to believe.
 
Turn to John 2:11 taking us back to the beginning of the Gospel of John. The first sign, the beginning of the signs when Jesus changed the water into wine. This was the first miracle. “This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee and manifested His glory and His disciples believed in Him.” In Greek that’s pisteuo eis autos”. That’s the key phrase that John uses again and again. He doesn’t say they invited Jesus into their life. He doesn’t say they committed themselves to Jesus. He doesn’t say they walked the aisle, raised their hand, or got baptized. Again and again and again, 98 times in John, he emphasizes believe, nothing more, nothing less.
 
Now as you read through John 2 we move from the northern area in Galilee where Jesus performed the first miracle and He goes down to Jerusalem. While he’s in Jerusalem he’s going to perform a number of unspecified miracles. John 2:23 reads, “Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name.” Pisteuo eis onoma. Believed in His name. It’s the same phrase John uses again and again and again. If you just read that, what do you come away with? They did what John said to do in order to be saved, in order to have eternal life. And they did it because they saw the signs which He did.
 
Now something interesting happened. Jesus knew all these people believed in Him but He doesn’t trust them. Not because they’re not saved but because they haven’t been taught yet. They’re still holding on to the view of the Messiah as a political deliverer and not as a spiritual redeemer. Because they have a political agenda, not His agenda, He’s not going to entrust Himself to them, not because they’re not believers. You have a lot of superficial believers today who say they want to find a doctor, a mechanic, and other people who are Christians. That’s fine. But I don’t want to have someone just because they’re going to end up in Heaven. I want the best cardiologist, the best auto mechanic, and I want the person to be able to fix whatever my problem is. Maybe I’ll end up witnessing to them. Maybe they’re already saved but their spiritual status has nothing to do with their current, real time capabilities, and talents. So we can trust an unbeliever to fix our car. We not be able to trust a believer to fix our car. He may say, “Oh, I’ve got another one of these Christians who just trusts me because I’m a Christian so I can do a sloppy job. And there are lots of Christians out there who actually think that way because they’re not walking with the Lord.
 
Then you get a problem today with people who believe in “Lordship salvation” who come along and they say, “See, these people weren’t really saved.” This is the example they use over and over again no matter where they fall on the academic scale. Whether they’re someone as astute as Dr. John MacArthur or whether they’re someone who just got a church education in some small country church, they all go to this passage and say, “See, this is an example of a faith that isn’t a genuine faith. Because if it was genuine, Jesus would have entrusted Himself to them.” But that’s not what it says. If language means anything these people are all saved. It has nothing to do with whether or not Jesus would trust Himself to them. He still knew they were sinners. He still knew they had a wrong agenda.
 
If we go into John 3 Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. Now I’ve often said when I’ve taught John 3 that at some point in John 3 Jesus quits talking and John starts talking. We don’t really know where that occurs. I think it occurs in verse 16 but that’s just my opinion. I think Jesus is still talking to Nicodemus, giving him an Old Testament example in John 3:14-15. There’s a repetition of the phrase “whoever believes in Him” in John 3:16. I think verse 16 is when John, as the writer, adds his editorial explanation of what Jesus says in 14 and 15. That’s just my opinion of this but there’s debate as to when it happens.
John was very young. He was 18 or 19 when he started as a disciple of Jesus. Like many 18 or 19 year olds he is very impressionable and very impressed by the Lord and he learns everything he can from the Lord and he emulates His speaking style. I think this is true. If you read John 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 on into the High Priestly prayer, that’s Jesus speaking. If you read that in the Greek and then you read John’s first epistle they are so similar, they are like the same person.
 
You know people like this. You’ve been exposed to young pastors and when they first start teaching or preaching they’ve been impressed by some preacher or some seminary professor and they sound very much like that person. It’s no different from any other profession. You learn from the best and initially you emulate that person as you’re learning. But eventually you develop your own style, your own personality and your own skills.
 
So an Old Testament example is from an event in the wilderness in the desert when the Israelites are coming under divine discipline and God sent a bunch of fiery serpents among them. Their bite was fatal and many, many thousands were dying. God gave them a solution which was for Moses to raise up a brass or bronze serpent and all people had to do was look at that bronze serpent. Isn’t that a great example of faith? They’re not committing to the bronze serpent. They’re not inviting the bronze serpent into their life. They’re not raising their hand and waving at the bronze serpent; they’re just looking at the bronze serpent. They don’t have to have a theological understanding of the bronze serpent. They don’t have to have an understanding of metallurgy and bronze and brass and everything else that goes into it. They don’t have to have a degree in herpetology. They don’t have to know everything there is to know about snakes. They just have to know that God told them that if they looked at the bronze serpent they would be saved and they look and boom, they’re physically healed, instantly.
 
That’s a great picture of the gospel. All a person has to do is basically look to Jesus, believe in Jesus and they’re saved. So Jesus says that whoever believes in Him is saved. In John 3:16 we read, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” So this is what Paul is describing at the end of Romans 13:11 when he says when we first believed, when we first trusted in Christ, when we first heard the gospel. Now I want to come back next time and talk a little bit more about faith but we’ll just stop there tonight and come back and set that up and that will prepare us for the next three verses.

Romans 146b-What is Belief?

Romans 13:11 NASB95
Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.
Romans 146b-What is Belief? Romans 13:11
 
All right. We're continuing in Romans 13:11 and tonight we're going to continue what I did last time in understanding this concept of faith and belief. What does the Bible mean when it talks about belief and about faith? What do these terms actually mean? We're coming at this out of the passage we're studying in Romans 13:11-14 which is a focus upon and a challenge to our spiritual growth.
 
In this verse as we looked at it last time, the Apostle Paul adds something in light of what he has already been saying. He says, "And this…" This is in addition to what he has said before in talking about government and in talking about loving one another in Romans 13:8-10. Now he adds this, "And this, knowing the time…" As we saw last time this is a causal participle meaning "because you know the time". He's referencing the fact that he has instructed the Romans already. They know this. They're aware of the circumstances such as we're learning in our Tuesday class about dispensations.
 
They're aware they're in the Church Age and that the Church Age is not an age related to the fulfillment of prophecy. No prophecy need be fulfilled before the Lord Jesus Christ returns at the Rapture. That's the next major event on the time scale. As we've studied there are some events that might fulfill prophecy prior to the Rapture but they have to do with fulfilling prophecy related to the Tribulation that comes sometime after the Rapture of the Church.
So Paul says because we know the time and because we know the situation, it is time to be awake, to be alert. Last time we talked about how we as believers need to be alert and to be watchful. We need to be focused on the fact that we have a spiritual mission in our life and that we are ambassadors for Christ. We're to be involved in witnessing both with our life and with our lips. So we are to be alert, not dozing or sleeping through the Church Age.
 
Then he says, "For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The word here for salvation is SOTERIA. Paul uses this word in a very distinct sense in Romans. There's this whole word group meaning "to save" in English. Often because of our American English evangelical idiom we think of saved primarily as being saved from the eternal punishment of the Lake of Fire. We think of it only in the sense of Ephesians 2:8-9, "For by grace you have been saved through faith…" Yet many times the Apostle Paul uses this saved word group in distinction from justification. He talks about our future deliverance.
There are three phases or three tenses to salvation and the use of that term in the New Testament. We're saved from the penalty of sin when we trust Christ as Savior. We're saved from the power of sin during our Christian life and we are ultimately saved from the presence of sin at the time we are absent from the body and face-to-face with the Lord and we are glorified. So what Paul is referring to here is our ultimate glorification, Phase 3, and each day, we're closer to the end of our time on earth than we anticipate.
 
Yesterday morning I had an e-mail interchange with Mike Stallard who spoke at the Pastor's Conference in March and he informed me that one of the faculty members who happens to be the same age I am went to be with the Lord three weeks ago due to cancer. I wasn't aware he even had cancer. He seemed to be a pretty vibrant guy the last time I saw him. He was a faculty member at Baptist Bible Seminary named Rodney Decker. Those kind of things just sort of strike you and make you aware of the fact that we think we're going to live according to the actuarial tables to our mid to late seventies or if you've got good genetics and some of you, I know, have parents who lived to be in their 90's, we think somehow we're going to fit that optimistic side of the longevity scale but it may not be that way.
 
I remember Dick Seume who happened to be the second pastor of Berachah Church back in the 1940s. Later he was pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago and then he was the chaplain at Dallas Seminary. At the time I was a student in the late seventies he had been on kidney dialysis longer than any other person in the United States. He just seemed to be very healthy and very vigorous. Some ten years later, sometime in the mid-eighties, Dr. Seume went to be with the Lord. It had nothing to do with kidney failure. He was killed in a head-on collision.
 
We have no idea when the Lord's going to take us home. He has our time marked out and we may think it's going to be one thing and it could be something else. We don't know if it will be today, tomorrow, or twenty or thirty years from now. What Paul is pointing out here is that as each day goes by our salvation, Phase 3 glorification, is nearer than it was when we first believed.
 
Now I pointed out that the word "first" is not there in the original text. It is supplied by the translator to make sure you catch the nuance here, the past tense of the word believe, to indicate that this is referring to our Phase 1 belief. I pointed out a couple of passages last time related to the use of salvation as a future tense. Hebrews 9:28, "To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation." That is in the future. 1 Peter 1:5, "We're kept by the power of God through faith for salvation." This is a future tense, future time.
1 Peter 1:9, "Receiving the end of your faith, the salvation of your souls." Again, talking about Phase 3, that we will be saved from the presence of sin in glorification. That is our ultimate sanctification. So when Paul ends, he ends on this statement that our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.
 
Now what does it mean to believe? That may seem like a simple question to you. Some of you have gone through this with me before and others have not. Some of you haven't given it a lot of thought. But this is a word that has a lot of controversy with it, specifically related to certain theological disputes over the nature of the gospel and the nature of saving faith. Some people think that saving faith is a different kind of faith, that it is a gift of God, and it's not the same kind of faith that everyone uses on an everyday basis. Other people think that faith is simply trust.
 
So I want to go through about ten points. I started with the first point last week, going through introductory issues. One of the things you find among those in Reform theology and among some who hold to what is called lordship salvation, which is a view of the gospel that a person needs to do something more than simply believe, is that they believe that faith somehow involves a commitment to the authority of Christ at salvation. So they would make the word faith a synonym for the word commitment. Commitment may be a result of faith but they are not synonyms. You will never find commitment listed as a synonym for faith.
So one of the ways they make a distinction is this concept of head-faith versus heart-faith. At the very core of this debate is a gross misunderstanding on their part, I believe, of the nature of faith, just etymologically and linguistically as well as its been studied and analyzed through philosophy and primarily through Scripture. Faith is just simply belief. In English probably the best word to use is either the verb belief or the noun belief.
 
We see an artificial distinction here. Actually the word "heart" in Scripture is often a synonym for thought or for the mind or for thinking. The word heart whether we're talking about the Old Testament or the New Testament is never used of the physical organ in the body. It's never used that way. It's always used as a metaphor. Usually it is descriptive for the center or the core of something. So when it comes to the immaterial part of the soul of man, sometimes heart refers to the entirely of the soul but usually it has an emphasis on the thinking.
 
We looked at several verses last time. I've found a couple more. Psalm 15:2 talks about "speaking the truth in your heart". So that would again indicate when you're thinking and when you're talking to yourself through your own rational capacity. Emotions don't speak the language within your brain. Psalm 49:3, "the meditation of my heart". Meditation is a thought word. This is the thinking of the soul. You have the "thought of your heart" in Acts 8:22. All of these emphasize heart as the center of the thinking part of the soul.
 
Psalm 73:21 uses heart and mind in parallelism. In Hebrew poetry you have different kinds of parallelism. This is a synonymous parallelism where heart and mind are used as synonyms. The first line is mirrored by the thought of the second line. "My heart was grieved. I was vexed in my mind." Mind and heart are synonymous here. In 1 Samuel 2:35 God says, "Then I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind." God, of course, does not have a physical heart.
 
Often you find as a Hebraism where two words will be used as synonyms of one another in order to emphasize the point. In Jeremiah 17:10, "I the Lord search the heart. I test the mind." Again we see synonymous parallelism in the poetry. Searching and testing are parallel to one another. Heart and mind are parallel to each other. Mind equals heart. The heart is another way of talking about the thinking capacity of the soul. We see continued synonymous parallelism in the second part of the verse where it says, "according to His ways and the fruit of His doings" which are synonymous parallelisms. Psalm 7:9 uses hearts and minds together in a couplet that emphasizes two synonyms that are used to reinforce each other. This is the same thing we see in Revelation 2:3 where God says, "I am He who searches the minds and hearts."
 
So these terms go together. They're not referring to two different capacities. So, just by way of introduction, I pointed out that the basic issue is the question of whether faith is an intellectual activity. The answer is yes. We believe with our mind. That's what we mean by an intellectual activity. Some people think that when you say it's intellectual that somehow it loses something. Actually, historically belief is seen as an activity of the mind that is engaged by our volition. The volition chooses to trust something. When we trust we engage our mind in accepting something to be true.
 
Now the Bible talks about different kinds of faith. All I'm saying in this point is that there's faith related to how we are justified, the faith we exercise at Phase 1 in the gospel. And then there is the faith that we exercise as we live our Christian life. So faith at salvation happens in an instance of time when we come to understand and comprehend the gospel. We reach a point where we can believe that.
 
Someone in the congregation was recently telling me about her husband who has now gone to be with the Lord. Some of you will know who I'm talking about. For a long time he didn't want to talk about the gospel. Then he reached a point, a conscious point, in his thinking where he said, "I can believe that. Yeah, I can believe that." That's the point we reach when we understand the gospel. We'll get into the aspects of faith in just a minute.
 
So the third point is that we're given a command in Acts to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Believe is an imperative mood verb. It is a command. It is a challenge so we respond to a command with a decision. We're either going to do or not do the command. We're either going to do what we're commanded to do or not. So Acts 16:31 is a command and that emphasizes that it is a volitional activity.
 
One of the problems that we've gotten into in the last, I would say, thirty years there's been a lot of discussion and clarification on the gospel and on understanding the gospel. When I was a student in seminary back in the 70's some of these issues were not clarified. There were people who taught these things but the ideas behind what's come to be the free grace camp and the lordship camp were not clear.
 
In the early 80s Zane Hodges wrote a book called "The Gospel Under Siege". This was a remarkable book. The first time I read it I was a little bit confused by some things as I went through it. He starts off by dealing with about three different problem passages in James 2 and a couple of passages in Hebrews and some things in John. I had just finished teaching James and at that time no one really had a clear understanding of James. I was sort of on track but I wasn't really real clear on James. When I read Hodges on that I was a little more confused just because of my own lack of understanding of aspects of James. Then I read through it a second time and things really began to make sense. That's just the point that when you're reading something that seems difficult, go back and read it, reread it, until you make sure you understand it. When I got familiar with what he was saying, his vocabulary became very clear.
 
So Zane Hodges wrote "The Gospel Under Siege" and I always got a chuckle out of the fact that Dr. S. Louis Johnson who was a well-known professor of New Testament at Dallas (Theological Seminary) and was a 5-point Calvinist gave a book review at a lunch meeting not long after it came out. He said, "The title should be repunctuated and say the gospel under siege by Zane Hodges." They did not agree with one another. Zane Hodges was taking on a lot of the statements and theology that was taught by John MacArthur and Dr. Johnson would have been sympathetic with that so they were on opposite sides. It was good to listen to those kinds of debates to get clarity.
 
As the free grace movement developed, it picked up this terminology "free grace." They started a theological society that was focused on doing academic research and producing a lot of publications and in-depth studies on different issues in this whole arena of debate. That became known as the Grace Evangelical Society. They had a more academic purpose. Many of you are familiar with the Grace Evangelical Society with Robert Wilkins as the president. They've produced many, many wonderful good things in the 80s and 90s. They began to get sidetracked a little bit about ten or twelve years ago.
 
About that same time another organization called the Free Grace Alliance was started. I was actually at the initial, formative meeting of the Free Grace Alliance and they were really focused on a more practical aspect of organizing pastors and churches and individuals who believed in a free grace gospel in terms of supporting missionaries, establishing Bible colleges and seminaries and things of that nature. Unfortunately, in my view, both of these organizations began to get sidetracked and focus on some really minimal, non-essential aspects of some of their theological thinking. It got both of these organizations off track. That is a sad thing to watch but that's kind of the state we're in right now.
 
One of the issues that they got caught up in is whether or not belief was volitional. I've read four or five articles dealing with this. As I've come to understand this in talking to them, they're really not dealing with what I teach in terms of faith being volitional. What they are dealing with is that there are some groups and some writings that emphasize that if you don't know when you made a decision for Jesus then you're not saved. They call that decisional evangelism. I see a number of you shaking your heads. Yes, that's wrong. So when they're making critiques on the issue of volition or emphasis on volition, that's what they're talking about. They're not always talking about the way we use it. So sometimes you have to read people in light of the debate they're in. If you take them out of context in the light of the debate you're in, it makes it sound like you don't agree. But they do have some areas where this is a problem.
 
But if belief is an imperative mood, and that's the nature of the grammar, then it's addressed to your choice. So you have to make a choice one way or another. So it's very clear this isn't the only place belief is used as an imperative but this is one of them.
 
Now we get to the fourth point. This is a point that if you've never thought this through, if you've never been exposed to some rigorous logic or philosophic thought in terms of understanding some things then this might be difficult for you. One of the things many of you have in your background is that you've heard that the difference between Biblical Christianity and religion is that Biblical Christianity is about a relation with a person. And religion in the guise of many types of religious Christianity is more about religious activity and liturgy. That's not what we're talking about here.
 
When we talk about faith, faith in pure logic is believing a proposition to be true. Now proposition is a technical term. I didn't understand until I took logic some fifteen or so years ago. I'd always heard, though, that when we talk about the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture, we believed that the Word of God contains propositional truth. Proposition is a technical term that refers to a statement that can either be proved to be true or false. An imperative is not a proposition. If I say, "Go to the store." you can't prove if that's true or false. If I say, "Is it raining outside?" that's a question and you can't prove that one way or the other. But if I say, "It's raining outside." you can prove whether or not that is true or false.
 
If I say, "The speed limit is 35." you can prove whether that is true or false. If I said, "Mohammed did not claim to be God but claimed to be a prophet of God." you can prove whether that is true or false by looking at evidence within the Koran and within history. So propositions can be proved to be true or false.
 
When the Scriptures describe things for us and inform us of God's plan and purposes, this can be expressed in terms of propositions. God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Is that true or false? That's a proposition that's true. God used that as a pattern for the command to the Israelites to rest on the seventh day, the Sabbath law. Is that true or false? It's true. Jesus was born of a virgin. Is that true or false? It's true. Those are propositions that can be proven to be true or false. They're not just hanging out and you just guess at them.
 
Faith is always directed toward an object which can be expressed in a proposition. We believe in the person of Jesus as the God/man. How do you know He's the God/man? Has anybody here seen Jesus? I hope not. Outside of the Apostle Paul and Stephen no one has seen Jesus in a long, long time. How do you know Jesus? You and I only know Jesus because He has been revealed to us through the Word of God and it has been expressed there.
 
John says in John 20:31, "These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." "These" refers to the signs in the Gospel of John. So we can say that the Scripture teaches that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah. You either believe it's true or you don't believe it. So what we know about Jesus and His person is expressed to us through propositions in Scripture. That is what I mean when I say we believe in Christ but what we believe about Christ can be expressed in propositional form.
 
Jesus is the eternal Son of God who entered into history and went to the cross to die for our sins that we might have eternal life. True or false? That's it. Okay, that's faith. We express it in terms of believing a proposition to be true. So a proposition then is the verbal expression of a thought that can be verified or falsified. Therefore faith is not a function of emotion. I don't feel like it's true. That's not what we're saying. We believe it's true because we understand it. We've evaluated it. We look at the evidence in favor of it and against it and we conclude that it is true. That is what we believe. It is a mental function.
Now historically in Reformed Christianity primarily, which are the theological systems derived from John Calvin expressed through the Scottish Reformed Church, Dutch Reformed Church, Huguenots, Congregational Church, and Swiss Calvinist as opposed to German Lutheran or Baptist, they broke faith down. This is really interesting to a word lover like I am. They asked how they could really understand faith. So they picked it apart and looked at the components so that they would know that they really believe something.
 
So what's involved in doing this? First of all, you have to understand it. It doesn't mean you understand what the pastor said in terms of it sounding good. No, you have to understand the content of what the pastor taught. I've heard people over the years reiterate something I've said and I go, "Really?" I'm always amazed at that. They'll say, "I remember when you taught such and such." And I'm amazed and wonder where I was that day. I've heard that about other pastors as well. People will say that they remember so-and-so taught such-and-such. And I go, "Really? Where have you been? What radio did you listen to while you were in church?"
 
So the first thing is that we have to really understand what the proposition is. When we say Jesus died on the cross for your sins, we have to have some understanding of what that means. It doesn't have to be the understanding of a Ph.D. in theology but we have to understand the basic concepts of those words. So there has to be an understanding of the meaning of what it is that we're believing. We can't believe something we don't understand because how do you know you believe it? When you come to understand it you may not believe it. So it's foundational.
 
The second component they saw in saving faith was ASSENSUS, the Latin word for assent or agreement. "Yeah, I understand that and that's true." Then they define faith with a third word FIDUCIA, which means belief. Here's the trouble. The English word faith comes from the Latin noun FIDES. FIDES is the root for FIDUCIA. Rule number one in defining things is you never define a word with itself. You use other words and other terms to define something. You can't say "I'm going to define white." White is white. So you haven't defined it. You never define a word with what it is. So it's sort of a word game here. It's sort of a semantic shell game here. If we were to translate FIDES here, it would mean FIDES. You see by shifting from Latin to English they try to avoid being seen as defining the term by itself so they've slipped something else in there.
 
Now the other thing I want to point out is that the English word faith comes by way of the French from the Latin FIDES, and then it goes into French and then into English. In the Middle Ages, mid-thirteenth century, faith is first used and it has the sense at that point of being the duty of fulfilling one's trust. Now think about that for a minute. Is that what we mean when we say do you believe that Jesus died for your sins? Are we saying that you have the duty of fulfilling one's trust? In other words, it's taking us beyond simple belief to adding a component of commitment and duty but that derives from this medieval use of the word in French coming out of the Latin.
 
And then the English word, belief, has its origin in Middle English influenced by medieval German and medieval Anglo-Saxon from the word GLAUBEN in German. Some other terms used in Anglo-Saxon had the simple sense of trusting in God in contrast to being loyal to a person. Belief in the sense that it had in the English word meant mental acceptance of something that is true, something that we call intellectual assent.
 
A lot of people just think that sounds cold and distant but that's what belief is. You understand it and you agree that it is true. When you are adding up a column of numbers which is one of my favorite illustrations because you know I hate numbers and you arrive at an answer and you double, triple, quadruple check it, what do you do? You stop. You rest. You put your pen down. You agree that what you've done is correct. It's not a commitment. You agree that this is true. You believe it's true. That's the sense of belief.  Any time I'm adding up a column of numbers if I come up with the same answer twice I know it has to be right because miracles don't occur anymore.
 
So the basic meaning of the English word believe coming from an Anglo-Saxon German background meant mental acceptance that something is true. But when you come along into the 1500s things change. Remember English as a language in 1500 was not anything like it was in 1600. It goes through its greatest development between 1500 and 1600 and why is that? It's because the Bible is being translated into English. You have Tyndale's translation and Coverdale's translation. You have the Geneva Bible translated into English and then people want to have the Bible in their own language and it begins to solidify and stabilize the language.
 
And then what happens at the beginning of the 1600s? Two things that remarkably stabilized the English language. William Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Both appear roughly at the same time and this takes English out of its formative stage into a whole new arena where it's used in poetry, in drama, and in expressing extremely high and complex thoughts. Today English is one of the most profound languages on the planet.
 
If you're ever been on the mission field taking the Bible into some other language that doesn't have the history of English it's really difficult. English has developed due to the impact of the Reformation in Britain and brought an extremely technological vocabulary. You go over to some place like Russia where they use the Russian Synovial text and every time they have the Greek work DIKAIOSUNE for righteousness in the Greek text they translated it with the Russian word PRAVDA which means truth. Truth and righteousness are not the same thing. You don't have a lot of words that are used in this area.
I remember the first time I went with Jim Myers to Kazakhstan. That was one of those summers in the first week of August and it is in a high desert like Tucson and the temperature during the day would reach 112 to 115 in the shade. We had a room about a third the size of this room and there were approximately 90 students crammed into that room. They slept there at night. They just folded up their chairs and tables and put their pallets down on the floor and they slept there and in a couple of other rooms in this house that served as the meeting place of the church.
 
And they had one window unit. It ran full time 24/7 and it kept the temperature down to about 98 degrees in the room. We had two sections of the class because half the students were Kazak speakers and the other half were Russian speakers. So when I would give a sentence it would be translated into Russian by one translator and translated into Kazak by the other translator. Now Jim had hired these translators. Actually the Kazak translator was the wife of a pastor. She was fluent and almost unaccented in four or five different languages.
 
The guy we originally hired for Russian had translated for a number of well-known English pastors who had come over and taught in Kazakhstan. When I used words like justification and sanctification he looked at me like I was speaking another language he didn't know. That's a sad commentary on the fact that traditional words in the English Bible are not used commonly by pastors. But we had to get a new translator because his theological vocabulary was just impoverished. He didn't know how to handle these things. It took Jim Meyers several years with Margaret, his first translator, in working through Bible verses, crafting how to correctly translate these technical terms like justification, propitiation, faith, belief, and things like that. So it's very important to understand that.
 
But this is important in terms of the lordship/free grace debate because lordship says faith is better because it adds this component of loyalty to God whereas belief is simply assenting to the truth of Scripture. But the English word belief is almost identical in meaning to the Greek word PISTEUO which is the word faith through its Latin/French background. It picked up additional meaning in the sense of loyalty so that you will have pastors who will say it's not a matter of simple belief. It's not just head faith; you have to have heart faith. So they create this artificial distinction between the two even though the core meaning is simply assent or agreement that what the Bible says is true.
 
Hold your place and turn over to James. This is one thing you often hear people say, "This is just simple intellectual assent. The demons have it and they're not saved." In James 2 James is talking about the person who has faith and no works and no application and the person who has faith and has application. He gives an illustration of this in James 2:19, "You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe and tremble." What is it the demons believe in that verse? They believe in one God. Is believing in one God salvific? No, that's not the gospel. They believe that there's one God; unbelievers believe there's one God. People who are going to go to the Lake of Fire believe there's one God. That's not the Gospel. So this isn't a picture of false faith or pseudo-faith in the gospel or simply intellectual assent that doesn't do them any good. They truly believe there's one God. They know there's one God. Not just by faith but by sight.
 
But believing that God is one is not the belief proposition, which is that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and that He paid the penalty so that by faith alone, in Christ alone, you can have eternal salvation. So, point number five is that since faith is in a proposition we don't believe directly in a person. I've heard some people say that, "I don't believe a proposition; I believe a person." But we only learn about the person through propositions. The propositions tell us who the person is; so we are believing the propositions. We haven't seen Jesus. We believe what John says. We don't believe directly in the person or come to salvation through a relationship with Jesus.
 
That's another way in which people often confuse the gospel. They say you need to have a relationship with Jesus. Well, guess what? Judas Iscariot had a relationship with Jesus and it didn't do him any good. He wasn't saved. Jesus' brothers had a relationship with Jesus for many years and it wasn't until after the resurrection that they believed in Him as their Savior. Having a relationship with Jesus wasn't the issue. The issue in Scripture is belief.
 
John uses the verb 98 times without any modification in his gospel. Over and over and over again the issue is believe in Him. By the way, that's another way in which people try to distort this. They say that there's a difference between believing that Jesus is the Christ and believing in Him. I could give you many citations that linguistically there's no difference between believing the Greek phase "believe in" and "believe that". They are semantic equivalents so they mean the identically same thing.
 
So what this tells us is that faith is rational. It's not irrational. That's what a lot of secularists would have us believe, that it's irrational. They separate faith from reason. They separate faith from science. They say faith is just what you have to believe as if it has nothing to do with the intellect or with evidence or thought. You just have to believe it because there is no evidence. But the writer of Hebrews says that faith is the evidence of things hoped for. Faith is knowledge. It's not just knowledge through perception. It's knowledge based on the revelation from God.
 
So point number six says that faith is an activity of the mentality of the soul, which is the affirmation and agreement that something is true. Now let me clarify this. There's a difference between saying, "I believe the Bible when it says Jesus died on the cross for my sins." Let me give you an analogy; I believe that Darwin taught that human beings evolved from monkeys. Does that mean that I believe that human beings evolved from monkeys? No, I'm just saying that I believe that Darwin said that. There are a lot of people that might say that they believe the Bible says Jesus died for their sins but they don't believe that Jesus died for their sins. That's just what the Bible says, according to them, but they don't believe it.
 
So saving faith is believing that Jesus died on the cross not just for the sins of the world but for your sins. It's personal. Jesus died for you. I remember I had a camper when I was in college working at Camp Peniel who came to me one night to talk. He'd grown up in a Bible church here in Houston, in a Christian family. I knew his brother real well. The camper said that he just realized that night that Jesus died for him. Now he may have been saved before that but I think he reached the point where it was now a reaffirmation. He believed it was the first time in his life that he realized, not just that Jesus died as an historical fact, but that Jesus died for him.
 
That's that personal object that says, "I believe that Jesus died for my sins and that's the basis of why I go to heaven." If someone were to sit you down and say, "God is going to ask you when you get to heaven why He should let you in, what's your answer going to be? How would you answer that? It's very simple. The answer is because Jesus died for my sins. I asked that question one time when I was interviewing someone for membership. I said, "Well, tell me, if you went before the throne of God and He asked why He should let you into heaven, what would you say?" She looked at me like I'd grown a horn between my eyes. It was causing her to have to think and to put it together in a way that she'd never heard it before. I had to talk to her awhile. I was pretty sure she was saved but she had just never thought about it quite that way before.
 
Point seven is that faith has no merit in itself. All the merit lies in the object of faith. Faith is the conduit. The Scripture says we're saved through faith, not because of faith. Faith is like the electronic wiring in the building. The wiring doesn't generate power. The wiring isn't the source of electricity. It is simply the conduit that moves the electricity from the generator to the light bulb. It's the means by which something gets from one point to the other. So the object of faith, the Lord Jesus Christ, is what has the merit, not the fact that I'm so smart that I believe but that Jesus is the One who died. That's the point. It doesn't matter how much faith I have or how sincere I am.
 
If I believe I have a thousand dollars in my checking account but I only have a dollar, I'm in trouble. Faith means that the object has to be worthy and true. I'm believing in Christ. It's not the sincerity or the quality of my faith. I may believe the wrong thing. The issue is I have to believe the right thing, which is that Jesus died on the cross for my sins.
 
The eighth point says that faith as an intellectual activity excludes emotion. It's not about how we feel. There may be feeling associated with it. When some people come to understand Christ died on the cross for them, they can be quite emotional. I remember when my parents told the gospel to me I was so excited I just lit out of the house and found my best friend. I was excited. Other people are just overwhelmed and they may weep because they realize that they're saved. There's all kind of emotions that may come with the faith in Christ but they're not faith in Christ. They're simply the consequence of the intellectual activity.
 
Now there are four ways historically that have helped us determine how we come to know anything. The point I'm making here is that faith is always present. The most devout atheist operates on faith. The devout scientist operates on faith. Now they may try to juxtapose faith and reason but their belief in reason is a belief. See, it's a belief of the reason that comes before the reason. So I break it down into the four ways we come to know anything.
 
The first is rationalism which is the idea that we start with certain innate ideas and our faith is in human ability to understand and logically develop first principles. So it's built on an independent use of logic and reason. That is, independent of God. The second, empiricism doesn't start with innate ideas. It starts with sense perception, what we see, hear, taste, and touch. Plato in the ancient world is an example of rationalism. Descartes in the modern world is an example. Rationalism couldn't really get to ultimate causation. Empiricism can't either. Empiricism operates on the idea of observation and external experience.
 
Now both of these are true in a limited sense. We learn a lot from both rationalism and empiricism. In terms of empiricism, Adam learned a lot in the Garden. He was to name all of the animals and he learned about all the trees and all the different kinds of fruit and the food that God provided for Adam and Eve. But there's one thing Adam couldn't learn in the Garden through either rationalism or empiricism. And that was that if he ate from the fruit of one tree he would die. He could only learn that if God told him.
 
So I'm not saying empiricism and rationalism are wrong. They're just limited. They can't get us to ultimate truth. Now sort of a perversion of both of these is mysticism. Mysticism is the idea that I can come to know truth on the basis of some sort of inner feeling, some sort of intuitive flash of insight, and this is not subject to verification through logic or anything rational. It's non-verifiable. I just know it's true because it's true. Don't confuse me with facts. Don't confuse me with logic. I just know it.
 
How do you know UFOs exist? Oh, I just know it. There has to be someone living on other planets. I just know it. On what basis? Is there any evidence at all? No. None whatsoever. Mysticism was the basis for many of the ancient, pagan religions. You see where does all the activity take place in rationalism? Between your ears. Where does all the activity take place in mysticism? Same place between your ears. Mysticism is rationalism gone to seed.
 
That's why you can say the whole modern environmental movement, if you understand its pagan roots, is ultimately the result of mysticism, not science. In fact, there's a new DVD out that I'm hearing from people that is fabulous on the whole issue of climate science and global science and environmentalism. I'm thinking this is something we need to address so we'll be showing that sometime during the summer. I'm going to watch it. I ordered it a couple of days ago. Charlie Clough has been really high on this for several months. Dan Inghram watched it a couple of weeks ago. I want to sit down and watch it. It's an hour and a half. I think it's too much for one Bible class so I'm thinking about cutting it in half and having some discussion questions about it which is very important.
 
So the fourth way we know truth is through revelation. God tells us things that we can neither learn from rationalism or empiricism, such as if you eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. And so when we view revelation, there's objective revelation from God and we use logic and reason to understand it but we don't develop an independent system of reason that tells us that God could not do some things. That's what 19th century liberalism did. It came along and said, "Well, we've got what we think are facts that we discovered in science that tell us that the earth is really old. We can't figure out how that can fit with the Bible so therefore, the Bible must be wrong."
 
Where are they putting all their faith? In their human ability to properly interpret those facts. Now some 200 years later we see they misinterpreted a lot of those facts and scientists know that but they still cling to the theory of evolution. So we have to use logic and reason but we assume the Bible is true and that's our starting point, not something within the creation.
 
So then, under point 9, we understand that faith is not something we do. It's not something we get merit for. It's something that is a channel. The merit is in the object. We speak of faith as being non-meritorious. We're saved by grace, through faith. And then the last point is that I've alluded to already is that Scripture divides faith into two types. So when we look at a passage that's talking about faith, we need to ask if this passage is talking about faith-related to Phase 1 justification or is this talking about faith toward the promises and statements of Scripture for my spiritual growth and spiritual life?
 
Okay, that's a lot on faith. It's very important to understand this that faith is simply belief that what the Scripture says is true. It's important to understand that in regards to the gospel, believing that Christ died for my sins is what I believe. And if I believe that, then I'm saved. But what about what some people say? Do I have to believe in the deity of Christ? Well, you can't reject the deity of Christ but that may not be an issue when someone explains the gospel to you. It's implicitly there but it's not explicitly there. You can't explicitly reject it but you're implicitly believing it when you believe the gospel. You're implicitly believing in the resurrection and several other things in a normal gospel presentation that aren't necessarily talked about.
 
When we've gone through the whole illustration of the Barrier, the different dimensions of what Christ did on the cross, we see that Christ died to redeem us from our sins. He died to propitiate God. He died to justify us. All of these are different facets of what Christ did on the cross. We don't have to understand all of them to be saved. We just have to understand that Christ died on the cross for our sins. A four year old or three year old child can understand that. He can barely understand what death is. But he can comprehend to some degree that he has a problem and that Jesus solved the problem when he died on the cross and if he believes that, he'll go to heaven for eternity. They can comprehend that.
 
There's a lot more to the gospel than that because we spend our whole lives trying to comprehend it all but you don't have to comprehend it all to get saved. You just have to believe that basic principle, that basic proposition of Scripture that Christ died for your sins. So next time we'll come back and start looking at the next few verses which are some of the most significant verses related to the spiritual life in the New Testament. They really connect the passages of Ephesians 4, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, James 1, 1 Peter 2, and others so we'll come back to that next Thursday night.

Romans 147b-Light: Putting Off and Putting On

Romans 13:11 NASB95
Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.
Romans 147b-Light: Putting Off and Putting On Romans 13:11-14
 
Tonight we're moving forward a little bit. I want to say a couple of more things about faith in Romans 13:11 where the apostle Paul made this reference to our salvation which is nearer than when we first believed. Last week I took some time to go through the doctrine of faith and what faith is. You would be absolutely amazed, perhaps, if I were to start cataloging all the things that are going on in the world of theology that are trying to understand and comprehend and communicate what faith it. Faith, righteousness, and a number of other key concepts of Scripture always generate a lot of discussion. Some of it is enlightening and some of it is not. A lot of it is not.
 
It seems like in every generation there are things that are required. One is in the area of freedom, no matter what previous generations have done there are those who have to fight and die to preserve freedom. Likewise, each generation has to come to an understanding of the truth of God's Word on its own, apart from the fact that there have been generations before us who have laid the groundwork. In each generation, men have to come to an understanding of what the Word of God teaches and be able to articulate it to their generation, just as you have generations of leaders who have to come to understand the law, the principles of the Constitution, the principles of freedom and to carry those forward into their own generation. This is important. That's how we learn and grow.
 
I was on a radio interview and someone asked me the other day a question about who influenced me in terms of my theology. I talked about the fact that we're all influenced by a number of different people. Anyone who gets in the pulpit anywhere stands on the shoulder of his mentors, the pastor under whom they grew up, and on the shoulders of their seminary professors, and the shoulders of the great leaders of the faith, whether you're talking about Lewis Sperry Chafer, Charles Ryrie, going back to 19th century, Scofield, John Nelson Darby, going back even further to people like Calvin and Luther.
 
They are all part of the process of understanding the truth of where we are today, even when they go down wrong paths. It's part of the path of understanding the truth. That's true for us. We learn more from the mistakes we've made than from the things we did right and that's true in theology. As people have run down wrong tracks, we've learned from those errors. We all stand upon their shoulders.
 
Today there are a lot of battles that go on over just the meaning of faith so I'm not going to bore you with a lot of those things. We went through an in-depth analysis of it last time and my conclusion was, basically, that faith is an operation of the mind. It is an intellectual function, not an emotional function. It has a volitional element because we choose what we believe. It's primarily intellectual and it's not emotional so therefore, it has to do with an operation of the mind.
Now a lot of people think this sounds too impersonal, or too academic, or too abstract, when you define faith as simply intellectual assent. By intellectual it means it's an operation of the mind. Assent means that you agree that it is true. If you're not agreeing that it's true, then you're saying that it's not true. If you're saying its true but you don't really believe it, then you're not saying it's true. So if you're saying that something is true and that you absolutely agree that it's true, then anything less than that would not be true.
 
To say that you agree with the proposition that Jesus Christ died for your sins and you believe that it is absolutely true, then you're saved. If you believe that Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world but it doesn't have anything to do with you, that's not a saving proposition for you. You've rendered it sort of a 3rd person abstraction which doesn't have anything to do with your own personal trust and reliance upon Christ.
 
 I also pointed out that faith in and of itself does not have any merit. It has no value in and of itself. It is simply a conduit. It is the means by which something is appropriated, something is embraced, much as a wire is a conduit for electricity or a pipe a conduit for water. Faith is that which moves something from one place to another. It is not the valuable thing in and of itself. It is the object of faith that has value. So if we have the wrong object for faith, then faith is not saving faith. If we have the right object for faith, then it is salvific and we have salvation. So faith has no merit in and of itself. Faith is an intellectual activity and is the only means by which we appropriate God's gift for us.
 
 It is salvation that is the gift of God, not faith. This is another problem in the discussion, especially when dealing with lordship salvation and when dealing with many Calvinists who are more consistent Calvinists. There are lots of technical terms related to Calvinism such as Hyper-Calvinist, a 5-point Calvinist, a superlapsarian are all different terms describing different degrees and different beliefs within a Calvinistic system.
 
You have people who are considered 4-point Calvinists. What that means is that they don't believe in limited atonement but they do believe in the other 4 points. Then there are those you might call a 3 ½ pointer or 3 pointer. It depends on how you might define those points. I usually say I'm not a 5-point Calvinist. I'm not a 5-point Arminian. I'm neither a Calvinist nor an Arminian. I define all of those categories in a completely different ways.
 
I don't deny the totally depravity of man. And I don't deny that God ultimately oversees His creation to a degree that He is able to bring about that which He intends but He is able to do so in His magnificent, omnipotence without violating individual responsibility and accountability. So His creatures have the ability to make choices and are held accountable for those choices and it is not God who predetermines what their choices will be.
 
The way many Calvinists approach faith is to talk about faith as the gift of God. Often they will use Ephesians 2:8-9. There are other passages they use often, too. They will say that God gives you the faith. If you define total depravity as total inability, then if you're totally unable to comprehend or believe the gospel, then you're totally unable to even express positive volition. They never talk about it that way. And they say that you're totally unable to express faith so that the faith that you have is something that must be given to you. They believe God only gives that to those who are unconditionally elect so God gives saving faith and that makes it a separate kind of faith. God gives saving faith to the elect. He does not give it to the non-elect so those that receive that gift of faith then, in turn, demonstrate their election by their works. That's what we mean by lordship salvation.
 
Now not every strong Calvinist holds to lordship salvation. Louis Sperry Chafer was a very strong Calvinist. He had a strong background as a Presbyterian. He was ordained in the Southern Presbyterian Church. They actually brought him up on heresy charges because of his dispensationalist but he was not a 5-point Calvinist. There's some debate that he may have been early on but he wasn't when he taught at Dallas and when he wrote his Systematic Theology. While he held to the "p" in Tulip (There are two flowers to describe theology. TULIP: Total inability, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace and the Perseverance of the saints. That last "p" is not what Chafer believed. A lot of moderate Calvinists, like Chafer, only defined perseverance of the saints as eternal security.
 
However, there are many today who say if you do not persevere in obedience and good works then you weren't ever truly saved to begin with. Louis Sperry Chafer did not hold to that definition of perseverance so I would say he was more of a 3½-point Calvinist. The other flower is DAISY. That is the Arminian theology. In reference to God, the Arminian pulls out a daisy and goes, "He loves me, He loves me not, He loves, He loves me not, He loves me, He loves me not." So it's either daisy theology or tulip theology but there's another theology that's somewhat in between that is Biblical. It's interesting how some of these things will pop up.
 
Now just in terms of our conclusion from last time. First of all, I pointed out there was no Biblical distinction between this concept of a head faith and a heart faith. Heart is simply a figure of speech using a body part to symbolize and represent the thinking of the soul and the soul itself. So the Bible doesn't make any distinction between the head and the heart. Some people say "Well, they had a head faith. They're going to miss heaven by twelve inches, the distance between the heart and the head". That's just completely bogus. That may preach well but it's not going to get anyone to heaven.
 
Secondly, saving faith is not a different kind of faith but its object is the difference, the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross. If you have a hymnal in front of you, look at "I Know Whom I Have Believed" (page 409 in WHBC hymnal). We're just going to get a lesson in applicational theology when it comes to hymns. I wish there was one way we could straighten out this hymn because there's a lot of positive things about this particular hymn but if we look at the second verse. "I know not how this saving faith to me He did impart." Did you catch that? It's saying that God is the one who imparts that saving faith. This was written by a Calvinist, a high Calvinist. It says that God imparts the right kind of faith that is saving faith.
 
The hymn goes on to say, "Nor how believing in His Word brought peace within my heart." And that's fine. Then in verse 3 we read, "I know not how the Spirit moves convincing men of sin, revealing Jesus through the Word, creating faith in Him."
 
This is same idea, that God creates faith. That it's a different kind of faith, not the same category of faith as every other kind of faith. So we see how these things show up in one hymn. There are many others, I'm sure I could go to. But this is even a contradiction to John Calvin. On John 3:33, John Calvin says, "That to believe the gospel is nothing more than to assent to the truths that God has revealed." Did you hear that? That's what a real Calvinist believes. Not a Bezaite. Beza was the man who followed him and really systemized Calvinist theology, not Calvin per se. So we see Calvin said that they believe the gospel is nothing more than to assent to the truths or propositions which God hath revealed.
 
Then the last point by way of review is that salvation is not based on a personal relationship. Often that's the way in which the gospel is presented. "Would you like to have a personal relationship with God?" That's saying that the only way you can get saved is through a personal relationship with God. There's always an element of truth in these things but the Bible never says that to be saved you need to have a personal relationship with Jesus. Believing on Him results in a personal relationship with Jesus but that's putting the cart before the horse. Judas had a personal relationship with Jesus and it didn't do Him any good. He was an unbeliever. What matters is faith alone in Christ alone.
 
Faith is not an emotion. If we put an emphasis on emotion then we will fail in the Christian life. The Scripture consistently emphasizes that the Christian life is related to belief and knowing something. That comes up to the two categories we talked about as part of faith: understanding which means we have to know the Scripture and assent which means we have to believe that it's true.
 
Now let's move forward. In this closing part of Romans 13:11 Paul is going to introduce the concept of light versus darkness and day versus night. He's going to use a metaphor that is common for him and that is the idea of taking off something, the same verb that's used in taking off clothes, and in putting something on. But what is interesting that these two concepts of taking off and putting on are used grammatically in completely different ways. If we don't pay close attention to the text then we can really get confused.
 
It took me a while as a young student of the Word to work through some of these things because of the nature of the Greek grammar. You're not going to get this if you just look at the English. That doesn't provide you with an excuse to never read your Bible. You just need to recognize that there are problems with English translations but as I always tell students of Greek and students going off to seminary, that Greek and Hebrew do not solve all your problems. They may solve some of your problems but they will often create other problems. Language is limited. Anything that is finite and part of creation cannot adequately and perfectly express divine truth. It presents it inherently but not comprehensively. There's always a limitation in language and language always has a certain ambiguity to it. This is where you have to evaluate grammar and syntax on the basis of the analogy of Scripture which is theology comparing Scripture with other Scripture.
 
There are issues here. One issue I briefly touched on earlier in Romans which is a problem in Romans and Galatians is that when we read a passage such as Galatians 2:16, "Nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but by faith in Christ." it isn't that clear in the Greek. In the Greek it's a genitive and that genitive can mean "by the faithfulness of Christ" or "the faith in Christ". It can be either an objective or a subjective genitive. This has become a huge arena of controversy and discussion in academics in Greek.
 
I've got a large book at home with each chapter written by a different person. Some are proponents of one view. Some are proponents of another view. The preponderance of scholars argue that it's an objective genitive and should be understood as faith in Christ and I was reading in there today and at the conclusion at several of the chapters that grammar cannot solve the problem. Syntax cannot resolve the problem. These are men who have probably forgotten more about Greek than most of the people I know will ever learn. That's the issue. Grammar and syntax don't solve the problem. At some point you have to bring theology and a comparison of Scripture to Scripture and other doctrines in context to bear upon the particular passage. So that's just one illustration.
Now let's go into the rest of Romans 13:11-14. Paul says, "And this (because you know the time) it is time to awake out of sleep for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed." In verse 11 he is simply laying a motivational foundation that, as believers, we need to wake up. We're living in a time where there is limited option for fulfilling the mission that God has given us as members of the Church. So we need to wake up because we don't know when our time is up.
 
Our salvation, that is our ultimate destiny either through the Rapture or our death, could come today, tomorrow, the next day so are we ready? We need to not waste time. Ephesians 5 says to redeem the time. Use it wisely, don't waste it. So that's the foundation for the motivation here. Then he continues in Romans 13:12 saying, "The night is far spent. The day is at hand." What does that mean?
 
Next he draws a conclusion, "Therefore (because of this short time) let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light." So there we have two things. The imagery of darkness and light, day and night, and then we have the verbs "to take off" and "to put on" there. In Romans 13:13 he says in a first person command that involves him as well as us, "Let us walk properly." Here he's commanding us to walk by the Spirit so he's bringing in the whole doctrine of the Christian way of life, the Christian walk.
 
Paul continues, "…As in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy." He uses three pairs to give a focus on the fact that sin should not be a characteristic of the believer's life. In contrast, Romans 13:14 says, "But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to make no provision to fulfill its lust." A couple of observations here in terms of those last couple of verses: here in verse 12 we see the command is to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Putting on the armor of light is the positive; removing the works of darkness is the negative. When he comes to that same topic but in different words in verse 13 he positively says we're to walk properly.
 
By juxtaposing the imagery into verse 12 and 13 we see that the proper and the appropriate walk is putting on the armor of light. Now that's important because that tells us that putting on the armor of light isn't positional. It isn't related to what happened at salvation. It has to do with our ongoing battle after salvation. It's important to pay attention to that because Paul uses this terminology. This is not easy stuff.
 
He uses "put off" and "put on" both positionally and experientially and you have to be careful because just because you see "put off" and "put on" terminology doesn't mean he's always using it the same way. He talks about the fact that at salvation we "put on" Christ but here in verse 14 he says to believers to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ". So in one sense we've already put on Christ, that's positional, and in another sense we need to "put on" Christ after we're saved. In other words we put on His character and that would be equivalent to walking by the Spirit.
 
Walking properly is contrasted with these three pairs of sinful activity and then it is further expanded in verse 14 as "putting on the Lord Jesus Christ". So this is parallel to putting on the armor of light. They mean the same thing. They're both talking about the Christian life in two different ways.
Then negatively we're not to make any provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts. So that's just sort of a fly-over of this passage to help us understand that Paul is really challenging us or exhorting us to obedience. He's saying, "The time is short. Don't waste time. You have to focus on your spiritual life and your spiritual growth because you and I have no idea how much longer we're going to have in this life to grow to spiritual maturity and to fulfill the mission that God has given to each and every one of us."
 
Now let's start drilling down a little bit. There's our motivation in verse 11. In verse 12 he says, "The night is far spent." The day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Two things we see here. First of all he's stating a principle in the first part of the verse relating to the fact that it is now night but it's progressing. The word there in the Greek for "far spent" is the word PROKOPTO which means to advance or to move forward.
 
What he is saying in this whole section is that he expects Christ to return at any moment. Now there is a difference between the "at any moment" of Christ returning, and the idea of Christ's soon coming. You can believe today that Christ is soon coming because as we see different things happen in the world it seems as if God is moving things forward and setting the stage more and more for what happens after the Rapture. So we think it could be soon. It could be in twenty or thirty years.
 
For the last sixty-six years since Israel was re-established as a nation in 1948 there has been this increasing sense that we're living very close to the time of the Rapture. While we're not date setting I think there's a parallel between what happened in the story of Simeon and Anna at the time Jesus was born to what's happening today. In Luke 2 we read that they had been told by the Holy Spirit that they wouldn't die until they see the Messiah, the Lord's Anointed. We just know historically that there was this heightened level of expectation that the Messiah was coming. There were numerous pseudo-Messiahs that were popping up all over the place. There was such a heightened sense of Messianic awareness in the early 1st century that it really characterized that particular time.
 
I think for much of the same reason that today there just seems to be so many things happening that it gives us this sense that it could be very soon. But the Apostle Paul thought it would happen in his lifetime. That's what imminence means that it could happen at any time. Nothing must happen before Jesus returns at the Rapture. Not one thing must happen before Jesus returns at the Rapture. There is no prophecy that must be fulfilled.
 
Now I want you to think about what I'm beginning to say. The fact that no prophecy must take place before Jesus returns at the Rapture is not the same thing as saying that prophecy might be fulfilled before the Rapture. The prophecy that might be fulfilled before the Rapture doesn't have anything to do with the timing of the Rapture, doesn't have anything to do with the immediacy of the Rapture. It might be part of stage setting for what will happen after the Rapture.
For example, if something were to happen today or tomorrow or next year that obliterated the Mosque of Omar, the Dome of the Rock, so there was nothing on the Temple mount then there would be opportunity to rebuild a temple. There are numerous groups in Israel who have rebuilt the furniture. They've identified qualified priests. I saw a report yesterday that someone sent me that a link that they've identified another potential candidate for the red heifer. A red heifer has to have no other color except red, no black. Just one black hair will disqualify it. It can't have ever worked and there are a few other qualifications. The red heifer will have to live to two years of age and then be examined and then sacrificed as a burnt offering. The ashes will be used to sanctify the new temple.
 
We know we're not under the Law so we wonder what that has to do with anything. Remember, the Jews still believe the Law is valid. When they rebuild the Third Temple, the Tribulation Temple, it's an apostate temple. So they believe that to be able to rebuild the new temple they have to establish it with the sacrifice of a red heifer. So these things pop up. Ten or twelve years ago there was another candidate for a red heifer and then a couple of black hairs showed up and disqualified that one.
 
Let's say something like that were to happen. Then the Jews could build the temple. People would say, "Jesus hasn't come back yet. We must already be in the Tribulation." No, all that we know is that in the Tribulation there will be a temple. There has to be temple there for the Antichrist to defile it and desecrate it. So that temple has to be built. It doesn't have to wait until after the Rapture for the temple to be rebuilt. It doesn't have to wait until the Tribulation for the temple to be rebuilt. A third temple could be rebuilt a hundred years before the Rapture occurs.
 
Paul expected it in his lifetime and when he wrote Romans, guess what, there was a temple standing on the mount when he wrote this. He expected Jesus to come back at any time. Even though some prophecy seems to be fulfilled that relate to something in the Tribulation, it still doesn't affect the imminence of the Rapture. The Rapture is not dependent on any sign. The signs are all related to what happens after the Rapture. All it means that God may completely set the stage and wait another hundred years before the time is up. We just don't know but we have to be ready at any moment.
 
That just undergirds everything that Paul is saying here is that the day is near. This is the Greek word EGGIZO which is used many times to indicate the whole concept of imminence, that it is at hand, that it could happen at any moment. He lays that principle down in the beginning of the verse and then he draws a conclusion. If this is true, and it is, that the day is at hand, then we need to cast off the works of darkness. That means to quit living like the cosmic system and put on the armor of light.
 
As we analyze this what we see is a contrast between two sets of words that indicate this imagery. One is night and darkness which always indicates something negative and day and light which always indicates something positive. We'll have to look at what the scriptures say about light and darkness as we go forward. Paul says here that the night is far spent, that it's advanced. We don't know how far it's advanced. We assume that it's advanced pretty far after almost 2,000 years but we don't know.
 
The night is far spent and here we need to do an analysis of how the Bible uses this imagery of night and darkness and light and day. So let's just go through a few of these verses. One of the first places where we run into an emphasis on this imagery, this contrast between light and darkness, is in the Gospel of John. At the very beginning John says, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." He goes on to say in John 1:4 "In Him [the Lord Jesus Christ] was life." It continued to be part of him. It's the same verb that John used in John 1:1. It's an imperfect tense which means continual action in the past, emphasizes the eternity of the LOGOS in past life. "In Him was life and the life was the light of men."
 
What we see here is that Jesus' life, the life of the 2nd person of the Trinity is identified by this equative verb with light. His life is light. His life is what gives light. John says His life is the light of men. Here it indicates one of the ideas presented in the light metaphor and that is illumination and revelation, that part of the role of the 2nd person of the Trinity is to provide illumination and revelation to men. He is the one as we'll see later on in John 1:18 where John says, "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him." That word for declared is EXEGEOMAI which is where we get our English word exegesis which means to explain or to instruct about Him.
 
This passage is saying that we learn about the Father by looking at the Son. This is why later on in the gospel Jesus says, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father." He's talking to Phillip. In John 1:10 He says, "I and the Father are One." So if you've seen Him, you've seen the Father. He is the One who reveals the Father. He is the light of men. It's His role to reveal.
 
In John 1:5 we read, "And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it." Shines is in the present tense. That's an interesting word for comprehend. It's the Greek word KATALAMBANO. LAMBANO is the word used a few verses later in John 1:12, "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name." It's a contrast with the previous verse which says, "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him." This is the intensification of LAMBANO, which means to receive, to take something in or to hold it. KATALAMBANO has the idea of embracing something, making something one's own, or taking possession of something. So it came to have this idea of comprehension but it's really more than just comprehension. It's a little weak for this but it does relate to that first aspect of faith, which is understanding.
 
KATALAMBANO means more than simply comprehension. It means to comprehend and to embrace that which you have comprehended. Again, this is used as a synonym for faith. We often talk about the fact that you need to receive Christ as your Savior. Receiving Christ as your Savior is the same as believing that He died on the cross for your sins. So Jesus appears to His generation. The light shines in the darkness. The world system is considered dark because of sin and because it's apart from truth and apart from light. And the light shines into the darkness and the darkness does not embrace it. The darkness does not accept it. The darkness did not believe in it.
 
Then we skip a few verses and John uses the light metaphor again. In between he introduces the ministry of John the Baptist. In John 1:9 he says, "That was the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world." This is a principle of common grace. Since the incarnation Jesus gives light to every man coming into the world. It's part of general revelation. This is the idea of light. It indicates illumination and it indicates life that comes from that illumination. The first principle we see in understanding night and darkness and light and day, as it's used in the scripture, is that night and darkness are used to describe the state of the world under the condemnation of sin and living under the authority of Satan. This is seen in these verses. John 1:4, 5, and 9.
 
I'll repeat the principle again. Night and darkness are used to describe the state of the world under the John 8:12 He says, "I am the light of the world." One of the seven famous I AM statements in the Gospel of John. I AM is the Greek phrase EGO EIMI emphasizing that Jesus is the eternal existent one. That's the same as the Old Testament I AM which is how God defined His name to Moses.
 
So Jesus shows up and He keeps saying I AM, making clear claims to deity and to be God. In contrast to the night and the darkness Jesus says that He is the Light of the world and He has come into a fallen, dark world, operating on the darkness of Satan's lie and all the false views in the world and Jesus is bringing illumination of truth.
 
In John 3:19, John writes "And this is the condemnation that the light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." Now a lot of people read it that all men love darkness. It doesn't say that. It's a general statement of truth, a gnomic principle that generally it's true that men prefer the dark rather than light but not all. It's because their deeds are evil that men didn't want the exposure that illumination would bring. It's like a bunch of cockroaches in your kitchen. You get up at 3:00 in the morning and click the light on and they all scurry and scramble to run under the counters and hide. That's probably not true of anyone's house here but that does happen at times in some places.
 
Okay, the third point, Jesus also defined His mission in terms of light. He defined His mission as illumination. He states that while He was in the world, it was day. His illumination is so bright that He basically says that while He was there it was day; it wasn't night. When He left the night would come. The way He states this when He says "I must work the works of Him Who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work."
 
The problem people have is that they try to make these word-for-word explanations. These are idiomatic illustrations and this probably comes from a proverbial statement related to time. The time is short to accomplish His job. Paul sort of uses this in the reverse way that Jesus uses it here. The idea is that especially in the ancient world before the light bulb, even candles, they had many different little lamps they would fill with olive oil. You still see these if you go to Israel. The little lamps would have a little wick and you would light that. You just wonder how in the world they could ever see anything in the dark because they don't provide that much illumination. Pre-Thomas Edison, the world was a pretty dark place at night.
 
In the past the only thing you could do at night was turn on your television and watch a soap opera? No, you couldn't even do that. You just went to sleep. The sun went down you went to sleep. The sun came up the next morning. Then you'd get up. You worked during the day but when night came you couldn't work anymore because you couldn't see what you were doing. That's the idea that Jesus is saying. While He's with them, it's time to work but when He left, went to Heaven, then they couldn't carry out the ministry as it was defined during the Incarnation.
 
What was the message? Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. When does John 9 take place? More towards the beginning of Jesus' ministry. The message is still to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He's saying that as long as He's with them they had work to do. When He was gone, it would be too late to accomplish the mission of this particular time. So Jesus uses that imagery here of the night and the day to talk about the fact we have a mission to accomplish and we need to hurry about the mission before the time runs out. That's the same thing Paul is saying but he uses day and night in a reverse sense.
In Romans 13. Paul says "the night is far spent." He's talking about the current time in which he's living, the Church Age. He's describing that as the night in contrast to the day when our Lord, the Light of the world returns when He will illuminate everything. We see that the light of the world is so great in the Eternal state that there's no need for a sun or a moon in the future state after the creation of the new heavens and the new earth.
 
The third point, then, is that Jesus defined His mission in terms of light, teaching that day and night are a metaphor about the importance of getting the mission accomplished right now before the time to do so ends. When the night comes the present opportunity would be past and be gone.
 
Light is also used in contrast to darkness. It's used this way in various passages when it's used to talk about our position in Christ. It's a very important concept to understand who we are in Christ. We are as John 12:36 indicates, "Sons of light". When we are saved we are positionally identified as sons of light. John 12:36, "While you have the light, believe in the light, in order that you may become sons of light.
 
When Jesus is talking about this in John 12 He's talking to the crowds. When does John 12 take place? This may sound like a silly answer but it takes place right before John 13. What happens in John 13? Jesus is having the Passover Seder with His disciples right before He goes to the cross. So John 12 is the last discussion of anything going on in the life of Christ before all of the events related to the crucifixion take place. It happens right after He has raised Lazarus from the dead.
 
In John 12:36 He's predicting He's going to be taken and crucified. He's talking to the people. He's having this interchange with the people. John 12:34-36 says, "The people answered Him, We have heard from the Law that the Christ remains forever and how can You say, 'The Son of Man must be lifted up?" Who is this Son of Man? Then Jesus said to them, "A little while longer the light is with you. Walk while you have the light lest darkness overtake you. He who walks in darkness does not know where He is going. While you have the light, believe in the light that you may become sons of light." He's presenting a gospel presentation, challenging the people to believe in Him that they might become sons of the light."
 
Peter talks about this also in terms of our position in 1 Peter 2:9, "But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light". So this is also taking about a positional transference that took place at the instance of our salvation. This isn't the only place that does it. There are a great group of verses that talk about what happens positionally to us in relation from this shift from darkness to light.
 
In Acts 26:18 when Paul is preaching he says, "To open their eyes and to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God." Darkness is the pagan system. All human viewpoint. From darkness to light. Darkness is related to the dominion of Satan. God is the ruler of the kingdom of light. So you see this contrast and what happens at salvation is that we are "turning from darkness to light, from the dominion of Satan to God in order that we might receive a forgiveness of sin and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in me. [Jesus]"
 
Paul is talking here that this is what Jesus has said to Paul in terms of His mission. Jesus says that Paul's mission is to give people the gospel so they can turn from darkness to light, the dominion of Satan to the kingdom of light. It's a position of potential spiritual growth to ultimately have an inheritance that we receive at the judgment seat of Christ. Another parallel to this is Colossians 1:13, "He has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love." Power is the word EXOUSIA, the same word that's used in John 1:12.
 
We're born in darkness and we're sons of darkness. That doesn't mean that if you're a female you're not qualified to be a son of darkness. We're born as sons of darkness but when we are transferred into Christ at faith alone then we're now in the kingdom of His beloved Son. This doesn't mean the kingdom is here. This is in terms of where we're headed. We are now qualified to be in that kingdom when it comes. A couple of other verses that are tied together are 1 Thessalonians 5:5, "You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness." Paul is talking to the Thessalonian believers and telling them this is their positional identity. This is who you are in terms of their relationship to Christ. They are sons of the light and sons of the day. No matter how carnal and disobedient you might be, we are not of the night or of darkness.
 
Ephesians 5:8 says, "For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light." Our identity before we were saved was that we were in darkness, the kingdom and domain and authority of Satan but now we are light in the Lord. That's our position. But then it says to walk as children of light. Walk always has to do with our experience. So the fact that we are light in the Lord indicates our position in Christ.
 
We are sons of light but sometimes we don't live like it. It's sort of like when you were a kid, maybe, your parents told you that you're not acting like a member of their family, like a Jones, or a Smith, or a Williams, or whoever. You're not acting like a member of the family. It doesn't mean you weren't a member of the family. It just means you're not acting like a member of their family or how they thought a member of your family should act.
 
We need to learn to walk as children of light. This is a term related to enjoying fellowship with God and our Christian life. In 1 John 1:7 John says, "But if we walk in the light [maybe we will and maybe we won't] as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another." It's something we enjoy. We're not in fellowship with one another. We have or enjoy fellowship with one another. It's something that is richly experiential.
 
Often you hear someone say, "Well, I just can't get along with someone. There's just some sort of personality conflict. What we're really saying is that we can't get along with them because of their sin nature or my sin nature. It's really a sin nature problem. You see what the scripture says that if you're walking with the Lord and they're walking with the Lord and the Holy Spirit and the scripture are the focal point it's not going to be any kind of personality conflict. What you're really talking about when you say this is that your sin natures don't get along.
 
That's one of the things I try to tell young couples when they're going to get married. They really need to get to know the other person, not just how they are at their best, but how they are at their worst. There needs to be a sin nature compatibility because if you can't put up with them when they're walking according to the flesh, then you're going to have some real problems. That always results when we're focusing on our sin nature and letting that dominate. There are always times in marriages when people get a little crossways with each other, but if your sin natures are incompatible, such as if one's sin nature turns toward morality and the other person's trends toward immorality, you're going to have some real problems. You just can't understand each other at a fundamental level of your sin natures. But the redemptive factor for marriage and all relationships is walking in fellowship in dependence on the Holy Spirit.
 
As long as we're doing that we can enjoy fellowship with one another and notice what is happening at the end of 1 John 1:7. It says that the results of Christ's death on the cross are having a moment and moment impact on our relationship and it cleanses us from all sin. How do you recover from sin in relation to God or in relation to other people? It always comes back to what Christ did on the cross. Grace is what enables us to overcome any kind of personality conflict or any kind of difficulty that we have in those relationships.
 
John 12:46, "I [Jesus] have come as a light into the world that whoever believes in Me should not abide in darkness." That word abide in scripture always relates to fellowship. It's time to stop here but we need to see our positional relationship with Christ and that by identification we are positionally sons of light. Then we have our temporal realities. When we're walking by the Spirit we're walking by the light. We're walking in fellowship.
 
When we sin, the enjoyment of that fellowship is broken and we are out of the light and we're walking in darkness according to the sin nature called carnality. It's only when we confess our sins in 1 John 1:9 that we are restored to fellowship to continue that walk. This is fundamental to understanding the passages we're going to go to in Romans 13, Ephesians 4, and Colossians 3 They are all talking about what it means to take off those acts of carnality that dominate our lives when we're out of fellowship and to put on that which is related to Christ.
 
There are other passages that are talking about who we are in terms of our identity and they also use that "put on and put off" terminology so that when we're saved we see we put on Christ. Then we have a passage like Romans 13:14 that talks about the fact that we are to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ". That is not talking about our position but is talking about our relationship with Him. It goes on to say "make no provision for the flesh". That means we're not to walk according to the sin nature. Next time we'll come back to continue our study on light and darkness in the writings of Paul and in the writings of the New Testament to help us learn how to live the Christian life.

Romans 148b-Light: Putting Off and Putting On–Part 2

Romans 13:11 NASB95
Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.
Romans 148b-Light: Putting Off and Putting On–Part 2 Romans 13:11-14
 
I want to begin with a current event update. Everyone should be aware of the fact that we're in the third day of what is called Operation Protective Edge in Israel. One reason I want to do this is to sort of alert people of what is going on. If you are really interested in what is going on, there is an app you can download on your cell phone called Red Alert: Israel. If you activate that app, a siren will go off every time there is a rocket that is being launched at Israel. Over 400 rockets have been fired at Israel since the beginning. There are differing numbers being given. I have enquired why there are different figures but haven't heard.
 
We're living in a time of intensified danger internationally. Sadly we live in the time of a president who is a do-nothing president. I just wanted to update you a little bit on the situation. We have a group that's going to Israel in November. That's four months away. In the Middle East that's like four lifetimes. A lot of things can happen between now and then so I want to educate those going on the tour a little bit. We have more people from the immediate local congregation going on this trip, or a higher percentage on this trip going from Houston. Usually we have a lot of people who are live streamers and others going on one of these trips.
 
The problem that's going on now in Israel, as with the previous war a couple of years ago, is Hamas and the control that Hamas has over the Gaza Strip. To understand the nature of this we need to know that Hamas was founded in 1996 during the first intifada. It's a wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood which is a radical Muslim group. They're calling for jihad and they're seeking to establish sharia law wherever they go. They took over in Egypt for a while before that fell apart for them fortunately. Now Egypt recognizes the great danger they face because the Gaza Strip borders them on the northeast.
 
Hamas in their charter quotes from the Koran, "You are the best nation (Islam) that has been raised up to mankind." They believe that their mission is to destroy the Jews. One of their leaders in an interview on Al Aqsa TV said on December 31, 2008 regarding the Jews, "Our business with them is only through bombs and guns." In an article in the official newspaper of Hamas, Hamas promotes the "extermination and complete annihilation of all the Jews and the complete and total destruction of Israel". In that interview, a Hamas representative stated, "We find more than one condemnation of the resistance operations and bombings carried out by Hamas and the resistance branches. Eventually everyone will know that we did this only because our lord commanded so. As the Koran says, 'I did it not from my own accord but so the people would know that the extermination of Jews is good for the inhabitants of the world.' " So this is their focal point and they've never backed off from this and they've never been willing to sign any kind of peace accord and they never will because they would have to compromise this end game.
 
We've had a little pamphlet on the Hamas charter distributed by "Stand With Us" (www.standwithus.com). It's an excellent little summation of Hamas. In 2006 they won a democratic election and they took control of Gaza on June 14, 2007. Before that there had been numerous Israeli communities in Gaza but they pulled out all the Israelis in 2005 and 2006. (The pastor showed a map of Hamas control of Gaza which shows the range of these various missiles that Hamas has).
 
The Kassam missile which is a short range has a 17 kilometer range. Firing from Gaza they can't get as far as Tel Aviv but anything close to the Gaza Strip within 17 kilometers, which is about 12 miles, is fair game for a Kassam. Then you have the Grad which is a 48 kilometer range. This can reach Beer Shiva and as far as Tel Aviv. The N-75 has a range of 75 kilometers which includes Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and then the M-302 has a range of 160 kilometers. This is new for this war. The IDF intelligence thought they had a hundred. It turns out they have about 400. They fired probably about 20 or 30 of these.
Nothing, apparently, has really hit the target. There have been no casualties in Israel as of this date. There's minimal property damage. Many have missed completely. They've landed out in the fields or wherever and many have been shot down. Much of the area of Israel is where Israeli's have 15 seconds to get to a bomb shelter. So when they hear the alarms go off, they have only 15 seconds to get out of the shower, get dressed, pick up the kids, and get out the door and get into a bomb shelter. They live with this as a daily reality in those areas.
 
One of the areas that's been hit the most is Sderot. (Shows a picture of a bomb shelter.) I read yesterday in an article in the Israel My Glory magazine in the July/August 2014 issue which just came out about how Friends of Israel have set up an autonomous non-profit organization that is taking donations to contribute to the IDF and a number of other organizations that are helping Israelis out. In that article it mentioned that the Friends of Israel had bought several underground shelters that had been put in place in some villages in some of the kibbutz close to the Gaza area. Some of these areas because of the expense of building bomb shelters and because of the small size of the communities they just have steel pipes like great big drainage pipes that the people go out and run into. That's all they have for protection. In the back of the police department in Sderot they've just stacked all the debris from the rockets after they have blown up.
 
What has given Israel a new lease on life in many ways is the Iron Dome project which shoots down these incoming missiles. They have a success rate of 90%, meaning they have shot down 90% of the missiles the Iron Dome has aimed at in this recent engagement. I have heard hints that Iron Dome's success rate is even higher. Saturday night I'm going to have dinner with the man who was the project manager for Israel's satellite program and he was a project officer for their Aero Project Defense System. They have three levels of defense. They have the Iron Dome which targets low-flying missiles. The next one is called David's Sling. The highest one that takes out ICBMs that might be coming in is the Aero Defense system. (Video of Iron Dome at work was shown. It was from the New York Times)
 
One comment I want to make before we get into our text this evening is that I know the ones planning to go on the tour to Israel or who have family members planning to go are beginning to worry a little bit. This is four lifetimes between now and November and the war will probably be over long before we make our trip over there in November. In fact if you look at all of Israel's wars, all six of them since 1948 you will see they are short-lived. In 1956 the Sinai War lasted eight days. In 1967 the six-day wars lasted six days. In 1973 the Yom Kippur War lasted 19 days. In 1982 the first Lebanon War began on the 6th of June. The fighting was mostly in Lebanon where they were taking out a lot of Hezbollah fighters with very little fighting in Israel. That lasted through the month of June but they didn't pull their forces out until sometime in August to early September. In the second Lebanon War which was in August 2006 it began on the 12th of July and ended on the 14th of August, lasting for 34 days. And then the most recent fight was Operation Cast Lead which was from the end of December in 2008 until the 18th of January 2009 and that was a 23-day conflict. These are all very, very short. This current one started on the 8th of July and this will probably be over with before the middle of August. I'm not predicting. I'm just making a guess based on past history. So by the time we go to Israel in November this will be ancient history.
 
Now, open your Bible with me to Romans 13 and we're looking at the last three verses of the chapter which summarizes the Christian life. It's one of the great passages related to the Christian life which we find in the New Testament and it uses vocabulary which is common to the other key passages in Ephesians, Colossians, James, and several other passages.
 
Hebrews 13:12-14, "The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore, let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry or drunkenness, not in lewdness or lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts." Now to understand what Paul is saying here we have to understand this "night and day" imagery which I talked about in the last lesson but that was two weeks ago. And we need the imagery of "casting off and putting on" which is the real key terminology. I just want to set this up so you can get this in your head. This is one of the great descriptions of the Christian life.
 
Every believer is positionally in Christ the instant they trust in Christ. Romans 6:3 says we're identified or baptized in the resurrection of Christ. So we become a new creature in Christ. This is fundamental. This was so emphasized by the Keswick or victorious living groups in the late 19th century that it picked up a name called the identification "truthers". Unfortunately some of those who emphasized identification truths in terms of our identity in Christ failed to recognize experiential realities which is our day-to-day experience. We're to walk by the Spirit. We are to be filled by means of the Spirit. It's called walking in the light.
 
So our position is, our identification in terms of our family identification, is that we are "sons of light". That's who we are. Then we're to walk by the light. That's what we're to do. Sometimes we don't walk by the light. We live like we're part of someone else's family. Perhaps when you did something when you were growing up that was out of character for your family your mother or father would say, "How can you be a member of our family if you do something like that?"  Well, they don't mean they're literally kicking you out of the family. They're just telling you that we have a standard of living in our family and that doesn't fit it. You need to live like you're a member of our family, not like you're a member of someone else's family.
 
Now when we walk by the light, we often sin. When we sin we stop walking by the light and we're walking in darkness. This is talking about our day-to-day experience. The Bible describes this as walking according to the flesh or the sin nature. It also uses the term walking in darkness in contrast to walking in the light.
 
The only way to recover from this then is through 1 John 1:9 which is how we understand that as a confession passage. You have to realize that there are some theologians, notably those who hold to a covenant type theology, who want to take this as a salvation verse. They say that we confess sin and admit we're sinners at the point of faith in Christ and that's when we're cleansed of all sin. That's not what 1 John 1:9 is talking about. It's talking about this experiential reality.
 
So last time I talked about the fact that in Romans 13:12 we have two pairs of words that we need to understand. They're antonyms for each other, night and darkness and day and light. This is typical of the imagery that's used in the Scripture to describe those who are in relationship with God because God is light. That describes His perfect righteousness and holiness. In Him there is no darkness at all, John says in the 1st chapter of John.
 
Now there are different ways in which this light and day imagery is used. I ran through these last time. I want to just pop through them quickly as a reminder. In John 12:36 Jesus is talking to His disciples and some unbelievers and He says, "While you have the light, believe in the Light so you may become sons of light." That's talking about our position in Christ. He's talking to unbelievers and telling them that if they believe they will become a son of the light. That's positional.
 
1 Peter 2:9, "We've been called out of darkness into His marvelous light." That's our position in Christ. We are in the kingdom of light Peter says later on. In Acts 26:18 Paul describes it this way, "We have turned from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God in order that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified." This is a perfect passive participle which indicates a past completed action so this is talking about positional sanctification.
 
In Colossians 1:13 it talks about the fact that at salvation we were "delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of His beloved Son." So again this is our position in Christ, moving from darkness to light. 1 Thessalonians 5:5 says that we are all "sons of light and sons of the day." That's talking about our position. We are "not of the night nor of darkness."
 
In Ephesians 5:8 Paul says "you were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord." That's positional. Then he says, "Walk as children of light." So that moves us from talking about our position and identity as sons of light to the experience of walking as children of light. That tells us that Ephesians is not talking about our positional realities in Christ. It's talking about and challenging us about our day-to-day walk with Lord. Our position is who we are as those who have been baptized into the body of Christ and then we are to focus on the experiential truth, the experiential reality of the necessity of walking by the walk and constantly recovering from sin through the use of 1 John 1:9.
 
We are to walk in the light as He is in the light. This is what 1 John 1:7 says, "If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another." Notice there's a priority here. What comes first is our relationship with God. Walking in the light is enjoying our fellowship with God. It's not a static thing. Often we speak idiomatically and we say we "have" fellowship. Fellowship is something that is a partnership, something that's enjoyed, and something that's dynamic. It's not just static.
 
So really we walk in the light and we enjoy fellowship with God and as a result of having fellowship with God. By walking in the light we then can have fellowship with one another. The basis for this is that the death of Christ on the cross is sufficient for all sin. This is what Jesus is talking about in John 1:46, "I have come as a light into the world that whoever believes in Me should not abide in darkness." This word "abide" in Johnine writings is very important. It describes that on-going fellowship. It's not talking about salvation.
 
If you're reading what someone has written that has a lordship view of salvation, then they interpret abiding as being equivalent to salvation. Those who are saved abide and those who don't abide aren't saved, they say. They think they never were saved; they just thought they were. In fact in the NET Bible which has a lot of good notes in it but also a lot of questionable notes. It was edited by the faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary. One of the notes in one of the verses in either 1 John 1 or 1 John 2, talks about the fact that this is referring to those who are saved.
 
People have an elitist view of Christians. That some Christians abide and others don't. That's completely wrong. Jesus is emphasizing that on-going relationship. This is another way Paul talks about it in Ephesians 5:14. Let's just turn over there. Some of these verses are going to get a little technical. The focus in Ephesians 5 is on the Christian walk. This is what Paul introduces going back through Ephesians 4:1, "For this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord implore you to walk in the manner worthy of the manner in which you have been called." In chapters 4, 5, and 6 he focuses on our Christian walk, not our possessions in Christ. When he gets to Ephesians 5:2 he says, "Walk in love just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us and offered a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma." Then in Ephesians 5:8, "Walk as children of light."
 
The focal point here is on our daily walk. We need to wake up and be alert. Ephesians 5:14, "Awake you who sleep [out of fellowship]. Arise from the dead [the carnal life in terms of living like a spiritually dead person] and Christ will give you light." Here the light metaphor is talking about something a little different. It's talking about the illumination in the Christian way of life so Romans 13:12 uses this imagery of night and day.
 
When Jesus was on the earth He said that it was now daytime but the night was coming. The coming of the night was when Christ left the earth. Now Paul is talking about the same Church Age as the night which is progressing but the day is almost here. Day is being used here to refer to Christ being present once again upon the earth. I pointed out the importance of imminency that lies behind that verse, that we expect Christ at any moment. No sign must take place before Christ comes so it's near, it's at hand, it could happen at any moment.
 
Then he says that as a result of that the conclusion is that there are certain actions that should take place in our lives. "We should cast off the works of darkness and we should put on the armor of light." Now casting off is the word APOTITHEMI which is used in a literal sense of taking off clothes. When you get ready to go to bed at night you take your clothes off. When you get up in the morning you put your clothes on and get ready to go out. So that's the idea of taking something off and putting something on. This is clear in the vocabulary that's used there.
 
The word that is used in this passage for putting on is ENDUO which means to dress or to clothe. This is in contrast to APOTITHEMI which means to put off or to take off or to remove something. These two words are used a lot of places in the New Testament in talking about the Christian way of life but they're used in two different senses. You're never going to get this from the English because it's based on the Greek grammar as to how they're used. The same words can be used but how they're used grammatically makes a difference.
 
We'll start with that which is the most familiar to us and that is relating it to the whole concept of confession of sin and of recovery. James 1:21 says, "Therefore [first] lay aside filthiness and overflow of wickedness…" The KJV translated this the "superfluity of naughtiness," whatever that's supposed to mean. Another translation is "the excess of evil". We are to lay that aside and "to receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your soul." Lay aside here is an aorist participle. Now these people James is addressing are already saved as is clear from previous verses. He addresses them as brethren. Earlier he had talked about the fact that they were already saved.
 
Now he's talking to them as to how saved people should live. He says to first lay aside and then receive. In 1 Peter 2:1-2 we have the same verb, APOTITHEMI for the removal of clothes. "Therefore lay aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking. Desire the sincere milk of the word." If you just look at this in English you might think that first of all you have to really clean up your life before you can receive the Word. You have to really repent and have a lot of remorse and you have to morally clean everything up before you can take in the Word. That's not what's implied here.
 
If we look at this verse there are two actions indicated by the words "lay aside" and then "receive". Lay aside is an aorist participle. In an aorist participle the action precedes the action of the main verb but when the main verb is an imperative then the aorist participle can be stating the pre-requisite action for fulfilling the command. So you have an aorist imperative preceded by an aorist participle which is describing what is called by grammarians as a participle of antecedent circumstances.
 
There are five features that are usually all present for you to be able to identify a participle as one of antecedent circumstances. The first is that the tense of the participle is aorist. The second is that the tense of the main verb is aorist. Third, the mood of the main verb is usually imperative but might be indicative. So the first three fit. We have an aorist participle. We have an aorist main verb and we have an aorist imperative main verb. The fourth feature is that the participle will precede the main verb both in word order and in time. That's exactly what we have here. The fifth characteristic of a participle of attendant circumstances is the one that doesn't apply. Attendant circumstances participle most frequently apply in narrative literature. Well, this isn't narrative literature. This is an epistle. But one or two cannot be true and you still can have a participle of attendant circumstances. Of the five characteristics the one that is least significant is the fifth one, its presence in narrative literature.
 
So what we have in both James 1:21 and in 1 Peter 2:1 is this exact syntax. You have an aorist participle that precedes an aorist imperative. That indicates that what the writer is saying is that first you have to lay aside before you can fulfill the requirements for the commandments. Now there's no way we can morally repair our lives before we take in the Word. We would never take in anything. So the only solution here is that this is talking about confession of sin. That's what the pre-requisite is. Before you can take in the Word you have to clean your life. 1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." So the way that we lay aside the filthiness, the excess of wickedness, is to confess sin. We do that first.
 
Then we're able to receive with humility the implanted Word. The Word that is already implanted with us because we're saved "which is able to save our souls." Save our souls is an idiom for saving your life. This is Phase 2 of the Christian life, being saved from the power of sin in your life. James doesn't use saved as a synonym for justification. He talks about justification in chapter 2. "Saved" here is talking about the spiritual life. Here we have this same principle.
 
A lot of people have said, "I don't find confession anywhere except in 1 John 1:9." That's true. That word confession is only found there but we have other passages such as 1 Corinthians 11 which talks about examining your life. Here we have a grammatical principle indicating that first there has to be a cleansing from sin before you can take in the Word. In 1 Peter 1:21 we have this same terminology with APOTITHEMI again for laying aside.
Here Peter lists specifics. He says, "Therefore first lay aside all malice, all deceit…" Let me ask you a question. This is part of using reason, the right use of reason in Scripture. Is it possible for a fallen corrupt sinner to remove all malice and all deceit from your life before you take in the Word? That's not possible. We can't clean it up that much but God can. Here we have the same structure, the same syntax that we have in James 1:21. Laying aside is an aorist participle that precedes the aorist verb.
 
The aorist imperative verb is the word desire. We are to desire the Word. We are to thirst for the Word. We are to hunger for the Word like a newborn baby. Some of you have a little experience with infants recently and it's not too much of a stretch of your memory to remember what it's like when a child gets hungry. What happens when a child starts to get hungry? They start screaming for food. They start demanding food. Now I've always thought that there's a comparison here between eating and fasting. If you go on a genuine fast like Jesus was on, a genuine fast when he fasted for forty days and forty nights. That's not unusual. Anyone can do it. It doesn't take any kind of extra miracle power. You may think that it does because you can't last two hours without food but once you get past about the second day your hunger pangs and appetite really goes away.
 
I experienced this many years ago when I was on a two and a half day backpacking wilderness expedition in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The last three days were a solo on the shore of Lake Superior. We were not to have any food with us because our leaders scared us that bears were active in the area and if people had food with them, the bears could smell it and attack you. So we didn't take anything with us. The week before someone had been camping there and the bears had gotten into their packs and torn everything up. What I experienced on that and I've read about that is that it's common that once you get to about the 40th day your appetite starts to come back pretty fiercely. Now you have to eat! You're just ravenous and you start eating again.
 
I didn't go that long. We went three days and I was really surprised. I was fairly young at the time and was eating everything that was set in front of me. I had no thought I could go twelve hours without food but we went thirty-six hours. Afterwards we were taken back and had lunch and we were all taught how to gradually get back into food. Over the next twelve to twenty-four hours I ate more than I've ever eaten in a twenty-four hour period. Once your appetite comes back you're just ravenous.
 
I think that's an analogy. This means that Christians today should be demanding that their pastors feed them the milk and the meat of the Word. There are people out there who are being starved to death. They're on a spiritual famine. They've lost their appetite for the Word and for the truth because they never get it. They're on a starvation diet. We're starving the body of Christ in our generation. What Peter's talking about here using that graphic analogy of desiring the milk of the Word is that first of all before you desire it, you have to lay aside the sin. It's confession of sin and then you can fulfill the command to desire the pure milk of the Word. Another reason I think a lot of Christians aren't desiring the milk of the Word is they've never been taught anything about confession. They've never been taught anything about 1 John1:9. From the moment they got saved until the present moment they've just been living mostly in carnality with no idea how to recover.
 
This is what we're talking about in these passages is that when we're walking by the Spirit, we're walking in the light, and we have to recover so we can spend a maximum amount of time in fellowship and walking with the Lord. On the other hand we have this emphasis on identification with Christ, our positional truth, which is the result of our being baptized by the Holy Spirit. So these are the two things we have to keep together, keep in our minds as we go through these passages. I want you to go back with me to Colossians 2. We're going to start in Colossians 2:11. I went through this in detail when we went through Colossians. It talks about "in Him". That's our position in Christ. "In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands." This is not talking about literal physical circumcision but it's using it as a metaphor for what happened at the baptism by the Holy Spirit when we are separated by the tyranny of the sin nature. This is another way the Apostle Paul is describing for his readers the break between the old life and the new life. "In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ." The body of the flesh there is talking about the sin nature. So this was a circumcision.
 
How did it take place? In Colossians 2:12 we read "Having been buried with Him in baptism in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God." Is that talking about literal water baptism? No. It's talking about that baptism by the Holy Spirit that occurs at the instant of salvation. This is when we're cut off, as it were, where Christ is the One who circumcises us from the flesh of the sin nature. He's talking about this positional reality. Putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ is being buried with Him in baptism." So Colossians 2:11-12 is talking about a positional reality.
 
Then we skip down to verse 20 where Paul says, "If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world." When did we die with Christ? We died with Christ when we were identified with His death, burial, and resurrection. That's the positional reality. Then in Colossians 3:1 it says, "Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ…" He uses those conditional clauses such as "if you died with Christ" talking about baptism by the Holy Spirit and "if you've been raised up by Christ" which is the same thing, he adds," Keep seeking the things which are above." That's experiential.
 
As he starts off in each of these three statements in Colossians 2:20, Colossians 3:1 and Colossians 3:3 he's basically saying that since this is true, since this is what happened when you were saved, you were identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection and the tyranny of the sin nature was truly cut off. You may not feel that because that sin nature still has a hold on you and you still follow it too easily but the way to break that is to understand the reality that took place at the instant of salvation.
 
In Colossians 3:3 he says, "For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." Your life and my life from that instant of salvation is hidden in Christ with God. We can never lose that. That is our identity. That is who we are. And because that identity is true he goes on to talk about what that means experientially. In Colossians 3:5 he says, "Therefore because you have died, put to death…" You're dead but now you need to put something to death. It's true positionally but you still need to make it true experientially.
 
Therefore he says, "Consider…" This word means thinking. You have to think according to this new reality. You need to "Consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed which amounts to idolatry." This is just one of many sin lists Paul gives in various passages in Scripture. He does the same thing through pairs in Romans 13:13. So he goes on to say, "It's because of these things that the wrath of God [divine discipline in time] will come upon the sons of disobedience." That's those who are characterized by disobedience.
 
Sons of disobedience is a Hebrew idiom. If you're Jewish and you spoke Hebrew of Aramaic, you had this kind of an idiom. If you were a robber, you would not be called a robber. You would be called a son of a robber because that noun that comes after the son is a description. When it's says you're the son of something it means you're characterized by that noun. If you are a murderer you'd be called the son of a murderer, not because your father was a murderer but because you're characterized by that phrase being a murderer. If you are destructive you'd be called a SOB, a son of Belial because Belial was a demon idol responsible for destruction. So if you are human, you'd be called son of man. Ezekiel continually was addressed as the son of man. Jesus takes on the title of Son of Man to emphasize His humanity. The title is used in Daniel 7 and also in the gospels. Jesus is also called the Son of God. Son of doesn't mean you're a generated product of something. It's just the way they spoke to emphasize that description.
 
Paul says in verse 6, the sons of disobedience. That was just talking about a group of people who were characterized by disobedience to God. It could be believers. It could be unbelievers. And he says, "In them [these sins] you also once walked." Walking is a description of a lifestyle. "You once walked when you were living in them, but now you also put them all aside." That means they're already saved. It doesn't have to do with getting saved. This is APOTITHEMI. Again it's descriptive. Then it names what you're to put aside: anger, wrath, malice, and abusive speech from your mouth. Here we don't have the same kind of construction that we had in James or in 1 Peter. We're not talking about confession. We're talking about applying the Word to our lives so we're no longer characterized by these sins. We are to not commit these sins. We are to remove them from our life so they don't characterize our lives.
He goes on in verse 9 to say, "Don't lie to one another since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices." See at the moment of salvation we're not that person before we were saved. The old self isn't the old sin nature. The old self is our identity as an unregenerate who could only follow the dictates of the sin nature. He says, "Since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices and have put on [ENDUO] the new one." That's positional. You have this new identity. "You have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one who created him." This is only true if we're learning and applying God's Word.
 
In Colossians we see this distinction between the positional reality that we are a new person. We have positionally laid aside the old self. We've positionally put on the new self. But experientially we have to do that in terms of our lifestyle. In Galatians 3:27 Paul says, "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ." Same word so it's positionally. We put on Christ positionally but according to Paul in Colossians 3 and Romans 13 we now have to put Him on experientially as well.
 
When he says, "put on Christ" this is that same word ENDUO. So the way we put on Christ is at the moment we accept Christ. You have put off the old man and put on the new man, the Christ, by being identified with Him. But in Colossians 3:8 we are to put off all these various sins and put on that which characterizes the new man by renewing our souls. These are the same things we see again and again and again in Scripture. Romans 8:12, "Therefore brethren we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh." We've got to stop living according to the flesh. We can't do that completely but the way we recover when we do is confession of sin and then we have to stay in fellowship.
 
In Romans 8:13 Paul says, "For if you live according to the flesh, you will die." See, they're already saved but you're going to have a death-like existence if you keep living according to the sin nature. Then he goes on to say, "But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body." How do we have experiential victory over the sin nature? By putting to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit. This is what everybody leaves out when they talk about the mechanics of the spiritual life. They're just talking about you going out and morally improving your life, quit sinning and start doing the right thing. That's just morality. What the Bible is talking about is spirituality. "We walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh."
 
The only way we cannot do this by the flesh is to confess our sins and to walk by the Spirit. So let's just go back to Romans 13 where Paul says, "Let us walk properly as in the day." Then he describes the improper walk, "Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy." There are three pairs here, synonyms with each other. So these aren't to characterize our lives. He doesn't go on and list as extensive a list as he does in Galatians 5 and Colossians 3 but you get the point.
 
He says, "But in contrast, put on the Lord Jesus Christ." Now we can mention that didn't it say in Colossians 3 I had already put on the Lord Jesus Christ? Well that was positional. Here's it's experiential. We're "to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts." And that word for provision is the word PRONOIA, PRO meaning beforehand or ahead of time, NOIA related to the word for the mind, NOUS, and it means forethought.
Don't think ahead of time that "Well I can get away with this." That's what we facetiously refer to as pre-bound. I'll just confess my sin ahead of time and then later on I'll be okay. Rebound being the idea like in basketball when you miss the goal you can recover. Recovering the ball is called rebounding. So often that word has been used in imagery for confession. Then some wag came up with the idea of 'prebound' where you just confess your sin before you sin and then you'll be okay. That's just licentiousness.
 
Here we're to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and not make a provision for the flesh. Don't give yourself an opportunity to sin later on, to fulfill its lusts. In a nutshell what Paul has done here at the end of Romans 13 is to give us a snapshot of the Christian life. That we're to walk by the Spirit and not according to the flesh. It's the Holy Spirit although he doesn't mention the Holy Spirit here but he does in parallel passages. It is only through the Holy Spirit that we're able to lay aside the deeds of darkness, verse 12, and put on the armor of light.
 
In 1 Thessalonians, and especially Ephesians 6:10-18, Paul expands on this armor imagery. He uses it often to refer to that which protects the believer. It's defensive. You don't defeat the enemy with your armor. You protect yourself from the enemy with your armor. The only way to do that is to lay aside the deeds of darkness in terms of experiential sanctification and put on the Lord Jesus Christ. It has to be something that is part of your thoughtful, conscientious approach to day-to-day life. Don't put yourself in a position where you will easily succumb to sin and to temptation.

Romans 149b-Loving the Weaker Christian

Romans 14:1 NASB95
Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions.
Romans 149b-Loving the Weaker Christian Romans 14:1-4
 
Tonight we're starting Romans 14. Chapters 14 down through 15:13 is the last major section in Romans. After that we have the conclusion and final salutations. This section that we're dealing with now is a specific problem that Paul addressed coming out of a discussion in chapter 13 where he began to talk about the believer's responsibility to honor government and to love others. Actually this begins in chapter 12. I just want to take us back there for a second.
 
In chapter 12 we have the summary opening for this last section. It covers chapters 12, 13, 14 and part of 15. Paul gives a command, "I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service." The word there for service is LATREIA, which indicates our personal worship. The focus is that we are saved for a purpose and that is to glorify God. We are saved for a reason and that is to grow to spiritual maturity and to reflect the character of Jesus Christ in our lives. Ultimately that is demonstrated when we love one another as Christ as loved us.
 
As we go through and as I've outlined the ten spiritual skills that we develop in the Christian life, those that represent that maturity concern love. One is our personal love for God the Father because that is ultimately the motivator behind our advance into maturity. Our impersonal or unconditional love for one another is second because that is a reflection of a mature grace orientation. We love others, especially those in the body of Christ, as Christ has loved us. That takes a tremendous amount of spiritual maturity.
 
The Old Testament command in Leviticus 19:18 was to love our neighbor as yourself. Notice the focal point in the Old Testament was to love a neighbor. Now it is to love one another. But there is a certain parallelism there because within the concept of the Torah a neighbor was another member of the covenant community of Israel, assumed to be a believer. But the standard of comparison in that command was as you love yourself.
 
The Bible assumes that every human being is a self-lover. This is the orientation of the sin nature. We're self-absorbed and we're born, coming out of the womb, loving ourselves and developing an expertise in loving ourselves from the moment that we are born. No one ever hates their own flesh, as Paul states in Ephesians 5 so that shows once again that the world system and the psychological orientation that the world has, is that people have problems because they have a low self-image. No, they don't have a low self-image. They have a problem because they think too highly of themselves and because of that they're disappointed in their failures. Because they're disappointed in their failures they make it sound as if they hate themselves but the Bible says no flesh hates himself. The Biblical truth that helps us cut through all the psychological mumbo-jumbo is that everyone has a basic orientation of self-love. That's the pattern that we see in the Old Testament.
 
In the New Testament Jesus said that we're to love one another as He has loved us. Jesus is the pattern for our love for one another so this is the mark in John 13: 34-35, the mark of a Christian. This is how you'll know that you are a disciple, which is a Christian who has decided to learn and apply the Word of God in his life. Not all Christians are disciples but all true disciples are Christians. Becoming a disciple is an additional step or stage or phase as we begin to grow spiritually. We come to understand that the challenge before us as a member of the family of God is to grow to maturity.
 
In Romans 12 Paul introduces that we are to serve God. Part of serving God means we are going to put His will over our will. Whether you feel like that's a sacrifice or not, that's determined by Scripture to be a sacrifice. Instead of living for our self we're living for God. That's Romans 12:1. In order to do that Romans 12:2 states that we're not to be conformed to this world. The word there is not KOSMOS but it is the word AION which indicates the age, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. When we think in terms of the spirit of the age then we're thinking in terms of self-absorption and self-love. So we're not to be conformed to this world but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.
 
Notice it's not the renewing of our emotions. It's not the renewing of our liturgy. It's not the renewal of our ritual. It's the renewal of our mind. Again and again in Scripture the emphasis is on how we think. If we think the wrong way we're going to live the wrong way. We're challenged to think according to the Scripture. The problem that we'll see tonight with some immature Christians is that they don't know how to think. They don't have Biblical knowledge in their soul. But Biblical knowledge is not an end in and of itself. Biblical knowledge or information is simply a means to spiritual growth. We are to learn the Word of God so that God the Holy Spirit can use it in our lives to challenge us in terms of how we live.
 
The first stage is sitting where you are or sitting out in the internet area, live streaming, or listening to some sort of recording. As you're listening you're learning the Word of God. If you're in fellowship God the Holy Spirit is helping you to understand it and apply it in your life. He doesn't apply it for you. Your volition has to come into effect again. You have to choose to apply what you've learned. It's only when we choose to apply what we've learning under the power of the Holy Spirit, walking by the Spirit, the Spirit uses that in terms of producing spiritual maturity and spiritual growth in our lives.
We're transformed by the renewing of our mind as we take in the Word of God and we get rid of the garbage in our soul from all the things we learn from the world system, from our peers, and from others prior to our justification. After we're saved as we're sanctified it comes as a result of walking by the Spirit and letting the Word of God fill up our thinking and fill up our soul. The result is that by application we demonstrate that which is good and acceptable and is the complete will of God. That's the starting point. That's the preface to this next section.
 
Then Paul focuses on spiritual gifts. He talks about the fact that we are part of the body of Christ. We're all members in one body. It's important to remember that. We're members in one body. We're different but we're all unified, united together in the body of Christ. This is what took place at the instant we were saved when we were placed into union with Christ, 1 Corinthians 12:13. That sets us up in terms of being one body.
 
1 Corinthians 12 also tells us that we're members of one another. Now that's very important because as Americans who have come out of a tradition of a strong heritage of rugged individualism with a strong emphasis on individual responsibility and autonomy, we have a hard time understanding the concept of this integrated body that is the body of Christ. We are members of one another. There is a certain interdependence in the body of Christ where we don't function autonomously. This is the brilliance of using the body imagery. One person may be an eye. Another may be a nose. Another may be a hand or a foot. Each individual part has an important function but that function is not independent of the function of all of the other parts. There's this interdependency that takes place in the body of Christ. We are all members of one body and members of one another. Romans 12:5 states that as well.
Next there's a list of some of the spiritual gifts. Then in Romans 12:9 Paul shifts his thinking again to the principle of love for one another. He describes the characteristics of love. Romans 12:10 says, "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love in honor giving preference to one another." He sets up those various "one another" commands several times in that section. This is further developed by showing that loving one another has to do with submission to authority, which we covered in the first part of Romans 13.
 
Then he comes to loving your neighbor. Part of our love for one another has to do with our submission to authority because to submit to authority you have to have humility. Humility is always related to love for one another. You can't very well love someone if you're self-absorbed and arrogant so there's a connection there. The long section dealing with love for one another, in Romans 13:9-12 is on the front side of the section dealing with submission to authority and then in the section following verse 7, Paul again refers to loving one another and what that means. The section dealing with government is bracketed by the section on loving one another. So that section is also part of the illustration of what it means to love one another and to carry that out in genuine integrity.
 
It concludes in terms of a reminder of how we are to walk in Romans 13:11-14 which all leads to this section we're beginning to study now focusing on some specific issues and some specific conflicts in the body of Christ. It's inevitable that we're going to have differences of opinion and that we're going to run into personal conflicts with the body of Christ. There's one reason for it and that's sin. We're all sinners and because we're self-absorbed we're going to get out of fellowship and we're going to come to certain issues with different viewpoints.
 
Now there are issues that are absolute issues that we can't compromise on at all. Those are issues related to first of all, salvation. Salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. Salvation does not involve any works, whether put on the front side like someone who says we need to believe and be baptized or if someone says you need to believe and join a particular denomination or you need to believe and do certain good works. Or it comes on the reverse side where people say that if you say you're saved and you don't have works that are in keeping with faith, if you don't have the right kind of works that qualify or give evidence of faith, then you didn't have the right kind of faith to begin with. That's called lordship salvation.
 
I bet there's not a person in this room who hasn't at one time or another, for some of you it may have been many, many years ago when you were a young believer, looked at someone and said, "How in the world can that person claim to be a Christian when they've done such and such? How in the world can that person be a Christian when they vote like that? How in the world can that person be a Christian when they are a socialist? How in the world can that person be a Christians when they are anti-Israel? How in the world can that person be a Christian when they commit flagrant immorality?" And yet the reality in Scripture is that what we do, whatever sins we have, whether they're sins of belief because we're committed to wrong belief systems, whether they're overt sins of murder, violent assault or whatever, whether they're sins of the tongue like gossip and slander, maligning of whether it's just a mental attitude sin of anger, resentment or any of those things, it doesn't matter. Jesus Christ paid for every single sin on the cross.
 
That means sin isn't the issue when we're evangelizing people. We don't say, "You need to believe in Jesus and clean up your life." You can't clean up your life. Only the Holy Spirit can. That's what comes after salvation. You just need to believe on Jesus Christ. Someone will say, "Does that mean that I can continue to sin with impunity?" That's a nasty way to put it but yes you can. Sin was paid for at the cross. Once you become a believer in Christ, you're going to be in the family of God. God promises in Hebrews 12 that He is going to bring discipline on anyone that is a member of His family. So sooner or later God will get involved and start straightening you out. But it's not the evangelist's job to straighten you out. It's not the pastor's job to straighten you out. It's not other believer's job to straighten you out although there's always a responsibility in the body of Christ to encourage and admonish one another. That's done in appropriate contexts. Sooner or later God's going to get ahold of you if you're a believer in Christ, then God's going to discipline you.
 
You can't compromise on the gospel at all. Another thing we can't compromise on is the spiritual life. The spiritual life is also based upon the grace principle. You don't do anything to earn God's blessing. That's one of the most important things we can get our hands around. It's so common in Christian circles today to hear people use blessing in a lot of different ways. As a greeting they say "God bless you." When they answer the phone or say goodbye to someone they say, "God bless you." They use it so much it's become meaningless. A lot of people have the idea that if they're obedient to God's Word, then He will bless them. That's a works blessing system. What Scripture teaches is that we are not blessed because of what we do. We are blessed because of what Christ did on the cross.
 
When we're saved, we're not saved because of anything good on our part. We're saved because of what Christ did on the cross and His righteousness is given to us. When God sees that we have Christ's righteousness, He justifies us and regenerates us because we have Christ's righteousness, not because of anything good in us. After salvation He blesses us on the basis of our possession of Christ's righteousness. If we are disobedient, then God will withhold blessing because it might destroy us.
 
An interesting example of this is let's say you're the proud father of a newborn son. You want everything in the world for your son. You have pretty good financial resources and you go out and buy him a Lamborghini and you put it in his name and it's going to be his when he comes of age at eighteen or you may put a stipulation in there that when's he's an adult or whatever. When he's old enough to appreciate it and properly utilize it then you will give it to him. Is it his when he's three years old? Yes. Are you going to give it to him? No, because he will hurt himself and a lot of other people with it. Are you going to give it to him when he's twelve? No, because he's not mature enough to properly handle it. Is it his? Yes, it's his. It was given to him because of his identity as a member of the family but it's not put into his activated possession until he's mature enough to where it doesn't destroy him.
 
God is not blessing us because we're obedient. He's blessing us and He's already blessed us with all the heavenly blessing [Ephesians 1:3]. He's only going to distribute them when we show enough maturity to handle the blessing. He's going to hold back because if He gives it too soon, it will become a problem for us. So this is grace. We can't fudge on grace at salvation. We can't fudge on grace in terms of sanctification.
 
The issue in this passage is that when it comes to the Christian life there are some issues that are definitely moral. There are some issues that are definitely immoral. But there are some things that aren't quite moral or immoral. They are neutral. They're not prohibited in Scripture. They're not commanded in Scripture. They're just somewhere in-between. A term that Paul uses when we get into Romans 14 is "doubtful things". In Romans 14:1 we read, "Receive one who is weak in the faith but not to disputes over doubtful things." So he's saying here that we are to receive or accept the one who is weak in the faith but we're not to get involved in arguments that don't go anywhere, that are non-productive, over these doubtful things.
 
The only point I want to make now is that there's a category of doubtful things. Things that are neither approved of nor disapproved of in Scripture. So how do we handle these things? It may surprise you but there are some Christians who are really opinionated. They have very firm opinions about whether or not Christians ought to do or not do some of these things. It's just amazing. I grew up in a background that was fairly grace oriented. I didn't know anyone who held to any sort of legalism in their background. That's usually a phrase that's used even though it's not always understood or used well.
 
It always surprised me when I ran into some folks that had come from this kind of background. This happened when I was in high school. I looked at these people like I was looking at someone with a third eye or a horn between their ears or something. It was very strange. Gordon Whitelock who was the founder and director of Camp Peniel had gone through Moody Bible Institute with a man whose name was Nelson Miles who was the President of Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music which was reduced to an acronym called GRSBM. It was a school that was part of a denomination known as GARB, the Greater Association of Regular Baptists.
 
That's one of several conservative Baptist denominations that originated in the North from the Northern Baptist denomination prior to the American War of Northern Aggression, as I always refer to it. There was a split in the denominations over the issue of slavery. Northern Christians did not want their mission money supporting someone who came out of a southern Christian church as a missionary. They thought their money would become soiled by supporting someone who might have been connected to slave owners. So this reached pretty virulent proportions in the late 1840's and 50's. All the major denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, all split north and south. So you have the Southern Baptists and the Northern Baptists.
 
Now the Northern Baptists denomination went liberal fairly early, by the mid-1880s they were already having legitimate heresy trials of seminary professors who had slipped completely into 19th century liberalism. They denied the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. They denied the virgin birth, the miracles of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, the Resurrection, and they denied the literal, future coming of Christ. That was just about the essence of where they focused the battle lines. That became known as the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. In the North you had more and more of these modernist beliefs filtered down into the local churches.
 
There were a number of groups that split off from the late 1920s to the 1930s. One of them was the Conservative Baptist Association. They aren't very big here in the south. One of the founders of the Conservative Association was Pastor Thieme's father-in-law. He started that out of church in Tucson, Arizona. The GARB were the same way. They had a lot of rules and they still do. You couldn't watch TV, except for Gomer Pyle and one or two other shows. There were even bad new shows censored. Now in light of the 150 channels on TV, we might not think that's such a bad idea. But back then when you only had black-and-white ABC, CBS, and NBC and educational networks, that seemed kind of extreme that you couldn't watch most of the shows on TV. You couldn't go to the movies. If you went out on a date, a chaperone had to go with you and you couldn't get within 6" of each other and many, many other rules.
 
Well, these kids would come down to Texas and go to Camp Peniel as counselors. Most of the counselors came out of Houston and came out of churches influenced by Dallas Theological Seminary and Pastor Thieme and were grace oriented. On Saturday night, which was our night off, we fell in a car and went to a drive-in in Austin or somewhere and see a movie. These kids had never seen a movie before. It was culture shock for them. There was a bit of a culture shock for us because we'd never met legalists before. By the end of the summer they'd gotten pretty grace-oriented. They kind of liked all this ability to do things but this has always been a problem in the history of Christianity because from the very beginning, you had people who didn't really understand all the significance of the cross in paying for our sins and they added certain kinds of things as absolutes in terms of how Christians should live and what they should do or not do. They would make absolutes out of things that are doubtful, things that weren't clearly stated in the Scripture.
 
This has its history as we studied in Acts. Turn with me to Acts 15. This was one of the first problems, if not the first major problems, that the apostles in the early Church had to deal with. I want you to notice that the issue that was coming up was what should we do about these Gentiles. They've been unclean for centuries. They do all of these unclean things. They eat unclean food. How can we let them fellowship together with us? What are we going to do about these Gentiles? So they had a meeting among the apostles that we refer to as the Jerusalem council described here. Look at Acts 15:6, "The apostles and elders came together to consider the matter." That means they wanted to think it through Biblically and rationally. I want you to notice something here. They don't come together and pray, "Lord give us revelation as to what we should do." See, that's how lots of modern evangelicals would go about it in a completely wrong way. God's not going to all of a sudden turn on a light in your head or give you a new revelation to answer the problems that you face. He wants us to think through the issues in our life on the basis of the doctrine that's in our soul.
 
This is one thing I love about the Jerusalem council. This is exactly what the apostles did. They don't get a new word of revelation even though these guys still had the revelatory gifts available to them. But God was showing them that this wasn't going to be the normative procedure for decision making in the Christian life. Decision making in the Christian life comes from putting your thinking cap on in terms of Scripture and getting into the Word and thinking it through in terms of the circumstances of your life. So they had a great discussion.
 
In Acts 15:17 we read, "There had been much dispute." So they were going after it. They were arguing both sides of the issue, back and forth, and after there had been much dispute Peter rose up and gives a summary of what had happened. In this he rehearses what happened when he took the gospel to the Gentiles with Cornelius back in chapters 10 and 11 and he reminds them that God who knows the heart acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit just as He did to us. When the Gentiles believed we see in Acts 11 that they received the Holy Spirit. They didn't have to do anything. They didn't have to change. They didn't have to get circumcised. They didn't have to submit to the Mosaic Law. They didn't have to do anything else. It was faith alone and at that instant God gave them the Holy Spirit just as did to the Jewish believers.
 
Peter goes on to say, "He made no distinction between us and them purifying their hearts by faith." Then he hit them between the eyes saying, "Therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke [the Mosaic Law was too controlling for those who didn't have the Holy Spirit] on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they." That Jew and Gentile are both saved by faith alone in Christ alone. Notice it's both based on grace.
 
All of this we're going to study in Romans 14 and 15 is related to understanding grace and what it means to be gracious to others who may have different opinions in areas that are not important. It may even be that you're right and they're wrong but they're wrong because they lack knowledge, they lack training, they lack instruction. So we're going to learn how a more mature believer, identified as a strong believer, is to exercise and show his love for a weaker brother, a weaker believer. Now when it came to the end of the council they basically made a summary statement which is given to us in Acts 15:19 when James says, "Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood." Now the reason they're asking that is not because it's inherent to the spiritual life. The reason they're saying that is because this was a cultural problem for the Jews and if they're going to have peace and harmony in the synagogue then let's not practice things that are going to get our fellow believers all upset when they don't quite understand all of the issues. So these things did not have to do with absolutes but with things that are relative. It's an aspect of loving one another.
 
Now let's go back to Romans 14. This chapter begins with a command, "Receive one who is weak in the faith." In other words there's a tendency and I know no one here would ever do this when mature believers are around someone who doesn't quite understand things the way you do and who might be immature in their faith and they might be a little legalistic and we just don't want to associate with them because we want to relax and enjoy life the way we understand it. We don't want to put up with these little sniveling babies running around. You know they're always messing in their spiritual diapers and we don't want to have to clean up the mess.
 
Paul addresses this and he's addressing mature believers. He says, "Receive the one who is weak in the faith." This word for receive means not just accept them and let them sit in church. Sure we're going to let them come and sit in church and hopefully they'll get straightened out but we're not going to invite them over for fried chicken either because we'll have a glass of wine and we don't want to be worried about them. The word has the further idea of accepting someone into your company or your fellowship. Now look at Romans 14:3, "Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat." So the one who eats is the mature believer. He understands that this issue with the dietary law is not that big of a problem. He may just get really upset and irritated with the immature believer who is trying to make an issue out of the dietary law.
 
I get the sense from these commands that there was definitely a group, sort of a clique, within the Roman Church that knew they were mature and understood their freedom and they didn't want to be bothered by these messy little immature believers who want to get involved in some kind of legalism. So the first thing Paul says is to receive the one who is weak because apparently they weren't receiving them. This should be an ongoing thing. It's a present imperative indicating this should be an ongoing action.
 
Then he gives a prohibition in verse three, "Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat and let him who does not eat judge him who eats for God has received him." That word for receive here is the same word as before, PROSLAMBANO. God has accepted him into fellowship meaning eternal fellowship, our union with Christ forever. So if God has accepted this little whining, messy, legalistically baby believer who hasn't learned very much yet, so should we. Don't let the fact that he's a bit of a problem to deal with be a reason why you don't have fellowship with him and accept him.
 
Now this is an important principle to understand for a small church. A lot of us have known each other for a long time. Some of us have known each other too long, maybe. I've known some of you since…I can't remember when I didn't know some of you. We've known each other since I was an infant and maybe some here were infants as well. So we've known each other a very long time. We have a lot of history together. It's typical in churches where you have people who really like and enjoy one another's fellowship to sort of develop little cliques. You enjoy the people that you know and ones you spend a lot of time with but as a church and as a congregation we constantly have new people to come into the church.
 
I'm not jumping on the congregation because you haven't done this but just as a reminder, most of the time this congregation is very welcoming of new people and you accept new people very well. You're very gracious and generous in that respect. I think there's a few cases here and there were some haven't been that way on occasion but not as a norm. That's also understandable but we need to recognize as a small church we don't want to run into sort of the syndrome of a small town, where you just have a few cliques. Everyone knew each other and anyone that's new has to be there for ten or fifteen years before they're considered to be part of the church.
 
My first church down in LaMarque had that syndrome. The mean age in that church, including all the bed babies and the nursery was 58 years of age. There was a huge gap right in the middle of the congregation. From 35 to 55 there were three couples and that's because ten years before I became the pastor the church had split. The people that were all 60 and older weren't willing to relinquish the power and the control they'd had in that church for 30 years to their children. The pastor had been the pastor for 40 years and he'd retired in 1974 and this older group were still in lockstep. They weren't going to open up to anyone new even though many of them were their own children. A huge split occurred and everyone from about 25 to 45 left. That's why when I got there no one attended between the ages of 35 and 55 except these three couples, two of whom had come to the church since the split. There was a terrible example of this sort of clannishness and cliquishness.
 
That was bad enough I won't even go into the really fun story of my very first candidating at the first church I went to. Talk about clannish. It was in the heart of Cajun country. It was so Cajun that one of the deacons was like Amos Moses. His left arm was gone clean up to the elbow and his son had to translate into French the questions and answers during the interview. That was an extremely clannish church. I've spoken in a lot of churches over the last 40 years and without exception, I've been invited out for coffee or lunch. I went to that church in Oppolusa, Louisiana and I stood at the backdoor. Everyone filed out and went and got in their cars. I didn't even know where the closest Popeye's was so I didn't even know where to go for lunch. It was so clannish.
 
That's one thing we need to avoid, any kind of appearance of excluding new people, especially if they may not come from a similar background that we have. That's what Paul is addressing here. "Receive the one who is weak in the faith." Now this word weak is one of my favorite words to do a word study on. It's one of the first words I ever really got into in terms of doing an in-depth word study. This is the Greek word ASTHENO in the verb form. The "a" at the beginning is like our English negative prefix "un". It negates the main root. The root means strength so this is someone without strength which means they're weak. Now word meaning do not derive from their etymology. When people do that it's called an etymological fallacy. Word meanings come from usage. This word has two primary uses and it's really interesting how they play out in Scripture. It means to be weak in a physical sense in the sense of an illness. This is used about 80% of the time the word ASTHENEO is used in the gospels and Acts. Jesus is healing those who are sick. But there are a few examples in the New Testament when Jesus says "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" it's not talking about sickness there. He's talking about a spiritual inability. So there are a few examples where the word emphasizes a spiritual weakness, not a physical weakness.
 
When you get into the epistles and start looking at how the word is used in Romans all the way through Jude, it reverses its primary connotation. About 20% of the uses refer to physical illness, maybe not even that many. It usually refers to spiritual weakness, spiritual inability, someone who's really struggling in the spiritual life. They just want to give up and fade out. They're not persevering. This is a major concept in the epistle of James. So the second meaning is to be spiritually weak in the sense of being weary of obedience as in James 5:14.
 
If you're familiar with the James passage, this is a passage that usually stumps a lot of people when they read it because it just doesn't seem to make sense to them. It seems to be talking about healing. In James 5:13 we read, "Is anyone among you suffering?" That sounds like someone who's ill. Later in the next verse he says, "Is anyone among you sick?" That word for sick is this word. To translate it sick, means the translator interpreted the word for us. If he was translating correctly, he would have said "Is anyone among you weak?" Then he would leave it up to the reader to discover whether he's talking about weak physically or weak spiritually so immediately we're slanted in the direction of talking about physical illness.
 
It's actually not talking about physical illness at all. That would be like James is talking about cooking apples all the way through to James 5:12 and then all the sudden he switches and starts talking about how to prepare a prime rib roast. It doesn't fit the context. He's been talking perseverance in times of spiritual testing. The problem here is a person who's so spiritually weary that they want to fade out. So James 5:13 says, "Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing songs. Is anyone among you weary or weak? Let him call for the elders of the church."
 
Now this is written long before the pastoral epistles. It's probably the first epistle written in the New Testament. I think that word PRESBUTEROS there should simply be mature Christians, not an elder in a sense of an office. "Let him call for the mature ones of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil." In some denominations they go and get oil and they will anoint someone because they're sick. That's supposed to heal them.
It reads like an unconditional promise. It says, "And the prayer of faith will save the sick." That's how James 5:15 is translated so this is an absolute promise. How many people here have prayed for someone who was sick with cancer, leukemia or some kind of fatal illness and may have even anointed them with oil and yet that person died? The answer you get from the healing charismatics is that you didn't have the right kind of faith, faith like a child. I always ask, "Really?"
 
When I was born my mother had polio. She contracted polio two months before I was born. I never knew my mother to walk. She was in a wheelchair. She was in an iron lung because the polio had advanced to where it had paralyzed her diaphragm and her ability to breathe on her own. So they would put polio patients into this contraption that would breathe for them. Somehow it had a mechanism on it that would pressure on their diaphragm that would push in and then release and push in and then release to help and enable them to breathe. Those ladies who are here who have gone through natural childbirth know that one of the things required of them is to push. You have to have diaphragm muscles and abdominal muscles to push. My mother didn't have any. This was really a remarkable situation because they basically would pull her out and trying to get me out at the same time.
 
I remember when I was a little boy my mother had these braces that would hook into holes into her shoes and she would put these braces on her legs and these crutches and she did this physical therapy for years until I was nine or ten, thinking that somehow this would reenergize these muscles. I became a believer when I was six years old and I would pray every night that my mother would walk again. I think when I was six, seven, eight, nine, and ten I had the faith of a child. I believed God could do it. No qualifications entered my mind from Scripture or anything like that. I didn't know about this promise. I just believed God could do it.
 
That's not what this is talking about and that's not a promise we have in Scripture. This is talking about the fact that if you're struggling spiritually and you are weak in the faith then you're to call for mature believers who can pray over you. The word for anointing with oil is an interesting word here. It's the word ALETHO. Now there are two words for anointing in Greek. ALETHO and KREO. KREO is the word from which we get our word CHRISTOS, the anointed one, the word for Messiah. That is a ceremonial ritual term. This is the term ALETHO. Every morning when you ladies get up, you go and wash your face, you anoint your face with various creams. Some men do that as well. You don't have to do that so much in Houston because we're in such a humid climate it keeps all of the woman just looking young. But if you go to the Middle East where it's an exceptionally dry climate, everyone would put oil on as part of their daily toiletry in order to take care of their skin. This was the normative thing.
 
Remember in Matthew 6 Jesus tells the disciples that when you fast, don't be like the Pharisees and go around looking like you're fasting, but anoint yourself so that when you're out no one knows you're fasting. They can't look at you and say, "That guy's fasting. He hasn't had a shower in a while. He smells bad. He looks bad. He must be fasting. He's miserable." No, Jesus says to anoint yourself.
 
This has to do with the fact that in the situation here the person who is weary in their spiritual struggle is depressed. They're down. If you've ever struggled with depression, sometimes you don't want to get out of bed in the morning and when you do, you don't want to go take a shower or do anything. You just feel like you have a heavy weight on yourself so you don't want to do those things. This is very practical advice. The elders are to pray over him and then he's to go take a shower.
 
I remember going through some tough times at one point in my life and one of my seminary professors would call me every morning and say, "Did you have a good breakfast? Did you take your walk this morning?" That's this kind of advice. You need to do those things every day and that will physically help you to get through them. That's all that's being said here. And then the prayer of faith will save or lift up or strengthen the one who is weary and the Lord will lift him up and if he has committed sins he will be forgiven. If sin has entered into his life because he's failed in times of testing, then this prayer is appropriate. This is the background for understanding this particular word. In Romans 14:2-3 this refers to someone who is weak spiritually and immature. It's used that way in 1 Corinthians 8:11-12 as well. So we are to receive the one who is weak in the faith. That is, they don't know enough doctrine to know the truth so they're operating on a false set of standards. Now we're going to come back next time and get into this in a little more detail to understand how we are supposed to handle this sort of person and what the issues are for us.

Romans 150b-Weaker Brother, Stronger Brother

Romans 14:1 NASB95
Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions.
Romans 150b-Weaker Brother, Stronger Brother Romans 14:1-5
 
Open your Bibles to Romans 14 where we're continuing to talk about the weaker brother versus the stronger brother. The background here is how do we deal with issues, how do we make decisions about issues that are not moral issues in the Christian life? They're neither prohibited by God nor commanded by God. It's amazing how many different activities in life are not specifically directly addressed by Scripture. Yet most of us have rather firm convictions about whether or not these activities are something we should participate in as a believer.
 
Last time I pointed out a situation that occurred many years ago when I worked many years ago working at Camp Peniel when I ran into a group of Christians coming down from Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music that we thought were legalistic. Often that's what happens. People identify some Christians as being legalistic when the other group is just being a little more rigid in their precision of application. Legalism is one of those funny terms that is often used and abused. Technically legalism in a Biblical sense is either adding works to the gospel, such as saying that in order to be saved you not only believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins but you have to do something else on the front end or the back end.
 
On the front end I mean you not only have to repent of sins and clean up your life you have to stop smoking, dancing, going to movies or whatever plus believe in Jesus. You have to change your moral behavior and trust in Jesus in order to be saved. In some denominations it's believe in Jesus and be baptized. In some situations it's believe and be a member of our denomination but the Scripture says its faith alone in Christ alone. So that's one form of legalism. The way it expressed itself in the New Testament mostly as a group of Jewish background Christians who insisted that obedience to the Mosaic Laws, specifically in terms of circumcision for men, was necessary in order to be truly saved and have a relationship with God.
 
The second way in which legalism entered in was the idea that you had to have a moral life, you had to obey the law, in order to be sanctified in order to grow as a Christian. It taught that if there were certain things that were not present in your Christian life then you were not really living like a Christian. These were things that were added that were not specifically prohibited or commanded in the Scripture. Sometimes we speak of them as "gray" areas. I don't think that's a good term because I don't think they're necessarily gray. They are non-moral behaviors that are not addressed in Scripture but groups come together and some people will make choices and then they expect everyone else to go along with their choices. So the Scripture addresses these in terms of the weaker brother and the stronger brother.
 
I tried to find an article online but apparently all of Moody Monthly's articles are not on line yet. I tried to locate this the other day. I remember about the time I went to seminary or a little before there was an article in Moody's monthly publication called Moody Monthly, always thought that was too much creativity there, called "Grow up Weaker Brother" that made a good point. There are a lot of Christians who hold to certain dogmatic positions related to these non-moral areas that they believe are moral for one reason or another but they're not addressed by Scripture. They continue to hold them even though they ought to know better. Even though they have reached a level of spiritual knowledge. So there's really a third group here.
 
It's not just the weaker brother or the stronger brother. I'm going to add a third category that is not addressed in either the 1 Corinthians 8 passage that deals with this issue or the Romans 14 passage. The category I'm adding is the legalistic or the Pharisaical brother who has come to his convictions that are not addressed in Scripture and then wants to impose those upon everybody else. I remember Dr. Ryrie used to use the illustration when talking about the injunction in Scripture not to put a stumbling block in front of a weaker brother. He used to make the point that in order for something to be a stumbling block the other person has to be moving forward so they can stumble over it. A lot of times you have people who aren't growing. They're just being critical so that again is in Dr. Ryrie's terminology a recognition of this third category that exists out there other than just the weaker brother and the stronger brother.
Paul gives a command here at the beginning to receive or accept into fellowship the one who is weak in faith. The word there to receive is PROSLAMBANO which means to accept into one's company or fellowship, to welcome them as part of your congregation and not to make things that are somewhat unaddressed by Scripture as a test of fellowship. So he says, "Receive the one who is weak in faith." I pointed out last time that the verb here for weak is ASTHENEO and it means to be without strength. It can refer to being without strength physically as in being ill or without strength spiritually in the sense of being spiritually immature or unable to go forward because of difficulties in life. So we are to receive the one who is weak.
 
We're to accept them into fellowship and in contrast we are not to dispute. The word here for dispute is the word DIAKRISIS, which means to argue, to debate, or to quarrel over something. So he's saying not to have quarrels, which is a word for debating, expressing your opinion, or getting involved in issues where you may have legitimate differences of opinion but the Scripture doesn't specifically address those issues. So he's saying to receive the one who is weak or immature and do not get engaged into quarrels over opinions.
 
"Doubtful things" is a doubtful translation. DISALOGISMOS just means ideas or opinions or topics of debate or discussions so he's saying not to get involved in quarrels over opinion as opposed as things that are clearly stated as absolutes in Scripture. As we look at this passage we have to understand who these weak believers are in the context of Romans. As we look at this there are several positions that have been suggested that you may run into them in a study Bible or in some other writing.
 
The first view is that the weak were mainly Gentile Christians who abstained from meat and particularly wine on certain fast days under the influence of certain pagan religions. Now the problem with this is that when we look further down in the passage at Romans 14:14, Paul says, "I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself but to him who considers anything to be unclean to him it is unclean." Then he goes on in the next passage to talk about food. So he introduces the category of clean and unclean when he's talking about this food. The issue here is really dietary.
 
That wasn't a problem with the Gentiles. Clean and unclean indicate that this is a Jewish issue. There was a large segment of the Romans church who were from a Jewish background, believers who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah. That seems to be what the real issue here so it wouldn't be Gentile Christians here causing the problems. Now in 1 Corinthians 8 you had a slightly different problem, a variation, where the food that was being eaten was food that might have been previously sacrificed to idols or offered to idols so that violated the conscience of some believers. So the first option suggested here doesn't work.
 
The second option is that the weaker Christians, perhaps both Jewish and Gentile, who practiced an ascetic lifestyle for reasons that we cannot determine. This is just sort of leaping at the conclusion that they were just being aesthetic but you don't really have aestheticism as being a major issue in the early Church so that's probably not the right option.
 
The third option says the weak were mainly Jewish Christians who observed certain practices derived from the Mosaic Law out of a concern for established righteousness before God. Now the real issue in this third option is that last part that they were seeking to establish righteousness through their obedience to the dietary laws of the Mosaic Law, the Torah. Now those laws are described in the Old Testament by the Hebrew word KASHIR which is where we get our word kosher and also the variant of that which is the laws of KASHRUT which has to do with determining what is clean, what is unclean, and what can be eaten and what cannot eaten according to the dietary rules and laws of Leviticus.
 
Last time we looked at Acts 15 when we talked about the Jerusalem council. If we go back to Acts 10 there is the situation where Peter was on the rooftop at the home of Simon the tanner and he is in prayer and God the Holy Spirit gave him a vision as an apostle. The apostles were still receiving visions and dreams and direct revelation from God because the New Testament canon had not been written yet. Peter sees this huge tablecloth or sheet descending from heaven that had all of these animals and food on it that was prohibited by the laws of KASHRUT. There were scallops and oysters and shrimp and catfish and pork, and bacon, all of these things and God gives him directions to take and eat.
 
Peter wouldn't. He said, "No, no, Lord. Nothing unclean has ever passed my lips." There's a self-righteous trend in Peter we see there. Three times the Lord says to take and eat and finally God makes a point to Peter that what He's declared to be clean is clean and not to separate from it Immediately there's a knock on the door that these messengers from Cornelius asking Peter to come. The reason is that in a Jewish/Gentile environment where you had Jews who were observant to the Law and you can see this some today with those who are Orthodox and eat according to the Laws of KASHRUT that they don't go to the homes of Gentiles to eat.
 
They're very strict in how food is handled, meat slaughtered, and food prepared. You can't use dishes and pots of pans that have had meat on them, chicken and beef used for other things. There's a complete separation of dairy and meat. The reason is there's an injunction in the Mosaic Law that you were prohibited from boiling a kid or a calf in its mother's milk. This had to do with certain pagan practices. In order to make sure that you're not mixing the meat of a calf with the milk of the mother they have a complete separation of meat and dairy. You can't go to a McDonald's in Israel and get a cheeseburger because you can't mix dairy and met. You can't have a hamburger and a milkshake because you can't mix meat and milk at all. Even in the home there's a possibility that if you have a pot or skillet and you're going to cook a steak in that skillet there may be a couple of molecules that don't quite get cleaned in your dishwasher. Then if the next day you use milk in that pot you have run the possibility that that molecule of that meat might have come from a calf and the milk from the mother so you can't run that risk. So there's one complete set of dairy dishes and one complete set of meat dishes and all of those are kept completely separate.
 
You either have a dairy meal or a meat meal, one of the other. You go to certain hotels in Israel that cater more to a Jewish clientele and there main kitchen will be either a meat kitchen or a dairy kitchen. The hotel where we're going to stay in our Israel trip this year is the Inbal. Their main kitchen is a dairy kitchen. First time I took a group there we were there five or six nights and I learned Americans like a little more variety in their diet. Pasta and fish can only go so far. I've stayed there a couple of times since then and I discovered that the room service kitchen is a meat kitchen.
 
These differences truly matter and they matter especially in the 1st century because you didn't have conservative Jews and reform Jews and non-observant Jews. Everyone ate according to the dietary laws of Leviticus. So Jews would never eat in the home of a Gentile. You just wouldn't do it because you weren't sure if the animals were killed according to the proper laws or if they were prepared according to the proper laws. This would have been a problem in a congregation where you wouldn't have any fellowship outside of the Church.
 
The Jews would not go the Gentile Christian's homes. Paul is having to address this particular issue. It's not based on this concept of trying to gain righteousness. This was addressed back in Romans 10:3-4 where Paul does talk about a specific group of groups but there he's talking about unbelievers who were ignorant of God's righteousness. He says, "And seeking to establish their own righteousness have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness for everyone who believes." Paul had already addressed that. In this context he's not talking about believers who are wrong because they were trying to gain righteousness through the dietary laws. That would be a violation of revelation and a violation of Scripture. Here he's addressing the weaker brothers who are doing something that's not prohibited from Scripture.
 
The fourth option you may find is that the weak were mainly Jewish Christians who had ascetic trends who were assimilating or blending Mosaic traditions plus pagan traditions. There was some of that going on but that's probably not the main issue here. The fifth option is that the weak were mainly Jewish Christians who like some of the Corinthians believed that it was wrong to eat meat that was sold in the market place and was probably tainted by idolatry. Again the verse dealing with the clean versus the unclean issue would negate that as an explanation and so we're left with the sixth option.
 
This option is that the weak were mainly Jewish believers who refrained from certain kinds of food and observed certain days out of a continuing loyalty to the Mosaic Law. They're not looking at the Mosaic Law as a means of righteousness for salvation or as a means of righteousness for sanctification. That would be wrong. Paul would have blasted them for that as he does in Galatians for adding works to either salvation or sanctification so we see that the problem according to Romans 14:14 is related to the Mosaic dietary laws.
 
Now we go back and look at Romans 14:2, "For one believes he may eat all things but he who is weak eats only vegetables." So what you have shows that the stronger believer has knowledge. He's informed. He's studied the Word. He's come to a mature understanding of the Word and a mature conviction about what he should and should not do in terms of his Christian life in areas that are not addressed by the Word of God, things that are neither prohibited nor endorsed. On the one hand, one says you can eat everything including that which is prohibited by the Mosaic Law but the other one eats only vegetables.
 
Now if I were an observant Jew at this time and you were a Gentile and you invited me to your house for dinner I might avoid the meat that's on the plate and just eat the vegetables. That would be one way I could eat at your home and not violate the tradition of the fathers. That's what they're concerned with here, just the tradition of the fathers. That's their culture, they respect it and they want to honor what they believe. Both the weaker brother and the mature believer are operating on humility. They're teachable. They're willing to have their opinion changed by the Word of God.
 
The legalist, on the other hand, is arrogant and they have come to their conclusions regarding these areas that are not addressed in Scripture and they're seeking to impose their conclusions on other believers. The weaker brother, though, is uncertain about whether or not he should participate in these activities or whether or not he should eat this food. He is an immature believer. He's unlearned. He's untaught. The mature believer, though, has come to a thoughtful conviction. He's thought through the issues and he's come to specific conclusions about what he's going to do in his life, not necessarily imposing that on anyone else.
 
The Pharisee has also come to thoughtful convictions but he's trying to impose these on everyone else. The weaker brother is uninformed. He's weak because he hasn't been taught. The mature believer understands Divine viewpoint but he's open to correction in case there's a change. That's one of the principles we'll see. When it comes to the so-called doubtful things, the areas not specifically addressed in Scripture, there aren't any absolutes. You may reach a conclusion that it's okay to drink an alcoholic beverage. That's the classic example in America.
 
That's one of the more interesting case studies in American culture. Back in the early 19th century this became a major issue in American evangelicalism. American evangelicalism was influenced by a post-millennial view of history and by the idea that people are not inherently bad. By the time you got into the Second Awakening they were minimizing the doctrine of original sin and total depravity. They believed men were no longer basically evil. They're basically good. If a man is basically good, then he's perfectible. If he's basically evil he's not perfectible. All you can hope for is something that's moral but he's still going to make mistakes.
 
Well, if human beings are not totally depraved and they're perfectible, then society's perfectible. So the only thing that keeps us from having an America that's truly utopic is that we have to get rid of the social sins. This idea where we're looking at social engineering has its roots in the self-righteousness that came out of, in many cases, a works-oriented gospel that was emphasized by some segments of the Second Great Awakening. Now there were several social evils that they believed needed to be addressed. If you could get these social evils addressed and changed then we could have a utopic society. This theology really took root more in the North than in the South. It was motivated by the arrogance that came out of the New Divinity theology and the Union theology that came out of the Second Great Awakening in New England specifically.
 
A lot of this was emphasized by the teaching of an evangelist at that time named Charles Finney. Finney didn't even believe in substitutionary atonement. Finney believed in the perfection of man. He was considered to be the Billy Graham of his day. He founded Oberlin College and Oberlin Seminary and it was the fountainhead for the whole abolitionist movement. They believed that the greatest cultural sin in America was slavery and we needed to get rid of it. They didn't really have a concern for the individual slave. They were very idealistic. The idea was to get rid of the social sin and they really didn't have practical working solutions for what would happen once you freed or liberated or emancipated all the slaves.
 
This became a cultural distinction between the North and the South. I'm talking broad generalizations here and that is that in the North there was that concern for idealism to perfect or bring in this utopia. They would often focus on this ideal and ignore the problems it would create for the individuals. So often it's been said in the North they loved the blacks as a group but individually they would treat them like dirt. In the South that was reversed. They would treat the slaves as individuals as a whole in less than honorable ways but then they would love the individual slave and treat them with respect because of the influence of Biblical Christianity. So arrogance was present in both the North and the South, manifesting itself in different ways.
 
What happened in America in a whole is that first you have the identification of the problem of slavery. They thought if they could get rid of slavery they could move on to the next problem, which is basically what happened. Reconstruction came along after the Civil War but the real arrogant radicals in the North were no longer concerned about blacks. They were moving on to the next issue. What was the next issue? It was temperance. The next issue was getting rid of alcohol. They even had places like Dodge City by the 1880's became completely dry. All of this led eventually to that massive and failed experiment of prohibition in the early 20th Century.
 
You also had the issue of women's rights which grew out of this same era. Then there were the emphasis on abolishing child labor laws. It's not that some of these things weren't evil but it was the motivation behind it culturally that if they could get rid of these things they could perfect and reform America and bring in a Utopic society. It was a right thing in many ways done a wrong way for wrong reasons and that's what led to a collapse.
 
So American Christians have always had this problem with alcohol. In the early 50's, not long after World War II, when you still had a dominant Christian and Biblical influence in this country Christianity Today, one of the major magazines for the evangelical world, conducted a survey among Christians. Close to 90% of all Christians believed it was sinful for a Christian to partake of alcoholic beverages. Thirty years later in the mid-1980's they decided to conduct the same survey again and the numbers completely reversed themselves. Almost the same percentage that had thought alcohol was a sin in 1950 thought that it was okay by the mid-1980. 90 to 92% by the mid-1980s thought it was okay for a Christian to partake of alcoholic beverages.
 
There are people who have problems with alcohol. Some folks have a problem that's physical. They have a reaction to alcohol that can make them extremely addicted to alcohol. That's a very small percentage. Other people just have a psychological addiction to alcohol. I went to with a friend to a church called The Believer's Chapel when I was in Dallas, Texas when I was first in seminary. I went there on a Sunday night. We had an argument on the way home because I had grape juice and he had wine. For several months we argued back and forth whether they served wine or grape juice until we found out that they had both in the tray. They had grape juice in the outer two rings and wine in the inner ring so people could choose one or the other. If you had a problem with alcohol, then you could take the grape juice. If you felt like you wanted to be like the New Testament church you could take wine. So they were making something available for everyone.
 
But you have a lot of Christians who would impose their view of alcohol on other Christians. They say. "You can't drink at all. You can't smoke. You can't go to movies. You can't watch certain television shows." So these people came to a thoughtful conviction but then they imposed it on everyone else. They weren't open to any correction. So we see that both the weaker brethren and the mature believer are oriented to grace. They recognize that whatever we do should be oriented to the Father. The legalist and the Pharisaical believer is works oriented. The weaker brother is easily influenced but the mature believer and the legalist Pharisee were not easily influenced. We'll see those characteristics as we go through the passage.
 
So you have on the one hand the strong mature believer who believes he can eat all things in contrast to the weaker brother who eats only vegetables. Then in Romans 14:3 we have the command, "Let him who eats…" This verb is a present active imperative, third person singular, which means to let him do something or let her do something. So it says, "Let not him who eats despise or reject with contempt the weaker brother." You're not to look at him and say, "You don't think you ought to eat that or drink that? You're just a fool." We're not to adopt that kind of judgmental attitude toward someone who isn't sure if they should participate in one activity or another.
 
Then in the next line it say, "Let not him who does not eat judge him who eats for God has received him." This is another application of Matthew 7 which says: "Judge not that you be not judged." We are not to condemn another person. It's not talking about evaluation. It's talking about a critical condemnation of someone else and the reason is given is because it says God has received him or accepted this person in fellowship in terms of the eternal fellowship which is part of the body of Christ so we should not be judgmental toward that person.
 
Which brings Paul to the point of raising the question, "Who then are you to judge another's servant?" We're all servants of the Lord. If I'm a servant and you're a servant, then it's not my place to judge you in terms of how you think you are best obeying the Lord in areas which are not specifically addressed in Scripture. Then he adds, "To his own master he stands or falls."  This is the principle that there are many areas in life that are not specifically addressed in Scripture. That's an important term. There are areas where we may have convictions. We may try to support them in some sense Biblically but it's not specifically stated in Scripture to do something or not to do something. We are to make a decision of what we think is best in terms of how we are serving the Lord as a servant of God. It's between each individual believer and the Lord and we need to let them make that decision.
 
Over the course of time we may change our views on things. We may be in different circumstances. Even within a particular day or week we may choose not to do something one day and do it the next day, depending on who is around. We may go out to lunch or dinner with someone and we know that they have a problem with alcohol or maybe we know they're diabetic and they have a problem with sugar so we're not going to order a dessert that might tempt them because that would cause them to have a problem. We're going to be considerate of the other person and understand that they have certain weaknesses. We're not going to exercise our freedom in an area that would be perfectly legitimate because we know it would be a problem for them.
 
The next day we may be out with someone else and we may have a couple of glasses or wine or beer because it's not an issue with that individual. In a lot of these areas there's no certain absolute. Maybe as a family you were trying to teach certain codes of conduct to your children so you may make a decision not to watch certain kinds of television, not to have cable in your home. Maybe you make a decision not to even have a television in your home and that may be the way you are going to teach certain values to your children. Then when they are in their teen-aged years in order to train them because you know it's not going to be long before they're going to leave the home and they're going to be exposed to all of these things that you may get a television and begin to teach them and to train them how to exercise discernment and judgment in terms of the entertainment that they watch or are exposed to. Different circumstances will call upon you to apply the Word in different ways. There's not an absolute right or wrong.
 
There are four basic principles or laws here that are identified in the Scripture. The first is the law of love. This is what overrules everything. It's a spiritual law based on consideration for others completely. In this situation it's love for immature believers. It's based on the idea that we are to love others as Christ has loved us in John 13:34-35. So just as we serve the Lord we are to be considerate of others and considerate of their views, their opinions, their ideas. If they are an untaught, immature believer then we need to be sensitive to that. There may be someone who is an immature believer that hasn't worked through the issue on something, like whether or not they're going to drink wine or alcohol and if they see you as a mature believer do it, then they're going to justify it and may end up abusing it. So we need to think through some of these issues.
 
I think we can go too far with that. You go out to a restaurant and you're going to have good Mexican food and you decide you want to have a really good Mogollon or Dos Equis with your Mexican food. You can't be worried about someone you hardly know who may just pass through the restaurant and see you sitting there drinking a beer. That may justify them going out on a bender and getting drunk for weeks at a time. That's not what it means to put a stumbling block in front of someone. Someone can look at any of us at any time in our life and use something we do possibly as a justification wrongly for their sin.
 
Putting a stumbling block in front of someone is something much more active. If I were to go out to dinner with someone and I know that they had a problem with alcohol and I ordered them a beer or if I'm going out to dinner with someone and I know they're trying to lose weight, I'm not going to order apple pie and ice cream for them for dessert without them knowing about it. I had that happen to me recently. You're not going to put something in front of them that's going to cause them to stumble. You're not going to knowingly do that.
 
Several years ago I used that example of a Mexican restaurant and a beer because I went out with Morris Proctor one day. We were doing a Logos seminar here. Mo and Cindy had flown in. He's a vegetarian so we went to a Mexican restaurant because they said they could find something to eat there. I ordered a beer with mine because I think nothing is better than a beer and Mexican food. Three or four months later word got back to me that he was actually using that as an illustration of exactly how Christians should handle these areas of doubtful things. One of his assistants is a guy who's been very much involved with this ministry for many, many years and so he told me, "Mo was so excited. He came back and told me that everybody sits there and they ask if you're going to be offended or bothered. They're so obsequious about it and lack so much confidence in what they're going to do. Robby just ordered a beer like he was ordering a glass of water and that's just how the body of Christ ought to function." I hadn't heard that perspective before but we need to be sensitive to others that are immature. I looked at Morris and from what I knew of him he was a mature believer. He's wasn't legalistic so I didn't think this wouldn't be a problem.
 
Now if I went out with someone else that I didn't know then I wouldn't have probably done that so I wouldn't create an issue when there really wasn't one. So that's how the law of love operates. Now the second law is the law of liberty. This is a spiritual law directed toward one's self that expresses the believer's freedom to glorify God. Galatians 5:1 says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." We are free from the Law. We are no longer under the dietary and other restrictions that were part of the Mosaic Law. There are no rules of conduct in the New Testament for what we can eat or what we can drink. Everything can be sanctified to the Lord according to Scripture. So we have the right to participate in any activity that is not specifically sinful and that does not violate any of the mandates, either the prohibitions or the positive commands of Scripture, and won't cause a spiritual failure in our own life. We have that freedom but we're not to use that freedom to the degree where it could cause a problem for another believer. The law of expediency then emphasizes consideration for the unbeliever. A believer may refrain from certain doubtful activities, not because they're sinful, but because they may mislead or offend an unbeliever and prevent him from recognizing the true issue of the gospel that Christ died for his sins.
 
Let's say I'm going to the home of an Orthodox Jew for dinner. I am going to refrain from exercising my freedom to eat whatever I want to so that I will not create an issue that would distract from the gospel. So we have to be careful. We don't want to create issues that distract from the truth.
 
Then the last law is the law of personal sacrifice which is the principle directed toward God that involves the abandonment of a completely legitimate function in life in order to more intensely serve the Lord in a specialized capacity. Paul talked about this using the illustration of a wife. "The other apostles all have wives," he said. He exercised his option to not marry so he could more intensely serve the Lord in his ministry, not that there was anything special about celibacy or remaining single but it just gave him the opportunity to serve the Lord to a greater degree. That was his choice.
 
There are these gray areas or these non-addressed areas where we may choose one thing but others may choose something else. If you're in Christian leadership sometimes you have to recognize that while others can do something that you can't. Maybe it's a completely legitimate function but it might cause you to weaken in other areas that lead you into sin. So you have to come to convictions in these areas in terms of your own circumstances and your own life.
 
Basically what we have to understand is that the Scripture teaches that the spiritual life doesn't operate in a vacuum. We are not autonomous. We are part of the body of Christ. The body of Christ is not just made up of a bunch of individuals who live their Christian life without it impacting or affecting other Christians. There are verses like 1 Corinthians 12:27 that we are "Christ's body and individually members of it."
 
Other passages talk about the fact that we are members of one another. So we have to recognize that we are part of the body of Christ so we can't fall a victim of this sort of individualistic idea that a lot of Americans fall prey to. We have a history and a culture that promotes rugged individualism. I stand or fall by my decisions and I'm going to make my life work based on my decisions and my efforts and I'm not dependent on anyone else. That's not the picture we have of the body of Christ.
 
We have a picture in Scripture of the body of Christ where there is interdependency. We are supposed to be a member in a local assembly and a local body. Now that's not possible today for some people. It used to be thirty or forty years ago that even if you didn't have a very strong Bible teaching church in your area there would be one that was acceptable. You could get additional teachings through tape recordings, things of that nature, and reading to enhance what you were learning. It would give you an opportunity to be a part of the body of Christ and to influence that body and to minister to that body.
We shouldn't just go to church because of what we're going to get. That's self-absorption. Never say, "I'm not going to go to that church because that pastor doesn't teach me anything." See, it's all about me, me, me. The pastor may be a relatively young believer. Maybe he doesn't know the Word that well. Maybe he comes out of a background where he wasn't challenged to go beyond the A-B-Cs in Bible teaching. Maybe if you were to get involved in that church, and I know of a couple of examples where this happened, you would have an opportunity to minister to people in that congregation. They were still listening to Bible teaching on line and it gave them an opportunity to be a vital part of the body of Christ and to have an impact on them spiritually.
 
Today we live in a world where apostasy in the church is reigning supreme. You can go to many large urban areas and not find an acceptable church. If you're in a somewhat semi-rural area you may really have problems. I remember when I was at Preston City someone e-mailed me on this and said, "Pastor, I live up here in Vermont in a small town. I have gone to every church in town and the best church around is the Congregational Church. The pastor there doesn't believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ but I've been going there because I feel I need to set an example for my children that we go to church." I told him not to go. You're compromising doctrine if you go to a heretical church. The principle is that there are some churches that may be very elementary and simple but they're right. You don't have to just hide at home and listen to a MP3 player or listen on line where you're divorced from every other Christian. So we need to be a part of a local body if at all possible.
 
Some Scriptures that emphasize this are Romans 12:10, 16; 13:8; 14:13; 15:14; Galatians 5:13; Ephesians 4:25; 4:32; 5:19; Colossians 3:16; 1 Thessalonians 4:18; 5:11; John 15:13. You see there's this emphasis on the body of Christ and this interdependency in the body of Christ so we don't live our spiritual life in isolation. We live it around other believers.
 
We need to be sensitive to who is a mature believer, who is not a mature believer and if there are any issues that exist that may cause a problem for other believers. This is the background. Next time we're going to continue Romans 14:5. Much of what we have here is fairly easy to understand. We need to just remember the basic issue is about loving one another and showing basic consideration for one another, then we can easily work our way through most of these problems.

Romans 151b-Essentials and Non-Essentials

Romans 14:3 NASB95
The one who eats is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him.
Romans 151b-Essentials and Non-Essentials
 
Let's open the Scripture and focus on the Word. Turn to . We're looking at dealing with the difference between how we handle the essentials and non-essentials in the Christian way of life. We started out with this last week. The issue is laid down in the first four verses where Paul commands us to accept and receive in fellowship the person who is weak in faith.
 
The word weak in faith indicates someone who is spiritually immature. We're not to get engaged in disputes and arguments and debates over these opinions. Some people have one opinion. Others have another opinion but it's not an opinion that is specifically stated in the Word of God. Sometimes this is expressed as "doubtful things" but it's not really doubtful things, it's talking about areas where there's nothing specifically stated from Scripture.
 
We see in this passage that there's a couple of different issues that show up. Part of it is about dietary issues just as there's a meat issue in . As I pointed out last time makes it clear that this is likely to be an issue between Jewish background Christians who were brought up trained in their tradition all their lives to follow the laws of KASHRUT, eating kosher, not eating TREIF which is the opposite of kosher. This would be very difficult for them if you had been living this way for thirty, forty, or fifty years of your life. You might feel very uncomfortable if that was drilled into you. You wouldn't want to go out and have bacon-wrapped jalapeno-stuffed shrimp. That might not fit with your conscience.
 
In Paul says, "I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself." He uses clean/unclean terminology which would indicate it's probably going back to the Mosaic Law where there's clean and unclean food. I also pointed out that as we go through this there are really three types of believers. The passage only addresses the weaker or immature believer and the stronger or the mature believer. The weaker believer has humility but he's uncertain about what's right and what's wrong in these areas. He's uninformed because he hasn't studied the Scriptures so he has false norms and standards in his conscience. He's grace oriented but he is easily influenced and swayed by the opinions of others because he hasn't had time to think through the issues himself.
 
In contrast to the weaker believer you have the stronger, mature believer who also has humility and is grace oriented. He has studied through his views and he has a well-thought out conviction of how he should live and what he should practice. He's basing his views on divine viewpoint but he's open to correction because he's characterized by humility. He's grace oriented but he's not easily influenced or swayed in a negative sense. He knows what he believes and he's not going to be easily swayed to one position one day and another position another day.
 
Then you have the third category not really mentioned here but you run into these people a lot. In fact what I discovered when I was young and I think this is an issue that concerns younger Christians rather than older Christians because they're faced with a lot of issues in life as to whether they're going to participate in certain things or not which are not mentioned in Scripture, as such. These are the legalists. These are the ones trying to impose their well-thought through convictions on others when it's not an area discussed in the Bible.
 
The legalist-Pharisee type tends to be arrogant. He has well-thought-out convictions but the problem is he's imposing them on others. He thinks that if he believes it's the right thing for him, it ought to be the right thing for everyone else. So he's not open to correction. He is works-oriented because these examples we have is of people still thinking that there is spiritual value to following the Mosaic Law. They think it accrues to their spiritual growth when it doesn't so they're works-oriented. They, like the mature believer, are not easily influenced. They have their convictions and they're not going to be swayed but they quickly take offense.
 
That last category is important. We live in a hypersensitive world today. A result of hypersensitivity is politically correct speech. You see this with all of these various minority groups, whether it's senior citizens or handicapped, which is not the correct term. I used to tell wheelchair jokes a lot but people don't understand it now that my mother's not around. She loved handicap jokes. I told you the story last time that I was born in an iron lung. I came home one day and I mentioned a "Little Johnny" joke, which you may remember. I was probably 12 years old and I said, "Did you hear what happened? Johnny came in to his mother and said he's unplugged his dad's iron lung." His mother said, "Well, what did he say?" I answered with a breathless gasp. My mother almost fell out of her wheelchair she was laughing so hard.
 
When you grow up in an environment like that and no one's hypersensitive and no one's running around screaming about their handicap rights and everything, you have a different attitude about this. I've learned that people don't know all that and they think we're really insensitive. I'm probably more aware of these issues than most people are. We used to go on family vacations back in the 50's when no one had a restroom door that was wider than 26" and wheelchairs were 28". That was always a major problem. So those kinds of things people never think about.
 
Anyway, the Pharisee takes offense at everything. You say something innocently and he's going to take offense and have a chip on his shoulder. This is what has happened in our culture. It's dominated by self-righteousness. It happens on both the left and the right side of the spectrum but we hear it a lot especially from minority groups. People just can't relax anymore about anything.
 
You go back into the 20s or 30s and people had fun little terms for different ethnic groups. People who were part of those ethnic groups used those terms for themselves. In World War II the Brits were the "limeys", the French were the "frogs", all of this sort of thing, and no one even took offense at those things. Now if anyone even says those things everyone gets all uptight, and someone's going to accuse someone else of hate speech, and on and on. That's a result of a hypersensitivity and it's a result of someone who doesn't have a relaxed mental attitude and someone who's not grace oriented.
 
This is why you often had these kinds of conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees because Jesus would do something that was completely permissible by the Mosaic Law but it wasn't permitted by the Pharisaical tradition and so they would get all upset and accuse Jesus of being a blasphemer because they're operating on a false set of values. So when we run into people who are building their whole vocabulary in life on the basis of politically correct speech and the hypersensitivity of certain people you know right away you're dealing with someone who is arrogant and who is a legalist and has a pharisaical mentality.
 
Now that's not the issue here but a lot of time and in my experience when I was a young man there were always certain believers who would tell me I couldn't do that. They were imposing their beliefs on me. It wasn't that they would stumble if I did something like that because they were mature believers. Pharisees don't stumble. So often what I observed in life is that the people who are more concerned about someone participating in one of these doubtful activities is that the people were more worried about offending the mature, arrogant Pharisees, not the immature brother who might stumble.
 
And so Paul recognizes that for the immature believer who is untaught that this is legitimate. One person believes he can eat all things but the person who is weak is eating only vegetables. Now this isn't a vegetarian issue. The reason this would happen in this culture was if an observant Jew was invited to the home of a Gentile, he wasn't sure if the meat was the product of kosher killing, according to the Mosaic Law or what the circumstances would be around anything else. The only thing he felt he was safe to eat were the vegetables. So he would only eat vegetables if he went to a Gentile house. That helps explain what Paul is talking about.
 
The issue that we see introduced in the first four verses is that because of arrogance and not understanding or applying the law of love these believers in immaturity were judging one another over these non-essentials. And by judging it's not just making a statement like, "Well, they just don't understand the issue yet". No, they were making spiritual decisions about a person that only God can make as to whether or not that person was saved, and whether or not that person was walking with the Lord. They might say, "Well, I saw that Christian go to the movie theater and it was an "R" rated movie so they must not be a Christian. That was the kind of judgmental decision that was being made.
 
makes that clear, "Let not him who eats despise the one who does not eat or let not him who not eat judge him who eats, for God has received him." In other words God has accepted both because the issue here is really between the individual believer and the Lord. This is for non-essentials. If you do something that is a violation of a command of Scripture then you're out of fellowship and that's also a matter between you and the Lord. But if you are a believer and you engage in judging others then you're acting like you are God. Now this is really important.
 
As we talk about this context the issue here has to do with judgment. When we get a little further on we're going to see in that Paul says, "Why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ." See, we're acting like we're the judge at the judgment seat of Christ and the background is what's going to happen at the judgment seat of Christ. We are going to be evaluated on our decisions and how we apply the Word even in the area of so-called doubtful things.
 
says, "Who are you to judge another's servant? To his own master he stands or falls." We are all servants of God and my master is God and his master is God. He's not answerable to me. I'm not answerable to the other believer. Paul goes on to say in , "Indeed he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand." What he means by being "able to stand" is to stand as a believer at the judgment seat of Christ receiving rewards.
 
There are some other ways the word stand is used aside from physical standing. One of them is that we are to stand firm in the faith. At first I thought that was the idea here that God is the One who makes us stand firm in the faith. That's possible but when you look at the overall context several times the reference is to the judgment seat of Christ so I think the meaning here is that we will stand in approval at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
 
I drew up this diagram of a triangle. At the top we have God and the Trinity. The THETA in the middle represents the Greek word "THEOS" for God. On the left you have the strong or mature believer. On the right you have the weak or immature believer. The arrows go in both directions between each individual believer and God and the arrow that goes from the strong believer to the weak believer has a red X through it because we're not answerable to one another. God is the one who judges us and we are answerable only to Him. That's the point in verse 4.
 
Our standing is indicated by how well we apply the four laws, which I went over last week. The first is the law of love which is mandated by the Lord Jesus Christ in as the ultimate indicator as to whether or not you're a disciple. It doesn't refer to whether or not you're a believer but whether you're a growing, maturing disciple. It's a spiritual law based on consideration for others.
 
A lot of Christianity reflects what I was always taught were good manners. But good manners and good etiquette were actually an outgrowth of a culture that was grounded in the ethics of the Scripture and the idea of showing consideration for others. When you are taught good manners and that's grilled into you as a child, then that is to help you even if you're not a Christian to restrain the baser instincts of your sin nature. In our culture based on the Word of God that we're to show proper consideration for others including ignorant, untaught, immature Christians. We're not to look down upon them and we're not to judge them. So we are to let this law of love govern our behavior.
 
We also have the Law of Liberty. We recognize that we have true liberty in Christ. In areas not addressed in Scripture that are not sinful then we have the freedom to participate or not to participate (). Then there's the law of expediency, which indicates that we may remove certain doubtful things from our life just because they might cause a problem with other believers. So rather than creating a situation that might mislead or offend others we may just decide not to participate in that activity at all just because of where we live and the people we're associated with might have a problem with it so I'm just going to recognize that I'll willingly limit myself in those areas so I don't create any problems.
 
If you're in ministry that may be something that you do as part of personal sacrifice. When I went to Dallas Seminary they had at that time a code of conduct and it was sort of an oddly worded statement. It was introduced by Dr. Walvoord. It wasn't there when Dr. Chafer was there. It stated that they believed that a Christian leader should not participate in any alcohol or tobacco products so we expect our students to abide by this. That was kind of an odd little phrase. Everyone had to sign that, and I just believed when I was there that I just wasn't going to be drinking or smoking because that was their policy. This is a basic policy that was set up.
 
The interesting thing I've learned over the years is that Dr. Walvoord was a prohibitionist because his mother was a temperance marcher. And Dr. Hoehner who was head of the New Testament Studies Department used to give him a hard time. He would always say under his breath as he walked by Dr. Walvoord, "Jesus turned water into wine and it was alcoholic." Walvoord preached a message from the pulpit that it was not wine, that it was just grape juice. He'd been brought up in this home where his mother was a temperance marcher and this was just drilled into him.
 
The way I know it wasn't that way when Dr. Chafer was president was that a somewhat well-known radio preacher later on in life by the name of J. Vernon McGee from Waxahachie, Texas had gone to Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. They weren't dispensational and they were uptight and legalistic. So he came home after his first year and he had heard about this new seminary. This was about 1932-1933 and he wanted to make sure that they weren't legalistic. He went up there. I think they just had one building at that time which was later called Davidson Hall and he decided to test their grace orientation. He brought with him the largest, stinkiest cigar he could find and when he went in to apply for seminary he lit that cigar up and walked into the admissions office smoking that "stogie". They didn't kick him out and they accepted him and the rest is history. J. Vernon McGee was quite a character.
 
There are different scenarios that happen over time that people come up with to try to establish these taboos. I've got a list here of taboos that we can have a little fun with. These taboos are prevalent in some parts of the country but not in other parts of the country. One is attending movies. In some part of the country you just never went into a movie. If you went to Bob Jones or Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music or a number of other Christian schools you couldn't watch TV. There might be one TV on the floor but the hall monitor determined which shows could be watched or couldn't be watched.
 
You couldn't work for pay on Sunday. Many Christians think of Sunday as the Sabbath. When I was in my first church there was a wonderful elderly lady in her 70s who'd just retired from the mission field at that time. She'd graduated from Moody Bible Institute. She believed you just didn't work on Sunday. No one was to work on Sunday because that was a violation of God's laws. But every Sunday after church she and a group went to Wyatt's Cafeteria for lunch. I asked her one time somewhat jokingly but I wanted to just kind of needle her a little bit, "You don't really think people should work on Sunday?" "No, not at all. It's a sin," she answered. "Well, what about all those poor workers at Wyatt Cafeteria? You expect them to be there working and providing you a meal." She got a look on her face and I don't think she ever went back to Wyatt's Cafeteria again with a clean conscience. I felt terrible.
 
Other taboos are fishing on Sunday, drinking wine in moderation or even cooking with wine, or attending the theater for live drama. Participating in sports or participating in contact sports or eating food in the church building. We're all just going to go to hell for that. Using any musical instruments in worship. There are some denominations that are that way because they didn't have pianos in the Bible so you can't play a piano in church. They didn't have organs in the Bible so you can't play an organ in church, not to mention a guitar.
 
Kissing. If you're not married, you can't kiss. Long hair on men. That was big in the late 60s. Taking tranquilizers. Wearing two piece swimsuits, or bikinis or something like that. Mixed swimming. They used to call it mixed bathing. I met a guy when I went to seminary who had been a youth pastor in an independent Baptist Church somewhere in the South like Mississippi or Alabama. He told me this story that I just couldn't believe. I had spent a lot of time in college and in high school going on ski trips with Camp Peniel. I don't think they do those any more but we did that a lot. Of course if you go skiing they have those bib overalls and really tight stretch ski pants. But what they did at this church is because they believed women had to dress like women so they had to wear skirts or dresses. So when this church took their youth group skiing, the girls had to wear a dress over their bib overalls, over their ski wear. This was in 1977, just amazing that they still had that belief.
 
How about life insurance? Some believed that you'd go to hell if you bought life insurance. Or smoked. If you smoke and buy life insurance you're sure to go to hell. Women wearing pants or pants suits to church. Using a Bible other than a King James Version. Or raising tobacco, but if you go to certain parts of the Bible Belt and you smoked you were in carnality. But if you smoked in North Carolina or Virginia you were contributing to the economy and you were a mature believer. See, many of these things are culturally determined. Using guitars in worship. Women wearing makeup. Men wearing beards. Women having short hair. Dancing. Those are just some of the things on the list.
 
These are the kind of taboos. They're used to control people in legalistic denominations. The problem has always been for Christians going back to the 1st century, what's to keep you in line after you're saved? What's to keep you from just living a licentious lifestyle? So denominations would come up with this kind of rules in order to keep everyone in line. That always flows from a core of self-righteousness and arrogance and it creates a false criterion for spirituality. You're defining a person's spiritual status by overt behavior.
 
This is part of the problem in lordship salvation because ultimately what they're trying to do is quantify fruit. When the Scripture says the believer should produce fruit they want to quantify it and say they saw someone does "x, y, or z", so how could they be a Christian. I think nearly everyone in this room has probably said something close to that at one point or another. Yet if we believe in grace we know a Christian can do anything and they may continue to do it after they're saved because they haven't grown or matured in the Lord at all. Legalists create a rigid network of these taboos or systems of right or wrong that are based on personal opinion, background, tradition, or prejudice. It's just a real problem and creates these false or pseudo systems of spirituality. Instead of teaching the Bible so people can learn to make wise decisions about these things, they just go to this sort of a crib sheet. If an activity's on their crib sheet then they think they can't do it instead of thinking like a mature person and being able to work their way through the issues in different situations and different circumstances. The issue here is going to be knowledge.
 
In which is an important parallel passage, Paul says, "Not all men have this knowledge but some being accustomed to the idol before now eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol and their conscience being weak is defiled." We'll get into the issue of conscience in a minute but this is a situation that here you have someone who may be doing something that in and of itself isn't sinful but because of the impact it has on their conscience it becomes sinful.
 
Now that's a hard thing for us. We want to think of everything as absolutes but there are some things that are relative to your conscience. So the weaker brother is weak because he's weak in faith according to and 23. Here it brings up this issue of conscience again. "He who doubts is condemned if he eats because he does not eat from faith for whatever is not from faith is sin." In other words if you were coming from a Jewish background and you've been trained that you can't eat pork. Now when you're fifty years old and you sit down and you're going to have a bacon sandwich there's something in your conscience that hasn't really been retrained yet and you feel a little guilty.
 
What Paul is saying is that you're wrong and you shouldn't eat it if your conscience hasn't changed yet because what you're doing is you're setting a precedent for violating your conscience. We'll get into this a little bit more. So he's weak in faith because he hasn't understood that "whatever is not from faith is sin." Second, the weaker brother's weak because he's weak in knowledge. Paul says, "Therefore concerning the eating of things offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one." Eating something that's been offered to an idol is irrelevant but if that violates your conscience, then you've got a problem.
 
, "However there is not in everyone that knowledge, for some, with consciousness of the idol, until now eat it as a thing offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled." So it may mean nothing but because it may mean something to them it defiles their conscience. , "For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol's temple, will not the conscience of him who is weak be emboldened to eat those things offered to idols?" So the weak brother caves in and eats at the idol temple restaurant but because he doesn't know you know, for him it's a sin, because he thinks it does mean something. He's still attributing something to the idol.
 
, "And because of your knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died? But when you thus sin against the brethren and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ." Now that is a hard verse and it's not one of the popular verses that you hear people talk about very often. But it's true. If there is a weaker brother, not a Pharisee or a legalist but someone who's weak and you're in a position where they see you doing something, such as a religious activity in an idolatrous temple, then because they haven't been informed in terms of their concept of right and wrong this leads them to stumble. So that creates an insensitive situation.
 
Paul is talking about stumbling here with the phrase "wound their weaker conscience". So now the weaker brother thinks it's okay but he's thinking it's okay for all the wrong reasons. So that takes us back to basic principles such as "A right thing done in a right way is right. But a right thing done in a wrong way is wrong, and a wrong thing done in a wrong thing is wrong." So what happens here is the stronger brother is doing a right thing in a right way but because the weaker brother hasn't learned the truth which redefines his norms and standards in his conscience he's going to do the right thing but it's for the wrong reasons so that makes it wrong.
 
Let's discuss conscience here. As unbelievers we all learn a variety of norms and standards which may or may not be compatible with Scripture. Let's say you don't become a believer until you're 30 years of age and you grow up in a libertine atmosphere with pure relativistic morals and ethics which makes you think that anything goes. You have a certain idea of what's right or wrong. When you get saved, these norms and standards are still ingrained in your conscience because you haven't studied the Word to tell you what's right or wrong. Your norms and standards haven't been changed.
 
Ten minutes or six months after you're saved you're still operating on a set of standards that haven't been transformed by God's Word yet. Since you're living in the 21st century and go to your average generic evangelical church you may be a believer for twenty years before you learn that some things you think are right are really wrong because you're not taught very much. The presence of absolutes in the soul is an indicator of the existence of God. The argument that Paul uses in isn't that the absolutes in your soul are right or wrong but the very fact that you believe there's something wrong and something right means that you have a sense of absolutes and that's an indicator that there are absolutes in the universe.
 
If you think lying is wonderful such as the film we showed many years ago on the Peace Child and the book on the Peace Child written by Don Richardson. He and his family were with New Tribes Mission and they went to Papua, New Guinea and they worked with a group of people called the Sawi. The greatest thing that one Sawi could do to another was to deceive them, to set up an elaborate deception and walk others through that deception and if it worked, they were successful and that was the highest thing they could do. So lying for them was a really good thing. Well, lying was an absolute in their culture and because it was an absolute, it indicated there was an absolute sovereign God who created absolutes, even though their absolutes were wrong. The fact that they had absolutes indicated the existence of God.
 
Even unbelievers have absolutes and Paul uses that in to argue for the existence of God. A weak conscience is one that has norms and standards that are not derived from the Bible. So the weak brother has a conscience that isn't correct but it's still a conscience. Therefore when someone with a weak conscience discovers a rationalization to go against his conscience without Biblical support, such as thinking lying is good, once he's taught from the Scripture he's going to change that to think that lying is wrong.
 
Lying is bad but until he learns that, he still thinks lying is good. Then if he violates that in his conscience Paul is saying that's wrong. He says it sets a precedent for rationalizing against your conscience. That's hard for some people to get their thinking around. If you believe something is wrong and you create a practice of violating that and going against it and breaking that norm in your soul then what you've done is teaching yourself how to rationalize against your conscience. That's why the Scripture says that's a sin because if you become a believer it will be easier for you to violate your conscience when it's right because you've already taught yourself how to rationalize against an absolute, even if that absolute was wrong. Now you've set up a pattern where you can deceive yourself.
 
[A question is asked: "In the area of gray areas, how can we help weaker people to grow?" Answer: You do help him grow by teaching him. Like I said this is a situation that really has more in common in our culture if someone was an alcoholic and you knew they had a problem with alcohol and you go out to dinner and you order a bottle of wine for the table. That's creating a certain set of circumstances that might make it easy for them to stumble. In both of these scenarios in the Bible they're different from our culture. One is the meat sacrifice in Corinth, which had a religious dimension to it. And the issue to the dietary laws and the observance of days and feast times had a religious dimension in the Mosaic Law. That list of all the things that have become taboos in American Christianity most of those things are not done in a religious context. Take dancing. Going to a movie. Watching television. These are not things that have religious connotations to them. Buying life insurance. Playing pool. Playing cards. Gambling. These are not things that have religious connotations attached to them whereas the examples of these opinions we see in Scripture are all areas that are deeply involved and enmeshed with a religious system.]
Anyway, next time we'll continue this and summarize this a little bit as we go on in the chapter.

Romans 152b-Dos and Don'ts

Romans 14:13 NASB95
Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way.
Romans 152b-Dos and Don'ts
 
We are in and we are studying the issue of what's usually or often referred to as "doubtful things" as it is translated in . Actually the Greek there is really talking there about things that relate to individual opinions. This means you're talking about issues in life that are not specifically defined or addressed by the Word of God. There are many different things, as I pointed out last time, many different areas of life, usually cultural applications that have been deemed sinful by different people, different religious groups, different pastors, or different seminaries.
 
Usually we think of things related to the use of alcohol, the use of tobacco and we also see people who say you can't play cards and be a Christian, you can't go to movies and be a Christian, you can't watch TV and be a Christian and in some circles you can't do anything including watch sports on a Sunday afternoon. They say that's violating what they think is the Sabbath. There are all kinds of different taboos that have been developed over the years in terms of Christianity. Christians don't do these things, they say.
 
I ran into this in one of the most extreme ways in my experience in the very first church I ever candidated at after I was out of seminary. It was a Bible church in Opelousas, Louisiana. If you know anything about Louisiana you know that Opelousas is right in the heart of Cajun country. It was quite an interesting experience.
 
The parsonage looked like it had been cobbled together from leftover parts from different building projects. The master bedroom had four different patterns of wallpaper, all of which clashed with the floral, flocked mirrored type wallpaper that was in the master bathroom that you could see through the door. Carpet differed from room to room. It looked like all the cabinetry was made from leftovers from building mobile homes, high quality construction material. So that was very interesting but that wasn't the most interesting part.
 
I went in to interview with the pulpit committee. There were five men. If you remember "Amos Moses" sung by Jerry Reed, there was a character in the song who had his left arm gone clean up to the elbow. He sat right in front of me. His son was also a deacon and had to translate every question into Cajun French and every answer into Cajun French, which kind of slowed the process down. But that was very interesting.
 
The first question was for me to explain my philosophy of ministry. The second question was whether or not I would preach against smoking, drinking, and dancing. We never got to the third question. There was an hour of debate over why in the world they would want me to preach against smoking, drinking, and dancing. The bottom line was, and you often find this among some Christians, that they viewed their congregation as almost exclusively converts from the Roman Catholic Church. Their experience with the Roman Catholic Church is that going to church was just something you did on Sunday. The rest of the week it was just pure antinomianism. All you had to do was go in and say a few "Hail Mary's" and "Our Fathers" and you were good to go. That meant there was no sense of any kind of accountability or moral absolutes within the functional operation of Catholic Christianity in southern Louisiana so they had reached a conclusion that if you were going to have a testimony as Biblical Christians you couldn't do anything that the Catholics did. That meant the pastor had to preach against smoking, dancing, and drinking continuously.
 
I didn't quite come from that background. We didn't quite agree on those things, that smoking, dancing, and drinking were inherently sinful, so therein we discovered a conflict. It was a most unusual thing. I preached the next morning on Sunday morning and walked back as is typical in traditional churches that the pastor goes to the back door and shakes hands with everyone as they leave. Everybody left. I've preached in a lot of churches in a lot of places and have never except that one church, not been invited somewhere for lunch. When I turned around I saw I was the only one left. I had no idea where to go to eat. It was a very clannish place and there are places like that, still today.
 
There are Christian groups like that who have set up a rigorous code of conduct. It may be that the things they have in their code of conduct are not necessarily wrong. The problem is it's not a Biblical code of conduct. They have come to convictions that are not necessarily revealed or mandated in Scripture. Then, this is where it's wrong. It's not wrong to come to convictions in the area of these doubtful things. What's wrong is to come to convictions in your life in the area of doubtful things and then want to impose that on everyone else because God has not spoken with regard to these areas. We have to understand that there's room for disagreement among believers about these things because God has not specifically addressed them in His Word. They are neither moral nor immoral. They are not spiritual absolutes.
 
Paul brings us here to a discussion. He focuses on two categories of Christians. The weaker brother or immature believer and the stronger or mature believer. As I pointed out last week, there's actually a third category, not present in this particular passage but we clearly see evidence of this third category in the gospels. This category is the legalist or the Pharisee. The issue here is how are to live or how are we to deal with these doubtful things when it affects a weaker brother, not a legalist. See we run into people like I did in that church in Opelousas, Louisiana and their problem wasn't that they were weaker but that they were legalists. They wanted to impose their do's and don'ts on everyone else.
 
The Bible clearly has certain do's and don'ts and as we come to the second half of chapter 14 there are a number of do's and don'ts that the apostle Paul lists. Just by way of review let's talk about the three categories of believers: the weaker brother, the mature brother, and the legalist. The weaker brother and the mature brother are both characterized by humility. They seek to put themselves under the authority of God's Word. That's the essence of authority but the legalist is arrogant. He is imposing his moral standard as a grid upon the Word of God.
 
The immature believer is uncertain about what he should participate in. He asks, "Is this good or bad?" He's heard some people say one thing and another say something else but he hasn't had time to think it through for himself and some of these areas may involve a violation of his own conscience. He may have been brought up a certain way. The context here indicates that the division between these two groups in the church in Rome was between those who were of a Jewish background who had norms and standards of the Mosaic Laws and the dietary laws and the observance of Shabbat and other feast days taught them and inculcated in them as they grew up. Now they're surrounded by a Gentile culture. They've become believers in Jesus as Messiah. When they go to a Gentile home suddenly they're confronted with food that they would not have eaten before. Someone is wanting to serve them a BLT, or maybe some fried shrimp or fried oysters. That doesn't fit their Levitical diet so this is a problem for them.
 
If their conscience says it's wrong, how are they to handle this? Often they might be swayed into going ahead and eating. In one sense that wouldn't be wrong but it's a violation of their conscience so it causes them to stumble in their Christian life. So the weaker brother's uncertain because he hasn't had time to study things through. The mature believer has studied the Word. He has thoughtful convictions but he holds them with humility whereas the legalist has thoughtfully come to his conclusions but he's holding them in arrogance and seeking to impose them on others.
 
The weaker brother is uninformed. He hasn't come to his position based on knowledge of the Word. The mature believer has studied the Word of God. He's oriented to divine viewpoint and he's open to correction, if he's wrong. That's because of his humility. But the legalist is not open to correction. One of the men that I was deeply influenced by early in my Christian life when I was a teenage who really got me focused on the road to understanding the issue of creation and evolution was a graduate of Bob Jones. We have at least one member of the congregation who's a graduate of Bob Jones who's not legalistic but Bob Jones is sort of the paradigm of the legalistic Christian university. They have all manners of rules and regulations and he had brought this with him. He wouldn't let his kids watch TV or go to movies and finally, as he spent about 15 years in a grace-oriented environment, he actually broke down and allowed his wife to take him to see "The Sound of Music". He thought that maybe not all movies are bad. His humility finally began to develop.
 
Weaker brothers are grace oriented as are mature believer but a legalist is not. He's works-oriented. He's more concerned about a rigid code of conduct than truly understanding the Word of God and not comfortable with the fact that there may be some things you can do under certain circumstances but not under other circumstances. They want everything spelled out. The weaker brother is easily influenced and this may cause some problems for him. The mature believer and the legalist are not easily influenced. The difference is that the legalist is one to easily take offense. It's not that someone has intended to offend him but that he has chosen to be offended by something that was done in innocence. We'll come back and talk about that before we're done tonight.
 
There are five principles that basically summarize the teaching in the first twelve verses of chapter 14. First of all we have to distinguish between absolute commands in Scripture and areas where there is no specific command. We have to distinguish between these areas of absolutes and areas of freedom. The Scripture is very clear. , "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." The apostle Paul clearly understood his freedom but he also understood that under certain circumstances he was not to exercise his freedom. So it's a self-limitation. Someone has once said that at times we have to say others can do something but I can't because of my position as a leader or of because of someone else that may be in the area, someone that I may wrongly influence that are not ready to handle areas of freedom. This was the problem that Paul deals with in both and the first part of and in .
 
Second, each believer must investigate and think through his own convictions in areas of freedom. If the Bible doesn't specifically address something then it's between each believer and the Lord as to whether or not they are going to enjoy freedom or participate in certain activities or not. Some of these are culturally determined. They are cultural taboos. They are things that may be accepted in some groups and not accepted in another. Part of this is just good manners and being considerate of other people's beliefs even though they may be wrong or you may think they're wrong. Each one of us must think through and investigate these areas.
 
In Paul says, "One person esteems one day above another. Another esteems every day alike." The issue there emphasizes that this is probably a distinction between Jews and Gentiles in the Roman congregation. There were Jews who were still observing the traditional, historical feast days. They thought that was important. As we studied in Acts, we saw that Paul still held a vow. We saw other things they did that Jewish believers did, not because they felt it had a spiritual significance but because this was part of their historical and cultural background. It was part of their upbringing as Jews. They observed Shabbat. They observed Passover. They observed Pentecost. They observed the feast days because that was part of their historical background and it honored the Old Testament, not because it had spiritual value. Some believed that they would continue to follow the dietary laws because that's what they were comfortable with, not because it's going to make them more spiritual.
 
On the other hand, I've talked to at least two or three Jews who were raised Orthodox and always ate Kosher and as soon as they became believers, the first thing they did was go have a ham and cheese sandwich. They wanted to exercise that freedom. We have to think through those convictions and come to our own convictions.
 
Where it gets into a problem is when we start imposing that on others. We do have liberty. says, "But take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak." Paul isn't saying you don't have the liberty to do "x, y or z". He's saying there needs to be maturity involved as to where and when it is exercised so that it doesn't become a problem for a weak, immature believer. We have rights. Paul says in and following, "Do we not have a right to eat and drink, do we have no right to take along a believing wife…" That was causing a problem. Paul was single and when he would go to these churches and teach he would try to support himself through his tent making endeavor and start a local business to support himself. But the other apostles would bring along their wives and their families and expect the local church to support them. Paul was saying that neither is right or wrong. This is a gray area. This is a doubtful thing. This is a matter of opinion.
 
Just as today you have some pastors and some ministries who charge for tapes. There's nothing in the Bible that says you can't charge for the teaching of the Word of God in order to have the financial resources to support the ministry. There have been many pastors and many ministries that choose that path. There's nothing in the Bible that prohibits it. You also have others who say they're not going to charge for anything but trust the Lord to provide and individual believers to support the ministry. These are individual decisions.
 
Paul made the same kind of decision. He chose to remain single and not to become a financial burden to the congregation but he doesn't say the other apostles are wrong because they brought their families along and expect the church to support them. Both, he said, are legitimate. It's just a matter of personal choice. So that's what is teaching. In and 29, Paul says, "All things are lawful for me but not all things are helpful." So just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it and even if we should do something it doesn't mean we should always exercise that freedom. Point number 3 is that in areas of freedom we must allow others the freedom to hold different convictions as firmly as you hold to your convictions and be comfortable with that and not impose your views on them or their conclusion because this is an area of personal opinion, not an area of direct revelation.
 
Fourth, we must exercise our freedom in love for other believers, being willing at times to restrict legitimate behavior when it might cause a spiritual problem for an immature believer. I want you to notice that it's not because it might cause a spiritual problem for a legalistic believer. Jesus never modified his behavior because the Pharisees would take offense at it. What we see is that Paul is saying to modify your behavior if it will cause an immature believer to have a problem, not a legalistic believer. A legalistic believer is not an immature believer. There's clearly a distinction in Scripture. This is definitely the part of the nature of what it means to love one another and to serve one another through our own decisions. We capitalize on our freedom when we can, and we limit it when necessary. That term "when necessary" is very important.
 
Fifth, our pattern is Christ. On the one hand, Christ demonstrates perfect love but on the other hand, He doesn't restrict behavior based on the legalistic and wrong standards of others. What we saw last time is that there are four things that characterize the weak believer. He's weak in faith, he doesn't understand the Word, but here it has to do not only with its content but he's not sure what to believe. He may think for a minute that it's okay to eat non-kosher or TREIF food but then his conscience bothers him. So he's weak in faith. He's weak in knowledge because he hasn't been under the teaching of the Word long enough to truly understand what the new principles are for the believer in this new age.
 
This is what Paul pointed out in and 7, "Therefore concerning the eating of things offered to idol, we know that an idol is nothing in the world." But someone who's brought up in idolatry may still have the norms and standards in their conscience informed by thinking there's really something there. The superstition and the religion and the mysticism is so bred into him by his training that when he would go to the situations in 1 Corinthians which is going to the temple and eat at the restaurant there which was basically serving meat that had been sacrificed to idols, it would bother him. For him, he can't separate the two in his thinking so by going and participating in the restaurant there and eating that, it pulls him back into thinking as he did in his former life as an idolater. So that causes him to stumble. He needs to come to a firm conviction but he doesn't have that knowledge yet so he falters he stumbles in his spiritual growth.
 
A weaker brother is also weak in conscience. This seems to be a difficult thing for us to understand. The conscience is the location of the norms and standards in the soul. So you have an area of your soul that tells you what is right and what is wrong. When you do something that is wrong your conscience sends up a flare to warn you that you are on the verge of being out of bounds. The conscience functions like a traffic cop. Now if the traffic cop is wrong, it's wrong because the norms and standards are wrong. Even if the traffic cop is wrong and you disobey the traffic cop you've still broken the law because you've violated the respect for the cop.
 
What happens is that if you set up in your soul a pattern of violating the authority of your conscience, even if you or I might not think it's a Biblical standard, you're setting a precedent of rationalization and disrespect for your conscience. That, in turn, will cause problems down the road in your spiritual life because you start training yourself that it's okay to tell it to go away and not to bother you. Whether that standard is right or wrong what Paul is saying is that it's wrong to violate your conscience. This is a foundation for what he is saying here. , "When you thus sin against the brethren and wound their weak conscience you sin against Christ."
 
It's really easy for people to get impatient with weaker brethren who haven't quite figured it out yet but that's the nature of being a child and an immature believer. You haven't figured it out yet and sometimes it takes time. So in terms of defining weakness we would say the weaker brother is a believer in Christ who because of his weakness in faith, knowledge, conscience, and will can be easily influenced to violate his conscience by the example of a differing mature believer. He's going to go along with something, eating meat that's been sacrificed to idols or not observing the holy days, the Shabbat or whatever, and he doesn't have a conviction for that in his own soul so he's violating his own conscience which puts the mature believer in the position of causing spiritual failure and promoting spiritual failure in the life of the weaker brother.
 
In contrast, the stronger brother is a believer who understands his freedom in Christ. He understands the principles of grace. He understands the doctrines related to the Christian life in the area of essentials and non-essentials so he exercises his liberty with a peaceful conscience without attempting to impose his views on others and is willing to limit his freedom, when necessary, for the benefit of the weaker believer. That term "when necessary" is so important because you can be with one group one day and you know that if you're with that group and even though you'd like to have a glass of wine, you're not going to have a glass of wine. If they don't think Christians should play cards or they haven't figured things out yet about any number of areas, you're not going to make an issue out of that because it would just be a distraction. Instead, you're going to willingly limit your freedom in that particular area.
 
I had a situation occur some years ago when I was involved with a ministry with some black pastors out in southern California. I was invited out to dinner with two or three pastors and Wayne House was with me. We both ordered a glass of wine and one of those pastors, a black Baptist pastor, really got his panties in a wad over that. Not there, but later on the rumors came back to me how offended he was. See, that's the legalist. This guy wasn't stumbling. We weren't going to cause him to drink a glass of wine or to do something that violated his conscience but he was imposing his views upon us. If we had been aware of his beliefs then we would not have done something to create that problem. That's how the stronger or mature believer acts. He's willing to limit his freedom for the benefit of others.
 
When we talk about the conscience it's the place where the norms and standards are located in the soul. As unbelievers we fill up our conscience with a lot of standards which may not be Biblical. Those standards don't change just because you trust in Christ. You have to have your conscience educated on the basis of Scripture. Many norms and standards which are ingrained in the conscience of an unbeliever are Biblically false, but that conscience is still his traffic cop.
 
The fact that an unbeliever has these absolutes in his soul is used by Paul to indicate the existence of God in . An unbeliever knows there are absolutes, even though his absolutes are wrong the fact that he knows there are absolute rights and absolute wrongs is evidence of a creator who has made him in God's image. Part of His imageness is that he has these standards of right and wrong.
 
Now a weak conscience is one that has norms and standards that aren't derived from the Bible but the person who has a weak conscience hasn't quite figured out how to redirect his conscience and how to re-educate his norms and standards. Therefore when someone with a weak conscience finds a rationalization which goes against his conscience without Biblical support, he then sets a precedent for violating correct norms later on. If you're violating your conscience even if it's wrong you set a precedent for violating it later on.
 
In it says, "So then each of us shall give an account of himself to God." The bottom line is that we're accountable to God, not to each other in these areas so we're not to be spiritual policemen running around imposing our convictions in these areas of doubtful things or these areas of personal opinion on each other. We have to learn what is clearly stated from Scripture and what is not.
 
In the next section, , Paul lists various dos and don'ts. I thought that the way I would address this rather than going to technically address it verse by verse I would just summarize this by going through the various things we're supposed to do and the things we're not supposed to do. Actually I'm going to go through the things we're not supposed to do first. First of all he says we're not to put a stumbling block in the path of a growing but weaker believer. We're not to do something that would cause him to violate his conscience because of a lack of understanding or a lack of knowledge on his part. We need to develop a sensitivity there.
 
In we read, "Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather resolve this, not to put a stumbling block or a cause to fall in our brother's way." The problem here was that out of arrogance the stronger believers were judging the weaker believers and saying, "They just won't grow up." They were not understanding the fact that maturity isn't a rapid process. It takes time to learn and to study so they were judging one another. The weaker brothers were sometimes judging the mature believers.
 
When I finish this I want to talk about what it means to put a stumbling block in another's way. It is to create a trap they fall into that causes them to injure themselves as it were spiritually. I always liked Dr. Ryrie's comment that when you talk about something like this that in order to cause someone to stumble they have to be moving. There are a lot of Christians who aren't moving. They just want to be critical and tell other believers what they can and can't do. So this is clearly dealing with a young immature believer who is trying to go forward.
 
Second, we're not to destroy them with food. says, "Yet if your brother is grieved [upset] because of your food, you are no longer walking in love." If you are eating what he thinks you shouldn't be eating then you're creating a problem. You go out to eat and you know this is someone who is weak and doesn't understand the issues and they don't believe you should eat pork and you order a BLT then you're just creating a problem. You're not being sensitive to the situation. continues: "Do not destroy with your food the one for whom Christ died." This is a brother in Christ. You're to help them, not hinder them.
 
Third, don't let your good thing become evil. See, enjoying your liberty isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing, Paul says, but if you're doing it in a certain context where it hurts another believer it's not a good thing. It's not someone who goes out to eat and they have a glass of wine and then there's someone who watches them around the corner and says, "Oh, I saw so-and-so having a glass of wine. I'm going to go have some." Then they go out and they get drunk. This is not that kind of situation. It's talking about the fact that you're both sitting down together and you are personally engaged with the weaker brother where you are. You might even go so far as to order a glass of wine for them knowing that would be a problem or they have certain restrictions on their diet for what they believe are spiritual reasons and you want to go ahead and force the issue and so you order them a ham sandwich. That's how you create that stumbling block. It's not that someone just passes by and observes you enjoying your freedom. You can go too far with some of these examples. Paul says in , "Therefore do not let your good be spoken of as evil but be willing to limit it."
 
Fourth, don't tear down God's work. God is at work building and maturing the immature believer and you shouldn't create a problem in the process. , "Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. " No matter how wonderful you may think it is to eat lobster and shrimp and oysters and to eat pork and pork sausage and ham sandwiches and bacon, it's not worth it to cause a problem in someone else's spiritual life. As Paul said in verse 17 that eating and drinking are not relevant to the kingdom of God. We'll have to come back and look at that before we're done.
 
Fifth, he says not to give offense. , "Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are pure, but it is evil for the man who eats with offense." So if it offends him and he violates his conscience you have aided and abetted him in his sin.
 
Sixth, don't cause a brother to stumble. , "It's good neither to eat meat nor drink wine nor do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is made weak." We have to maintain that distinction.
 
Seventh, don't do things just to please yourself without regard for others. , "We then who are strong ought to bear with the scruples of the weak, and not to please ourselves." That word "bear" means to carry something. I think it comes across a little better if we were to say, "We who are strong ought to put up with the scruples of the weak and not just to please ourselves." Too often mature believers might just get impatient with the immature believer.
 
In terms of the dos, what are we supposed to do? First of all we're to walk according to love. , "Yet if your brother is grieved because of your food, you are no longer walking in love." We're to make sure that what we're doing is best for the person we are with at the time. Second, we are to serve Christ. "For he who serves Christ in these things is acceptable to God and approved by men." So we are to serve Christ and that means loving one another and being sensitive to their spiritual condition.
 
Third, we're to pursue peace. , "Therefore let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another." This is clearly stated in several other passages in the Scriptures that we are to pursue peace with others. So the question we should ask is, "Does this action of mine edify and is it going to maintain peace or harmony in our relationship?"
 
Fourth, we're to build up one another. Again this concept is that we're to focus on edifying one and building one another up. Fifth, Paul says we're to put up with the weaknesses of the weak. We're to bear those weaknesses. That's a limitation for now but as they grow and mature, it won't be in the future. Sixth, we're to please our neighbor for his good. Paul says in , "Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, leading to edification." So that becomes the standards. We are to help them along the road to maturity and not create roadblocks or speed bumps.
 
Seventh, we are to edify the weaker brother. We can do this through conversation. We can do this through encouraging them to read through certain material or to listen to certain lessons so they can come to convictions on their own and grow to maturity.
 
So having said all that, let's go back and look at a couple of passages that seem to be problems for some people. is one of those passages that comes along in the New Testament every now and then and someone says, "Oh, you teach that the kingdom of God is future. That it's not today. Well, it seems like this verse is saying that the kingdom of God is present because it's a present tense verb." Paul is writing here that the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
 
There are a couple of things we need to understand anytime we're talking about the kingdom of God. First of all we need to understand that a kingdom is characterized by three things. A kingdom requires a king. The king needs to be present. A kingdom requires a domain and a kingdom requires a people. Now what kingdom are we talking about when we're talking about the kingdom of God?
 
When we go back to the Old Testament we realize there was the prophecy from the prophets that God would bring a kingdom upon the earth in the future that would be centered around Israel. The king of that kingdom was to be the Messiah who was a human descendant of David and that this Messiah would rule over a domain in the land that God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He never changes those terms. The king will rule from the throne of David in Jerusalem over the descendants of Jews, specifically Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All through the Old Testament until you get to the end in Malachi this is the understanding of the kingdom.
 
When the New Testament begins in the Gospels, John the Baptist shows up on the scene and says: "Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand." He never redefines the term kingdom. It is what they were taught to expect in the Old Testament, and this is what is announced by John the Baptist. When Jesus begins His ministry He says the same thing, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." When he sent his disciples out, he sent them not to the Gentiles but to the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the message that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. All of these are assuming the same thing for the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God; those terms are used interchangeably. It was expected to be what the Old Testament predicted, a literal geophysical kingdom on the earth.
 
That kingdom does not exist until Jesus returns from heaven to the earth to establish His rule on the earth. This is a fundamental concept so when we come to a verse like this that may be a little difficult to understand for some. We have to understand that under the laws of interpretation and hermeneutics, the terminology must be defined in an obscure passage by the clear passages that are governed by all the other passages in the New Testament. So the kingdom of God must be a reference to this same geo-political kingdom promised and prophesied in the Old Testament that is going to be established.
 
It won't be established until Jesus returns at the end of the Tribulational period to establish His kingdom on the earth. This will only take place at the end of the Tribulation. In amillennialism Jesus is now serving as king over a spiritual kingdom. Covenant theology redefines the literal kingdom promised to the Jews in the New Testament as a spiritual kingdom because the Jews rejected Jesus, God rejected them. This is part of replacement theology. They believe that God rejects Israel and replaces them with the  so that the literal promises of a literal land and a literal king and a literal throne in the Old Testament are no longer literal. They are now spiritual and Jesus is now sitting on the spiritual throne of David in the heavens and He is now ruling over a spiritual kingdom, which they say is the , the body of Christ today.
 
In amillennialism, which means no millennium, no literal thousand-year rule on the earth, they say there's no future kingdom. We're in it right now. It is a spiritual kingdom now because the Jews rejected Jesus but to get to their beliefs you have to quit interpreting the Bible on a literal, historical, grammatical basis. You have to interpret the Bible according to a spiritual allegorical sense of the Scripture.
 
The second point we have to recognize is that Jesus is not now reigning as king. He is not referred to as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords until He receives the kingdom. He is not that now. He hasn't been given the kingdom yet. Let's see how that is shown from Scripture. In that's the first time he's called King of kings and Lord of lords. This is right before the battle of Armageddon as He is coming to establish His kingdom. is in the context of His coming at the time of the battle of Armageddon when He comes to establish His kingship.
 
We understand when He receives His kingdom based on . Jesus as the Son of Man who is being described in this passage, one of two figures described here in Daniel, the Ancient of Days, which is God the Father, and the Son of Man. The Ancient of Days gives the kingdom to the Son of Man. Daniel is looking at these visions in where he sees the vision of the future kingdoms of man, the kingdom of Babylon, the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians, the Greek kingdom, and the Roman kingdom. Then all of the kingdoms of man are destroyed by the Son of Man, who comes to establish His kingdom on the earth.
 
As Daniel concludes what he saw in his vision he says in , "I was watching in the night visions and behold, one like the Son of Man [emphasizing the humanity of the Messiah] coming with the clouds of heaven. He came to the Ancient of Days and they brought Him near before Him." This is the Son of Man being brought before the throne of the Ancient of Days. Key word at the beginning of , "Then, at that time, to Him [the Son of Man] was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting kingdom that shall not pass away and His kingdom the one which shall not be destroyed."
 
Jesus right now is not receiving the kingdom. He is sitting at the right hand of God the Father. In John writes what Jesus says, "To Him who overcomes, [that is the believer who perseveres in the Christian life to maturity], I will grant to sit with me on my throne [that's in the future] as I also overcame [in the 1st Advent] and sat down with My Father on His throne". The only person sitting on a throne in Revelation until you get to is the Father. All through this period, up until the Father gives the Son the kingdom, the Son is sitting on the Father's throne, which is that last line in the verse.
 
What Jesus is saying is that in the future when He comes in His kingdom He will grant church age believers the right to sit with Him on His throne which is in the future just as in the past when He ascended to Heaven He sat on the Father's throne on His right hand. So this is talking about a future event saying that Jesus is not now sitting on a throne that is His. He's sitting on the Father's throne.
 
This is all future so when Paul writes this he's telling us as believers not to get all caught up in debates over what you need to eat and what you drink and what days of the week you should observe, if any. He's saying that's not an issue in relation to the kingdom of God. What is an issue in relation to our future destiny in the kingdom of God is our development of experiential righteousness in terms of spiritual maturity, which is also related to peace in terms of peace within the body of Christ. As he states in this context we are to pursue the things which make for peace, which edify one another and joy in the Holy Spirit. When we are walking in fellowship we experience the joy and the happiness of God, the Holy Spirit.
 
Therefore, verse 17 doesn't have anything to do with a present form of the kingdom or with a spiritual part of the kingdom. I really emphasize this because there are some folks in this congregation and some folks related to you who have been going to one or two formerly doctrinally sound churches who have been hearing this kind of preterism and "already not yet" view of the kingdom and these distortions that come out ultimately of a replacement form of theology. There have been wolves in sheep's clothing who have taken over the pulpits in some of these churches and caused problems. Now they're not directly affecting us as a congregation, except for the fact that we have family members who are very concerned about their parents or children who have been involved in those congregations and haven't had the doctrinal discernment to realize what has happened to them, and they haven't left those congregations.
 
In Paul says, "It's good neither to eat meat or drink wine nor do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is made weak." The idea here is that stumble is the word PROSKOPTO, which means to strike something or to hit someone with something in order to cause them to fall down. Then the word offended is the word SKANDALIZO, the noun meaning to set a trap for someone. It's sometimes translated to become offended. It's used both actively and passively but we see it in the passive sense in relation to the Pharisees who were offended when they heard Jesus.
 
Jesus didn't offend them. Jesus taught the truth. But they didn't like it and reacted to it and took offense. That's what I was pointing out last week. We live in a culture today in which all kinds of subgroups are taking offense when no offense is intended. Now I totally recognize that there are people in this culture who are racists and have all kind of problems and are offensive. But in many cases what you have is minority groups who take offense when no offense is intended. We've lost our sense of humor. We've lost our sense of lightness and being able to joke with each other.
 
When I used to work with a lot of black pastors and black groups they used to joke but I couldn't joke back with them. They would call me various names I won't say, but it was all meant to be done in fun. But if I had said those same things to them they would have taken offense. It was clearly a one-way road. It was quite interesting but I'm not going to say some of the things they used to call me. We had a lot of fun with it but I was always careful to realize it had to be a one-way road. If I reversed on that they would take offense. That's a problem we have today culturally. We take offense instead of just treating one another with grace and love.
 
In , Paul says, "Do you have faith? Have it to yourself before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves." So you need to just go along with your conscience. If you violate your conscience it's still going to cause you problems when you ignore the traffic cop as it were. You're still going to get ticketed in your soul, as it were. "But the one who doubts is condemned if he eats." He's not condemned because he's doing something wrong by eating. He's condemned because by eating he's violating a norm or standard, even though it's not wrong, in his soul.
 
This is where Paul says, "For whatever is not from faith is sin." He goes on to say in , "We, then, who are strong or mature ought to put up with the scruples of the weak and not to please ourselves." Don't be self-absorbed in the process. The word there for "bearing with" is the word BAPTAZO and I think the best idea there is that you put up with it because they're immature. Just like you put up with the silliness of the children because you know they'll grow up and learn better. You know the weak are powerless. This is the word ADUNATOS. They're unable to do something. They're powerless because they're immature.
 
Then in Paul says, "Let each of us please his neighbor for his good leading to his edification." We're not to focus on us. It's not self-absorption. We're to focus on the maturity and spiritual growth of others. Why? Because our model is Christ. Christ did not come to this earth to do what gave Him pleasure. Did He have joy? Did He have pleasure? Sure, but that wasn't His focal point. Then there's a quote from which says, "The reproaches of those who reproach you fell on Me."  This is taken from a psalm and is applied to Jesus who is taking the reproaches of God upon Himself. He was reviled. He was hated. He was abused but He didn't seek His own personal pleasure over his service to God. In the same way we're not supposed to seek our personal pleasure over serving one another and serving Christ.
 
We have the conclusion of this section in , "For whatever things were written before were written for our learning that we through the patience and comfort of the Scripture might have hope." So when Paul wrote this he was talking about the Old Testament. So when we finish Romans in the next month we're going to go back to the Old Testament. We're going to go back to 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, a wonderful period in the Old Testament which has a lot to teach us.
 
The first part of 1 Samuel deals with the judges and their moral relativism, which is very applicable to our period today. They had a false solution to that. They wanted a monarchy on their terms and this also has application for us. They sought a political solution without a spiritual reality. Then of course 1 Samuel ends with God providing the true solution through the type of the Messiah who was David. According to Paul, there's a lot for us as church age believers to learn from a study of the Old Testament. Paul concludes in , "Now may the God of patience and comfort…" Notice how he emphasizes these two qualities of God. Patience. As mature believers we have to be patient with some of the wrongheaded notions of immature believers. He emphasizes the patience of God. Just as God has been patient with us we need to be patient with others. "Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be likeminded toward one another according to Christ Jesus." The emphasis here is on unity based on the truth of Scripture. Christ is the standard. Not us. Not our opinions no matter how well grounded they might be. This is so there would be unity in the body of Christ and there would no division over non-essentials.
 
Paul clearly teaches elsewhere that there should be divisions over essentials but where they're non-essentials, we need to set those aside as not being relevant and focus on serving the Lord and glorifying the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Next time we'll come back and go into the remaining part of . We're very close to the end because most of is Paul giving various greetings to people in Rome. We are very close to finishing a study of Romans after almost four years. Probably by October we will be in 1 Samuel.

Romans 153b-Accepting All

Romans 15:7 NASB95
Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God.
Romans 153b-Accepting All
 
We are in Romans, chapter 15. This is the last section in , ends and concludes the section that we began several weeks ago on the weaker brother in . It also concludes the section in Romans that began with so it might behoove us a little bit to go back and look at the introduction so that when we get to , we'll be starting the conclusion to the epistle.
 
is the introduction. to is the main body of the epistle. The concluding section began in verse 1 of chapter 12 where Paul challenges them. This is an exhortation, which is a personal challenge to obedience in a number of areas. He begins in by saying, "I beseech you, therefore, brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice…" I noted at the time that your whole life is to a sacrifice to the purpose and the plan of God for your life. This is something that we all grow into as we mature as believers. It's supposed to be a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable or rational service.
 
What this means is that we're not to be conformed to the world [verse 2] but transformed by the renewing of our mind. Mind first, then action. Mind before emotion; mind before action. We don't just change what we do. We need to change the way we think. One distinction between Christianity and all world religions is that Christianity focuses on an internal change first.
 
In the New Testament it focuses on an internal change that is empowered by God the Holy Spirit. This is something that has never before happened in human history, and that is that every single believer has God the Holy Spirit indwelling them and filling them so they can walk by means to the Spirit throughout their life. It is God the Holy Spirit who is the energizing, empowerment for the church age believer.
 
Then this comes as He renovates our thinking, overhauls our thinking according to the Word of God for a purpose "that we may prove something." Our lives are to demonstrate something. It's like an experiment. You go into the chemistry lab and you perform an experiment and one purpose of that is to demonstrate a known truth. So we are to demonstrate in our lives the reality and the value of living according to the will of God. So that is our purpose to prove that the will of God is "good and acceptable and perfect."
 
Now as we look through this section, there's an emphasis of this whole aspect of the life of the believer within the body of Christ and how we are to serve one another. This comes under the primary command of loving one another. That is repeated several times in chapter 12. Then it's applied in chapter 13 in relation to government. Then it is applied again in terms of dealing with the weaker brother.
 
So chapter 14 began with the command to "receive one who is weak." This is actually the immature believer who is weak in the faith. We're not to get involved in disputes over debatable or insignificant or unimportant issues, which are things that are not directly addressed in Scripture. We may think and come to certain convictions on our own that some behavior or some activities do not conform to the will of God. That's our opinion because it's not specifically stated in the Word of God. So the issue here is that there are those believers who are imposing their convictions on other believers.
 
The command that Paul gave there was for the more mature believer was to accept into fellowship those who were immature or weak in the faith and who might hold to other convictions that were not important or part of revelation. The more mature believers were to accept them and have this unity. In the conclusion of this section Paul goes back to this same idea. In he says, "Therefore receive one another just as Christ also received us to the glory of God. Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision for the truth of God to confirm the promises made to the fathers. And that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy as it is written, 'For this reason I will confess to you among the Gentiles and sing to Your name.' And again he says, 'Rejoice O Gentiles with His people.' And again, 'Praise the Lord all you Gentiles. Laud Him all you peoples.' And again Isaiah says, 'There shall be a root of Jesse and He who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, in Him the Gentiles shall hope.' Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."
 
See this ends with this benediction in verse 13 focusing on the fact we cannot do this on our own. The church age is not based on a principle of simple morality. Anyone can be moral. There are many pagan religions that emphasize morality. There are Christian cults that emphasize morality. There are religions like Islam that has a law that purportedly emphasizes morality. Judaism emphasizes the Law of Moses as a standard of morality.
 
But that's not spirituality according to the New Testament. Spirituality is based upon our walk by means of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality is based on grace and not based on works. So we start this final section [verse 7] with Paul starting off with the particle DIO, which draws a conclusion from that which has gone before. He says, "Therefore receive one another…" He uses the word "receive" here twice. He says we are to receive one another first and the pattern for that, the basis for that, is Jesus Christ. "Just as or in the same way as Christ also received us to the glory of God." So we are to receive one another the same way Christ receives us.
 
Now when we look at this word receive it takes us right back to which say, "Receive one who is weak in the faith…" That's the same word, same command. In down through 15:6 the focus was on the mature believer accepting and receiving into fellowship the immature believer. Now Paul expands that. He steps it up a notch and he says we are all to receive one another. In context he's not just talking about you and me. He's not just talking about the mature believer and the younger believer. When he develops this, starting in verses 8 and 9, he's talking about Jew and Gentile.
 
Again, this reinforces the idea that the issue at stake in is that the weaker brother was referring to those from a Jewish background who were still following the Mosaic Law. Not necessarily as a way of spirituality because if they thought it was a way of spirituality, Paul would say they were wrong. That's what he did in Galatians. He said they were wrong, that the Mosaic Law is not a way of spirituality. It's not a way of salvation. He made that exceptionally clear in some very strong language in Galatians.
 
Here he's talking about the weaker brother as the person who was worried about eating food that was clean, concerned about observing certain days. If his motivation was that made them more spiritual, Paul would have said they were wrong. They're following those because they think it is still significant and important because this was what was drilled into their background when they were children. This is their comfort zone within their orthodox Jewish background. They still believe it's important to observe the dietary laws but not for spiritual reason but for other reasons. If they were spiritual reasons Paul would have come down on them hard. They're still thinking this is right for other reasons and they're trying to impose that on others.
 
Paul moves from this problem that is apparently occurring between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the Roman church and he's coming to this conclusion that they are to receive one another. We could paraphrase this verse as, "Therefore receive one another into Christian fellowship." The verb PROSLAMBANO has that idea of accepting someone into fellowship, into your social environment, making them part of coming to church with you and be very accepting of one another. So we are to accept them just as Christ also received us into permanent fellowship.
 
Fellowship is used a couple of times in the New Testament in terms of our permanent union with Christ. That is a permanent fellowship. Most of the times we use the term fellowship in terms of relative fellowship describing our rapport with God. The word is actually used both ways in the Scripture but primarily in 1 John, it is used of that on-going rapport where John talks about the fact that we are to have fellowship with one another for our fellowship is with God. So there's both a horizontal fellowship with one another and a vertical fellowship with God. That vertical fellowship with God is the basis for our horizontal fellowship with one another.
 
It's interesting that in John that the primary basis for breaking fellowship in 1 John isn't that you've committed a personal sin. Most of us think that's the primary way that we break fellowship with God. I love it when I can say something and watch those of you who've been around for a long time and your face just sort of screws up and you're asking, "What in the world is he talking about?" In 1 John, John is more concerned about doctrine. If you hold a wrong doctrine you're out of fellowship. His primary thing isn't relationship.
 
Americans emphasize relationship over other things more than other cultures have. That's just your cultural background showing through. In 1 John, John is really concerned first and foremost about right doctrine. It's not that he's not talking about the other. That's clearly there. Wrong doctrine means you're out of fellowship. We rarely hear that emphasized. If you have a heretical view of the person and work of Jesus Christ or a heretical view of God or what Christ did on the cross in terms of substitutionary atonement then you are out of fellowship. As long as you maintain those heretical views you're out of fellowship with God because right fellowship is based on right doctrine. It's also based on walking by the Spirit. But if we're holding the wrong doctrine, consciously believing heretical doctrine, then that excludes that of fellowship.
 
So Paul says we're to receive one another in Christian fellowship, just as Christ also received us into permanent fellowship. Now Christ accepting us into permanent fellowship is based on our faith in Christ. At the instant we trust in Him God imputes to us perfect righteousness. When we have His perfect righteousness then God looks at us, not on the basis of who we are or what we've done, not at all the petty little sins we've committed but He looks at the perfect righteousness of Christ. That perfect righteousness of Christ covers all the nasty little sins in our lives and the fact that we're born spiritually dead and God the Father declares us to be just. It's not because of anything we've done but it's because we possess the righteousness of Christ. At that instant we're accepted into the perfect fellowship with the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
 
Now ask a question here. When this happens upon whose character is this based? When Christ receives us into permanent fellowship upon whose character is that based? It's based on the character of God. It's not based on anything related to us. It's based on Christ's fellowship and the character of God. Therefore when Paul makes this statement that we're to accept one another into fellowship in the body of Christ, that's not based on the character of the people we're accepting into fellowship. It's not based on what they've done. It's not based on what they haven't done. It's not based on their failures in life. It's based on the fact that we need to accept them because they are already accepted by God. If God says they're righteous and they're accepted, who are we to say, "Well you have to clean up a bunch of stuff before I can accept you?"
 
Someone else can look at our lives and could say, "You've got all these failures so I'm not going to accept you." I think there's a difference between accepting someone into Christian fellowship and accepting someone as your BFF (Your best friend forever). I thought I'd just throw that off in case you weren't paying attention. Someone you want to accept as your friend has to meet other criterion as well. I'm talking about a person who is more intimate with you than someone else.
 
All of us have circles of intimacy. We have those people we spend a lot of time with and we get to know well. We are much freer with them and we share things, private things that we may not share with other people. That's part of discrimination in the good sense. We all have different degrees of intimacy with people. No one can be intimate with everyone at the same level. I don't even think it's wise to try to be intimate with everyone at the same level because not everyone is necessarily trustworthy in that sense so we have different degrees of closeness and intimacy with different people.
 
In terms of accepting someone in the body of Christ then we're not to exclude them on the basis of certain sins or certain kinds of behavior. Christ has accepted them so they are acceptable. Now this may apply to some of you and not to others. I've observed people who come from rather large families, whether they have 4, 5, or 6 siblings plus their parents and aunts and uncles and lots of people. But even among families in relatively good harmony there's not the same degree of intimacy between siblings. I know some families where one or two of the siblings may be incredibly close and they're not so close to maybe one or two of the other siblings but they all have a family devotion and loyalty to one another. That's sort of the pattern we should see in the body of Christ.
 
I'm a little bit hesitant to use as analogies good patterns of human families because the family is such a wreck in the United States. A lot of people have never really experienced a healthy family with two parents and siblings and anything close to stability. They're born into a family with no father or mother or the parents are irresponsible and the fallenness of this world has just impacted their ability to understand family analogies that we have in Scripture. Nevertheless the Bible uses these kinds of analogies. So we're to accept one another into this permanent fellowship.
 
We know that prior to salvation none of us were very lovely. We were all rather obnoxious. We go back just a few chapters in Romans and we're described as ungodly, sinners, and enemies. Christ died for us. He didn't die for you because you were such a wonderful person. You were so bright and brilliant and had such good ideas, were so successful. He didn't die for you because He knew you would end up being a really good Christian. He died for you as an obnoxious sinner in violation of God's righteousness. This reminds us when we're dealing with other people we have to deal with them in grace.
 
Grace is the foundation for love. If you don't understand grace you don't love someone. I'm somewhat surprised in some marriages that they manage to survive because neither person understands a thing about grace. Then they don't understand a lot of other things too and they don't know how to communicate with each other. Somehow they just have a partnership that manages to work but it has nothing to do with the kind of marriage that Scripture talks about where there's a level of intimacy and fellowship that goes beyond just traveling down the same road together in the same general direction.
 
Sadly, a lot of marriages are like two people in separate cars speeding down I-10 parallel to each other headed for San Antonio but there's not a lot of interaction between the two. There's not a lot of interaction between them because they're in two separate vehicles isolated from each other. What Scripture portrays is two people who are going to some destination together. They're both in the same car. So we are to be working together and that's the application of fellowship toward one another. The pattern is Christ.
 
This concept of grace toward one another is something that has played a very large role in this last part of Romans. We've all studied the many, many passages in the New Testament that talk about our responsibilities to one another. We're to teach one another. We're to admonish one another. We're to serve one another. All of these are part of what it means to be in the body of Christ. In the immediate context of we see this. In at the very beginning of this section Paul says, "So we being many are one body in Christ." I pointed this out several times.
 
This is somewhat difficult for a lot of American Christians to understand because we have such an emphasis on individualism, rugged individualism. Everyone does their own thing as opposed to being part of a team. If you have a background in team sports or you were in the military environment where you worked as a team, you'll have a better perception of these things. The Scripture says we are members of one another. We're not just living our spiritual life in isolation and autonomy.
 
While we recognize the importance of privacy and recognizing other people's privacy you can push privacy to the point where there's no one another. The Bible really emphasizes that we are to be a part of one another's life. That's our ontological spiritual reality. There's a good word for you. This is who we are in Christ. We are members, co-dependent, and we have this inter-dependency within the body of Christ. We are members of one another.
 
Because of that in Paul says, "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love." This isn't just loving one another in a sense of saying "I don't really know you very well but I'm just going to be kind and polite to you and as gracious to you as I possibly can even though I don't really know you." That a sense of impersonal love which we've talked about. This is talking about more of a personal dimension to that love for one another. "In honor, giving preference to one another." 
 
The foundation for that in Scripture is that whoever we are with as a human being is worthy of honor and respect, not because of who they are or what they do but because they are created in the image and likeness of God. That's the foundation for the whole doctrine for the value of human life. It doesn't matter how despicable, obnoxious, dirty they are. It doesn't matter how ignorant, wrongheaded or clouded by religious activism or activities a person is, we are to honor their life because they are created in the image or likeness of God.
 
It doesn't matter what kind of a religious extremist they are. Even if they're a member of ISIS, if they're attacking the United States, we need to kill them as quickly and efficiently as possible to the glory of God and out of love. That's how you deal with loving your enemy in some contexts. But in other contexts where there's not a combat situation we need to deal with people like that out of love and respect because is how the Lord Jesus Christ did.
 
It's really interesting when we go through Matthew on Sunday mornings to watch how the Lord deals with the Pharisees because they're an obnoxious, wrong-headed group. Jesus deals with them very sternly and politely. He doesn't back down. He doesn't let them set the agenda but he doesn't lose control. He's not impatient. He's not insulting to them personally. He identifies them as a group as a brood of vipers, which is an idiom for the spawn of serpents. That takes it right back to the Garden of Eden. He's honest but he's not being personally insulting or personally hostile in that sense.
 
He's being accurate and describing the truth. That is described as speaking the truth in love but it's got to be done without a self-absorbed basis for the rest of us. Jesus did it. He didn't have a sin nature. I have trouble with that because my sin nature gets in the way. says we are to be of the same mind toward one another. That means we're to exercise humility and grace orientation towards one another.
 
says, "Owe no one anything except to love one another." We looked at that idiom for owing no one anything and we saw that's not a financial term. It's not talking about financial debt. Sin in rabbinical thought was a debt against God. That's basically saying not to sin against each other, just love one another. That's the focal point for "He who loves has fulfilled the Law."
 
We come to our passage in where Paul says, "Wherefore, receive one another just as Christ received us." As we think about having the same mind toward one another and loving one another, this really takes us back to the previous two verses, which I covered rather briefly at the end of the lesson. This is a benediction at the end of the section in through 15:5 where Paul is pronouncing a blessing, "Now may the God of patience and comfort…" Both of these are emphasized because when you're dealing with someone who is an immature believer just as when you're dealing with an immature child who is out of line you need patience and the ability to encourage them. That's the word comfort there. "May the God of patience and comfort [encouragement] grant you to be like-minded toward one another."
 
This doesn't mean we're going to agree on these debatable areas but we're going to agree to disagree and not make issues out of non-essentials and focus just on the essentials that are a part of Scripture. It's hard enough just to focus on just the essentials that are a part of Scripture and what God has specifically told us to do and not to do without introducing a lot of secondary issues into those commands that aren't really part of Scripture.
 
Paul says, "Also may the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another." This is the real basis of unity. Unity is grounded in our relationship to God. There's a lot of talk about unity in Christianity that is completely fraudulent. People look out and say, "Well, there are so many denominations." There's a reason why there are so many denominations. It's not necessarily a good reason. In some cases it is. The reason you have a lot of denominations in Christianity is because of people who are self-absorbed and have let their thinking dominate their minds in terms of doctrinal things or the way in which they've handled their authority in a local church.
 
For roughly 1500 years or a little less there was only one denomination, basically. There were all kinds of problems within that denomination. There were groups and subgroups and all kinds of sects in what became known as Roman Catholicism. There was a lot of division. In fact, if you can break down within Roman Catholicism from roughly 600 to 1500 and you can identify almost as many different subsets of Roman Catholics as you later developed among Protestants. It's just that they didn't all separate out into autonomous groups. That had to do with how the church was united with the state. Once you separated out it was viewed by the political leaders as an act of treason as well as a religious act.
 
When Martin Luther led the Protestant reformation in 1517 it was at a time when political leaders were flexing their muscles and breaking out from the domination by the Roman Catholic Church. So it was the right time for these kinds of splits to take place. When Luther started by nailing his 95 theses onto the church in Wittenberg he was not intending to leave the Roman Catholic Church. His intent was to reform the Roman Catholic Church. He wanted to have a debate about it but the powers that be said they didn't want to talk about it. They intended to do things the way they wanted to because they were so corrupt. That was one of the most corrupt periods of the Roman Catholic Church. They just didn't intend to pay attention to the authority of Scripture. They were forced to separate.
 
You had the original separation of Lutherans. That was pretty much confined to Germany and areas in Scandinavia where Lutheran missionaries went. Then you had the development of Calvinism, the followers of John Calvin, in French speaking Switzerland and France. They also had a heavy influence among a lot of British clergy in what became known as the Anglican Church. Then later on you had the development of the Anabaptist movement, a movement that means to be baptized again. Everyone was being baptized as an infant. That was a part of their introduction into citizenship as well as into the church. The Anabaptists came along and said that had no spiritual value because baptism is supposed to be a statement about your personal faith in Christ as Savior. These are your basic groups that split out.
 
Because you still had this orientation and uniting of church and state in Germany, France, and England where even today the king or the queen of England is the head of the Anglican Church, you still had these state religions. You had German Lutheranism and Swedish Lutheranism and you had Dutch Reformed and French Reformed and Scottish Reformed and all these different things.
 
Then in the United States after the American War for Independence there was no state identification with the denominations, they splintered into all kinds of different ways. It could be as trivial as this person looked cross-eyed, that person didn't read his Bible the same way another person did, and they fragmented into different groups. But you still had your major denominations. You had one Presbyterian Church. You had some Cumberland Presbyterians and a few others. You had basically one Baptist denomination with a couple of smaller ones. You had these subgroups, the freewill Baptists and a few others. You had the development of the Methodist Church, which was a break off from the Anglican Church starting in the late 1700s.
 
You had all these different groups but then they split again at the time of the Civil War. You had Northern Baptists, Southern Baptists, Northern and Southern Presbyterians, Northern Church of Christ and Southern Church of Christ so everything just multiplied more and more and more. Then with the introduction of 19th century liberalism your northern denominations tended to go liberal and reject the authority of Scripture faster than your southern groups.
 
That led into what became known as the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. This really hit the north hardest at first. These denominations began to fragment at different times and in different ways but they fragmented over doctrine. You would have a certain number of Christians, for example in the Northern Baptist denomination as they officially went liberal, who would become sort of fed up with where they were going at different times. One group would leave in one decade and another group of conservatives would leave 10 years later and then another group of conservatives would leave ten years later still.
 
That gave rise to various smaller denominations such as GARB, General Assembly of Regular Baptists, and Conservative Baptists. What happened was the Bible-believing fundamentalist and conservatives always lost. They lost property, church buildings, seminaries, Bible colleges, missionary organizations. They had to start all over again in the early 20th century. Out of that came the development of a lot of conservative fundamentalist seminaries.
 
The reason they were called fundamentalists is that they believed in the fundamentals of the faith, which meant they believed in the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, miracles such as the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ, and all of these doctrines were very important. They were published in a book called The Fundamentals of the Faith. If you believed in those things, such as a literal second coming of Christ, then you were a fundamentalist.
 
It's not something that's militant. It's something that believes in the basics of what the Bible teaches. What happened was that they had to start all over again. You had seminaries like Dallas Theological Seminary, you had Bible colleges like Moody Bible Institute' which started in the late 19th century but was basically a product of this. BIOLA which is the Bible Institute of Los Angeles; all of these different schools, including Wheaton were started about then. All of these were a product of this new group of fundamentalists/evangelicals.
 
Then starting about the 1970s, everything sooner or later starts to detonate because of the corruption of sin and you had bad doctrine infiltrate to those different organizations. For the last thirty or forty years some of those stalwart schools no longer believe unequivocally in a literal historical . In fact, there's only one faculty member I know of in the Old Testament department at Dallas Theological Seminary who believes in that or in a young earth. It was not that way when I was a student forty years ago. implies a young earth.
 
The Bible implies a model of the spiritual life that enables a believer to face and handle all problems in life. But now since the 50s or 60s you've had the intrusion of Christian psychology. It's not just enough to know the Bible as a pastor to help people. You have to have subsequent training in counseling and in psychology so you can really, really help people. You not only had the intrusion of human viewpoint science into the creation/evolution issue, you have the intrusion of sociology and psychology into the spiritual life.
 
And how do you plant churches? How do you develop churches? Modern church growth literature is loaded with sociological, human viewpoint influence. You also have in language study, at the seminary where you study Hebrew and Greek, and your professor has gone off and he's studied linguistics at some place. He's picked up a few ideas here or there that really aren't kosher. He's young and he really hasn't had time to think through a lot of things yet and most linguistic studies today are heavily loaded with presuppositions from post modernism, which teaches that language and meaning is fluent. You see this when you hear people talk about that the Constitution is a living document. They believe a postmodern view of language. It's always changing. It's always moving. It doesn't mean the same thing all the time.
 
So what happened in the fundamentalist/modernist controversy is that you lost everything in the early 20th century. The fundamentalists and evangelicals were rebuilding it in the middle of the 20th century and then they're starting to lose it again. A lot of people don't realize it. We're in the second stage of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy and most evangelical Christians are either ignorant of it or they don't care. That's really sad because every institution that was founded in the early part of the 20th century on a solid biblical basis is no longer there. They have all compromised.
 
Some have had some good battles and they've recovered. Page Patterson who's the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary—previously he was at Southeastern Baptist Seminary—did a great job of reversing those seminaries. In the context of this, these major denominations won and fundamentalists lost. Well, these liberal denominations had compromised so much of faith that they slipped into what is now modern ecumenicalism. Now modern ecumenicalism is the contrast to biblical unity. It says for everyone to get along together and if we have beliefs where we disagree we'll just get rid of them. They believe that what matters is that we all have the same experience and we all love each other.
 
They want to go out and change society. That's what's wrong with modern ecumenism. It began in the early part of the 20th century and it's a counterfeit unity. It gave rise to organizations such as the World Council of Churches and many other organizations like that. Many of them are dominated by socialism and other forms of Marxism; they're also dominated by incipient or overt forms of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. They've rejected biblical truth and that's really the unity factor with them.
 
When we talk about what we've been studying in I went through what appeared to be a digression but we have to understand what it means to be like-minded. There are a lot of Christians out there who want to be like-minded. They're out there in the United Presbyterian and the United Methodist and the United Church of Christ and they're all hugging each other. They've all gone ecumenical in the bad sense of the word.
 
What about the rest of us who are still trying to be biblical? We understand that the basis for unity is the Scripture. gives us that foundation. Paul says, "I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called. With all lowliness and gentleness and long-suffering…" These are three virtues of the Christian life. These are repeated either in pairs or all together in other passages. Lowliness is TAPEINOPHROSUNE, which means humility. Humility was not valued by the Greeks at all. It was not a virtue to be humble so they didn't like it but Paul says with humility and gentleness. Gentleness is the word PRAOTES which is a synonym of TAPEINOPHROSUNE and indicates meekness in a biblical sense.
 
Meekness means someone who is strong and oriented to authority. This isn't someone who can just be rolled over or taken advantage of. Moses was the meekest man in the Old Testament. Now Moses was taking 3 million rebellious Jews for forty years through the desert. He was not a pushover. He was very strong. What the Bible means by meek is to be oriented to authority. Longsuffering means patience, to endure in difficult circumstances. So this is how we are able to bear one another with love is because it's grounded in basically these virtues of grace orientation. Humility, meekness, and longsuffering.
 
That means that we endeavor to keep the peace. The word for endeavor is the same word that is translated, "study to show yourself approved unto God". It doesn't really mean study but in that context it kind of does because it means to work hard at something, to labor intensely over a particular kind of activity. The context of Timothy is to the idea of reading and getting into the Word. That's why it's translated study there. In Hebrews it has the idea of working hard and endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit.
 
It's not a sociological unity. It's not a unity because we all call ourselves Christians because we're not Jewish and we're not Muslims and we're not atheists and we're not pagans so we're Christians so we can just have an experience of warmth together and just hug one another and say "Oh, wasn't it good to have been together tonight? Let's do this next week. But let's not study the Bible because that will just divide us.'
 
The unity in Ephesians is a unity of the spirit based on faith. talks about these same three virtues, "As the elect of God [believers], holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, and longsuffering." There are those virtues again. They're the foundation for the Christian life. Now back to , where Paul talks about this unity. There's one body. There's one spirit. But just because there's one body and one spirit doesn't mean we ignore differences. There are some differences that we have to pay attention to. Those are doctrinal differences. We have to divide over doctrinal issues.
 
You have to be careful, though. You don't divide over petty things. You don't divide over things that are doubtful things. You don't divide over whether or not you play a piano or some other instrument. You don't divide over the color [and I'm not being facetious here because there are churches who divide over this]; what color you paint the church or what kind of steeple you have or whether you have pews or whether you have chairs. You don't divide over a lot of things churches divide over. That's just arrogance that causes that division.
 
Our unity is based on one Lord, Jesus Christ. We have to have a proper Christology. One faith. That refers to not just believing but a body of doctrine, what is believed. There is one body of doctrine and it's the infallible Word of God. One baptism and that's the baptism by God the Holy Spirit. One God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in all." This is the basis for real Christian unity.
 
What happened coming out of the early 20th century with the rise of ecumenicalism is that all of these fundamental evangelical churches that were spawned during that time, left their churches because they realized that their pastor didn't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Or in some cases the church got a new pastor such as a Methodist church that got a new pastor in old Houston Heights in about 1932. He was a classic 19th century Protestant liberal. He didn't believe in the infallibility of Scripture. He didn't believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ. He didn't believe in the substitutionary atonement.
 
There was a man who taught a Sunday school class there for young couples that was quite large and quite popular. His new pastor called him in and told him he couldn't teach Sunday school anymore because of his fundamentalist beliefs. This man left and he took his Sunday school class with him and they started a new church. He decided to name it after the church he had come from in the Pittsburgh area called Berachah Church.
 
That's how Berachah Church got started. Their first pastor was a young red-headed guy who played football at Wheaton College, named Elwood Evans. He was known as Red Evans. He married John Walvoord's wife's sister. He and Walvoord had gone through seminary together. He was the pastor of that church for about five years but that was really a pattern for how a lot of Bible churches got started in the early 20th century. They had been part of a liberal church and they left.
 
What happened is these people got their feelings hurt and I mean that mostly in a good way because when you have been maltreated by what you have been devoted to for many years and you were abused and kicked out, you're going to be a little protective at that point. So a lot of these independent churches threw the baby out with the bath water.
 
The problem with independent churches is they're too independent. They say the problem is denominations. The problem wasn't denominations. The problem was false doctrine so they developed this anti-denominational framework and they all split off into their little atomistic groups. They lost a lot of clout. They lost their buildings. They lost their seminaries.
 
Some of them would get together in loose associations. They recognized they only had about $4,000.00 to give to missions and another group had $4,000.00 and they could get two other churches and if they co-operated they could support a missionary on the mission field. They all basically believed the same things.
 
In the Houston area you had churches like Berachah and Minotex, which is Fellowship Bible Church of Pearland now, I think. And Almeda Bible Church which has a new name and Spring Branch Bible Church, which is now Bridgepoint out on I-10. Spring Branch, Minotex, and Almeda were all started during the era of World War I. They would get together and they supported Dallas Seminary. They supported some of the same missionaries so when those missionaries came back to Houston they could minister in the same four or five churches because that's where they got most of their missionary support. They understood the value of working together in a co-operative way. They didn't sacrifice in any way their independence.
 
That's a value among believers. We do something like that with Camp Arete. There are people from eight or nine doctrinal churches who all work together to put together a camp every summer. The pastors all work together. They're involved in Chafer Seminary. The problem you run into is that you still have people who think that if one pastor talks to another pastor, it's ecumenicalism. That's what's called shooting yourself in the foot. We have to work together. The unity of Christ doesn't sacrifice doctrine. But if you're not sacrificing doctrine, if you're not sacrificing the integrity of the local church, then churches should work together and co-operate together. We're stronger together than we are separately and independently.
 
You know, pastors are some of the most ego-sensitive people I've ever known. It's real easy for pastors to succumb to competitiveness. There are some pastors who are so competitive they won't have anything to do with any other churches or any other pastors because they're afraid that somehow they won't be thought of very highly. But we're not in competition. We're all serving the Lord. We're all trying to do our best and we should be cooperating with one another. We shouldn't be fighting and dividing over things. The churches are not supposed to be built on isolationism. We should all be supportive.
 
This is what these scriptures are talking about in terms of being like-minded, having a focus on the Word of God. So unity is fundamental but it's a unity on the basis of doctrine, not at the expense of doctrine. Now that ties us back to verses 5 and 6, which emphasize the fact we're to receive one another. Then we get into the next section next time where Paul relates what Jesus Christ did to Jew and Gentile. That helps us understand that when he says to receive one another he's saying that there should be unity between Jew and Gentile despite the fact they have different traditions and different cultural backgrounds. They should be united as believers in Rome. So we'll come back and begin at verse 8 next time.

Romans 154b-Spiritual Goals: Faith, Hope, Love

Romans 15:8 NASB95
For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers,
Romans 154b-Spiritual Goals: Faith, Hope, Love
 
Open your Bibles with me to Romans, chapter 15. This section we're in from verse 7 down to verse 13 is really driving toward that final verse, verse 13. Paul is looking at these spiritual goals which is really stated in the form of a benediction at the end of this section which and closes out the main body of Romans. Then we go into the conclusion and there will be a number of key things we learn in the last part of chapter 15 as well as into chapter 16. I'm looking forward to getting into chapter 16, even though we tend to reach chapters like that and see a lot of names and greeting to various people that we don't know who they are. We'll get a chance to find out who they are and why God the Holy Spirit has preserved this information for us down through the centuries. This should be a good study.
 
When we wrap up with Romans in the next five or six weeks, probably before we go to Israel, we'll start a new study on Thursday nights which will be in 1 and 2 Samuel. I taught this last about thirty years ago. It's one of those that I'm glad doesn't surface anymore. Everyone has those. I've always enjoyed 1 Samuel. There are a lot of important applications, especially relevant to today because like today, it was a world of chaos. It was a world of cultural collapse, a world dominated by cultural relativism. It begins in the period of the judges when everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes, which is an applicable commentary for our culture today. It is a tremendous book. Their solution is a political solution but it's a wrong political solution and that's a dire warning for most of us. There's a lot of very good stuff there as well as a lot of good personal principles for application.
 
says, "Therefore receive one another just as Christ also has received us to the glory of God. Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers, and that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy, as it is written: 'For this reason I will confess to You among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.' And again he says: 'Rejoice O Gentiles, with His people!' And again, 'Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles! Laud Him all you peoples!' And again, Isaiah says: 'There shall be a root of Jesse; And He who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, In Him the Gentiles shall hope.' Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."
 
There are a couple of things we ought to pay attention to just in terms of a fly-over in this section. One of the most important things you can develop as a skill in your Christian life is to study the Bible on your own. Now that doesn't mean you're going to drill down like a pastor's going to drill down or maybe even as much as a Sunday school teacher is going to be able to drill down. But you can apply these principles as you're going about your reading of Scripture, which everyone should be doing on a daily basis.
 
You ought to pick out 3 to 5 chapters to read every day. It doesn't take that long. If you spend about 15 minutes a day reading through the Bible then you can read through the Bible in a year without any trouble. As you do that, questions are going to come up. Now there are some questions that you say, "Well, I'm just really confused about that." That's great. We all are that way. Every time I read through a book of the Bible, I'll circle things and put a question mark next to it so that next time I come back and have time to study it, I'll spend some time drilling down. I just pass over, set it aside, and keep reading.
 
One of the reason we read is just for content, just for information, just to know the scope of the Bible and just to know who's who, what's what, and where's where and to understand those things. It's also helpful if you have a study Bible to look at the maps in the back, especially if you're reading the Old Testament. It's good to stop and look and follow the progression of events. As you read you ought to pay attention to key words and to certain things that are said and to certain structural things.
 
One of the things that we note in the structure of this particular paragraph would be what? What sort of stands out? Well, one of the first things you should notice is that there are four quotations from the Old Testament. Any time we see a quote from the Old Testament that ought to raise our attention just a little and make us ask how the writer of the New Testament is using that. What's going on here? Is this a fulfillment of prophecy?
 
We've gone through those four different uses in detail of how the Old Testament is used in the New Testament. Sometimes it's a direct prophecy, remember? You have passages like that predict the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. That passage is directly quoted by the religious leaders that Herod consults when the Magi, the wise men, came to Herod asking where the King of the Jews was born. Herod called his advisors, his religious leaders, and asked what the Scripture said and they quote . That's a direct prophecy.
 
Then you have other times when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament and it's a little more obscure. For example, you have passages like that's quoted also in . It quotes the sentence, "Out of Egypt I called my son." When you dig down a little bit you realize that the passage is not talking about prophecy at all. It was simply the statement that described a historical event that Israel had come out of Egypt. There is a little more to it than that as we saw the last time we studied that and there is a prediction in the visions that are given by Balaam in and 24 that connect that verbiage specifically to the Messiah. Just as Israel came out of Egypt in the second vision there of Balaam, so the Messiah, the king mentioned in the third vision would also come out of Egypt. When Matthew uses he's not just pulling a phrase out of the Old Testament somewhere. He's using a phrase and a specific issue that is identified by Old Testament writers as a type, as an example, of something that would apply to the Messiah. So that is the second use we look at.
 
The third use we looked at is that sometimes there's a parallel, certain similarities between an Old Testament event or prophecy or statement even, and this is picked up by a writer of the New Testament and he's simply applying the principle. Usually there's only one point of commonality between the Old Testament verse in its original context and the way it's used in the Old Testament. We call that an application.
 
Then there's a fourth use where sometimes the writer says that this is what the Old Testament said and it sort of summarizes something in one sentence that's said in the Old Testament in various different ways. It's not a specific sentence. It's sort of a summary. So if you remember that, then when you look at this you ought to think, "Oh, let me go back and read these in their original context and understand what is being said in the original context to the original audience and then I can see why Paul is quoting these." So we look at that and we see there's a progression there.
 
If you just stop and look at there is one word that is common to all of those verses. You ought to be able to look at that and pick it out. It's the word Gentiles. That's why Paul is going back and quoting from those verses. He's keying in on that word Gentiles. Then a third thing we ought to observe right away that is fairly obvious is that when he comes to the conclusion of this and builds to his final benediction in it plays off the last phrase in .  This gives us a key to really understanding the major doctrine he's trying to communicate in this last section.
 
He closes with that quote from Isaiah, "In Him the Gentiles shall hope." Our hope is in Christ. Then if you look at we see that the word "hope" is used two more times. "The God of hope" in the first line. "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of God the Holy Spirit."  This is what we emphasize when we go through a passage and ask what the passage says, what the writer of Scripture is trying to communicate to us. You don't just go into the Bible and read into the Bible things you would like to see there. You don't just sort of cherry pick key things that are there but we want to read things that are there in context and understand the background and the structure that is there so we can actually dig into the mind and thinking of the apostle Paul writing this under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit.
 
As we looked at this last time and spent a lot of time in , we see that Paul draws a conclusion, "Therefore receive one another just as Christ also received us." We are commanded to accept in terms of fellowship, which is what PROSLAMBANO means. Christ is to be the pattern. He is the one who gives us the pattern of grace and understanding of what genuine love is all about. Then I pointed out that we're to receive one another just as Christ received us to the glory of God.
 
That phrase "glory of God" actually drew us back to the last two verses in the previous paragraph, which talked about the fact in verse 6 that we were to "with one mind and one mouth glorify the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ." The emphasis there was on unity in the church and understanding of this whole concept so let me just summarize a couple of things of what the Bible teaches about unity among the body of Christ.
 
It's sad there's so much division.  I went through a little review last week of the history of how since the Protestant Reformation there have been numerous splits and schisms and the rise of different denominations. Sometimes there was the rise of certain denominations simply because coming out of the Protestant Reformation some of these groups had a state church orientation back in the old country. You had Swedish Lutherans, Norwegian Lutherans, Danish Lutherans, German Lutherans, and Swiss Lutherans. When they came to the United States, they maintained those sorts of historic alliances so they didn't really unite together very much. That's one reason you have some of those divisions.
 
Then another reason we saw in the United States was because there was a rise of heresy at times and disagreement over doctrine. One such scenario, especially in the 19th century, was what was called the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. So we have to understand this whole concept of unity. When we look at the history what we see is that reaction set in among conservative Bible-believing Christians in the early part of the 20th century where they cast great suspicion upon anything that was associated with denominationalism.
 
As a result you see some people who operate on fear and they think that any time a Christian from one church does anything with a believer with another church that that smacks of denominationalism. They don't understand unity and that has nothing to do with denominationalism or ecumenicalism. If two Christians go to different churches and they are supportive of something like Camp Arete and Chafer Seminary and Dallas Seminary or different missionaries, then these are very positive things and believers should be cooperating there.
 
We stand in terms of our position in Christ in unity. The first point is that the basis for Christian unity is the baptism by God the Holy Spirit who has entered all of us at the point of salvation into union with Christ. We have an organic, supernatural unity as members of the body of Christ. So this is the established reality in terms of our ultimate position in Christ.
 
The problem is that we have sin natures and we don't understand Scripture correctly so we get crossways with each other. We all think that our understanding is right and yours isn't. We get into arrogance and this creates division. The reality is that some Christians, due to carnality, create and cause divisions. We see a couple of passages that reference this. For example, in which is going to be coming up in the very next chapter where Paul says, "Now I urge you, brethren, note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned and avoid them."
 
Even in the early church there were people who created schisms in churches. They caused problems in churches. Now that may surprise a lot of Christians because I've heard this said my whole life: "Wouldn't it be nice to go back and just be simple like the early church?" My response is, "No." They didn't really understand the Scripture very well. They had just as many problems as we do today because the sin nature is the same. As a result of that, we have a much better understanding of Scripture today than they did in the early church.
 
Now I'm not saying we have a better understanding than the apostles but we had a better understanding than the average believer. They didn't have a completed canon of Scripture. They didn't really understand concepts like the Trinity and the hypostatic union. They understood them in a sort of elementary, primitive way, sort of like a three-year old looks at his parents and says he loves them. He has a very elementary, childish understanding of love but he doesn't have a mature understanding of love. It wasn't until you get into the third or fourth century that you had vocabulary such as Trinity, hypostatic union and terms like that. That would have helped them comprehend those kinds of doctrines. The early church was a mess. It was not some kind of ideal situation and there were a lot of divisions so Paul says that they need to pay attention to who the troublemakers are in the congregation. Who the people are that go off on wild goose chases, who the people are who don't pay attention to the leadership of the pastor and the leaders of the church, and go their own way.
 
I've been in congregations in the past that you get someone, who as a result of reading some book or studying something, gets into some strange notion about prophecy or some sort of strange thing about the person and work of Christ or all of a sudden they get extremely Calvinistic or extremely Armenian. They get messed up on eternal security or they get messed up on the gospel. There are a lot of different things that happen. The next thing you know they want to teach Sunday school and they're teaching their brand new understanding of the Word to someone else.
 
You have to understand that in a local church like this there are always going to be some people in the congregation, some people who teach in Sunday school, and who are leaders, who may not agree one hundred percent with what the pastor teaches. That may be for a number of reasons and usually it's because they haven't had enough time to really study and understand the issues like the pastor has. That's fine. I've been in churches and I've been on staff in churches where I didn't agree one hundred percent with the pastor. In fact, I'd be surprised if there's anyone in this congregation who agrees one hundred percent with me. That's just the reality of life. Gene is raising his hand back there. Are you raising your hand, Gene, because you agree or because you don't agree or because you're the troublemaker? Both; okay. We know Gene. He's the troublemaker. (laughs)
 
That's the reality. What we do is have a set body of teaching that's handed down, that's agreed to by the leadership of the church and the leadership of the pastor then everyone follows that. That's how you keep things in order and you do things in an orderly manner. I've been in congregations where I didn't agree one hundred percent with what the pastor did and you keep your mouth shut and you go along with it. I did my pastoral internship in a southern Baptist church in Irving, Texas where the pastor didn't even believe in the infallibility and the inerrancy of Scripture. I had a good lesson in humility and authority orientation. That's what that's all about. You don't ago around telling everyone that you disagree with the pastor and he doesn't know what he's talking about. That would create divisions and offenses and so Paul says to pay attention to those people because they're nothing but troublemakers and they can really create trauma in a congregation.
 
In Paul says, "Now I plead with your brethren by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you all speak the same thing." In other words that you all be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you. Now this isn't talking about the ultimate reality of one faith that Paul talked about in , which is a positional reality in terms of our union in Christ. This is talking about an experiential reality. Quit focusing on non-essentials and things that create controversy and focus on unity. But it's not unity at the expense of doctrine. That's ecumenicalism. It says that if we're going to disagree on something, let's just get rid of that and water everything down until we get to the point we can agree on everything which ends up with not really believing in anything. That's ecumenicalism.
 
Paul pled with the Corinthians who were much divided. They had all kinds of factions and all kinds of problems as we'll see in the next couple of verses. Paul continues, "Be perfectly joined together in the same mind and same judgment." That has to do with submission to the authority of God and being in agreement on the basis of the Word of God. We'll see it come up again in in just a second.
 
Now divisiveness and schisms are always a manifestation of carnality. These words that are translated division and strife and heresy are words that show up in that talk about the works of the flesh, of the sin nature. That's always present in passages that describe people that are living on the basis of their sin nature. Arrogance and self-absorption are always going to produce this kind of divisiveness. You can watch it in people. There are some people in some churches that won't associate with other believers. They won't associate with other churches. They won't go and do anything with anyone else.
 
As you know from observing me that I will join with other believers to engage in certain things we have in common. There are certain core beliefs that we must hold in common as believers. One thing in this United States has to do with our understanding of the First Amendment. I can join with anyone from Roman Catholics to Greek Orthodox to Charismatics if the issue is defending the freedom that we have to proclaim the Word of God however we understand it. That is under attack in this country. There are some Christians who won't join forces with any other Christian to defend their very liberties in terms of the First Amendments. They won't join with them because this person might be a five-point Calvinist and I might be a four-point Calvinist and since they don't agree on that they can't agree on anything. So they're basically shooting themselves in the foot out of their own arrogance.
 
This kind of thing had a historical manifestation in the period known as the Jewish Revolt between AD 66 and 70. It was the same kind of arrogance that produced that same kind of divisiveness among the Jews. They were split into numerous minor groups, all kinds of different revolutionary groups and zealot groups according to accounts from Josephus, who was a Jewish general who had been defeated by the Romans. He had surrendered to the Romans and wrote a history much later on of the Jewish revolts. According to his history which is the only account we have of the Jewish revolt in 66-70, during the final assault on Jerusalem by the Romans, these Jewish groups were not only fighting the Romans but they were killing each other at the same time. They were so antagonistic to each other because they didn't agree on every minor point that they were fighting each other and that kind of arrogance and that kind of divisiveness just leads to self-defeat. We see a lot of that in the church today.
 
This kind of thing was manifested in the early church in Corinth. Paul drills down on this issue why there are these problems in . One thing we have to understand is that we always have some churches, some pastors, and some people who think that their church is the only church with truth. Their pastor is never going to go to associate with any other pastors because he's better than everyone else. You have different kinds of Christians who think they're superior and different denominations who think they're superior. This is all just a sign of arrogance and it shows extremely poor spiritual health.
Sometimes Paul says divisiveness is a good thing. It's a sign of health because if you have someone who comes into your congregation and they're teaching erroneous doctrines then you need to identify them as a troublemaker, someone who's causing division and you need to be able to exclude them. The whole process needs to be done with humility with a goal of restoring the person and helping them to understand what the Scripture says and what the issues are. It should not be done from a hostile viewpoint in the sense you're just trying to drive the person out because suddenly they're teaching something that's wrong. The point should always be restoration and an attempt to achieve peace and unity.
 
says, "For first of all when you come together as a church, I hear there are divisions among you and in part I believe it…" There were all kinds of divisions, all kinds of antagonisms, all kinds of cliques that had developed in the Corinthian church. In verse 19 he says, "For there must be these factions among you." He uses a term in the Greek that indicates this is necessary. You must have this. He was recognizing reality that there are going to be people who come in who get wrong ideas, teach wrong things, and that has to be dealt with in order to show those who are right and on target that they are approved in terms of their teaching.
 
The word that's usually translated divisions is SCHISME, which is where we get our English word schism referring to someone who creates divisions. The word translated factions is HAIRESIS, which means a sect or a faction. It came to mean heresies as it's brought over into English. The original Greek word does not really have the connotation we have to heresy. Then that last noun for approval is DOKIMOS. The focus there is on approval, showing the value of something. So in the midst of this kind of controversy as you drill down into Scripture, study what the Word says, and come to understand truth, you might have to exclude someone who's causing a problem. It will improve the quality of the congregation in terms of their understanding of the Word of God. It's a difficult and tough circumstance and situation.
 
Now the passage we looked at last time related to says that unity is on the basis of gentleness, lowliness, longsuffering, and humility, which is indicated by these particular words. I pointed out last time that these particular words are brought together in , "As the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on [experiential sanctification] tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, and long suffering." Those are the same words that we find here. We are to walk worthy of the calling with which we are called with all lowliness, which I would translate with humility and meekness if we properly understand that meekness is really more related to authority orientation. It's not the idea we often think of as someone who's just a wimp, just sort of a pushover.
 
A meek person is someone who understands who he is, has a solid view of himself in terms of his position and relation to God, and his submission to the authority of God. Moses was called the meekest man in the Old Testament. He understood the authority of God and he was subordinate to it but he made sure that he stood his ground as he led the Israelites, two and a half to three million of them, and they were rebellious but he did not yield to them. He was not a soft leader. In as I wrapped up last time we're told that we were called in one hope of our calling, one hope, one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. That phrase "one faith" indicates that unity. That's the basis. We don't unify at the expense of doctrine but on the basis of doctrine.
 
Now let's go into , "Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision." Paul is shifting from talking about the importance of receiving one another, which is grounded on humility. What undergirds what he says here is his understanding of grace orientation in terms of having unity in the body of Christ. His illustration here is going to be Jesus Christ just as it is in . He says, "Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision for the truth of God to confirm the promises made to the fathers." That verse starts off with GAR, which indicates he's explaining what he's just said.
 
Verse 8 needs to be understood as an explanation and a further development of why it's important to receive one another. He says that part of this explanation is to understand that Christ became a servant to the circumcision, which refers to the Jews and Christ in the first Advent. We have to understand something about the terminology that's used here. Christ is referred to as a servant. This is the noun form of DIAKANOS where we get our English word deacon. It's not saying that Jesus became a deacon. It's saying that Jesus became a servant, which is the ultimate meaning of that Greek word. It's someone who became a servant, someone who ministers or helps someone else.
 
Paul says that Jesus Christ became a servant at the first Advent when Jesus entered into human history. He's the eternal second person of the Trinity. He's fully God. He has all the attributes of God. He's due all the honor and respect for God. He is the eternal creator of the universe and as tells us He holds together the entire universe. That didn't change when he entered into humanity and he was a baby lying in a manager. In His deity He was still holding everything together. He came for a purpose, which was to become a servant. The verb translated become is a word that means to become something you weren't before. So He's entering into human history as a human, something He wasn't before, that is He's adding humanity to His deity. He's coming for the purpose of being a servant to Israel.
 
The focus here is on Israel and God's covenant with Israel. The fact that Paul calls them the circumcision takes us back to the Abrahamic Covenant. In we have a foreshadowing and a summary of what will become the key elements in God's promise to Abraham. God made an eternal covenant with Abraham described in and where God said He would make Abraham's name great. He would give him descendants that are more numerous than the star in the sky and the sand of the seashore. God was going to bless him and those who blessed Abraham's descendants, God would also bless and those who cursed them, God would also curse.
 
God promised to give them land that was bounded by specific real estate points in the Middle East by the Mediterranean, by the brook of Egypt called the Wadi Al-Hariz which is down in the Sinai. [There are a lot of issues related to this. In God promised Abraham from the river of Egypt and there's a lot of debate over that. The word in the Hebrew that's translated river there is never used anywhere else in the Scripture to describe the Nile. The Nile is always described by another Hebrew word nahor and in about five other passages in the Old Testament concerning the southern border including the prophetic passage in Ezekiel that describes the boundaries in the Millennial Kingdom which says that the southern boundary is the brook, the nachal, not the word for river.] God gave this specific real estate from the Euphrates to the Wadi Al-Hariz, from the Mediterranean over again to the Euphrates.
 
This was a specific piece of real estate and when God gave this covenant to Abraham He said the sign of this covenant is circumcision. So when we read this emphasis on circumcision what ought to come to our thinking is that this is a reference to the Abrahamic covenant and to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So He's coming as a servant to Israel "for the truth of God to confirm the promises made to the fathers." Those promises included the fact that there would be a provision of salvation.
 
This word servant in the verb form is picked up in . The verb here is DIAKONOS.  If you serve someone [a verb] then you're a servant [the noun form.] Mark wrote of the Lord Jesus Christ when there was some controversy over who would be the greatest apostle in the kingdom and Jesus responded by saying, "Whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all." He's making a point that the path to greatness is through humility. He illustrates it with Himself. He says, "For even the Son of Man [a title for the Messiah used by Jesus] did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many." So Jesus Christ came to serve. He became a servant to the circumcision.
 
This passage summarizes some of the concepts we find in a well-known passage in the New Testament, . This is a passage talking about humility. Remember the context of is talking about humility and receiving one another and not operating on arrogance. The church at Philippi had the same problem with arrogance that most churches do and in verses 1-4 he's talking about what we have in common in Christ. In he says, "Therefore, let this mind [this mental attitude] be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. Who being in the form of God…" We're all supposed to have the same mental attitude of humility. Paul uses the Greek word MORPHE for form, which indicates the essence of God. He is in that form and in Greek terminology the word MORPHE referred to that which were the intrinsic attributes that made something what it was.
 
We would talk about what makes a chair a chair is that it has "chairness". What makes God God is that it has something called, the attributes of. So by making the statement this way Paul is saying that Jesus was in the form or the essence of God, meaning He had full. But he didn't consider it something to grasped after to be equal with God. Now that takes us back to what? What should we be thinking of? Who grasped after? Who wanted to be like God? Well, that takes us back to . The serpent came and told them that the reason God didn't want them to eat that wonderful looking piece of fruit is that if you do you'll be just like Him. Eve reached out and grabbed that apple. She wanted to be just like God. She didn't have but she wanted to have. The contrast is that Jesus had but He didn't think it was something he needed to grasp after or hold on to in order to assert His equality with God.
 
, "But He made Himself of no reputation…" The point that Paul is making here is that Jesus is going to disguise Himself, limit the outward expression of His divine attributes and He's going to clothe Himself in humanity. He's going to a true human being. He's going enter into mortal flesh. Sometimes you think, "Robby, why are you just emphasizing this again and again?" Let me give you a little example and I'm not going to name any names.
 
There is a young man who is an officer in the Air Force who grew up in a doctrinal church. You would know the pastor and you would know the church. He should have been pretty squared away. As he's been in the Air Force he's gone around to some different churches in some different cities. He has been very divisive because he doesn't hold to an accurate, biblical view of kenosis. In fact he holds to a view that in the early church they called Docetism, which comes from a Greek word DOKEO, which means something appears to be something. It really isn't but it looks like it. Docetism was the view that Jesus really didn't become a full human being; that Jesus only appeared to be a man and appeared to be in flesh.
 
This guy has insinuated himself into several churches. He's actually been at this church at Chafer Conferences three or four times. He's insinuated himself into two or three different churches and caused great divisions. Then he siphons off all the people who are the heavy donors in a church. He manages to get into a congregation and just like Satan he looks good. He looks like a nice guy. He's very enthusiastic. He wants to help the pastor. I got a call from a pastor just last week who called me up and asked if I knew this guy. He had shown up in that pastor's church and he made himself useful to the pastor. Then the next thing the pastor knows, he's in trouble. Fortunately, this pastor who called me said he'd done some research and talked to other pastors where he'd caused trouble. This man is one of those troublemakers I was just talking about who breach the unity of the church by teaching false doctrine.
 
What is saying is that Jesus added to His deity the form of a bondservant and He made Himself of no reputation. The Greek word here is KENOSIS and this is a big issue in theology. Basically what happens is that Jesus is fully divine from eternity past. When He enters into human history through the virgin conception and virgin birth He adds to His deity true humanity so that He has two natures. One is true deity and one is true humanity and He's now one person with two natures. He doesn't relinquish His deity. Some people have stated it that way by saying He gives up His deity. He doesn't give it up. He changes the water into wine. He stills the storm. He does numerous other miracles to indicate He's still truly God.
 
What He's doing is He's not accessing His deity to solve the problems of His humanity. He's living His life in the incarnation as a human being but there are going to be times when, as it were, reaches through the firewall between His humanity and His deity and He will use some of His divine attributes, His omnipotence or His omniscience, in order to make the point and teach that He is fully God. But He's not using His omnipotence to solve the problems of His humanity because He's showing that you and I can live the Christian life on the same basis He does, through the Word of God and the Spirit of God.
What point is understanding Jesus' temptation if He's just handling temptation by His deity. What encouragement is that for us? We can't do that. We can't follow that example. If His example of humility is based on His divine attributes well, we're all sunk. We can't do that. No, the point is that He is exhibiting these characteristics and solving His problems by relying on God the Holy Spirit and the Word of God just as we should. But there are other situations and circumstances in His life where He is asserting Who He is as the promised and prophesied Messiah of the Old Testament and He's going to demonstrate that through these other miracles that are accessing His deity.
 
It's not that He gives up His deity but that He adds humanity. In we read, "And He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death." Now that death wasn't a pleasant death. It was miserable. It was painful. The language that we see in the gospels related to what Jesus went through is graphic. The night before He went to the cross when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane He is under such physical and emotional distress that He sweated blood. This is a reality. It's a medical condition that is known that when people under certain circumstances and pressure, blood will be forced through the capillaries in their skin. Jesus is going through this tremendous emotional distress.
 
I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you've had to go through a lot of emotional distress. I've gone through that at times and usually I don't respond very well in terms of my dependence upon God and letting my sin nature take over. Jesus never lets the emotional pressure that He's under, facing the misery and knowing all the horrors that He will have to endure in His humanity the next day, control His reactions. He resists that and He trusts in God the Father. This is what Jesus is talking about when He says in the garden in His prayer, "Nevertheless not My will but Your will be done." He's completely submissive to the will of the Father in His humanity.
 
It says Jesus humbled Himself. What is humility here? He humbles Himself by being obedient to the authority over Him. That's what real humility is. You boil it all down and humility isn't someone who's self-effacing. It's not someone who's mild and unassertive. Humility is someone who is oriented to the proper authorities over Him and is obedient to them. He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death on the cross. There's nothing more miserable than that. You really want to get a sense of that then maybe you ought to Google some of these videos that are out on the internet that are related to ISIS's crucifixion. I don't think I want to watch that but if you want to get an understanding of how horrid crucifixion was, it was one of the worst forms of torture and execution ever devised by the human mind. It was designed to keep a person alive as long as possible and to promote as much pain and torture as possible, during that time they were on the cross.
 
This is what Jesus did. He became a servant to the circumcision. PERITOME is the Greek word for circumcision, indicating that He specifically focused on His mission to the Jews as the Messiah. He is going to confirm through His ministry, which is what we've been studying in Matthew, that He was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies and promises related to providing an eternal solution to sin from the Old Testament.
 
In , Paul talks about this as he quotes from the Old Testament, "Now to Abraham and his seed…" In the Old Testament in Hebrew the word seed is what's called a collective singular. The word seed can refer to one or it can refer to many. So the Apostle Paul is playing off the singular sense of the word in its use and that it was one seed, not to many seeds plural, but to one which is Messiah. So he is saying Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies and promises that were given and that Paul's ministry was also to the Jews. He is talking about that when he says that Jesus became a servant to the circumcision for the truth of God to confirm His promises made to the Father. And that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy.
 
Here he shifts to talking about the Gentiles and who the Gentiles are. This is another interesting and important little word to focus on here. He's saying that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy as it is written. The word that is translated Gentile here is the Greek word ETHNOS. The Greek word ETHNOS according to the Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich lexicon of the Greek language, gives the first meaning of ETHNOS as a body of persons united by kinship, culture, or common traditions. It's also translated nations and people. Most often, though, it is just translated Gentiles, as opposed to Jews meaning anyone who is non-Jewish.
 
Here in the NKJV we have the statement that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. It's very clear from the context here that we're talking about Jews as God's covenant people and Gentiles. What's interesting is He brings out this quote from and it's identical to one in . As we go through Samuel I'm going to bring in all the different Psalms that we will cover in their historical context. Not all psalms that David wrote are identified and linked to a specific situation but there are many that are so we'll look at those within their historical context.
 
is a psalm that written near the end of David's life. In his conclusion he says, "For this reason I will confess EXHOMOLOGEO, an intensified form of HOMOLOGEO and means praise among the nations. If we translated that Gentiles it would give a totally and erroneous impression of what that verse is talking about. He's talking about the Gentiles as opposed to the Jews.
 
In and we see a conclusion which we see in . is just a fantastic psalm and one of my favorite psalms. It begins with a praise to God where the psalmist says, "I will love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock." Here he uses the Hebrew word sehlah. "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer. My God, my strength, in Whom I will trust. My shield and the horn of my salvation. My stronghold…" This refers to a high and elevated place that becomes a refuge in the heights. That's not in the Heights in Houston. It refers to high places. Houstonians need to understand that distinction. You can't go get refuge in the Heights anymore.
 
, "I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised. So shall I be saved from my enemies." This is one of my favorite verses and it emphasizes seven different metaphors describing God as the One who has protected us. As we think about this psalm, we need to understand that it's a praise psalm, a song of thanksgiving. It's a great psalm if you want to write out a prayer sometime related to how God has delivered you. This is a lengthy pouring out of David's soul in gratitude to Yahweh for how God has delivered him throughout his life.
 
It's written near the end of David's life, not long before he dies. In it he portrays God in various forms, as a rock, as a fortress, as deliverer, as a bulwark, a shield, a horn of salvation, and as a stronghold. As we look at that the first word rock, which is sehlah indicates being hidden in the cleft of the rock, hiding up in a ridge in the back of a crack where the storms or the arrows, nothing can reach you. You're in protection.
 
Then he uses the term "my fortress". This is the Hebrew word malsud. This is where the fortress gets its name at Masada. God is our deliverer. He rescues us from times of difficulty. The writer goes on to say, My God, my strength. It's a different word used here. This word indicates something of a fortress or a bulwark, a fortification to hide in. It's a synonym for malsud. "My strength in Whom I will trust." God is the only one who can truly protect us in the midst of the horrors of life. He is our stronghold. He is our shield. "He's the horn of My salvation." An animal's horn was thought to be the place of their strength and their power so this metaphor indicates power and strength so God is the power and source of our salvation. Then He is our stronghold, a refuge in the heights.
 
Paul is going to come to the end of this passage in Romans and we'll come back to that next time where he concludes this great psalm You ought to read between now and next week. Great promises there. Great verses to memorize. The point that Paul is going to be getting at here is that at the end David calls upon the Gentiles also to praise God. He envisions a time in the future when the Jews and the Gentiles will together glorify God so that's important to understand that term. We'll get there next time.

Romans 155b-Spiritual Goals

Romans 15:9 NASB95
and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy; as it is written, “Therefore I will give praise to You among the Gentiles, And I will sing to Your name.”
Romans 155b-Spiritual Goals
 
The passage we're studying tonight is in . Coming out of chapter 14 where there's this emphasis on unity, there's also an emphasis on exercising the law of love toward other believers. There are disagreements on non-essential issues between different groups of believers. Specifically in this context it had to do with food. It is very likely that these issues related to food were generated by many of the Jewish-background believers that were involved in the church in Rome.
 
As Paul brings this together to a conclusion, starting in and 8, he is specifically addressing unity between Jew and Gentile. In he said, "Therefore receive one another just as Christ also received us to the glory of God." Now the implication would apply to any different groups of people but in the context, this has to do with some differences between the Jewish-background Christian community and the Gentile-background Christian community.
 
That becomes very clear through the examples that Paul develops beginning in as he goes to four different passages in the Old Testament in order to show that it was always a part of God's plan for Jew and Gentile to come together in unity. So he starts this conclusion, pulling this together in where he says, "For [not 'now'] I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision…" That phrase circumcision is a code word for the Jews. It goes back to the fact that circumcision was a sign of the Abrahamic covenant. So he's stating that Jesus came specifically as a servant to the Jews. He came primarily addressing the Jews with the message to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He initially sent out his disciples to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. On several occasions he emphasized that His ministry was primarily targeted to Israel.
 
Paul is taking his readers back to remind them that Jesus Christ came first and foremost as a fulfillment of the Old Testament promises and prophecies related to the Messiah. Continuing in verse 8 Jesus came "As a servant to the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers." So we looked at that verse last time. This is an interesting passage to look at in terms of Messianic prophecy. In Paul says, "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He does not say, 'And to seeds', as of many, but as of one, 'And to your seed,' who is Christ."
This is important. When you think through what is taught from the Old Testament concerning the Messiah you'll see its significance. Even the fact that there are Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament in certain areas of evangelicalism today, including professors in the Old Testament Department in Dallas Theological Seminary and at other evangelical schools, there are a lot of questions as to whether there are truly Messianic prophecies, in the Old Testament. Now that's not something that's new. For many of us coming out of our background, that is something that is somewhat surprising. We've always heard, from me and from other pastors that you've listened to, an emphasis on , , and many other passages in the Old Testament as the prophecies of the Messiah.
 
Since the Protestant Reformation, there has been a certain segment of Bible-believing evangelicals like John Calvin and others who were influenced, sort of indirectly, from a stream of thought that came out of rabbinical teaching. We need to understand the background of this. If you go to a lot of Jews and have them read , if you just put it there, and you don't put verses or a name on it, they're going to think that it comes out of the New Testament. Even if you tell most Jews that it's from Isaiah, they'll still think it's from the New Testament. They don't know the Bible any better than most Christians do.
What happened during this first thousand years is that the Jewish rabbis were trying to figure out ways to sort of de-prophesy these Messianic prophecies. They wanted to remove the implications. There were these various attempts to re-interpret and even change the terminology of the text. There were some Messianic prophecies that were changed when the Masretes put the vowel points in. They knew that when they changed the vowel points it would change the meaning of the word. For example, if you have the English word "stop" and you take the vowel out and change it to an "e", you have a completely different word. If you change it from stop to step, it changes the whole concept. You may look at that and say that in some sentences that wouldn't even make sense. There are a couple of verses in the Bible where the word was changed by changing the vowel points and it's almost impossible to understand that verse as it is in the Masoretic text. That was part of what they did. The Masaretes were recording and preserving the scripture in that period from almost the 2nd century to about the 8th or 9th century A.D. during this same period. They were trying to remove these Messianic prophecies from the Old Testament.
 
There were a lot of different ways in which they did that. Once they did that and were able to sort of re-interpret these passages, then these new interpretations became embedded within rabbinical teaching. If you go back, for example, to the early Targums you'll see this. Targums were commentaries that were written on the Bible somewhere around the 1st or 2nd centuries. Some Targums were even written before the 1st century. If you go back and read those, they understood some of these passages to be Messianic. If you look at rabbinical commentaries after about A.D. 900– 1000, they no longer understood them to be Messianic so there's this shift.
 
During the Protestant Reformation you would have Protestant pastors who wanted to learn Hebrew. The only person around them who knew Hebrew was the rabbi in town. The pastors would go and learn Hebrew and they would have conversations with the rabbi and they would pick up these interpretations of the Old Testament that had removed the Messiah from this. So there was a certain stream of even Reformation theologians and pastors, John Calvin being one of them, who didn't see these passages as being Messianic.
 
One example is , a passage when God is announcing the curse on the serpent and said that there would be enmity between the serpent's seed and the woman's seed. The serpent's seed would bruise her seed on the heel and her seed would bruise the serpent's seed on the head. We understand that to be the first indication of the gospel. The seed of the serpent is talking about those who follow the serpent and the seed of the woman is talking ultimately about the Messiah. The key word there is the word seed. So we look at that and understand it but John Calvin didn't look at it like that. Calvin understood the serpent to be just the snake.
 
There's a man who used to be the head of the Old Testament Department at Dallas Seminary recently. He believes the same thing, that the serpent in was just a snake. You say, well what about and 13 that defines the serpent as the devil? They would say that wasn't written when Moses wrote so how would someone in 1400 B.C. without having access to Revelation know that the serpent in was more than just a snake? That's their argument. We believe there was an understanding of what these things meant that isn't necessarily identified as such in Scripture. There was a lot that God taught Adam and Eve and a lot that was revealed in the Old Testament that we know of that wasn't recorded in Scripture. Read though sometime and it talks about that Abraham did what he did because he saw the city of God, looking to the future. How did he know that? We don't read about that in the Old Testament so just because it's not recorded doesn't mean it wasn't revealed or that they didn't have access to that information.
 
This term seed takes us back to and to other references to seed in the Old Testament. There are those who will come along and say there's not really this kind of emphasis. You don't really find this reference in the Old Testament. That's why I wanted you to turn so you could mark this in your Bibles to . This is near the end of Abraham's life. is when Abraham takes his son, Isaac, to Mount Moriah to be offered as a sacrifice. And at the last minute in God tells Abraham to stop and not lay his hand on his son or do anything to him because now God knew that Abraham feared God because he had not withheld his son, his only son, from God. Then Abraham saw a ram caught in a thicket. He took the ram and offered it for a burnt offering and called God's name. Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven. So he's hearing a voice. If you had your little digital recorder with you, you could record the voice of God. God is speaking objectively to Abraham and says, "By myself I have sworn says the Lord because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son your only son, blessing I bless you and multiplying I will multiply you. Actually this is a Hebrew idiom meaning I will certainly bless you and certainly multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sands on the seashore.
 
The word that is translated "descendants" is the word which means seed. It is one of those words that is a collective. We have certain kinds of words like that. Look at the English word "deer" and it can be singular or plural. There are many words like that. Seed is one of those words. It is always singular in form but sometimes it can have a corporate meaning. It can have the meaning of a plural group. You have to look at the context. Sometimes we're talking about a descendant. Sometimes it's talking about multiple descendants. In , God says, "I will multiply your descendants. There the word would be considered plural because he's reiterating the promise of the Abrahamic covenant and the context when it's compared to the stars of heaven and the sand on the seashore that indicates a plurality. So this would be seed singular but it's emphasizes a plural subject.
 
Then he goes on the say, "And your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies." That second word "descendant" is the same form of the word which is a singular in the Hebrew. It changes its meaning. Now how do you know it changes its meaning? Because when you get down to this pronoun in almost every English translation its "their".
 
Let's go back to English 101. Your pronouns are I, you, he, she, and it. What are your plural pronouns? We or us, you or y'all, and their. So this is translated their, but the Hebrew word has a third person singular suffix. That's how you would indicate the pronoun, it's just a suffix added to the Hebrew word. So it's a third person singular pronoun. What happens is that God shifts. Here He's talking about descendants plural, "I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and the sand on the seashore." Here he adds something and this descendant should be translated as a singular in order to conform to the third person singular pronoun because this third person singular pronoun refers back to this use of the word "seed". Now that's very subtle.
 
What happens is that God is shifting from talking about the descendants of Abraham to the "seed" of Abraham. Then in He says, "In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed." This is what Paul is quoting. In these other passages where God uses the word seed and it has a plural sense, that wouldn't fit in . Paul is making a specific statement in that the singular noun specifically refers to the Messiah. He is making the statement in that the seed in at the end is referring to the Messiah. He's saying this is a Messianic prophecy.
 
What happens is that when you don't believe in Messianic prophecies, instead of identifying the word seed here as a singular, you take what is clearly a third person singular pronoun in the text and because it doesn't fit you just change it into a third person plural in the English translation. But it's not a third person plural in the original and the way it makes sense is to make it agree with its antecedent and understand the antecedent could be singular. That noun could be either singular or plural. Then it makes sense by that God is saying, "In your seed [specifically this one singular seed] all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. He's not talking about all of the descendants. Here he is just talking about that singular seed. So that makes this clearly a Messianic prophecy.
 
Anyone have any questions? This is where it gets really fun when we get into grammar, and why grammar is important. is a very important verse because when we start talking about inspiration and inerrancy and we use those terms plenary [all the Scripture is equally inspired by God] and verbal, then we realize it's not the idea that's inspired by God. It's that each and every word is inspired whether it's a singular or a plural or a present tense or an aorist tense or a perfect tense, every part of that word is significant exegetically. We can't just blow past it and say that it's some kind of stylistic choice on the part of the writer or that Paul is going back and he's re-inventing the Old Testament. Some would say it should be understood that all through there it should be "seeds" but Paul is going to force it to say "seed" so he can force it to create a Messianic meaning. The reality is that since there's that third person singular in the text and there's no textual variant that has to mean that the word seed there should be taken as a singular.
 
Any questions? [Question from audience: Did the Old Testament understand the hypostatic union?] Answer: That's evident in places like , which talks about the promise of the Messiah that He was going to be born in Bethlehem. , "But you Bethlehem Ephrata though you are little among the thousands of Judah that out of you shall come forth to me the One to be ruler in Israel whose goings forth are from of old from everlasting." That's clearly Messianic. See, the only way His goings forth can be everlasting is if He's eternal. That means he's got to be God but he's going to be born in Bethlehem.
Right there you have this indication that He's born and yet He's eternal. There are other places like that in the Old Testament where both the human side, his birth, and the eternal side are pointed out. For example, says that He will be called Mighty God. That's a clear indication there. says He's going to be born of a virgin and His name is going to be Emmanuel which is God with us. They didn't understand it as clearly as you and I can understand it but they understood He was going to be God and man but analytically they didn't ever figure out what that really meant. Neither did the early church.
 
It wasn't until you get to the Council of Nicea and later the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century that you get this wording finally resolved. The early church believed Jesus was God. They also believed He was man but they hadn't figured out how to articulate it and put those two concepts together. Hypostatic union isn't in the New Testament, just like Trinity which Paul didn't have. So Paul didn't think as precisely about the Godhead as you and I can. That just blows your mind when you think about that. They believed in the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ, that's clear, but they didn't have the vocabulary. They hadn't structured it that way.
 
Vocabulary is so important. Just go to some country or culture where you have to teach the Bible in a foreign language that doesn't have the theological tradition that the English have. Jess is smiling back there. He's getting ready to go down to Brazil where he's going to have to work through a translator. That's going to be a whole new experience for him. This is what happens. I'm just talking about Russian. If you go to someplace like Zimbabwe or some place in Zambia and you get back in some remote areas where they're still speaking tribal languages, you find that they don't have this kind of precision in their vocabulary to communicate some of these things. I know Jim Meyers worked for years with Margaret in selecting the precise words that should be used for specific things.
 
When we went to Kazakhstan in 2000 it was so hot. Kazakhstan is about like Tucson, Arizona in August. We were in a room that had two window air conditioning units. We had a hundred people in that room and that room was about 1/3 the size of this auditorium and it was 106°F outside. When those air conditioners were working well it got down to 97°F inside. Half of the room spoke Kazak and half spoke Russian. I had a Kazak interpreter and a Russian interpreter. The Kazak translator was tremendous. He had translated for a lot of American pastors and Bible teachers but they didn't use technical words like reconciliation and justification. I'm not talking about big words like supralapsarianism or things like that. I'm just talking about words that are biblically sound words like imputation and so forth. We would use these words and the interpreter would turn around and look at us like he wasn't sure what the right word would be. So these theological terms are very, very important. This is what is in the background, that there are real Messianic prophecies in the Scripture.
 
Now let's go forward. In Paul continues to talk about why Jesus has come. That He has come first and foremost to the circumcision but this is not to the exclusion of the Gentiles. He came for both. He came to the Jews and He came to the Gentiles. In He says, "And that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy, as it is written: 'For this reason I will confess to you among the Gentiles, and sing to Your name." This is a quote that comes out of a couple of different passages in the Old Testament.
 
The word for confess here is not HOMOLOGEO but EXOMOLOGEO which adds a little something to it. It's primarily translated praise and that would fit in the parallel in this Psalm. There's a synonymous parallelism. "For this reason I will give praise to you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name." So the synonymous parallelism would be between EXOMOLOGEO and the word sing. So EXOMOLOGEO should be understood to be praise in this particular context.
 
This comes out of a verse in the Old Testament that's located two places: and . In David is rejoicing in God's victory over His Gentile enemies who will eventually serve God. Remember we've gone through how the Old Testament quotes are used in the New Testament. The first one is prophecy. I think that's what's going on here. I've gone back and forth over this, whether it's prophecy or application. I can see a case for application. I might have said that last week but I believe this is prophecy because in each of these places the point that Paul is making is that the writer from the Old Testament is foreseeing a time when Gentiles will be as equally blessed by the kingdom as the Jews. That salvation is not just for Israel. That salvation is not just for the Jews but that it will include both Jews and Gentiles in the future.
 
Now turn back with me to . We're going to run around in the Old Testament just a little bit to look at the original context of these quotations. is just one of those tremendous psalms that you ought to spend some time just thinking through. It's one of those psalms that has an historical note to it indicating that this was when David was delivered by God and he is giving thanks because God rescued him from all of his enemies. This is written at the end of David's life looking back on all the ways God delivered him, according to the annotation there, which is inspired. That's really verse 1. It reads, "To the chief musician, a psalm of David, the servant of the Lord, who spoke to the Lord these words on the day that the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul." That's part of the inspired text. It tells us the context of when this was written.
 
He begins with a praise. It says, "I will love You, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock [sela] and my fortress [metzuda]…" I pointed out last time that this is the same word as Masada. It just refers to the fact that God is a fortress. "And my deliverer; My God, my strength [stronghold, bulwark] in whom I will trust;" That first word "rock" is sela which indicates that which is a deliverer. It's not the word that indicates a foundation stone or a bedrock.  It's parallel to the word strength. Each of these words indicate a different vantage point. The sum of all these metaphors is that God is the One who protects us. He protects us like a rock. We can hide in the rock and we're protected from the storms of life. He's like a fortress and we're protected from our enemies, whatever is assailing us. He's our deliverer. He's the One who rescues us from the crises of life. He is our strength. This is like a stronghold or a bulwark. He is the One in whom I will trust. He is a shield and that is how we extinguish the arrows and spears and bullets that fly our way. He is our stronghold, which indicates a refuge high above everything else, high on the peak where we're hidden and protected. So David is indicating the sufficiency of God. He and He alone is the One who ultimately protects us.
 
We can do a lot of things to protect ourselves but ultimately it's God who protects. You can protect your house. You can get an alarm system. You can get a 45 or a Glock. You can get any number of weapons. You can get a blowgun. You can get a Taser. You can get pepper spray. Recently I learned that what's better than pepper spray is wasp and hornet spray because it will shoot a twenty-foot stream and you don't have to wait for the person to get five feet in front of you. There are a lot of different ways to protect yourself but ultimately it's the Lord who protects you. We have a responsibility to protect ourselves. When we leave our house we're going to lock the house. We're going to turn on the alarm system but above all we're trusting the Lord to keep us safe. We live in a world where people can still break in and get our valuables. So we trust in the Lord. He's the ultimate One who provides protection for us when things are tough.
 
The interesting thing is that when you think through David's life he went through hard time. He went through military defeats. He went through difficulties, yet God sustained him even in the midst of calamity. This isn't a promise that God is going to keep us calamity free. It's that God is going to protect us in and through the calamities of life. So David says in , "I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised." Why is He worthy? Because He delivers us from the storms of life. So David concludes, "So I shall be saved from my enemies."
 
Then we get to the end of the psalm. , "The Lord lives!" He is a living God as opposed to all the idols. "Blessed be my Rock!" He is the One who provides protection for us. We use the word rock in much the same way metaphorically in English. We see someone who's strong, who's able to withstand difficult circumstances and we say that person is just a rock. We mean they're stable and they're solid which is a very similar metaphor.
 
"Let the God of my salvation be exalted." We are to praise God for His deliverance. "It is God who avenges me. And subdues the peoples under me;" You know David did his role as a leader but it was ultimately it was God who empowered his leadership and enabled him to rule over his people. "He delivers me from my enemies." David had enemies who were Gentiles: the Philistines, the Amorites, and others who were opposed to Israel.
 
 "You also lift me up above those who rise against me; You have delivered me from the violent man. Therefore I will give thanks to You, O Lord, among the Gentiles." If you look at this in your English Bibles, some of them have translated this "nations". The Hebrew word here is goy. Goy according to the Hebrew-Aramaic lexicon of the Old Testament means people, Gentiles, heathens, tribal groups, or nations. Its primary meaning is people who are united by a blood relationship. That is a common ethnic group.
 
During the time of the Scriptures nearly all nations were ethnically related. You had the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Israelites, the Moabites, and the Ammonites. They're all ethnic groups. They go back to the tribal divisions that are established in the table of nations back in and 11. It's important to understand that's called the table of nations but it defines these tribal groups. Those tribal group names become the standard reference point all the way through into prophetic passages such as and 39. If you want to understand who Gog and Magog, Meschah, Tubal and all of those are you have to go back to to understand who they are.
 
Initially we had these tribal distinctions that eventually became what the Bible calls nations. These are different from what we call nations today because they came out of this tribal background which is what is indicated in all the lexicons. It goes on to point out that the Hebrew word goy is translated Gentiles in the King James Version of this passage but in other translations it's called nations. Nations has a completely different sense and when you look at the quotations in Romans, Paul uses the word Gentiles. Now when the psalm was translated into Greek in the Septuagint it used the Greek word ETHNO and ETHNOS like goy is a broad term and it is almost universally translated as Gentiles in all of the ancient translations of the text. It's understood that it's not talking about national entities. The text is talking about Gentiles, a group of people who are non-Jewish, who are not in a covenant relationship with God.
The word ETHNOS, according to the Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich lexicon describes a body of persons united by kinship, culture, and common traditions. It can mean tribe. It can mean a clan. It can mean Gentiles or it can mean people or even a nation. So the conclusion that I'm coming to here is that those translating passage are exactly correct that this should have been translated Gentiles in .
 
There's a contrast between the Jews and the non-Jews who are Gentiles and it's those who are non-Jews who didn't have a covenantal relationship with God who will also be joined with the Jews in the future to give thanks to God. So Paul is going to the Old Testament and pointing out there here are the passages that talk about a future role of the Gentiles and how these will be united in the future.
 
Now let's look at our next quotation which is in the next verse, , "And again he says: 'Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people!' " Now you see this right out of the first phrase in where Moses is giving his final message to the Israelites. It's called The Song of Moses and it's written in poetry. It's introduced at the end of chapter 31 and begins, "Give ear on heavens and I will speak and hear O earth the words of my mouth." Why does Moses say that? Because it's by the mouth of two witnesses that something is confirmed. This is a legal document and he's calling upon two witnesses. The first is those who inhabit the heavens, which are the angels. It's not the heaven as an immaterial body of planets and stars because they can't deal with this. He's talking about the sentient beings who inhabit the heavens: the angels. Then he says "And hear, O earth." So he's talking about human beings who inhabit the earth.
 
He's talking about two witness groups to witness this proclamation. Then he goes all the way through here summarizing everything God has done for Israel and the value of Israel to God and that God is going to fulfill His covenant and bless them. Then we come to the end, the very last verse, after he's gone through all this talking about God's blessing and how He will bless and curse Israel in the future. Then he concludes in , "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people…" So he's talking about how in the future there will be a time when the Gentiles are to worship together with the people of God from the Old Testament, the Jewish people and so Paul is just lifting that one phrase out of the Old Testament to show another indication that in the future Jew and Gentiles will worship God together. That's the point that he's making in terms of unity in .
 
Then in , "And again: "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles! Laud Him, all you peoples!" So here he's quoting , "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles! Laud Him, all you peoples! For His merciful kindness is great toward us. And the truth of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord!" This is the entire psalm. It's the shortest psalm in the Bible. So Paul goes back to to show another example where a Jewish psalmist is calling upon the Gentiles to praise and worship God and come together. He's saying this was clearly prophesied and indicated in the Old Testament.
 
He comes to the last quote in where he's quoting from . Again this prophecy describes that in the future Gentiles will praise God through the same Messiah that's given to Israel. In Paul states, "And again, Isaiah says: 'There shall be a root of Jesse;' " Now Jesse was David's father and so Paul is using this plant analogy, this root that comes out of Jesse is going to be the Messiah.
 
In other illustrations in Isaiah, the tree of Jesse is cut down, as if it's dead, as if it is no more. This is picturing prophetically the exile after the Babylonian captivity. But then he says in some places that there's going to be a branch coming out of this previously thought to be dead stump. That's a term for the Messiah. He's the branch in other passages in Isaiah. Here it's the root of Jesse. There's this root that comes out of that stump.
 
continues: "Who shall stand as a banner to the people; For the Gentiles shall seek Him." Here again there's that same word goy. It's not talking about nations. It's talking about Gentiles. "And His resting place shall be glorious." Now as you look at the quote in you see it's slightly different and that's because of the way the Septuagint translated it into Greek. When the writers of Scripture quote from the Septuagint the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew text that we have. It's not that the Septuagint is wrong. It's just not an accurate translation. The Septuagint is still truth so under inspiration it's accurate.
 
quotes, "And He who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, In Him the Gentiles shall hope." They will have this confident expectation of the future. I want you to notice that this key word that Paul brings in here is important to his conclusion. Let's turn back to our passage in Romans and we're going to see that he's going to take the idea of hope and then develop it.
 
In , he says, "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing…" Joy and peace comes as a result of believing. Not believing at justification but this is talking about faith afterwards, sanctification. Paul's blessing is that God who is the source of hope will fill us…" This is the same word that's used in for the filling of the Spirit. What does the Spirit fill us with? He fills us with His Word and as a result we are filled with joy and peace. When we believe God's word the product of that is we have joy and peace. Those terms are used together.
 
Joy is happiness. It is contentment. It is the presence of tranquility. The peace here is not talking about peace between man and God. It's talking about inner peace and inner happiness. So how do we have that inner peace and inner happiness? Through believing. That is, through trusting in the Word. The result is that we may abound in hope. The God of hope is the one who will enable us to abound in hope by the power of God the Holy Spirit.
 
Paul concludes this section by turning us back to focus on the role of God the Holy Spirit in sanctification in the church age. This emphasizes that if we want to have hope, joy, and peace this is a result of trusting in the Word of God. Next time we're going to get into the interesting conclusion of Romans and we'll start working our way through the last part of this chapter which is Paul's conclusion to this epistle to the Romans.

Romans 156b-Hope; Spiritual Service

Romans 15:13 NASB95
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 156b-Hope; Spiritual Service
 
I was surfing the Internet the other day and ran across something that I have not heard in a long time. I heard this the first time from a pastor in the pulpit. He could hardly read this thing without, well, he just lost it, uncontrollably laughing several times. I think I'll get past it. It's humorous and I thought I would read this to you to share a little humor with you before I get into the lesson tonight. This is an accident report. It was allegedly submitted and reported at the Oxford Union in 1958. This bricklayer had an accident. This is his report:
 
"Dear Sir, I'm writing in response to your request for additional information in block 3 in the reporting form. I put "poor planning" as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation. I trust the following details will be sufficient. I'm a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident I was working alone on the roof of a new 6-story building. When I completed my work I found I had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which was attached to the side of the building on the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out, and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the rope, holding it tightly to assure a slow descent of the 240 lbs. of bricks.
 
"You will note on the accident form that my weight is 135 lbs. Due to my surprise of being jerked off the ground so suddenly I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel, which was now proceeding downward at an equally impressive speed. This explains the fractured skull, minor abrasions and broken collarbone as listed in section 3 of the accident reporting form.
 
"Slowed only slightly I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which I mentioned in paragraph 2 of this form. Fortunately by this time I had regained my presence of mind and was able to hold the rope in spite of the excruciating pain I was now beginning to experience. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel. It was now devoid of the weight of the bricks the barrel weighed approximately 50 pounds. I refer you again to my weight.
 
As you might imagine I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles, broken tooth, and severe lacerations on my legs and lower body. Here my luck began to change slightly. The encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately, only three vertebrae were cracked. I'm sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the pile of bricks in pain, unable to move, and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my composure and presence of mind and let go of the rope."
 
Oh well, that gave everyone a good chuckle. Let's open our Bibles now to . Last time we wrapped up this paragraph dealing with all these various quotes from the Old Testament related to God's inclusion of Gentiles in His plan of salvation. They'd always been in God's plan of salvation. The point from these quotes was to demonstrate that the inclusion of Gentiles in the body of Christ was not unforeseen. Although the concept of the Church and the body of Christ was not predicted in the Old Testament, the salvation of the Gentiles was not unforeseen.
 
In looking at this last part of , there is a quote from and 11:10. The concept of hope is mentioned. In , "There shall be a root of Jesse and He who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles. In Him, the Gentiles will have hope." That word takes us into the key thought that sets up the final benediction in as Paul ends the main body of the epistle before he gets into the conclusion. He writes in , "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."
 
A couple of things we ought to note here as we look at this verse. The first thing we ought to note is that God is referred to as the God of hope. The topic of the verse is on the doctrine of hope. Now we've studied hope many times. Hope means a confident expectation. For the believer, for the use of hope in the Bible, hope is a certainty based upon faith. Faith in the Scripture is a way of knowing truth. It is not, as it's used so often in modern language, faith that is apart from evidence. Or you believe in spite in evidence. Or you believe just because you wish it to be true. Faith in the Bible is something that is based upon knowledge, something that is certain, something where you have assurance of its veracity. Hope is built on that faith. The faith points us to a certain direction. Hope, in turn, takes that direction and fixes its attention and just locks on that in the future. It's a certain expectation that no matter what else happens we have absolute, unbending confidence that this is what's going to take place in the future. Now that hope that we're talking about, Biblical hope, is a hope that derives from God. The "of hope" there represents a genitive of source in the Greek; it means the God who gives hope or the hope that comes from God fills us with something.
 
So what comes first? The hope or what it fills with? The hope, of course. What's the hope based on? Faith. So we see that hope builds on faith and then hope produces joy and peace. Then we have the phrase "in believing", which is by believing, so the means by which we have this hope is on believing. /We start with faith, then we build hope on that and joy and peace eventually result from that. So Paul is saying, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace."
 
The word for "fill" is the same word we have in , "Be filled by means of the Spirit." I've taught this many times but in the Greek language if you have a coffee cup, I don't have one up here so I'll just use this water bottle, and you're going to fill it up with something, you're talking about content. You're talking about what you're going to put into the cup or into the bottle. You would use a genitive construction. If you're talking about what you're filling it with, such as the content of that bottle or from that pitcher or from that carafe, the instrument that you're using to fill it is going to be stated with a dative case grammatically. Now when we come to and people read that as being filled with the Spirit, they think that what they're being filled with in terms of content is more of the Spirit. That's not what it means because it's not a genitive construction. It's a dative construction. It's that the Spirit is going to be filling us with something.
 
We're filled by means of the Spirit. The Spirit is the One who already indwells us. We can't get any more of the Spirit. But the Spirit is going to fill us with something. There's a parallel passage in where Paul says, "Let the Word of Christ richly dwell within you." So what's the content according to that verse? It's the Word of Christ. It's Bible doctrine. It's the Word of God. It's the instruction from Scripture. So it's the Holy Spirit in who fills us with the Word.
 
The by-product of being filled with the Word when we are obeying the Lord and walking by the Spirit is that the Spirit produces in us joy and peace. Both of these are stated as fruit of the Spirit in . So we have, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace." He does this through God the Holy Spirit which is what's clarified in this last clause. "That you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."
 
God gives us this hope so that we can abound in hope by the power of God the Holy Spirit. I want to look at both the concept of hope and the phrase here, "joy and peace". This is where believers have stability. This is what gives us joy in the midst of trauma, in the midst of crisis, and in the midst of chaos. Now that doesn't mean that we become emotionally disengaged from what's going on around us. Our emotions aren't controlling us. Our emotions aren't dominating us. We remain in control rather than becoming emotional. We don't panic. We don't give in to fear and worry and anxiety and excitement and all of these other things. We have a calm and a tranquility even in the midst of crisis because our focus is on the Lord and He's the One who sustains us.
In the past I've talked about this in terms of different spiritual skills. These spiritual skills are how we stay in fellowship because every crisis, every external adversity, every difficulty, whether it's because we're dealing with someone who's just decimal points away from being an imbecile or we're dealing with someone who's just too, too caught up in legalism or we're dealing with the wonderful flexibility of the government or some bureaucracy or the structures of our employer or whatever they may be or we're dealing with other crises that come along. Maybe all of a sudden we have health problems. We have financial problems or all of a sudden a hurricane starts barreling up the Gulf to hit the upper Texas coast and we have to figure out how we're going to solve whatever happens as a result. Our lives turn into turmoil. What should we do?
 
The first thing we have to do is we have to make sure we're in fellowship. We have to confess our sins which simply means to admit or acknowledge our sins. That makes it sure we're back in fellowship. We're enjoying our relationship with God. We're abiding in Christ and we're walking by means of the Spirit. That's the second area. We have to maintain that walk by the Spirit. That's another term for walking in the light and abiding in Christ. It really describes the core dynamic of fellowship. It is enjoying that on-going relationship with God. This is talked about in passages like and .
 
Three things that we do help keep us enjoying that fellowship. We trust in God, which is the Faith-rest drill stated in . God has given us these rich and magnificent promises and we claim those promises. We're oriented to God's grace. We grow by the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ which is . That's also doctrinal orientation. These are the three basic skills we have to implement day in and day out as we face these challenges.
 
Then as we mature we begin to understand that we're not just living for today. We're living for eternity. I think one of the hardest things I see people dealing with is that this life is preparing us for eternity. We know it in an academic sense but it needs to become a normative part of our soul and that's so challenging. We have to accept that whatever happens in life is simply preparing us for eternity. We need to think in terms of the end game and not just what's going on right now.
 
We all have our plans, our hopes and our dreams for the next week, the next year, the next decade, or whatever it might be. These things hit our lives and all of a sudden those hopes and dreams and plans just disappear. We get so caught up in grief and introspection and self-absorption that we overlook that this was under God's control and God put it there for a reason. It's to get our attention to focus on His plan and not our plan.
 
The end game is that it's not about what we want. It's not about the direction we have planned out for our lives. It's all about serving Him and focusing on Him in terms of those priorities. So we have to develop that personal sense of destiny, not in light of our retirement, not in light of what we're going to do when the kids finally grow up and they leave the house, not in light of what we finally do when we get out of school and get a job. Instead, we're living today in light of what is going to count for eternity and what's going to be there at the judgment seat of Christ. We need to pass this stage which is like adolescence.
 
If you watch young people when they grow up they move from a time when they're about nine years old and they're really self-absorbed until they're fifteen or sixteen when they're absolutely and totally self-absorbed until they're about twenty-three or twenty-four, maybe even older now such as twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and they begin to realize that there are other people in the world who may know a little bit more than they do. They begin to focus on something outside themselves. That's what happens spiritually with a personal sense of our eternal destiny.
 
At that point we really begin to mature in love. It's not that it's not there before but now it begins to become mature. It begins to mature and really take root. So there again, just like in the infancy stage with its three key skills, faith-rest drill, grace orientation, and doctrinal orientation, in the adult or mature stage you have three skills that go together: a personal love for God, impersonal love for all mankind, and occupation with Christ.
 
A lot of people have problems with that term, impersonal love for all mankind, because they think it makes it robotic; it's not personal. What we mean by personal is that you have a personal knowledge or personal relationship with the person you are loving. A lot of time we don't have any kind of personal relationship with the people around us. The checkers at the grocery store, the customer service people on the telephone, other drivers on the highway, and all kinds of people around us that we have little or no personal relationship with. We need to love them just as much as someone we know and care about, that's intimately involved in our lives. That's why we call it impersonal love.
 
Another good term for it is unconditional love. It's not based on that person's behavior. It's not based on that person's personality. It's based upon God's character and the character of Christ. So that's our impersonal love or unconditional love for all mankind. We're to love one another. , "We're to love our neighbor as our self."
 
Then there's occupation with Christ. We focus on Christ. We keep our eyes focused on Him. We are to live like Christ. As trivial a cliché as it became with the little saying WWJD, "What would Jesus do", it encapsulates an important principle. That we should be thinking, what would Jesus do in this situation? What is the Christ-like response?
 
The last thing that closes out the circle is inner peace, inner joy, inner happiness, and this happiness that comes from God and is a fruit of the Spirit. It enables us to stay strong in the midst of crisis. That describes a circle. We've built a wall. That wall surrounds our soul. As long as we're walking by the Spirit, as long as we're enjoying that fellowship with God, we stay inside that circle and we're growing and maturing and we're operating on the power of the Spirit and the Word of God.
 
The Bible uses different terms to describe this. One is the term "abiding in Christ" coming out of . Other terms that are used are "walking in the light" and "walking by means of the Spirit." Walking is a picturesque term used in the Bible that always refers to your lifestyle. Are you carrying out your lifestyle in the light of God's Word and in the light of God's righteousness or are you walking in darkness? Are you abiding in Christ or are you staying in the world? The issue is always our volition. At any given moment we can decide, "Okay, I'm going to take this back. I'm going to handle the problem my way. I'm going to use anger or intimidation or worry or anxiety or panic or anything else that comes along to solve my problem." Then instantly we're outside of this circle and we're vulnerable spiritually to failure and self-destruction. The only way to get back in is to enter through confession or naming of our sins.
 
Several years ago we had our first attempt at drawing this and it came out more of a castle than a fortification. We have a gateway as a drawbridge. The entry is . This was an attempt to express this in a dynamic way. We don't build this fortification and put up these bricks in a static fashion. One day we're in Bible class and we're learning about the faith-rest drill. The next day we're learning about unconditional love for all mankind. A couple of years later we're learning other things related to doctrinal orientation and we grow in terms of whatever we're studying and whatever it is we're being taught. It doesn't always just grow one level at a time.
 
The reason I emphasize that is that a lot of people got the idea that first of all they had to get the faith-rest drill down. Once they got that down, they thought they could move on to grace orientation. After they accomplished that, they thought they could move on to doctrinal orientation. That's not how that works. That's just a graphic demonstration demonstrating the logical relationship between these various spiritual skills.
 
Another attempt was made which I thought was much more illustrious and graphic. This is actually a painting that is outside in the entry hall of the church. (Shows picture of castle.) This represents the fortification in the midst of the storms of life. Each brick in this painting is labeled with one of the different spiritual skills, demonstrating that the only way to survive the storm is to be inside the fortification and utilizing these spiritual skills.
 
Here's the logical progression. We start off in spiritual childhood. As long as we're mastering these skills we're growing and we're maturing. At some stage we begin to get a glimmer of our personal sense of eternal destiny. All of those first five spiritual skills are exemplified by the concept of faith. We're learning to trust God. Even when we're confessing sin, we're claiming the promise of which gives a condition, "If we do X…" Then the promise comes, "Then God will do Y…" "If we confess our sin, God will forgive us and cleanse us." The implication is that if we don't confess our sins then we're in a state of unforgiveness and we're not walking by the light or walking by the Holy Spirit. So this is building our faith, which is the application of what we believe in our life.
 
As we go through the next level, spiritual adolescence begins to develop with our personal sense of destiny and then we come to the upper level of spiritual adulthood. Now the adolescent level is hope. So we have to learn to really trust God. As we grow in our faith, what develops is that certain expectation of the future which is our hope. As that is secured then we can begin to love. It's interesting an observation from numerous psychologists, not that I'm looking there for validation, but it's interesting that a stopped watch is right twice a day. And even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then. So psychologists recognize that people can't love if they're not secure. says that "perfect love casts out fear."
 
The basic problem that people have is fear and anxiety and worry. That was the first emotion stated in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned, then God came looking for them in the Garden. Adam said, "Well we heard the sound of your voice in the Garden and we were naked and afraid." That's the first emotion related to sin. You can't love if you're afraid. Hope gives us that confident expectation and security so that we can fully develop in the area of love: personal love for God, personal love for all mankind, and occupation with Christ. The result of this is joy and peace as we experience the perfect happiness of God. That's almost a consequence of doing the other things.
 
The reason I'm giving this to you and reminding you of these things is that when we get into it's helpful to think through what Paul is saying, "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace…" The word here for being filled is that same word that used for God the Holy Spirit. So as we're filled up with God's Word the end result is that we have this supernatural joy and peace in our life that gets us through almost any kind of crisis…not almost any kind, it's any kind of crisis.
 
goes on to say, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace by believing…" See that takes us down to the ground floor, these initial steps of faith. Notice we have faith, hope, and love mentioned in where faith, hope, and love are what continue in this Church Age. "…That you may abound in hope…" That's more than you have at first. It's where your personal sense of eternal destiny is full and dominates your thinking. That's what's going on here.
 
This takes us back to a lot of passages in the Old Testament that are promises that focus on these aspects of hope, peace, and joy. In we read, "And now, Lord, what do I wait for?" He's waiting and waiting in Scripture is always this idea of trusting in God for something that's not coming right away. It has this idea of resting in God such as the verse that says, "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up as eagles, they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not faint." [] So again in , "And now, Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in You."
What enables us to wait and to rest is our hope, our confident expectation that God is in control and God's going to provide for us. where the psalmist is obviously struggling with emotional responses to the external adversities of life. He says, "Why are you cast down, O my soul?" He's asking himself why he's depressed, why he's feeling sad, why he's down, why he's disappointed. "Why are you disquieted within me?" He's having a little self-talk here. "Why are you cast down, why are you disquieted?"
 
The Psalmist tells himself to "hope in God." That's what we should tell ourselves. Don't hope in your circumstances. Don't hope in your plans. Don't hope in what you can see and touch. We like to know that things are going to turn out a certain way. We like certainty that our plans will work and yet when we're walking by faith, we may not see where things are going to go. Trust me. It's only an illusion that we think we know where things are going to go a certain way. God has a way of surprising us. The instruction that the psalmist gives himself is to hope in God and his conclusion is, "For I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance, and my God."
 
One of the things that we have to develop is that when we are studying the Word and claiming promises, we should not only look at the context but think through what's going on inside that verse. What's the thought process of the writer of that verse? What's the rationale that's embedded in that verse? We have this question that's being addressed to the depressed soul. Then we have a command to hope in God, which is the solution. Then the conclusion that is reached is because of the hope in God, which is basically an essence of God rationale where we focus on who God is. Remember that He is worthy of hope. Then there's a conclusion that comes from focusing on the character of God, "For I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance, and my God." See, all that's embedded in just one verse.
 
If you are prone to depression or worry or anxiety, that's a great verse to memorize. Ask yourself why you're depressed. Instead, hope in God. Direct your attention away from the problem and on to the solution. says the same thing, "My soul, wait silently for God alone, For my expectation [same word in the Hebrew for hope] is from Him." Are we expecting something else to provide for us? Something that can come from our job, something that can come from friends, something that can come from success, something that can come from money or the things that money can buy? If so, we're putting our hope in the details of life. Here our expectation, according to the psalmist, is in God.
 
Then Psalm 199:166 says, "Lord, I hope [a confident expectation] for Your salvation and I do Your commandments." The second line flows out of the first. Because of that hope, I am obedient. Jesus says to His disciples the same thing that Moses said to the Jews that if you love God you will obey Him. Hope leads to loving God. The barometer for knowing if we really love God is our obedience to Him.
 
Another great passage is , written by Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem in 586. It's a lament. He's expressing his sorrow, his grief, over the destruction of the First Temple and the destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. I want you to notice how he starts off. Often we quote verses 22 and 23 but verses 22 and 23 are bracketed by verses 21 and 24. What's the key word in verse 21? It's hope. What's the key word in verses 24? It's hope. So what encapsulates this promise is hope, the confident expectation in God.
 
The writer of Jeremiah begins, "This I recall to mind; therefore, I have hope." What he's calling to mind is the doctrinal principles of verses 22 and 23. He's remembering the essence of God. He's focused on the grace of God and the mercy of God. That's what we call the Essence of God rationale. Years ago when I was a young believer I read through the psalms and was impressed that every time the psalmist starts whining about a problem he's facing, he turns to some aspect of God's essence and the result of focusing on God's essence is that he comes out of the mire of depression into the light of hope and confidence in his future. This is what Jeremiah is reminding us.  
 
You can just imagine what this must have been like. The people of Judah had just lost everything they had. They lost their homes, their fortunes, in many cases they lost their children who were marched off to Babylon. They lost everything. Some of them left and went into exile down in Egypt. Others tried to stay in the land. Others were hauled off to Babylon and it looked hopeless. Every day when they woke up, they were still alive. As long as they were still alive, they knew God still had a plan for their life. As long as God still had a plan for their life, they knew they could be confident in Him and God would provide for them.
 
It wouldn't be in a day. It wouldn't be in a week. It wouldn't necessarily be in a year or two but eventually they would re-establish themselves and God would provide for them. Jeremiah focuses on the key issue, which is the character of God. "It is through the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed." The dead people back in Jerusalem were consumed. They were destroyed in the fifth cycle of discipline but the ones who survived were not consumed. God's grace kept them alive.
 
Now they may say, "Why did God keep me alive? I don't have anything. I lost everything. I don't know where my next meal is coming from." But it's the mercies of God that they still had an opportunity to survive and go forward no matter what has happened. They focused on the fact that "His compassions fail not." God's character is immutable. It never changes. He will never leave us or forsake us. He will never disappoint us. He will always sustain us. So because His compassions fail not, "they are new every morning." That's new in the sense of fresh. Each day God provides for us and sustains us.
 
Jeremiah may have been thinking about God's provision for the Israelites in the wilderness when God gave them manna from heaven every morning. Manna was a type of bread, something like that, that appeared every day with the mist on the ground. It tasted like coriander seed, according to the Scripture. I always thought it tasted more like a Shipley donut but that's just my preference. Or maybe it was like Blue Belle, whatever you like. It had all the nutrients in it that you could ever hope for. And it sustained the Israelites for forty years in the desert. God's faithfulness never failed. It was new every morning.
Then he breaks out in a statement of praise saying, "Great is Your faithfulness." His conclusion that he reaches is that the Lord is his portion. He's his share. He's his inheritance. Jeremiah is saying that the Lord belongs to him and so therefore he was okay. "The Lord is my portion says my soul. Therefore I hope. I have confidence in Him."
 
Paul talks a lot about hope in Romans. In it's connected to faith. He talks about Abraham who "in hope" and "against hope". What he means is that "in hope" is hope in God and against every kind of human expectation, Abraham believed. It resulted in Abraham becoming the father of many nations. This is in reference to Abraham's belief that God would give him a son through Whom the blessing would flow. Abraham saw the promise of God. He mixed that with faith, trusting in that. That gave him confidence in God that God would do what He promised at some time in the future and God eventually fulfilled that.
 
Again we see that development of faith first, then hope, and then followed love, and peace and joy. , "Therefore because we have been justified by faith [a causal participle] we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." That is the reality of our fellowship. We have that peace as a result of justification. "Through Whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand." That's the position inside the wall. Standing inside the wall protected by those spiritual skills. We're abiding in Christ. Walking by the Holy Spirit. The result is that we "rejoice in hope." We have joy. We have these same ideas of peace and joy all tied together.
 
In Paul says, "Not only that but we also glory in tribulation." We boast in tribulation. We face adversity and we're not saying to bring it on simply because we love adversity for the sake of adversity but because we understand that whatever the adversity we're facing it's going to take us into greater maturity and give us a greater opportunity to see God fulfill His promises to us. So we glory in tribulation or adversity because we know that "tribulation produces perseverance and perseverance character and character hope." There's the path. That's the outline. That's the roadmap to maturity.
You can't get to hope and maturity unless you go through adversity and you persevere. As you persevere, it builds character. What comes out of that is that confident expectation. That's the path through infancy and beyond. That's why a lot of Christians don't even make it to spiritual adolescence because they cave in to those adversities in childhood. They just can't trust the Lord. They're overwhelmed by the circumstances of life. They don't have any doctrine and they don't know how to trust God.
 
Then in Paul says, "Now hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit Who was given to us." Again this emphasis is that the Holy Spirit is the power source. He's the dynamic. He is the One who enables us to live the spiritual life. , "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another." What's that? That's impersonal love for all mankind. That is unconditional love giving preference to one another so this is what we need to master in terms of spiritual maturity.
"Not lagging in diligence." This means not just doing it now and then when it's convenient but all the time. "Fervent in spirit" means being passionate about growing spiritually; "serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing steadfastly in prayer." So this is how hope thinks within that same pattern that we saw in .
 
Now back to , "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace." So the God of hope is filling us with joy and peace that we may abound in hope. So how does He do this? , Jesus told his disciples, "These things I have spoken to you that my joy may remain in you." This isn't just normal happiness. Don't mistake this for giddiness. Don't mistake this for some kind of emotional experience. Don't ever mistake this for someone's personality trait.
 
I had a professor at Dallas Seminary by the name of Ron Blue. If they'd had the category of ADHD when Ron Blue was a kid he would have been classified as ADHD and he would have probably been overdosed on Ritalin just to keep him under control. He was just one of those people who is naturally exuberant all the time. I had him come and speak at my first church at a mission's conference. We had one guy in the church that really wanted the church to be charismatic. No matter what he was taught he wouldn't listen and he was mystical. After hearing Ron he said, "Wasn't that great to see the joy of the Lord in him?" I said, "That's his personality. That has nothing to do with God the Holy Spirit." You have to understand that there are a lot of people who are naturally exuberant and happy. That's their personality. That is not what the Bible is talking about.
 
Joy in the Bible is a production of God the Holy Spirit as a result of your study of the Word. It may or not be expressed overtly by someone's enthusiasm. It may be that someone is very quiet and very serious and very sober minded and very focused; yet in their soul they have great tranquility and joy. To confuse that with some kind of external expression of personality is going to lead you in the totally wrong way when you're studying the Word. Just before Jesus went to the cross in the context of abiding in Christ, Jesus said, "These things I've spoken to you [abide in Christ] that My joy may abide [remain] in you." He is connecting joy with abiding and staying in fellowship with God. "And that your joy may be brought to completion."
 
In He says, "Most assuredly I say to you that you will weep and lament…" Before that night was over with Jesus would weep and lament in the Garden of Gethsemane. He would be under so much pressure that blood would ooze from the capillaries just under his skin out through His skin so it looked like He was sweating blood. The terms that are used in the Scripture is that He had great emotional turmoil. But he didn't let that put Him in a position of sin. Just because you feel bad, doesn't mean you sin. If you feel bad and you do something wrong to assuage that bad feeling, that's when you've sinned.
 
What Jesus is saying here to His disciples is that a time will come when you will weep and lament. I talked about this on Tuesday night. Christians know we're going to go through tribulations and adversity and we may not get out of that adversity alive. The Lord may not save us through it. He may save us by taking us out of it in death. And it may be a long, slow, miserable, painful death. Think about the Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stood up against the Nazis in World War II. He was put into a concentration camp where he died just weeks before the war was over. Just because he was a faithful believer didn't mean that he would die a calm, quiet death but he had peace in his soul from dying grace. His circumstances were horrendous.
 
This has happened to numerous believers down through the ages. Jesus faces the reality of our living in the devil's world. He says, "You will weep and lament but the world will rejoice [because of the pain we're going through] and you will be sorrowful." It's not wrong to be sorrowful. It's the same words used of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Those emotions are typical. If someone in your family dies, if you wife dies, if your child dies, if your parent dies, you are sorrowful. The Bible says we grieve but "not like those who have no hope." It doesn't say, "No, no, no. You're a believer. You don't grieve. You never are sad or sorrowful." The Bible recognizes that yes we will grieve. That's a reality but don't act on that in terms of your sin nature.
 
That's a reality of living in the world where we face death, pain, disappointment, and sorrow. Jesus says you will be sorrowful but "your sorrow will be turned into joy." Jesus had perfect happiness. He was immutable. Did Jesus ever lose His maximum joy? Not at all. Was Jesus sorrowful? Yes. Did He grieve? Yes. He did both at the same time. We think of these as mutually exclusive. You can have sorrow and grief but not like those who have no hope. You can have sorrow but at the same time you can have peace and tranquility and stability because of your relationship with the Lord. That makes Christians different. It doesn't mean we deny being sorrowful or grieving.
 
Jesus says He's the One who supplies this joy. It's the fruit of the Spirit. , "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy…" Joy is number two. Love is mentioned first because the command that got Paul into this section was in that you are to love your neighbor as yourself. In the fruit of the Spirit, the first one is love, then joy and then peace. That's what we're talking about in , "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace by believing."
 
, "You became followers of us and the Lord, having received the Word in much affliction." There was a lot of opposition from the Jewish community that was turned into opposition from the civic, Gentile community who were opposed to them. He continues, "You received the Word with joy from the Holy Spirit." It only comes from God the Holy Spirit.
 
James summarizes everything at the beginning of his book saying "We're to count it all joy when we encounter various trials." So all of this is what Paul is bringing together in one very succinct statement, "And now may the God of hope fill you will all joy and peace by believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." We can't do this on our own. We can't gin it up. We can't make ourselves happy. It only comes as a by-product of being in the Word. If we're not in the Word and growing in the Word, then that's not going to be the by-product.
 
When you hit those adversities and you need it, it's too late to develop it. That's why it takes mental discipline every day in your Christian life to study the Word, to read the Word, to be reminded of the promises of God, utilizing those promises every single day so that as you grow and mature when you face these crises in life, you can rest and relax in the Word of God in hope.
 
Now we have a few minutes left. What I want to do is introduce you to the conclusion to this epistle. It begins in the next verse, and extends down to the end of the chapter. Just like the opening introduction, it reviews some basic themes and basic ideas that are stated in the opening introduction. If you turn back to Paul gives a salutation in verse one and then from we have the introduction.
 
There are several key things that Paul introduces in the introduction that—surprise, surprise—are restated in the conclusion. That's called good writing and good literature. He ties it together. So I want to go through six of these. We'll start tonight and we'll just get into the first one a little bit. This is application. Like Paul we should have serving the gospel as the central priority of our life.
 
Paul says in these verses that he is here as a minister of the gospel to serve the gospel. That's why he's on the earth. He's not here for any other reason. He's not here to become a success at his job, not that there's anything wrong with being a success and pursuing a great deal of success. But if you pursue success at the expense of doctrine, for you, for your family, for your spiritual growth, then that's going to be a sacrifice that will come back and haunt you the rest of your life. If you pursue any of the details of life, hobbies, your career, money, the things that money can buy, where the details of life consume you so that you cannot invest time in your spiritual life and the spiritual life of your family, then you will regret that day the rest of your life.
 
Paul says that our priority is serving the gospel. It's really interesting how he states this. I want to contrast the beginning of Romans with this. In Paul says that he was called to be an apostle separated to the gospel of God. In , he says he served the gospel of His Son. In he says that he is ready to preach the gospel. And in he says he is not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.
 
We ought to ask ourselves, "How true are these statements of us?" You're thinking, "Well, that can be true of Paul because he was an apostle." What's true of Paul here as an apostle should also be true of every single believer. We are all called to different ministries but we're all called to serving the gospel. We'll get into this in more detail next time but Paul recognizes that his focus is to minister the gospel of God. In he says, "And so I have made it my aim to preach the gospel." It uses the Greek word EUAGGELIZO where we get our word evangelism. It means to give the good news to someone. It's doesn't mean to proclaim it but it's a synonym. It's emphasizing giving the good news with that particular word.
 
In he says, "Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel." So in Paul's life the gospel is front and center. That should be true for every one of us. Like Paul, we should direct our lives toward a proclamation of the good news of the gospels. That can be done with our actions as well as our lips. A lot of times we're going to gain a greater hearing with some people by not running over them with the gospel and by not pulling out our gospel gun and shooting them. I've had to learn that the hard way just like everybody else.
 
There are times when we just have to keep our mouths shut about the gospel and we have to develop a relationship with someone. Sometimes it may take five, fifteen, twenty years. Sometimes we may never get the opportunity to really sit down and clarify the gospel. A lot of times we may be involved more in what is called today "pre-evangelism" rather than actually getting to the gospel. Some people have so suppressed the truth in unrighteousness that they've just created this whole thick veneer around themselves that you have to pierce because they don't want you to talk to them about the gospel. That's the last thing they want to hear. So we have to build that and peel away that veneer over time before they'll be willing to listen. A lot of that just comes with time and experience. So we work through that.
 
The first thing we learn from this is that we should direct our lives toward the proclamation of the gospel. The gospel is good news; a good proclamation. That's what it means. How many of us have forgotten have exciting it was when we realized we had eternal life and when we died we were going to go to heaven? And the good news is that God has solved all the problems for us. We want to tell people that good news.
 
Most Christians by the time they've been saved two or three years are a little bit embarrassed. They don't want to get into an argument. They don't want people to think that they are somehow backward or some sort of fundamentalist or whatever the word is. Satan has created the world system to create such negative images of Christians so we don't want to be associated with that. We want to be popular. We don't want to be unpopular. What we want to do is we're so busy avoiding that and being careful that we get to where we're so shy and timid about that that we don't want to give anyone the gospel.
 
We should be positive about giving people the gospel. Paul was very excited. He was not ashamed of the gospel. Our fear borders on fear of the gospel. In Paul says, "For God is my witness whom I serve with my spirit for the gospel." He serves the gospel. This is an interesting set of words. I want to end with this and let you hear it again the next time. He uses the word LEITOURGOS, which is an interesting word. Service is often DIAKONOS or DIAKONIA or some form of that word. But here it is a word that specifically is associated with priestly service. It has to do with our relationship to God. We serve the gospel of God's Son.
 
This word is used in to show that everyone gives religious service to someone. Everybody. Whether they're a Buddhist, an atheist, whether they're a secularist, a Muslim or whatever they all serve some religion. This is . The unbeliever is the one who has "exchanged the truth of God for a lie." It's talking about the atheist. "And worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever."
 
In , which is the beginning of this last section, Paul says, "I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice." This is a priestly concept. The term sacrifice and offering are used almost interchangeably. Here it focuses on the idea of a sacrifice "holy and acceptable to God which is your reasonable service." It's priestly service to God. It's part of your role as a priest in the royal family of God.
 
In Paul is saying, "That I might be a minister of Jesus Christ." It's not the word DIAKONOS. It's the word LEITOURGOS where we get our word liturgy. It's a word that focuses on priestly service. He's casting our service to the gospel in a very strong religious terminology but it has nothing to do with ritual. It has to do with the gospel, proclaiming the gospel. So this is his focal point. We see some other passages like in where this word LEITOURGOS is applied to Jesus as a minister in the temple and it's applied to Epaphroditus in his ministry to Paul's need. So in it emphasizes this.
 
Then we get to the next word "ministering the gospel of God", it's HIEURGOS, which means to serve as a priest. So what's the "ritual" of the church age? It's serving God day to day. It's , "I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service." This is focal point of understanding the spiritual life. We'll start off with that next time to get it back into our heads. It should revolutionize your understanding of your Christian life.

Romans 157b-The Gospel; Faith-Rest Drill; Spiritual Growth

Romans 15:13 NASB95
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 157b-The Gospel; Faith-Rest Drill; Spiritual Growth
 
Open your Bibles with me to . While you’re turning there I want to comment on some things going on in the national news. Most significant, of course, is this case of ebola in Dallas. I think that as believers we really need to think through how we’re going to respond if this gets out of control. I’ve read a number of things recently about the possibility of this really getting out of control not being very distant. We think that we have things under control.
We, as a generation, have been really blessed in this country with an incredible amount of health. My mother was a victim of the polio epidemic in 1952, which was centered here in Harris County. Prior to that, going back into the early part of the 20th century, there would be these periodic outbreaks of polio that just put fear into the nation. People were scared to death to let their kids go outside, to go to the swimming pools, and to go to any kind of gathering when these epidemics occurred. Most of us have never had to live with that.
 
You go back to 1918 and the flu epidemic. The other night I misspoke. I thought it was about 18 million that died but the actual number of deaths worldwide were between 50 and 100 million. It ravaged the trenches of World War I. We’ve never seen anything like that.
 
If you’re not familiar with ebola, a book I would recommend is a book that came out in the mid 90s called The Hot Zone. Many of us read that back when it first came out. One of the people mentioned in there was a Colonel David Franz, who at the time was the director of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research and Infectious Disease Institute in Frederick, Maryland. He’s got a fascinating testimony because when he was a college student, I think in Kansas, either University of Kansas or Kansas State, he had grown up as a Mennonite, a pacifist Mennonite. He got hold of a book called Freedom Through Military Victory and that changed his life.
 
He rose to be a full colonel in the army and he was the director of USAMB. In 1998, right after I’d gone to Preston City, Pam and I went down to visit Dan Inghram in Washington, D.C. and Colonel Franz gave the three of us a personal tour for two or three hours through the “hot zone”. Then he took us into one of the briefing rooms because he had been in charge of the teams that went in to dismantle the biological and chemical warfare stuff after the first Gulf War. He gave us the same briefing he gave to Congress minus whatever was top secret that he couldn’t communicate. That was absolutely fascinating. The movie that Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo were in in the late 90s called Outbreak was based loosely on that book.
 
The predictions in that book and the film very much fit the scenario that we’re seeing right now. There’s an outbreak of ebola in Africa. Someone is exposed. They get on an airplane and they come to the United States and dozens of people become exposed and infected and you can just have a pandemic that occurs. This is something we have to think about. I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen. I’m not saying this to be a gloom-and-doomer. I’m saying this because a) This is a real threat to the world and I have no confidence whatsoever in civil servants and bureaucrats which is what the Center for Disease Control is. Maybe they can get a handle on this. I’m reading some things showing where they’ve dropped the ball already. We need to be prepared in our souls and in other ways to face whatever threats may come. I don’t mean we should be survivalists or preppers or any of the extreme stuff, but we need to be thoughtful and aware of what’s going on around us. If this goes beyond this one case, the fear that will hit people is going to give us a wonderful opportunity for us to communicate the gospel. And it’s going to give us a wonderful opportunity to remain calm and to remain stable in the midst of panic. Many will be scared to death because suddenly their whole fantasy of a stable, secure world will have disappeared.
 
Last time when we were going through the text in Romans, which starts in and goes down to verse Romans 15:33, I focused on some key things that show up in the introduction and are parallel to what goes on in the conclusion, like any good piece of literature. I’m not going through this section at this point verse by verse although I’m doing some spot exegesis on some key passages.
 
There are some important things that run through this particular section. One of those is the word gospel. Just look at your Bibles with me for a minute. In Paul says, “That I may be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel.” You ought to underline the word “gospel” every time it occurs in this section. In he says, “I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.” In he says, “So I have made it my aim to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named but in new places.” In he says, “I’m going to Jerusalem to minister to the saints but I knew that when I came to you I should come in the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.” The gospel is mentioned so many times in that it’s a major theme of Paul’s.
 
As we come into this conclusion, the thing I pointed out last time is that, like Paul, we should have serving the gospel as the central priority of life. Just to review, Paul said he was separated to the gospel of God in . In he came to serve with his spirit the gospel of His Son. In he said he was ready to preach the gospel. Finally in we see a verse that many of you should have memorized that says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also the Greek.”
 
I went through these verses at the end where he emphasizes the gospel. In the closing benediction in Paul says, “Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching in Jesus Christ.” I looked at this last time and one of the important things that come out of this that is easy to miss is a series of words that are used that have this overtone of service of a priest. The bottom line is that Paul is viewing his ministry as an apostle as a priestly ministry, serving the people with reference to the gospel.
 
We have words like the verb LATREUO which means to serve. A lot of people miss the point that these words are used in a cluster and not just individually. They’ll focus on the word service but it’s a worshipful service. This is a word that is commonly used to describe the worship of a priest in the tabernacle or a temple. uses that same word in terms of the idolatry of those who have rejected God, that they serve the creature rather than the Creator.
 
We see this same word again in as Paul sets up the theme for the last part of Romans saying we are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. There’s that word “living sacrifice” and a parallel word meaning offering shows up in verse 16 again indicating this aspect of worship that is behind this. We are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is our reasonable service. The parallel word is LEITOURGOS where we get our word liturgy. It’s not just someone who’s being a servant but it’s always used within some sort of relationship to God. It’s used of the Lord Jesus Christ as a minister of the sanctuary and the tabernacle. It’s used of Epaphroditus’ ministry to Paul in . It’s also used in to refer to the government authorities as a minister of God. It’s always in that context of somehow serving God in relation to this kind of ministry.
 
In our passage in Paul uses the term minister of Jesus Christ [LEITOURGOS] clustered with the next word ministering. See, we use the same English word there to translate two completely different Greek words. I am always critical of that by translators because the concepts that are represented in the Greek are not identical to the English word “minister”. There is a connection. The second word ministering is the Greek word HIEROURGEO which means to serve as a priest. We lose the sense of that meaning by translating it with the English word ministry. Then it uses the word offering PHOSPHORA in where Paul says, “ministering the gospel of God.” So he is serving as a priest in his proclamation of the gospel. He is serving people.
Remember in the Old Testament you had two basic roles. A prophet represented God to man and a priest represented the people to God. A priest is the one who would come into the tabernacle or into the temple and present offerings. Even though priests were often responsible for teaching the Torah to the Jews, it was so they could have acceptable worship to God.
 
Paul says his ministry to the gospel of God was primarily focusing on the Gentiles. Then as they offered their lives as in , presenting their lives as a living sacrifice to God, holy and acceptable, it was set apart or sanctified by God the Holy Spirit. That’s one of the major themes in this section, the emphasis on God the Holy Spirit. PHOSPHORA is an offering term. It’s used to describe Christ’s work on the cross, that He loved us and gave Himself for us as an offering and sacrifice. That uses both the words PHOSPHORA and the word THUSIA for sacrifice in .
 
This gets us down to the last couple of words. One is acceptable. It’s a different word than what is used in . It’s a synonym, though, showing that the offering of the Gentiles might be pleasant or pleasing to God. It’s done for the right purposes, walking in fellowship, having been sanctified by God the Holy Spirit. The word there is HAGIAZO and again, the grammar is important. It is a perfect tense participle, indicating something that had been accomplished and completely accomplished in the past with ongoing results. So a perfect tense verb, whether it’s a participle or a verb, emphasizes the present result of a completed, past action. That completed, past action would have reference to positional identification with Christ at the cross which we call positional sanctification.
 
One other thing I want to point out in before we go on to the second area of comparison between the introduction to the book and the conclusion, is that Paul emphasizes that his focus is to serve in this priestly way the gospel of God. Now that’s really important because as I pointed out the word there for minister in the first case is that word LEITOURGOS where we get our word liturgy. He’s not relating this priestly service to some sort of liturgy. If you’ve grown up in a Roman Catholic Church or an Episcopal Church, or in a high Presbyterian Church or any church where you go through regular liturgy, then you understand.
 
We have more of an informal liturgy on Sunday morning. We go through a pattern that’s similar every Sunday but in high churches they repeat the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed. They will sing the “Gloria Patria” and the doxology and three or four other things. Often they follow the so-called Christian calendar throughout the year. At different times of the year they’ll change the colors of all the vestments up on the platform or different things like that. That’s a liturgical church but Paul isn’t talking here about serving in the Church in terms of liturgy, in terms of the kinds of offering sacrifices in the tabernacle or temple.
 
This is all oriented to Paul’s operation and function as one who proclaimed the gospel. That’s a function of our priesthood. Every one of us is a priest. We are a believer-priest and part of our function as a priest is to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, completely focused and dedicated to the mission that Jesus gave. This is called the Great Commission and says that we are to make disciples.
 
That’s not something directed to pastors or evangelists or only to the early church or just the prophets and apostles. Everyone is included in that. That is a mission given to everyone. Where you fit within that ministry will differ depending upon your spiritual gift and depending upon the circumstances in your local church wherever that may be.
 
We serve the gospel in different ways. Some people are involved in gifts of helps. Some people are involved in gifts of administration. Others are involved because of gifts of giving. In some way at a personal level, we should also be involved in getting involved in evangelism. I’ve often thought about different ways that we can develop an evangelistic outlook into a community. I think that I’ve been intrigued by one that Bret Nazworth’s church developed down in Brownsville. I’ve been hearing from different churches that adopted that. That’s a preview of coming attractions after we get past my Israel trip and past Christmas and everything when we get into the winter. We’ll be looking around at different things and I think this has some great possibilities. It will certainly be a challenge to people. Not a tough challenge. It’s a pretty simple way and I like it. We’ll focus on that.
 
The principle here of application is, like Paul the focus of our life should be on the gospel. We should be thinking all the time about how we can turn certain circumstances and conversations to the gospel. Now that doesn’t mean necessarily with some people that it’s an overt gospel conversation. Sometimes you’re just putting a thought out there. Sometimes you’re just challenging their pagan suppositions. It all depends on understanding and knowing the individual and how to get them to think about spiritual things by the questions that we ask.
 
I find that one of my biggest problems and the problem with many people who know a lot about the Bible is that we want to start correcting people’s misconceptions right off the bat and straighten them out without giving them the opportunity to think through the path from where they are to understanding the gospel. We jump in there way too soon in my opinion in telling people what they ought to be doing without leading them so they come to their conclusions on their own as a result of some of the questions that we ask.
 
So when we look at the phrase “gospel of God” I just want to go through several points so that we understand with clarity what the gospel is. First of all, the phrase “of God” tells us that the source of the gospel is God. Of God indicates source. It indicates its origin. It indicates that God is the One who came up with and designed the gospel in eternity past. Before God ever created anything, in His omniscience, He already knew all of the knowable. So when we talk about what God knew in eternity past, we communicate this in a logical sense but not a chronological sense because God has always known everything. He’s never learned anything. He’s never forgotten anything. All of His knowledge is direct and intuitive whereas all of ours is learned and progressive.
Isaiah pointed out that our knowledge is not like His knowledge at all. He designed a gospel plan in eternity past, understanding the problem of sin, all of the different aspects of the problem of sin because man, the fallen creature, would not be able to do it. So the gospel comes from God. He is the only One who can apply the gospel ultimately in terms of bringing people to salvation.
 
Second, the gospel is good news. That’s the meaning of the word EUAGGELION. The “u” in the word is usually pronounced like a “v” which is where we get our English term evangelism. It’s just a term borrowed straight from the Greek. It means good news. That “eu” prefix always indicates something that is good and positive so if you’re going to say something good about someone or something it would be a EULEGEO or a eulogy. That’s how that prefix works and it comes over to many different words in English.
 
The gospel is good news. It’s something we should be excited about. Too often Christians are fearful. They’re afraid of rejection. You’re not being rejected. God is the One being rejected in a gospel presentation. Too often people are fearful that they will say something or do something that will create a problem. The gospel, then, is good news for everyone, both Jew and Gentile.
 
Specifically in the context of passages like and in this passage where Paul is talking about Jew and Gentile and in other passages like the issue is that the gospel is for everyone. Jews had a problem with that because many of them thought that the Messiah was coming only for Israel, only for the Jews. Messiah, however, was coming for everyone, the Jew first, and also the Greek which means the Gentile.
 
We need to understand that God provided a salvation for all mankind. What I mean by that is that it’s without exception and without distinction. These are theological terms that you might hear. Remember that Calvinist theology is summarized with the acronym “TULIP”. The “T” stands for total inability, “U” is unconditional election, “L” is limited atonement, “I” is irresistible grace, and the “P” the perseverance of the saints. It’s that “L” in the middle that is what is usually referred to as the fifth point.
 
Calvinists are often split between moderate Calvinists who believe in 3- or 4-point Calvinism whose issues are on limited or unlimited atonement and maybe how they understand election but your 5-point Calvinist would say in defining limited atonement that when the Scripture says that Christ died for all, it means that Jesus died for all without distinction. What they mean by that is that He died for Jew and Gentile. So they will teach that when you read in the Scripture that Christ died for all what those passages mean is that He died for Jews and He died for Gentiles, all without distinction.
 
In unlimited atonement we say that Jesus died for all without exception. He died for every single human being without exception. To make it clear I like to use both terms and say that Jesus died for all without exception and without distinction. There’s no one that was left out. There’s always that challenge for people of understanding unlimited atonement. If Christ actually died as a substitute for someone who is an unbeliever, how is it that they end up in the Lake of Fire if Jesus paid the penalty for their sin?
 
I remember when I was contemplating going to Dallas Seminary I went up there to visit a close friend of mine who had become converted to 5-point Calvinism as a student at Dallas although I didn’t know this. It was the result of S. Louis Johnson, a well-known professor at Dallas Seminary. My friend’s name was Randy Price. Randy is still a 5-point Calvinist and nothing is probably ever going to be able to change that. He brought to my attention this one theological problem that if Jesus died as an actual, real substitute then how is it that anyone is lost, that is, if Jesus truly died and paid for their sins. That was a good question.
 
I thought that through over the years and actually came up with a good answer for that. The good news is that Christ paid the price to free every person from the sin penalty. There are actually three problems that people have. First of all, we’re all born spiritually dead. says that we’re born dead in our trespasses and sins. We’re born spiritually dead. There is an aspect of our immaterial being that cannot have a relationship with God.
 
Second, we’re told that we’re born lacking perfect righteousness. Only a creature with perfect righteousness can have fellowship with a God of perfect of righteousness. says that all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Third, we’re born under the condemnation of Adam’s original sin. Because we’re born under that condemnation, that penalty for that sin has to be paid for. So Christ paid the penalty for the condemnation but even though the penalty for every sin is paid for the person still has the first two problems.
 
Jesus solved the third problem but His death provided the basis for solving the first two problems. The first problem is that we’re born spiritually dead. Jesus may have paid my eternal penalty for being condemned under Adam’s original sin but I’m still born spiritually dead. Number two, I’m still born without righteousness. You’re born without righteousness. You’re born in a state of spiritual death and unrighteousness and that has nothing to do with the penalty for Adam’s original sin which Christ paid for. The only way to have the spiritual death and the righteousness problems solved is for us to trust to Christ.
 
Point four is that Christ’s payment for the penalty of sin doesn’t save us or give us righteousness or impart life. It paid the penalty for sin, the judicial penalty for sin on the cross. So fifth, only by trusting Christ do we then receive spiritual life and perfect righteousness. Christ died for all. He paid the sin penalty for all but that only solved one of the three problems. The other two problems get solved when we make a volitional decision to trust in Christ. At that instant, His life is applied to us and we are born again, given spiritual life, and we are justified which takes care of perfect righteousness. So under point six, at the instant of faith alone in Christ alone, we are positionally, that is legally, totally forgiven of all sin. It’s wiped out personally.
 
Now we’ve studied this in in the past that when Christ died on the cross the certificate of our sin, that death penalty, was nailed to the cross and was wiped out. But we’re still left being spiritually dead and unjustified. We receive a new human spirit instantly at the point of salvation. We’re regenerated. We’re made a new creature in Christ at that instance. God regenerates that human spirit, that aspect of our soul that allows us to have a relationship with Him. That is given birth to at that point and that is called regeneration.
 
Second, and I think this is the logical order. It all happens simultaneously and instantly. That new human spirit receives the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. God doesn’t save us because He sees anything good in us but because at the instant that Christ’s perfect righteousness is credited to us, it’s imputed to us, God looks on us as possessing that perfect righteousness. Third, He declares us then to be righteous. We are then given eternal life. All of that happens instantly. Christ died for our sins. That’s unlimited atonement but its application in terms of regeneration and justification is limited by individual volition.
 
Unlimited atonement is not universal which is what this Calvinist argument attempts to say. They say that if you’re really consistent and Christ died as a substitute then everyone ought to go to heaven. That’s a theological trap that many people got caught up with for many centuries. But it’s not true. You have to understand there’s an objective payment of the penalty which is for all and a subjective application which has to do with regeneration, imputation, and justification. That’s the gospel.
 
That’s why it’s not based at all on how we lived before we’re saved or what we do before we’re saved or how we live after we’re saved or what we do after we’re saved. It’s based upon one decision to trust in Christ alone for salvation. The instant that we do that then we’re regenerate and all of this is irreversible. We are secured forever.
 
Another thing that Paul says in is that Paul relates this to his own ministry. He says, “For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ has not accomplished through me.” We have a lot of personal issues in our lives that are really irrelevant in terms of eternity. We spend a lot of time talking about our kids, about our parents, about our hobbies, and about all kinds of things. If we’re really engaged with people, we spend time talking about things that really matter such as religion, their view of God, and politics. Everything else is really irrelevant. Paul puts it in perspective here and says that if it doesn’t have anything to do with what Christ has accomplished through him it’s not worth talking about. He’s not a master of small talk. He says, “I will not dare speak of any of those things which Christ has not accomplished through me in word or deed to make the Gentiles obedient in mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God so that from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.”
 
There are a couple of things we need to observe here. First of all, look on a map. [Pastor Dean shows a map on slide 24.] What we see here is that Israel and Judea are located down here and here is Jerusalem. Paul’s first missionary journey basically covered what is now southern Turkey. The second missionary journey took him across Turkey. He was not allowed by the Holy Spirit to go into Asia. He crossed over and went into Philippi, came down through Thessalonica, through Athens, and Corinth and then came back home. On the third missionary journey he retraced those steps. Apparently when he covered the area in Macedonia, he was involved in sending out people who took the gospel into Illyricum. This would have included areas of the old Yugoslavia and going up into areas of Switzerland and even into Southeastern France which are all part of Illyricum. So he’s taking the gospel there.
He’s saying his gospel has been confirmed by signs and wonders. That’s a term that refers to performing miracles, especially sign miracles which would substantiate his claim to be an apostle. In we read, “Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance and signs and wonders and mighty deeds.” Apostolic ministry was not restricted to just the 11 or 12 but there are associates like Steven and Phillip in Jerusalem in the early part of Acts. They were serving with the apostles and so their signs and wonders confirmed that apostolic ministry. talks about the fact that the prophets and the apostles are the foundation of the church. So how would you confirm that someone was an apostle? It was through these signs and wonders.
 
In the 1980s there was a development of a new trend in the charismatic movement that was called the signs and wonders movement. It was started by an adjunct faculty member at Fuller Seminary by the name of John Wimber. It was also called “power evangelism” because Wimber said that it’s not really evangelism unless you have it confirmed with signs and wonders. What was different from the charismatic movements was that they de-emphasized tongues but they emphasized miracles and casting out demons and many other strange things.
 
They misunderstood the point that signs and wonders were not given to convince people in an unerring way of the truth of the gospel. The Gospel of John is written around eight signs that John emphasizes in giving the gospel. Many people have rejected the Gospel of John. Jesus performed many signs and wonders and many people rejected His claim to be the Messiah. Paul performed many signs and wonders and people rejected the gospel. Just because signs and wonders are there doesn’t mean that that guarantees that people would believe in the gospel.
 
That was the mistake in the whole signs and wonders movements. These things were aberrations in the late 70’s. They got a lot of play in the 1980’s because there were some well-known pastors, even a professor at Dallas Seminary who got caught up with this. There were others who kind of kept their head underground. One of the most well-known Calvinist preachers in America who has recently retired by the name of John Piper was into this whole signs and wonders things in his entire ministry, although most people don’t know this. He just didn’t emphasize it like others did. Others who are involved at Phoenix Theological Seminary such as Wayne Grudem whose systematic theology is highly touted among evangelicals today was caught up in this signs and wonders movement and has been since I studied it back in the mid-eighties.
 
This has entered mainstream evangelicalism. We see these generic evangelical churches spring up all over everywhere and they have huge numbers of people. I always wonder where they advertise and where they get all of their money. I have no idea but this is part and parcel of the modern, young evangelical movement that anyone who questions the continuation of the sign gifts or signs and wonders are being arbitrarily dogmatic and there’s no basis in the Scripture for that.
 
It’s because many young Christians are still thinking in terms of moral and philosophical relativism, including logical relativism and post-modernism. They don’t want dogmatism at all from the Scripture. They want to sit down and talk about the five different views of this or the three different views of that, where no one ever really comes to any kind of definite conclusion. But God intended His Word to communicate something, not many different ideas. He intended to communicate one and only one thing and we have to discern that from the text through a study and exegesis of the text and come to a conclusion of what the text says and what it doesn’t say.
 
People who say you’re being too dogmatic are operating like a post-modern pagan. This is what’s happened to the evangelical church over the last forty years. We have been infiltrated by believers who have not left their pagan thought modes at the door. They come in. They sit in the pews. They want to sing music like they sing out in the world. They want to conduct the church service with entertainment like they have out in the world. They want to focus on how you evangelize people by using salesman techniques like they learned in the world, not from the Word of God. They do not want to hold to a hard and fast distinction between the human viewpoint techniques and modern techniques.
 
One of the great emphases in learning Biblical apologetics is to recognize as a foundational principle that you don’t bring people to an understanding of the gospel of Christ by validating their assumptions about life. If you validate their assumptions about music, and you sing the same kind of music they do, how are you going to give them an unadulterated gospel that you’ve already perverted by your compromise by affirming their pagan assumptions on music?  Or their pagan assumptions on morality?
 
This is how you grow an organization. You grow it by having entertainment. You grow it by providing what people want. If you provide what people want, then of course you’re going to build Summit-size churches but you’re never going to be teaching people the Bible. It’s going to be different when you have Biblical presuppositions. You’re not going to build a very big church because people today don’t want that big of a change. They want to make sure they’re going to go to heaven but they don’t want to disrupt the pattern of their life too much. This has always been a problem we face.
 
Paul faced it all the time and he says in that he “fully preached the gospel.” “Fully” is the word PLEROO the same word that’s used in . It means to complete something, to fulfill something and to fill something up. Here it has that idea of completing something. It’s a perfect active infinitive. Once again we’re dealing with grammar. Perfect tense means it’s a completed action. So he says he’s completed the action relating to the gospel. This is usually translated something like “I have fully preached the gospel”.  
 
In that English translation, the word preach is presented as a past tense verb. There’s no verb for that in the Greek. There’s the word for gospel, EUAGGELION, but there’s no word for preach. It should be translated “I have completely fulfilled the gospel.” The noun for gospel is in the accusative case indicating it is the object of the verb “completed”. What has he completed? The gospel and that would assume the word ministry. What Paul is saying here is that he has fulfilled the Great Commission. He has proclaimed the gospel. He has taken the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum. He is going out and taking the gospel around the world. In that sense he has completed the gospel of Christ. That’s all related to that first point of similarity between Paul’s introduction to the book of Romans and his conclusion.
 
The other parallels between the introduction and the conclusion are not as involved or as long. The second thing, Paul commends his recipients. In in the introduction he says, “First of all, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.” He says something very similar to the Thessalonians in . He is thankful to God that they are acting or living out their faith.
 
The word faith can mean a couple of different things. It has the idea of naming or identifying or trust in God at the gospel. The second meaning it identifies the content of what we believe. Sometimes we talk about a person’s faith, like they’re Christian, Jewish, Presbyterian or Methodist, or whatever they are. The content of your faith is spoken of throughout the world, Paul tells them. A third meaning is your outworking of your faith, your actions of believing, your on-going trust in God.
 
I believe that’s what he’s talking about here. I believe these believers in Rome have a reputation, like the Thessalonians who Paul said their knowledge of their faith, the way they’re trusting in God, has spread through all of Macedonia and all of Acacia. It’s going out through all the world. To the Romans he’s telling them they have a reputation that has gone through all the whole world, throughout the Romans Empire and beyond.
 
The emphasis here is on what we call the Faith-rest drill. Now there are three components to the practice of the Faith-rest drill. We’ve gone over this somewhat. I’m recording a whole series on the Faith-Rest drill that is part of the videos that you will be watching over the time I’m in Israel and the time I’m in Kiev in January, going through verse by verse, promise by promise, how we use the Faith-rest drill.
 
First of all, we mix faith with the promises of God. In the writer says, “For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them. So “us” means 1st Century Christians. “Them” is referring to the Old Testament believers, the wilderness generation, who left Egypt in the Exodus.
 
By the way, did you know there’s a new movie coming out called “Exodus: Gods and Kings”? It’s supposed to be quite interesting. It comes out around Christmas so everyone needs to read Exodus five or six or ten times between now and then so that when you go to the movie, see who can come up with the most Biblical discrepancies. That’s how you engage your mind and you don’t just suck it in but you think critically about the film. It should be a fascinating, interesting film. I still can’t get past Charlton Heston. I don’t know if I ever will. To me, he epitomized Moses.
 
So the writer of Hebrews was saying, “Indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them in the Old Testament.” When did you ever see a reference to the gospel in the Old Testament? Can anyone give me a chapter and a verse for the gospel in the Old Testament? No one can because it’s not stated that way in the Old Testament but the writer of Hebrews under inspiration of Scripture says they had the gospel in the Old Testament to believe. When you read the Old Testament you don’t find it but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
 
A lot was known and a lot was going on in Old Testament times that God didn’t see fit to tell us about in Scripture. In Hebrews we learn that yes, the gospel was preached to them but the word which they heard [the gospel] did not profit them. The wilderness generation were believers but they were disobedient to the message proclaimed to them in the wilderness. They failed to trust in God to take them into the land and to take it away from the Canaanites. They had to go through forty years of wandering in the desert, the Wilderness of Zen.
 
We’re going to go to the Wilderness of Zen when we go on our Israel trip in about a month and we’re going to see just how barren that area is that they wandered through for those forty years. The writer of Hebrews says “The word that they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith.” That’s the key phrase. They didn’t believe it. That’s what that phrase “mixed with faith” means, that you have to believe what the Word of God says and you have to believe that it’s true.
 
In the first stage of the Faith-Rest Drill, we think about a verse that we know or a part of a verse that we know and we wrap our mental arms around that and we grab it and say, “God this is a principle or promise you’ve given me. Here’s what you’ve said. I’m claiming this for you to fulfill this promise.” We don’t just claim an abstract principle or say, “God, somewhere you’ve said something that I think means this. I heard someone say this or I heard some preacher say that.” That’s not what Jesus did in the wilderness. He quoted Scripture verbatim against the temptations and the attacks of Satan. So we mix faith with the promises of Scripture. We need to memorize Scripture.
 
Second, we need to understand the embedded reasoning contained within the promise. For example, one you’ve heard from me many, many times is , “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths.” Now there are three commands there. To trust, to lean not, and to acknowledge. Then there’s a conclusion.
 
So how do those three commands relate to each other? The first command is that we’re to trust in the Lord completely or totally with our whole being, our whole heart. Second, we’re not to lean on our own understanding. Those are complete opposites. It’s not that we’re going to trust in the Lord but we’ve got to think through this and figure it out as well. No, we have to base our thinking completely and exclusively on God because He knows all the issues. We don’t.
When you’re making tough decisions with relation to career, with relation to life, we have to think through those issues. We think those through but we tell the Lord that we’re trusting Him. You admit you don’t know all the data here but you’re trusting God to guide and direct you. You will make the best decision you can based on the data that you have. I used to pray this all the time, “Lord, keep me from making a bad decision. Keep me from making a foolish decision. Keep me from making a decision that I’m going to regret down through the years.”
 
So we trust in the Lord. We don’t lean on our own understanding or our own frame of reference. “In all our ways, acknowledge Him.” That means put Him first. What’s the conclusion? The conclusion is that He will direct our paths. Not necessarily overtly where He’s going to put traffic lights out in front of us, directing us to turn left here and turn right there. As we make those decisions He’s going to close and open doors and give us opportunities. When we get done we look back and see how the Lord directed us down through the years. That’s the third aspect, when we reach a conclusion then that stabilizes our emotions and stabilizes our soul.
 
Paul is praising them in the introduction because of their faith that has gone out. In the conclusion he does the same thing. In he says, “Now I myself am confident concerning you, my brethren, that you also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another, for your obedience has become known to all. Therefore I’m glad on your behalf.” Notice how positive towards them he is because they are moving forward spiritually. He uses this idiom about goodness. It’s a descriptive term. They’re good people in terms of intrinsic goodness. It’s describing their character. They’re good. They’re kind. They are upright.
 
Second, they are filled with all knowledge. There’s our word PLEROO again. It’s a perfect passive participle, meaning completed action. They’ve already been filled which is accomplished through the Holy Spirit. This is the same word used in where we’re commanded to be filled by means of the Holy Spirit. They have responded to that command and they are full of knowledge from God the Holy Spirit. That’s what he fills us with, spiritual knowledge.
 
As a result they are able to admonish one another. This is a Greek word NOUTHETEO which is an interesting term because it comes from the noun NOUS which means the mind. It has an element of instruction or teaching with it but it also has an element of admonishment. It has the idea of addressing not only the intellect in terms of this is what you need to know or this is what you need to do but also challenging their will and their emotions. The meaning of the word is wide-spread. It has the idea of admonition, advice, and warning, reminding someone of the truth, teaching in terms of instruction and then challenging them, spurring them on to correct behavior. So this is the result of someone who is spiritually mature. They are “filled with all goodness and admonishing them.”
 
Next time we’ll come back to the last four points where first of all, Paul is persevering and overcoming all the obstacles in getting to Rome. Rome was God’s destiny for him. There are a lot of things God wants us to do but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get there. So he persevered in overcoming those obstacles to get to the goal.

Romans 158b-Paul’s Conclusion

Romans 15:14 NASB95
And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able also to admonish one another.
Romans 158b-Paul’s Conclusion
 
I have a couple of questions that came in last week and I want to address one of them first and then we’ll address the other one by way of review. The first one that came in was a question related to Calvinism. Last week I pointed out some differences between Calvinism, especially more consistent forms of Calvinism such as 4-point which is usually called Modern Calvinism and 5-point Calvinism which is sometimes referred to as Dortian Calvinism. A lot of people just don’t understand Calvinism and they just think that someone who emphasizes the sovereignty of God and election more than they do is a Calvinist or a hyper-Calvinist.
 
A hyper-Calvinist is actually a technical term for someone who is a high Calvinist who not only believes in the 5 points of Calvinist from the Synod of Dort but they also believe in a supralapsarian Calvinism which is a form of Calvinism that says that God decreed the elect before He decreed that He would even create anyone. One result of that is that hyper-Calvinists do not believe in even doing evangelism because they think that if God wants you to be saved, He will save you without any help from anyone else.
 
That was a popular position among Calvinists Baptists in the 1800s, when William Carey took the gospel to India and had a tremendous result of people who responded to the gospel. When he came back to England and reported on it, it upset the hierarchy of the Baptist church that was so Calvinistic they told him, “Young man, if God wants those people saved, He’ll do it without your help or mine.” That was their view of election and their view of Calvinism. Not all 5-point Calvinists are hyper-Calvinists. Not all 5-point Calvinists hold to even a strict lordship-type view of perseverance.
 
One of the key issues in Calvinism isn’t just the extent of the atonement although that’s usually what we talk about. But when you talk about the extent of the atonement, it also presupposes a certain view of election. The question that came in relation to atonement was an assumption that the election either referred to Jesus Christ or Israel. But the term “elect” is a synonym for those who are believers. We don’t know who they are ahead of time so it can only refer to those who have trusted in the Messiah in the Old Testament or the completed work of Jesus, the Messiah, in the church age. The word is used to refer to the elect in the Tribulation, which in and 24 includes both Jew and Gentile. In we’re told that there are among those saved and who are martyred and in heaven the elect are those from every tribe and tongue and nation. So the term “elect” in reference to the Tribulation does not describe only the Jews.
 
In Paul says, “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?” There he’s talking about the church age believer. In Paul says, “Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, and long suffering.” The term “elect” is used as a synonym for anyone who is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
As I pointed out before for those of you who remember the doctrine of the Magnum bar, an ice cream bar. On the Magnum bar is a Hebrew word. When I asked my guide in Israel what that word meant, he said it meant choice almond. It didn’t mean chosen almonds. There’s an important distinction between that. So the elect is a term that emphasizes the quality of those who are believers because they’re the choice ones of God. They’re the ones who have trusted in Christ as Savior. So that was an answer to the first question.
 
We’re looking at the conclusion to Romans in . In the last two classes what I’ve done is focus on six different key themes. We’ve worked our way through the first one as of last time. By way of review, the first one is that, like Paul, we should have serving the gospel as the central priority of life. The bottom line here is that when you look in the mirror you should be able to say to yourself, “My highest priority today is to serve the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
 
You may be going to work in any number of secular companies but the question that’s important is why are you working at that company in an ultimate sense? You’re there for a lot of different reasons but ultimately we are wherever we are in life to serve the gospel. That’s our mission as ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ. As I made that point I was talking about the gospel.
 
I said the gospel means the good news because Paul emphasized that it was the gospel of God. It originated from God and the good news is that Christ has paid the penalty freeing every person from the sin penalty. This means first of all that we’re born spiritually dead. We’re born lacking perfect righteousness. We’re born under the condemnation of Adam’s original sin. When we look at the barrier, which is a doctrine I’ve developed many times, we see that it emphasizes all the different areas of the problem of sin and its manifestations as well as the solution. All of them lead to reconciliation and redemption and all the different salvation words. What I’ve done here is simply boil it down to the three fundamental issues, to get it to its simple core issue. This specifically is to tie it to the issue of the atonement.
 
The question is that if Christ died for all as a true genuine substitute then why isn’t everyone saved? Why it is that some are lost? That is because Christ’s payment for sin doesn’t save people. It just pays the penalty. There’s more to the problem that just being under the condemnation of Adam’s original sin. We’re born under the penalty of sin because of that condemnation. When we come into the world, we’re spiritually dead and we lack perfect righteousness. Christ solves the fundamental issue for everyone at the cross, every single person.
 
I had a great illustration that was just sent to me. I’m going to see if I can do justice to it. That is the parable of the landowner, playing off some of the landowner parables in the gospels. The landowner recognizes that his servants, his workers, have been embezzling funds. They’ve not only put themselves into tremendous debt to the landowner where they’re going to have to declare bankruptcy but they don’t have anything left to provide for their own families. What the landowner does is accept repayment of what they owe him and absolves everyone of any more debt but that doesn’t solve the problem that they don’t have anything to feed their families. Their debt has been paid off but they still have a practical problem in that because they have embezzled the money and spent it unwisely they don’t have any food.
 
The landowner not only pays off their debt but he gives them food. They have to come and accept the food. Now there are among those who work for the landowner some who are arrogant and some who are rebellious and they don’t want to accept any food from him. They’re proud and they’re not going to accept a handout. Now their debt is still paid off but it doesn’t benefit them because they don’t come and accept the gift of food. That’s comparable to the gospel. Christ paid the penalty for everyone so that every unbeliever has his sin paid for but he doesn’t want to accept the positive aspect of the gospel. Unbelievers who are too proud to accept the gift of regeneration, the gift of righteousness, are going to die in their sins.
 
We’re not condemned for our personal sins. We are condemned for Adam’s original sin but if we continue in sin without trusting in Christ then, as Paul says and Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You will die in your sins.” That phrase is basically an idiom meaning we’re going to die spiritually dead. That’s what we have to understand. Christ paid the penalty for the condemnation but that leaves each of us spiritually dead and lacking righteousness. So at the instance of salvation that’s already paid for. That happened historically when the certificate of debt as Paul puts it in is nailed to the cross historically and that paid the penalty but we don’t realize the free gift from God until we trust in Him at which point we receive a new human spirit and the imputation of righteousness and justification. By putting it this way that shows the unlimited dimension of the atonement in that it paid the penalty for all as a true, genuine, actual substitute but it doesn’t save people.
 
That is an issue among some theologians who say, “Did Christ die to save you or to make you savable?” That’s the wrong question. Christ died to pay the penalty for your sin and because the penalty is paid for your sin then the issue is “What must you do to be saved?” So you have to change the question to get it straight. The first issue is whether or not the gospel ministry is your priority in whatever sphere of life you’re in. It can be government. It can be in the court room. It can be the legal profession. It can be a ditch digger. It can be a garbage man, or a sanitation engineer. It can be whatever you do, wherever you’re gifted, wherever God has placed you. He’s placed you there not only to perform the work that you have as part of your responsibilities to your employer but that needs to be understood within a broader context of your spiritual mission from the Lord.
 
The second thing I pointed out last week is Paul’s commendation of the recipients for their faith, for the faith-rest drill. As I discussed last week the faith-rest drill has three aspects, mixing faith with the promises of God in , understanding the embedded rationales within a promise, , and third, reaching a conclusion from that rationale that helps to stabilize your emotions, stabilize your mentality so that you can move forward, move ahead in life. You have to practice this over and over and over again. If you just come along and try to do this when things are nasty, you haven’t practiced this then you’re not going to do well. The only thing that gives you real spiritual success is perfect practice. Only perfect practice makes perfect. Imperfect practice you just learn bad habits.
 
So we came to where Paul commends this because they’re full of goodness, filled with all knowledge as a result of their being filled by means of the Spirit [] and they’re able to admonish one another. We looked at that idiom, “Full of goodness” as a description of their character. That’s the Greek idiom there.
 
The third point that Paul makes is a reminder in this chapter of what he started with in the first chapter. He is reminding them that he was trying to overcome all obstacles in getting to Rome. In Paul says, “I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that I often planned to come to you but was hindered until now that I might have some fruit among you just as among the other Gentiles.” Now Paul wrote Romans on his third missionary journey. How many epistles did Paul write after his first missionary journey? One. After his second missionary journey he wrote two. What were they? 1 and 2 Thessalonians. After his third missionary journey when he’s at Ephesus two years, he wrote three. That’s real easy to remember. He wrote three epistles, I and 2 Corinthians and Romans. So this is before he made his way to Jerusalem. At the close here he emphasizes that he is on his way to Rome but first he has to go to Jerusalem.
 
He always intended to go to Rome. That was in his plan to go further because as he will state in this chapter, he wanted to go where the gospel had not yet had an impact. He had a true pioneer spirit. By this time it’s roughly the early 60s A.D. and he wants to go places the gospel hadn’t been brought by the other apostles or by other missionaries some of the churches had sent out. He wanted to be in the vanguard and take the gospel where it had not gone. His path was to go to Rome. Rome was only going to be a stopping point, not an end destination. He wanted to come to Rome.
 
He said he had often wanted to come to Rome but was hindered. It’s interesting to speculate what had hindered Paul. He doesn’t indicate what it is. Is he hindered because God wants him to go to other places? Is he hindered because other spiritual opportunities presented themselves and so he just couldn’t get there yet? I think that’s part of it. There’s not a hint here that this is something negative, that he’s facing some kind of opposition.
 
We’re reminded that Paul wanted to go to Ephesus earlier as he began his second missionary journey but Ephesus was in the Roman province of Asia, the extreme western part of what is now Turkey and the Holy Spirit prevented him. He had to go around to the east of Asia and finally he came out on the Aegean and crossed over. It was the Lord’s guidance to lead him over to Macedonia to go to Philippi and Thessalonica and down through Greece, down to Acacia. He’s reminding them at the very beginning that he was attempting to come to them but since he can’t get there yet he’s going to give them this basic instruction of the core doctrines of Christianity.
 
When we come to he says, “For this reason I also have been much hindered from coming to you.” What reason would that be? If you’re looking at your Bibles and you should be, I want to point out to you what he says in , “And so I have made it my aim to preach the gospel [EUAGGELION] not where Christ was named lest I should build on another man’s foundation but as it is written…” Then he gives us a quote from where it says, “To whom He was announced shall not see and those who have not heard shall understand.” In the context that’s talking about Gentiles. Then he says for this reason, that is the reason that is stated and emphasized from that quote in Isaiah which is back to the point in , that he’s a minister to the Gentiles.
 
Basically what he’s saying is that because he’s had all these opportunities to minister, to serve the Word, to serve the gospel to the Gentiles, he has been hindered in coming. The focal point of this is that he’s been too busy in the ministry that he has before him on his second and third missionary journeys to be able to complete his desire to make it to Rome.
 
In Paul says, “Now no longer having a place in these parts…” This is toward the end of his third missionary journey and he realizes that he’s gone through Asia, Macedonia and Acacia twice. He’s completed the task. The churches are established. He’s leaving Timothy in charge in Ephesus. He has Titus in Crete. He has sent out other helpers to establish churches in these areas so now he can finally leave and come to Rome.
 
In he says, “I have a great desire these many years to come to you whenever I journey to Spain.” So Rome isn’t the end of his destination. He’s really heading to Spain. Rome is just on the way. That’s just a stopover point. He says, “For I hope to see you on my journey and to be helped on my way there by you if first, I may enjoy your company for a while.” So he’s headed to Spain. Church tradition has it that he did make it to Spain between the first and second imprisonments and established the gospel there. There are other legends and stories that he may have made it to Britain, may have made it into Gaul, which is modern France, but there’s no documentation of that so it’s probably just legendary.
 
The fourth thing we see in the close is that Paul expresses his indebtedness to help all mankind through the preaching of the gospel. What he means by this is that the Lord has given him a mission and that’s his debt. He needs to pay off this debt by completing his mission. We can apply that to each of us in that we have that same kind of indebtedness in terms of fulfilling the mission that God has given each one of us. So he says in , “I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise.” That’s his objective. He’s a debtor because Christ has given him the mission to minister the gospel to the Gentiles as stated in .
 
The barbarians were called barbarians by the Greeks who thought they themselves were the height of civilized people and the foreign languages that the non-Greeks spoke sounded to their ears as if someone were just saying, “Barb, barb, barb.” So they called them barbarians. That’s the origin of that term. In as Paul concludes it says, “It pleased them indeed and they are their debtors for if the Gentiles have been partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister to them in material things.”
 
Now we have to understand the references there. Who does “them” refer to and to whom does “they” refer to? We have to go back to where he says, “For it pleased those from Macedonia and Acacia [the Greek churches]…” Here’s a test on Acts. What were those churches he founded in Macedonia and Acacia? In Macedonia he founded a church in Philippi and in Thessalonica. Then when you move south that’s where you move to Berea which is probably still in Macedonia. Then he came to Athens, which is in Acacia. There were a few believers there. They probably started a church there but he didn’t have great success there. Then he went to Corinth. Corinth was also in Acacia. So he says, “It pleased those from Macedonia [the Philippians, the Thessalonians, the Bereans] and Acacia [Athens and Corinth] to make a certain contribution for the poor.”
 
We’ll see when I go through this a little bit more when I go through this verse by verse that Paul isn’t shy about asking people for money. We live in an era today that is kind of funny for a lot of pastors. On the one hand you have a lot of pastors, a number of churches, that are not only not shy about asking for money, they may take up two or three collections in the course of any Sunday morning if they’re not getting enough money to pay the bills or whatever they think they need they will take up several collections. I’ve even been in churches where they will have the tape recordings of the pastor available at the back door when you go out so you can purchase a copy while you are still revved up as you’ve heard that message that Sunday.
 
I’m not saying that’s necessarily wrong in and of itself; I think that’s a gray area in Scripture. Paul talks about this in or 9 where he talks about the fact that when the other apostles traveled to the churches they took their wives and families with them and expected the churches to completely support them while they were there. He says that’s just fine but he chose not to be a burden to them and he chose to support himself. That’s a personal choice. It comes out of the whole context of and 9, dealing with doubtful things. There are areas that are not absolutes.
 
Some people get the idea that if a ministry is really grace-oriented then they’re not going to put a price on tapes or books or things like that. That’s just garbage. There are a lot of stronger words for it but that’s garbage. It stinks. That is the height of arrogant legalism. There have been numerous people who for whatever reason, the only way in which they get money, is through the sale of their books. If you really believe that it is somehow inherently wrong to ask for money for a published book on the Bible or the Bible itself and you have ever paid one penny for the Bible you hold in your hand, then you are one of the grossest forms of hypocrites. You really are if you think it’s wrong to ask for money for a tape or a book and you paid money for your Bible or you’ve ever paid money for a book on the Christian life, then you’re a hypocrite. You’re inconsistent.
 
I believe that the policy I want to have in Dean Bible Ministries is that we do not put a price on things. When the Spiritual Warfare book was published by a professional publishing house, we had to go along with the way things were done so we had a price on the book. Now we don’t put a price on the book because it is published via God’s grace provision. That’s not an absolute reality in Scripture. It’s not right or wrong. It’s the way the individual ministry chooses to function. I’ve heard people act so arrogantly that one is right and one is wrong and that’s just not true at all. If we had our druthers we’d never charge tuition for going to seminary. We would never charge tuition to go to Camp Arete. You’d never charge tuition to go to any Bible college but the way the world actually works is that God does not provide that way.
 
The way in which George Mueller functioned and ran his orphanage was that he would not ask anyone for a dime. The way God provided for him is truly miraculous and those are wonderful stories. The Scripture doesn’t mandate that’s the only way to do that. The Apostle Paul didn’t do that. When he traveled around he went to these different churches and told them, “Our brothers in Jerusalem are going through a famine and they’re having a terrible time. When I come I’m going to take up collections so I want you to start setting aside money now on the first day of every week so that when I come, there will be a sizable collection. I’m not going to just hit people up one Sunday with whatever they have in their pocket that day. I want this to be planned.” So giving should be something that’s planned. Giving should be something that’s intentional. There’s nothing wrong with asking for money at a specific time.
 
There are a lot of people who just become uncomfortable with that. I know a lot of pastors, myself included, who are very uncomfortable getting specific for money because we feel, in one sense, like we’re asking for money for ourselves. That makes us feel a little bit embarrassed and a little bit uncomfortable so a lot of pastors are very uncomfortable about this. We have to recognize that there’s an extreme on one end that wants to take up a collection every three minutes and fleece the sheep every time the sheep show up and then there’s another extreme that says you should never, ever ask for money.
 
The reality is that there’s a pattern given in the Bible but it’s not a prescriptive pattern. What do I mean by that? Paul doesn’t say, “This is the way I do it. You need to do it exactly the same way.” Paul made it very clear that apostles traveled under different circumstances with different requirements and expectations from each individual church in terms of supporting their families but he took a different approach. One wasn’t right. One wasn’t wrong. They were both valid. So this is what he did. He had asked for support from these churches to make financial contributions to help the saints in Jerusalem. That’s what he’s talking about in , “It pleased them indeed [the believers in Macedonia and Acacia] and they [Jerusalem believers] are their debtors [to the believers in Greece.]
 
He explains that by saying, “For if the Greeks had been partakers of their spiritual things…” That goes back to that Gentiles are the wild olive branches that are grafted in to the olive tree that has its roots in the Abrahamic Covenant. He’s recognizing that all Gentiles benefit from God’s covenant to Abraham by virtue of blessing by salvation and so because of that there was a recognition that the Greeks or Gentiles had a responsibility to give financial support to those in Jerusalem who were going through difficult times because of the economic collapse due to the famine. So Paul expressed that indebtedness in all mankind, ultimately through the preaching of the gospel.
 
The fifth point of similarity between the introduction and the conclusion is that of ministering for reciprocal blessing. In the opening, , Paul said, “For I long to see you that I may impart to you some spiritual gift.” That’s interesting because when we think of a spiritual gift we think of pastor-teacher or the gift of evangelism, the gift of giving, the gift of helps, the gift of administration and the gift of service, all the spiritual gifts. What he’s indicating here by the way he’s saying it is that he’s imparting something from his spiritual gift. He is teaching them. He is instructing them. He wants to minister to them spiritually so that they be established. He wants to establish them with a firm foundation.
 
In he says, “That is, that I may be encouraged together with you by your mutual faith.” That statement explains more precisely what he means by the phrase “imparting to you some spiritual gift”.  He is encouraging them so they can encourage him. Someone asked me recently, “What do I enjoy the most about teaching?” What I enjoy the most about teaching is watching people get it. Watching the light bulbs go off. Watching when people finally understand the gospel and grace. Watching when people finally understand what the spiritual life is all about. Watching when people start seeing how what they are learning should impact their work life, their home life, and every other issue that they face in life. When all of a sudden they get that living is not about “me”, not about living here and now, not about being a success in my career. It’s not about just having an enjoyable time, making a lot of money, and having a lot of hobbies. It’s about serving the Lord. That’s what gives me a thrill to watch people begin to grow and get excited about the spiritual life and their spiritual growth. That encourages a pastor when he sees that. That’s what Paul is talking about here, how they can be encouraged by their mutual faith when they see those in  the congregations get excited and mature and grow and respond to the teaching of the Word.
 
He says it again in a slightly different way in , “But I know that when I come to you I shall come in the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.” He’s not talking about a full gospel here. He’s talking about fully experiencing the rich blessing of the ministry of the gospel to a congregation. That’s the same thing that he described in the introduction.
 
Then the last area of commonality between the introduction and the conclusion is Paul’s emphasis on prayer and for praying for one another. In we read, “For God is my witness whom I serve with my spirit [spiritually] and the gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers.” We talked about the first part of that verse when we talked about his dedication to the gospel but in the last part he says “without ceasing”. That means something that is continual. It doesn’t mean he walked around everywhere he went with his head bowed and his eyes closed. He wouldn’t have lasted very long. He says that this was something that characterized his life most of the time.
 
Grammatically Greek has two past tenses, the aorist tense and the imperfect tense. The aorist tense just summarizes something. Say if I’m talking about yesterday and I said I ate yesterday. Now I didn’t eat just one time yesterday. I ate numerous times yesterday. In one sense I ate continuously. I didn’t sit down at the table and never leave. I ate breakfast, then sometimes in the middle of the morning I probably had a light snack. Then at lunch I ate and in the middle of the afternoon I had another light snack. I ate dinner and then I ate again at night. I ate continuously through the day. That doesn’t mean I ate without ever leaving the table.
 
That’s the idea Paul is communicating here about something we do continuously throughout the day but not every second throughout the day; something that characterizes our life throughout the day. He says he made mention without ceasing of him in his prayers, making requests toward God “if by some means now at last I may find a way in the will of God to come to you.” So Paul made it a matter of prayer to come to Rome.
 
In the last four verses Paul talks about praying for others again. He says, “I beg you brethren through the Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit that you strive together with me in prayers to God for me.” We’ll talk about other aspects of that verse but what he’s talking about is that he wants the believers in Rome to pray for him continuously. I hope you pray for me continuously. I know that many people do. I pray for the congregation continuously. This is part of what we need to do. And we need to pray for one another.
 
In he tells them what they should be praying for, a specific prayer request, “That I may be delivered from those in Judea who do not believe.” He’s already thinking about the fact that he’s going to leave and go to Jerusalem and he’s going to meet opposition there. That’s going to be on the way to Rome so he tells the Romans to pray that the opposition will not be serious and that he will be delivered from it. We know that prayer was answered by the intervention of the Romans when there was a riot in the Temple precinct, and then he was taken to Caesarea where he was protected for almost two years before he finally appealed to Caesar and made his way to Rome.
 
He asked that he be delivered from those in Judea who do not believe and that his service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints. So he’s praying two things, that he’ll be delivered from those who oppose him and that the believers will accept the gifts he’s bringing to them and that they will have a positive time together. The end result in , “That I may come to you with joy by the will of God and may be refreshed by you.” He saying that if they want him to come to Rome they better pray that everything goes great while he’s in Jerusalem and that he’ll eventually come to Rome and they could enjoy their time together. Paul closes with a benediction, “Now may the God of peace be with you all.” That takes us through to the end of this sort of summary that we’ve been in for the last couple of lessons going through the similarities between the introduction and the conclusion.
 
I want to go through this rather rapidly now. We’ve hit most of the high points and most of the doctrines. I just haven’t hit every single verse going through so I want to just kind of pull all these threads together for us so we see how it fits together. As we come to this conclusion he says in , “I myself am confident concerning you, my brethren, that you are full of goodness, filled with knowledge, and able to admonish one another.” Those are three descriptions of a mature believer.
 
That first phrase “full of goodness” is an interesting phrase and it emphasizes their character. They are intrinsically good. The word there is AGATHOSUNE and it emphasizes intrinsic goodness. It is comparable or is a counterpoint to righteousness. It’s the application of experiential righteousness to life. They have received the imputation of righteousness but it’s only as we grow in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and we walk by the Spirit that we have experiential righteousness.
 
What manifests itself as goodness. We are kind to others. That’s a fruit of the Spirit. When he says they’re filled with all knowledge that’s the same word used in to be filled by the Spirit. The filling by the Spirit means that the Spirit is the one who is the instrument who fills us with something and what we’re filled with is the Word of God. This is a great passage as a counterpart to and that we’re filled with the Word of God as the content by the Holy Spirit and the focus point is on giving us knowledge of God and His Word. The result is that we’re able to admonish one another.
 
Admonish doesn’t exactly mean to go around correcting everyone and straightening everyone out. In the framework of our relationships with one another in the body of Christ we can help one another. This word NOUTHETEO is a word that comes from the mind, not the emotions. That NOU there is from the Greek word NOUS, which is the word for mind. It has the idea of warning someone or admonishing someone, advising them, correcting them, reminding them, teaching them, and just encouraging them to go forward. It’s a word that covers a range of meanings. It’s not talking about formal instruction like DIDASKO. It’s two people who are friends. “They go out for coffee and one person is having a tough time dealing with a particular situation in his life. The other person says, “Here’s a promise maybe you can claim.” Or maybe they remind them of something they can think about in terms of what the Word of God says. They promise to pray for them and they hope they’ll do x, y, or z as they continue to face this problem. That’s the idea here.
 
We’re able to do that because the Word of God in is our soul. Otherwise we sit there when someone is going through a tough time and we don’t have a clue what to say because the Word of God isn’t in our soul. We don’t have any verses that we can call to mind. We don’t have any understanding of any Biblical examples that we can encourage them with so you have these three areas in this verse describing a spiritually mature believer.
 
In Paul goes on to say, “Nevertheless, brethren, I’ve written more boldly to you on some points.” He has really focused on some key issues knowing they were a problem in the church in Rome because of the fact it’s made up of both Jews and Gentiles and there were some misunderstandings. Part of that had to do with the doubtful things covered in chapters 14 and 15 and others had to do with other issues related to justification and sanctification. So he wrote boldly and confidently in those areas reminding them it was because of the grace of God given to him. He’s really saying that it was because of the grace of God that he might be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles.
 
That’s his emphasis that God called him to be a minister to the Gentiles. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have any ministry to Jews. Paul always took the gospel first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles. His primary target audience was among the Gentiles. It’s not an “either/or”. It’s that his primary target audience was Gentiles whereas many of the other apostles, specifically Peter, took the gospel to the Jews. So he says the purpose God called him to was to be a minister to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”
 
We spent a lot of time going through this verse, emphasizing these words that are not the normal words we would expect Paul to use. Words like when he says minister of Jesus Christ, the word LEITOURGOS which is usually a word that has something to do with a priestly ministry. It reminds us of what he says at the beginning of this section of Romans, “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.” This is like a priestly ritual but it’s not ritual; it is offering ourselves to serve the Lord. “Acceptable to God which is our reasonable service.” So he’s emphasizing serving in the gospel is a priestly ministry.
 
The second word that’s translated ministering in the English is not related to the word translated minister in the beginning; it’s the word HIEROURGEO. The first part of that word is the word for a temple, serving in a temple. What Paul is emphasizing here is that since every one of us is a believer/priest we have a responsibility to serve God in reference to the gospel. Also he uses the term offering, which is PROSPHORA, another term related to ministry in the temple. He’s not talking about ritual or liturgy here. He’s saying this is what the gospel ministry is. This is the role for every single believer and it is pleasant and acceptable to God if we do this.
 
The last thing he says is that it has been sanctified, set apart, by the Holy Spirit. Again the emphasis as we see all through this section on the role of the Holy Spirit in empowering the believer to serve the Lord. It doesn’t happen just by saying, “I’m going to go do it.” You have to be in right relationship to the Holy Spirit.
 
Let’s skip on to . He says, “Therefore I have reason to glory in Christ Jesus in the things that pertain to God.” There are a lot of things that we’re excited about in life. Every one of us has hobbies. Every one of us has things related to perhaps our work that occupy lots of time or attention as they should because we’re working for someone and we’re serving them. But ultimately that doesn’t matter. When we get together in conversations, our conversation should focus on the Lord. It should focus on the Word. It should focus on things that have eternal values. Not on the trivial things that so often occupy all of our attention and all of our time. That’s what Paul is saying, He says, “I have reason to glory or boast in Christ Jesus, into things that pertain to God.” That’s what we should be talking about. He says it negatively, “For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ has not accomplished through me.” So the focal point is again on that which God is doing in and through us in terms of ministry.
 
stated very clearly that the signs of an apostle were performed among you with all perseverance. In verse 19 Paul went on to say that he’s going to go to Jerusalem first. Then he’s going round about to Illyricum so he came very close to Illyricum. He went through Macedonia. He took the Word through Thessalonica and Philippi and even into Illyricum. Illyricum went all the way around the north of Italy. Some maps don’t show it that extensive. In terms of the modern countries Illyricum includes the area that used to be Yugoslavia. Now it’s broken up into different countries. In the north it’s Italy. There’s the Adriatic Sea. Up in the north you have Austria and Switzerland, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the west of that you have Serbia, Montenegro and Albania. Then there’s Macedonia. This is the area that Paul is talking about when he talks about the gospel going to Illyricum.
 
He says he’s completed the gospel. It doesn’t say he’s fully preached the gospel in the Greek. He says he has completely fulfilled the gospel ministry. So he has established churches who have sent out missionaries into Macedonia and Acacia and on into Illyricum so he’s ready to move on into new territory, areas were all dominated by Gentiles, so he quotes a passage from and 15:21. In that verse he says: “So shall He sprinkle many nations.” The “He” there is the servant of Yahweh. This is the prelude to the great passage of the suffering servant in . It’s leading up to it. “Behold my servant shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. Just as many were astonished at you so His visage was marred more than any man.” That’s referring to when Christ was beaten up and hit and tortured before He went to the cross. In it says, “So shall He [Christ] sprinkle many nations.”
 
This has to do with salvation being available to all nations—not just to Jews, but to the goy, which is the word for nations there. It’s the same word translated Gentiles. “Kings shall shut their mouths at him for what had not been told them they shall see.” Gentile kings shall hear the gospel. He goes on to say, “And what they had not heard they shall now consider.” Paul is taking that from the Old Testament. We’ve looked at the different ways in which the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament and he’s saying this is what we’re seeing now. It’s an application of that Old Testament passage to what he is doing, taking the gospel to the Gentiles.
 
Because of that he’s been hindered as we’ve already looked at tonight. “For this reason I’ve been much hindered in coming to you.” Then in , “But now no longer having a place in these parts and having a great desire to come to you, whenever I journey to Spain, I will come to you for I hope to see you on my journey and be helped on my way by you if first I may enjoy your company for a while.”
 
In Paul says, “Now I’m going to Jerusalem to minister to the saints.” How is he going to minister to the saints? He’s going to bring them financial aid from the churches in Macedonia and Acacia. , “It pleased those to make a certain contribution to those among the poor of the saints in Jerusalem.” This was one of the great things Paul praised the Macedonians for and the Philippians for because they had given so much to help those in Jerusalem. In fact in Paul says, “Moreover brethren we make known to you by the grace of God bestowed on the churches in Macedonia in a great trial of affliction…” So they’re in the midst of suffering and opposition.
 
We know there was a lot of opposition in Thessalonica to the gospel. “In a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and deep poverty…” The Macedonians weren’t giving out of their affluence. They were giving out of their empty pockets. They were giving from their poverty, from the little they had. Paul says that in the midst of affliction and hostility they had such joy in the gospel that they gave out of their poverty in the riches of their liberality. goes on to say, “For I bear witness that according to their ability and yes, beyond their ability, they were freely willing, imploring us with much urgency that we would receive the gift and the fellowship of ministering to the saints.” So he praises them in 2 Corinthians for their generosity in giving to those in Jerusalem.
 
In Paul says, “Therefore, when I have performed this [taking the financial aid to Jerusalem] and sealed them this fruit…” He refers to this offering as their fruit, the ministry of those in Acacia and Macedonia. “When I have performed this and sealed them this fruit, I shall go by way of Spain and I know that when I come to you, I shall come in the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.” We’ve already talked about that.
 
He closes in verses 30 down through 33 and we’ve already talked about that as well. “I beg you brethren through the Lord Jesus Christ, through the love of the Spirit, that you strive together [come together and work diligently together]…” The ministry in the local church isn’t 98% the pastor and 2% the deacons and everyone else rides along. It is everyone working together. I think we do a great job here. We can always do better but so many people in this congregation are involved in one way or another helping out in prep school, helping out with planning different functions, praying, and doing different things. That’s how it needs to be in a local church. We always need to work together. It’s part of the ministry of the body of Christ to one another. He specifically calls upon them to pray for him in reference to his trip to Jerusalem that things would go well for him there and eventually he would come and join them in Rome.
 
He concludes then in , “Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.” We’ll stop there and next time we’ll come back and look at chapter 16. That’s another one of those chapters that people have difficulty with along with the genealogies. Who in the world are all these people that Paul gives a shout-out to as he goes through the close? It’s a long chapter and we’re used to short statements at the end of some of the other epistles where he says something to someone. But there’s a whole list here and God the Holy Spirit has thought that it’s important for us to have this preserved for our edification in some way so it will be interesting as we go through this last chapter of Romans.

Romans 159b-Greetings

Romans 16:1 NASB95
I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea;
Romans 159b-Greetings
 
Let’s talk a little bit about going on in Houston. In case you haven’t been caught up on this, there are really two issues. Issue number one is the HERO ordinance which is really a misnomer but that’s the acronym they set up for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance which was attempted to be passed by our mayor.
 
I heard today from an associate member of this congregation who knows one of the homosexual transvestite activists who really put forth this agenda and gave it to the mayor. His name is Ray Hill, I believe. Ray’s understanding of this law is a perfect illustration of when you suppress the truth in unrighteousness and God gives you over to three different stages that we read about in . It says God gave them over to lusts in their eyes and all the different stages of deterioration there and then you can’t think clearly any more. When he reads what this ordinance says and when he explained it to the guy who called me today, his understanding is not what it says. They just distort it. They look at data and it’s reinterpreted through their epistemological grid.
 
I want to talk a little bit tonight about this before we get into our chapter. Maybe we won’t get into our chapter. Something else happened. This morning I got another e-mail with a question that brings all of this to bear. But first, to finish covering the history of this ordinance the ordinance was passed by a large majority of the Houston city council. According to the city charter of Houston there are 30 days to respond to it or it’s just too late. The way to respond is to collect signatures for a petition to call for a referendum that it be put on the ballot. That is the focal point here.
 
The point of that petition was not to, in and of itself, turn over the ordinance but to put it on the ballot. The whole thing was that the people of Houston ought to have a say in this because it is apparent from many polls that the people of Houston do not support this ordinance. It’s about voting rights. It’s about the freedom of Houston citizens to be involved politically in this decision and not to have it jammed and rammed down their throats by the city council and the mayor. It is not a homophobic issue, per se. It is not an issue related to that. Fundamentally it’s an issue of voter rights.
 
The petitions were put out and many pastors and churches and a number of other people took those petitions, went around, and collected signatures and did the best they could to validate those signatures. They were presented in a timely manner to the city at the end of June, somewhere around June 28 or 29, according to the standards and the city charter. The signed petitions went to Anna Russell who is the city secretary. She’s been the city secretary since the last decent mayor of Houston, Louie Welch, back in the 70s. At least that’s what I think. I may be mistaken there. Anyway, she’s been around a very, very long time. She’s had a lot of experience in city government.
 
She was deposed last week and she said what happened was she needed to validate 18,200 signatures. I read someone who said it was 17,200 but it’s around that. What she did was she validated 600 more than needed so she validated approximately 18,800 signatures. She looked at only 19,200 to get the ones she needed so that means she had a 98% authentication rate which shows that the people who collected the signatures before they presented them did their homework and validated and authenticated as many as they could. They turned in these petitions that were properly authenticated. They didn’t have bogus names or bad names. Anna Russell wrote a letter to the mayor, outlining what she had found, coming to the conclusion that there were yes, indeed, enough signatures on the petitions to put this on the ballot on the next city election.
 
There are copies of that letter. She’s been deposed. It’s in the deposition and over that particular weekend which is the first weekend in August the mayor and the city attorney got together and said, “We can’t let this stand. We’ve got to do something to fight this.” The city attorney looked at all those signatures. They went through a process saying that if you printed out the name, such as Robert Lewis Dean, Jr., and then you looked at the signature and it’s wasn’t legible then it was invalidated. Oliver Pennington, who is one of the city councilmen who signed the signature, his signature is Oli and then just scribbles off. His signature was invalidated. There are a lot of doctors and college-educated people who take a lot of notes, especially if you go to seminary or medical school or law school, your penmanship is the first thing to go. Many people just have a signature that’s maybe a “Z” for Zorro but when you look at that “Z” you know what it stands for. It doesn’t have the whole name there.
 
What happened was that they invalidated so many signatures and even invalidated the whole sheet if one signature was illegible, that the city attorney came back and said they only came up with about 13,000 signatures so there’s not enough to qualify and they quashed it. There were various maneuvers that were made.
 
The head lawyer on that case is Andy Taylor. He’s one of the foremost attorneys. He was interviewed this morning on the Michael Berry radio show. I listened to him when I was out running. The lawyer went through the whole thing and described all the point-by-point material. He’s one of the top lawyers on elections in the state of Texas. So they went back and forth on this. Finally it was taken to court. The judge set a court date in early January when they’re going to hear both sides. The major issue at that time was to halt the application of that ordinance until it finally goes to court which I believe they got. It’s been put on hold until that happens.
 
All of that happened and now they’re in the process of deposing various witnesses. A suit has been brought against the city of Houston and what is typical in a legal case is that they get to depose the people who are involved. But the pastors are not part of that group that is bringing the lawsuit. It’s not coming from the pastors or from those individuals. I forget who is actually bringing that. What you hear from some people, in fact American Vision which is a post-millennial reconstruction group, which is pretty good on some conservative issues said, “This is typical of depositions. They want to collect materials.” That’s true. During discovery they collect materials on both sides.
 
This morning the e-mail I got was related to that. The person asked me to explain what I understood because she had gotten information from a lawyer she was familiar with whose name I’m not mentioning and who is running for judge in Harris County on the Democratic ticket. He wrote this. I thought this would be a good teaching tool for everybody in terms of how we, as believers, ought to think.
 
My study of the Word particularly over the last ten years has brought me to the conclusion that probably the most significant verse in the Bible related to the role of the church, the role of the educational philosophy of the church is , “Don’t be conformed to the world.” The word there is AIONOS, which is frequently translated zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the thinking of the age. It’s similar to KOSMOS, which focuses on the orderly arrangement of the thoughts. AIONOS locates that within a time period or an age.
 
As we go through the history of ideas, every culture goes through these various periods where thought systems change. When thought systems change, everything changes. Your view of music changes; your view of art changes; your view of politics and law changes. Within 20 years of the founding of this country we started going through a major shift in the thought form of this country into what is known as modernism. In the early part of the twentieth century we started shifting into something frequently referred to as post-modernism. Everyone who grows up in a non-theistic culture grows up thinking within the framework of this kind of a thought system. They grow up thinking like a modernist and a post-modernist. Most of you think more like a modernist than you do like a biblical Christian. That’s always the problem. That’s what I’m talking about tonight. Some of you have been around a long time and you’ve made tremendous headway in that but this is one of the battles we have to fight.
 
says, “Don’t be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your thinking.” It’s not easy to renew our thinking. I want to give you a mental picture to think about. I want you to picture building a house. Most of you are used to the house-building analogy in Matthew where the wise man builds on a rock foundation and the foolish man builds on a foundation of sand that can shift. When the storms of life come, the house that’s built on the sand falls down and the house that’s built on the rock stands up.
 
A lot of Christians still have a sandy soil in their mentality. They still think like a pagan. They may have adopted a lot of establishment truth. They may have adopted a lot of Biblical vocabulary that has entered into their foundation but their foundation hasn’t shifted to the rocky, firm foundation of the Word of God. The foundations are your presuppositions.
 
Shifting metaphors now to a medical metaphor we could say that presupposition has to do with your mental immune system. If your foundation is still based to some degree on paganism then you’ve got a compromised immune system and you’re going to get sucked into a lot of this thinking no matter how Biblical or doctrinal you think you are. This is what happens here with this woman who e-mailed me. She is a woman who grew up in a church where I grew up and many of you have gone where the Word of God was taught very faithfully and very well, but a lot of people didn’t get it.
 
It’s not unique to that congregation. More people don’t get it in a lot of other churches. One of the problems with modern evangelicalism is that they have built their Biblical framework in the above-ground foundational thought system in the soil that they had when they were unbelievers. They never changed at the presuppositional level. They still think in terms of being an unbeliever so when the pressure really comes their default is to be like an unbeliever.
 
What this lawyer wrote illustrates this. This is a guy that sat under the teaching of the Word of God for probably twenty or thirty years. I’ve run into this kind of stuff all my life. He says, “The facts on this issue as I understand it are that the pastors were told by a flyer of a lawsuit how to properly fill out the petitions.” I don’t know what he means by this flyer but we got information one way or another on how to address the petitions, the correct way to do it so they would be legal. That much is correct.
 
He goes on to say, “That means the sermons are relevant to that issue.” Wait a minute, the verbiage in the subpoena is that all the sermons, all the text messages, all the iMessages, all the chats, all the e-mails, all of the communications of the pastors in relation to homosexuality are included. How many years do you want to go back? Ed Young’s been teaching a long time. I’ve been teaching a long time. A lot of the pastors have been teaching a long time. Homosexuality is a big issue but the issue on the petitions had nothing to do with the issue of the HERO ordinance. They had to do with whether the petitions were valid.
 
The mayor wants everything ever said or taught about homosexuality, anything they’ve ever said about her, anything ever said about the HERO ordinance, and everything ever said about the petition. They basically put this out there.
 
What the response is from the other side is that they farmed their defense out to pro bono lawyers. The Biblical word for that is skybalon. Andy Taylor was saying that when he went to court in August and is representing the “good guys,” the city lawyer, David Feldman, came in with 15 pro bono lawyers. So it’s basically sixteen to one in the courtroom. The guy who is sitting second chair for Feldman is one of the top lawyers for one of the biggest, most powerful law firms in the city. I’m not going to mention names. Every one of those pro bono lawyers represented one of the top law firms in this country.
 
Michael Berry made a good point about that. He used to be a city councilman. He knows the intricacies of how all these systems work. When you and I hear pro bono we think it’s a second rate lawyer who just has to do a charity deal and he’s not putting everything in to it. Michael Berry says that is a complete misunderstanding how the system works. These lawyers are in there donating their time because they are going to get on David Feldman’s good side. He’s the city attorney and the responsibility of the city attorney is to determine what law firms get the contracts to handle the legal work for the city. So it’s tit-for-tat. If you go in there and donate your time and you do a really bang-up time for the city, then you’re going to get multi-million dollar contracts for your law firm. This is how this system works. They may be pro bono lawyers but let me tell you they’re some of the best lawyers in the country.
 
What the mayor is trying to say is “Well, I never read it.” Feldman is saying that he never read them either, that the subpoena is too broadly worded. Garbage. Skybalon. That is just bold-faced lying. A tweet from the mayor, Annise Parker, which I actually saw on ABC-13 News this morning, said, “If the five pastors used pulpits for politics their sermons are fair game. Were instructions given on filling out the anti-HERO petition?” She knows that all of these things were asked for in the subpoena and she’s just trying to back-pedal. They’re lying through their teeth. They’re lying to the citizens of Houston and their ultimate game is that the homosexual-gay-lesbian-transgender agenda is to stop anyone, whether you’re an orthodox Jew, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re just someone with good sense or whether you’re a Moslem, all of these people who stand against this ordinance. The mayor wants to silence anyone who has a system of morality that doesn’t approve of their behavior. They do not want them to be able to say anything. The bottom line is they want to remove the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran from having any influence on the ethics or the thinking of people.
 
Back to what this lawyer is saying. He’s validating the assumption that it’s a legitimate request to ask for all the sermons related to all those topics. There are about six or seven other topics that they listed in the wording of the subpoena. So he says, “The lawyers and judge will work out the scope of the request. The mayor’s office will issue a statement, which I shared with a previous post. Meanwhile, not widely known, many pastors who want to challenge the Johnson amendment…”
 
Here’s this guy spreading a lie. This is not true. About this time of year there is a Sunday called Freedom Pulpit Sermon when a lot of pastors will preach on politics specifically and some of them send all their messages from that Sunday to the IRS. Many do not. It’s a small number of white churches who do this. There’s a study indicating this. There are studies saying that about 70% of black churches endorse individual candidates from the pulpit and only about 17% of white churches endorse specific candidates.
 
Some of you have seen the clips I have shown from the rally I was at on the steps of city council, as well as when they were in the city council chambers and you saw there were a number of black pastors who were speaking but not one black pastor was named in the subpoena. Now I think that’s kind of racist. They don’t want to anger the black community but there were a number of black pastors who were up on the stand today when Ted Cruz had a press conference at First Baptist. I was there but I didn’t get the word early enough to stand on the platform with all the other pastors. I was in the back of the room which may be good because when they’re all in jail I’ll be the only one preaching the Word.
 
I was glad to see that two of my former students from WHW were up there on the platform. Of the 36 pastors who were on the platform I counted 7 or 8 who were black. That’s almost 25%. That’s a higher demographic percentage than the black representation of the city so I was very glad to see that. The city has avoided that.
 
Anyway, the city lawyer goes on to blame the pastors that they’re making a big deal out of this and that it’s really not a First Amendment issue at all, when it is. Let me tell you why he’s gotten confused in his thinking. Let’s go back to the analogy of the two houses. On one side there’s the thinking of the unbeliever; on the other, is the thinking of a weak believer. The unbeliever on the left’s foundation is that there’s no God. Whatever he’s coming out of, whether it’s atheism or Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness or any other religious system where’s there’s a distortion he doesn’t have a Biblical God as his foundation. That’s what philosophers call “metaphysics”. Everything comes out of your view of metaphysics but no one ever talks about it anymore.
 
People get involved with debates about behavior, law, politics, and policy and they fight at this level but they never talk about the foundation. This is all underground. Your view of God is going to influence your view of knowledge, which is called epistemology, your view of truth and your view of authority. How do you know something is true? What’s your authority for saying x, y, and z is true? That’s what connects what you say is true to the foundation. Your authority is what you think the ultimate reality is but if the ultimate reality is just matter then there’s nothing to go to.
 
If your ultimate reality is impersonal there’s nothing to appeal to and you become the ultimate reality. This is what we see in Judges. Since there was no belief in God in Israel everyone “did what was right in his own eyes”. So you become your own authority and it is out of that you develop your values. You develop what’s right, what’s wrong and what your norms and standards are, what your ethics are; all of that flows out of your understanding of knowledge and truth and authority. If you’re an unbeliever, it’s going to be consistent with your view that there’s no Biblical God. Then your behavior, your practice, what you do, the laws that you sign on to practice, your political theories, and your policies all flow out of your values, your norms, and your ethics.
 
What we do so often when we talk to people we just argue at the level of behavior, law, politics, and policy. We never get to the real issue. If someone is consistent as an unbeliever, they’re going to end up way out in left field. Many times I’ve mentioned Thomas Sowell’s book Conflict of Vision where he points out that liberalism is grounded on a utopic view that man is basically good whereas conservatism is based on a realistic view that man is basically evil. That defines the difference between the two views.
 
The liberal view sees everything as perfectible and the conservative view just sees you can make things more orderly but you can’t perfect them. So they’re not trying to get engaged in social activism and progressivism, which characterizes almost everyone who’s a thoughtful Democrat. About a third of the Republican Party is based on a view that we can bring in some kind of utopic state and we should be engaged in social activism.
 
If you become a believer, then all of a sudden your foundation is no longer no Biblical God but you have a diluted view of God. You now say that you believe in a Triune God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit but if you’re a baby believer you really don’t have a clue what that means or how that impacts your understanding of knowledge and truth. Now if you hang around for a while you’re going to start picking up some biblical knowledge, which may be exchanged for the knowledge you had before. You’re going to at least superficially think you’re under the authority of the Word of God but because you really don’t have a well-grounded theology proper where you understand God and His essence and His plan and His purpose, then your view of authority is going to be diluted.
 
Sometimes you’re going to base your decisions on experience, reason, and mysticism rather than exclusively on the Word of God. The Word of God is not the sole and exclusive authority in your life. It takes a long time for a baby believer to get to the point where he understands how exclusive that authority is, in every area of thinking. Then that changes his values.
 
An immature believer can have a lot of values change at a surface level but as Jesus points out, when the storm comes, when you come under the peer pressure of society or when you’re involved in certain professions and you work for certain companies and your human resources people come down and say you have to validate same sex marriage and you have to do other things, then what will you do? Or you work for a company that says various other social engineering schemes are handed down from the government or from various legislative decisions have to be implemented and you have to implement them. Then as an immature believer without enough confidence in the Lord you say, “Well, I’ve got to keep my job. I’ve got to be able to work here. I’ve got to provide an income for my family and this really isn’t going to hurt too much. I just have to do what my boss says. I don’t really have to believe this but it’s my job.”
 
Usually it’s not that much of a compromise at first. But it’s increased more and more over the last thirty years. I had a situation in Dallas about 25 years ago when I had a man in my church who worked for what was then Southwestern Bell. They were required to go to sensitivity training and basically New Age mysticism, guided imagery, and all of these kinds of things. He said absolutely not, along with other Christians. They got away with it. You couldn’t get away with that today. What happened is that too few people raised objections to that so now they’ve compromised and compromised and compromised.
 
We have a generation that those who are under 35 just don’t understand why these old fogies who are Christians are making such a big deal about this. Then you hear the Libertarian crowd come in and they say they just want to be economic conservatives. They think the Republican Party cannot survive with these Christians in here because it’s the social issues that are dividing the country. Well, you can’t do that. You’re a fool Biblically if you think that if this HERO ordinance goes into effect, it won’t matter. What do you think the economic consequences will be? It’s going to be huge. It’s going to force every business in this city to have a third restroom for those who are gender confused. It’s going to have all kinds of legal cases that are going to come up where people are going to be fined. It’s going to have all kind of economic consequences throughout business.
 
You can’t make a social decision that doesn’t have economic decisions. It’s clearly illustrated in the Mosaic Law. God said that if the Israelites gave themselves over to idolatry and perversion and disobedience there will be certain consequences. Now you can’t go into a laboratory and say there’s a direct correlation between the fact that if you go into immorality then a drought is going to start and your crops are going to fail and you’re going to have depression and you’re going to fall apart militarily. You can’t draw a one-to-one correlation unless you have the God of the Bible who is controlling both aspects.
 
If you have an impotent picture of the God of the Bible and you don’t believe He’s controlling both sides, then you have nothing. The reason bad social decisions impact economics negatively isn’t because it’s a direct correlation but it’s an indirect correlation because God’s in control of both. People don’t understand that and they think they can play with that.
 
This is what’s eviscerating constitutional conservatives in this country. They have compromised their thinking at a foundational level. They are thinking like pragmatists and relativists, presuppositionally. You can’t even talk to most Christians about this because they can’t think their way through it. They haven’t been taught enough to be able to understand these kinds of issues. Many people believe they have to do these things to get along. People who are on faculties sometimes fight these things and they win. It’s not pleasant. There are a lot of people who aren’t fighters. They’re not going to fight and die on these hills. The problem is that for every hill you don’t fight and die on sooner or later you’ve lost a lot of hills. You’re in trouble. You have to make judgment calls. I know there are a few people here who never saw a hill small enough they wouldn’t fight and die for.
 
We have to make good decisions. This is one that’s important. What’s at stake here is the First Amendment. A problem you see is that a lot of Christians don’t understand it because they don’t want to think about it. They just want to be about their business. They’re working for some law firm and as part of their responsibility for the firm they have to go and defend a lot of clients that are engaged in unethical conduct and they have to compromise. Or they’re working as a teacher or a professor somewhere and they have material they have to communicate in their curriculum that is contrary to the Bible.
 
People don’t make compromises in one big jump. They compromise one small step at a time. The next thing they do is they look around and all of a sudden they find that they’ve shifted from claiming to be a conservative Bible-believing Christian to being someone who’s not convinced about the Bible and has joined the other side. After explaining some of that to the person who sent that to me, a person who spent years under sound doctrinal teaching, but he never made it is because of a term I love. It’s a term 99% of the people who heard this term never understood it. It’s epistemological rehabilitation. Epistemological rehabilitation isn’t changing what’s at the surface level. It’s hard. It takes place at the foundation. The problem is most Christians never change those basic presuppositions that they pick up when they were growing up, when they were being influenced by their peers, when they were being brain-washed by the secular school system, and being brain-washed by atheist college professors.
 
As a result they’ve got a split personality almost. They have inclinations at their foundation that are pagan. They know they ought to think like Christians and they don’t know why they have this conflict. When the pressure comes and when the culture starts really putting pressure on them through their jobs, their careers, and their retirement they think, “Wait a minute. I just can’t go there. I don’t want to raise my head up. I don’t want anyone to notice me. I just have to make it. I’m not going to get into a fight because…”
 
What they’ve done is they’ve compromised and compromised and compromised. They didn’t even know it. It wasn’t something big. There were no big red flags. They just didn’t know how to think Biblically and they got snookered by the cosmic system again and again and again until they’re basically a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
 
There’s a problem. It’s the job of the pastor and I’m concerned because not enough pastors are showing up at these things and it’s the job of the pastor both to teach the Word of God and to protect the sheep that are in his sheepfold. Part of my job is that I need to protect you and at times that means I need to go out into the civic world and be involved in protecting us so that we can have a ministry that is not being interfered with by the government.
 
This is what gave the foundation to the United States, the pastors that took their stand during the American War for Independence. One of my favorite stories is about Peter Muhlenberg and his brother, Augustus. He was a well-known lieutenant colonel taking his commission in the Continental Army. He stood up in the pulpit of his Lutheran church. His father was a major preacher in the First Enlightenment. Peter stood up and pulled off his clerical robes and underneath was his lieutenant-colonel’s uniform. He basically asked who was going to follow him into battle. He recruited his battalion from his congregation and off he went. One of his most vocal critics was his brother, Augustus. Augustus was a pastor in New York. Augustus told Peter he was wrong, that it’s not the role of the pastor to be involved in civic affairs. That it’s not the role of the pastor to be involved in politics or in the fight.
 
That was Augustus Muhlenberg’s point until the British captured New York. The British knew that the greatest enemy they had in the colonies were the pastors so they burned the churches. They burned Augustus Muhlenberg’s church. Boy did he repent. Later he became the first Speaker of the House. We have to understand there’s a time when we just stick to our knitting but part of our knitting as pastors involves protecting the congregation and being out there and making our voice heard.
 
People in the congregation need to hear that. This is such a battle. It’s not one I wanted. I’m much happier staying in my study and working through a lot of Greek and Hebrew and studying the text but if I’m going to continue that in ten, fifteen, twenty years and if I’m going to continue to teach men who can teach your children and your grandchildren then we have to have the freedom to do it. If this doesn’t change, we’re not going to have the freedom to do it. What we do in terms of Bible study and Bible teaching today without being involved in these situations and trying to correct them then we won’t have a future and we won’t have the opportunity to teach the Word of God because there will be government officials not allowing it.
 
Now this is just one battle. There are going to be a hundred battles like this. It’s very possible that the mayor is going to be forced to back down and they’re going to restrict this and they shouldn’t be coming after anything that a pastor says. That’s the church’s intellectual property and it should be completely off-limits according to the First Amendment. But they’re going to try to back off of this and come out with a lot of rationalizations. They may end up being completely defeated on the issue because there’s been an enormous hue and cry raised against the mayor and the city council.
 
This is only the first shot across the bow. This is just the beginning. This is a long war. The war started about a hundred years ago. For a lot of people they’re just waking up to the fact that there’s something going on. The war’s been going on since progressivism reared its ugly head in the beginning of the 20th century. So we need to learn that this is part of the angelic conflict. It’s part of our spiritual warfare and it’s part of the battle, whether we like it or not. When 9/11 occurred, one of my first thoughts was, “Oh no, I’m going to have to study Islam. I hate studying Islam. I’m going to have to become an expert on Islam.” But that’s where the battle is today.  Martin Luther said that if we don’t reinforce and fight the battle at the point at which the fortress is being attacked then we’re going to lose the battle. We don’t get to choose where the enemy attacks us. This is where we are being attacked. We have to fortify ourselves. The only way we can do that is with the Word of God.
 
Now let’s get into the opening part of Romans 16. I’ve always thought is unusual. This is the longest closing of any of Paul’s epistles. It contains a lot of personal information and a lot of personal greetings. There are a huge number of names here that are unfamiliar to everyone. They’re not mentioned anywhere else so they’re virtually unknown. There are a few that are known but most of them we don’t know anything about.
 
We can learn some things just by way of overview. One of the first things we see here is that Paul had a wide variety of colleagues and friends and associates and people who loved him. He was very much a personal person. What you see so often in psychological characterizations of the Apostle Paul is that he is this obsessive, detailed-oriented theologian that’s more concerned with truth than with people. That’s how the modern mindset wants to approach the Bible. Here we see that Paul is very personal.
 
Another thing that you often hear from liberal and neo-liberal and neo-orthodox and neo-evangelical [how’s that for a lot of neos?] individuals is that Paul was a misogynist, that he hated women. Yet what we see here is that Paul mentions a number of women and praises them for of their involvement in the ministry and the local church. Paul clearly recognizes that there are role distinctions between men and women but there are no equality distinctions between them. They are equally in the image of God but God designed men and male souls for one purpose and women and feminine souls for another reason.
 
Another thing we should note here is that God the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve these names down through 2000 years of church history and on into eternity. If every word of the Bible is inspired by God, and it is, then there’s a reason for this and we ought to spend some time trying to think through why this is important. I think part of this is because it shows us the kind of people who are involved in the congregation in Rome. There are probably other reasons, some of which we’ll see when we go through this chapter.
 
Paul is writing to the Romans. We’ve gone through a lot of what people would consider to be heavy theology and doctrine. Paul wasn’t writing to Dr. Dean or to Dr. Ice or to Dr. Walvoord or to Dr. Ryrie. He’s writing to Bill and Sue and Mary and Jane. The names in this chapter are the common names in Rome. Some of these are considered to be predominant names you would find among slaves, according to certain scholars. I think that’s a certain amount speculative but that’s the conclusions that many have reached. They’re people who have come from the whole spectrum of life, some of them are servants, some are slaves, some are in the military, some are merchants, some are community leaders but they’re the everyday people of the Roman Empire. They’re not Bible scholars. They’re not professional theologians.
 
Paul expects all of these everyday people to fully comprehend and understand and implement what he has written in Romans. It gives us a little bit of a picture of the people that Paul is writing to and ministering to. He starts off in with a commendation for Phoebe. The word that is used here is a word that is used in two or three other places. For example has a similar word and talking about a recommendation of an individual to the congregation.
 
He identifies her as Phoebe, our sister. She’s not a biological sister but she’s a fellow member in the body of Christ, the royal family of God. He refers to her as a sister just as he referred to other male believers as brothers. We are all in the body of Christ if we are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.
We don’t know a lot about her. The name is a pagan name. It’s the feminine form of the Greek word PHOIBE which was one of the alternate names for Apollo. It means the bright one. Apollo was this sun god in the Greek pantheon. Such names were often given to the slaves who of course retained them even if they were set free. Phoebe was more likely a free woman.
 
She is called a “servant of the church” which has caused a lot of discussion. It is the feminine form of the word DIAKONOS from which we get our English word “deacon”. There are a number of people who have sought to establish a doctrine on this and say that the apostolic church had an office of deaconesses. There’s absolutely no support for that anywhere in the New Testament. There are only a few verses that people go to to support that. This is one of them. The other one comes up a little further down in verse 2 and later on in verse 7 where it will come up again.
 
Paul talks about her as one who has been a helper of many and of myself also. We’ll talk about that word in just a minute. This word refers to someone who functions as a servant. Now in the early church, you basically had two offices. You had the pastor who is sometimes called an elder and sometimes called an overseer, depending upon his function. The pastor focuses on leadership and the fact that he’s an elder focuses on his spiritual maturity, the fact that he’s called an overseer emphasizes the fact of his oversight over the congregation. Then you had deacons. Deacons were responsible for carrying out various day-to-day functions in any local church or any kind of organization. They didn’t have a “board” like we have. We think of the board of deacons who meet once a month. There’s a treasurer and different offices on our boards. That’s sort of an outgrowth and development from the development of corporations in western civilization. In the early church we think the model was closer to this.
 
I think the Word of God is broad enough and flexible enough to be adapted to a lot of different cultures but the primary leader of the congregation is the pastor. He’s the one who has the spiritual gift. He’s not a lone ranger. He doesn’t run it all himself and he has help. They had deacons. You look around a church and you have someone who needs to take care of the money so the pastor would appoint someone who was trustworthy and had integrity who would function like a treasurer. Then you’d have someone else who might need to take care of the distribution of the money to the widows and the orphans so that person would be qualified spiritually and would be a deacon. You might have someone else who would take care of the physical facilities. There might be two or three other responsibilities and so the pastor would appoint men to carry out those responsibilities. So they would carry out those responsibilities and report to the pastor. That was the rudimentary structure in the early church.
 
Now if there was a deaconess, it would be a woman who was appointed to carry out responsibilities to women and needs that were particularly associated with women in the congregation. I don’t have a problem with that but there’s no evidence until the late 2nd century or the 3rd century that the deaconess idea is an office. Certainly a woman did not have the authority over anyone, any man, especially, and was not allowed to teach. That wasn’t a part of the role. It was simply to carry out certain responsibilities.
 
I can think of some things in this church that are comparable. Ann does a wonderful job as a church hostess. That would be that kind of a position. Judy does a great job in terms of the nursery and some other things in the kitchen. That would be that kind of a job. That would be what a deaconess did. It wasn’t something that was an official leadership type of position. There’s no evidence in Scripture that it was anything official and I think the word would best be translated servant. She served the church in as “helper of many” and Paul says, “Of myself also.”
 
The word that’s used here is the feminine singular of PROSTATIS. Notice that the last two letters are “is”. The masculine form of the noun ends in “es” and that would indicate something completely different. In fact, in a study of the word, the word PROSTATES has the idea of a leader or a chief or a ruler. I’m quoting from John Murray who was head of the seminary at Westminster from his commentary on Romans. He said, “The feminine form PROSTATIS related to the masculine PROSTATES as a guardian or defender. The masculine is not used of Phoebe as one who rules. In Jewish literature the masculine word took on the meaning of the feminine which meant patroness or helper so in Jewish literature whether it’s masculine or feminine it picked up this idea of a patroness or someone who helped someone.”
 
In a pagan context the masculine had the idea of a ruler of a leader but that meaning is completely foreign here so she apparently was an independent businesswoman. She had some financial resources and was able to help the Apostle Paul and other believers financially. She is coming to Rome so Paul recommends her to them and encourages them to receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints. In other words be gracious and kind to her. Show her every bit of hospitality. She has need of you because she has been a helper of many, including myself. So he’s encouraging that.
 
That’s something that should be a part of any congregation, to help those who are traveling through. We had an example of that last summer where a family from Cornerstone Bible Church up in Lubbock were down here. The woman was fighting cancer and she had to go through a bone marrow transplant several different congregations organized to provide meals for them. That is a tremendous function of the local church. It shows grace orientation and it shows the function of the body of Christ in ministering to one another. There are a lot of different ways that can take place. That was the role of Phoebe.
 
Next time when we come back I’m going to talk about the next couple who are mentioned here. We do know a little more about them. They’re Priscilla and Aquila. This gets us into another little issue related to the role of women in ministry that we need to talk about because this example is often given by people. They say that Priscilla taught and that means Paul was not consistent in when he talks about not allowing women to teach. Priscilla and Aquila, people say, shared the gospel and straightened out Apollos. They insist that’s an example of a teacher. But that’s just such a perverted way of understanding and reading Scripture. I’m just amazed that people do that but when you don’t have a foundation, when you haven’t completely developed a solid foundation of Biblical truth as your authority, then you’re always going to be swayed and compromised by the culture around you. It will destroy your spiritual life and you will become completely ineffective in it. Next time we’ll come back and talk about that.

Romans 160b-Priscilla, Aquila: Women in Ministry

Romans 16:1 NASB95
I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea;
 
Romans 160b-Priscilla, Aquila: Women in Ministry
 
Turn in your Bibles to Romans, chapter 16. Tonight we’re going to get into an interesting topic we touched on some last time. A lot of people get to a passage like this where Paul basically is giving shout-outs to a lot of people that he knew from different places in the Roman Empire and people he knew from his travels and so many people think there’s not a whole lot here.
 
It reminds me of something that happened last Saturday at the picnic. When you walk around anywhere in rural Texas you will see here and there, if you’re looking, these small little disturbed areas of the ground that indicate a fire ant bed. If it’s rained recently they’ll try to get above the water and they’ll build up the mound a little bit. A lot of time you just don’t really see it until you kick it and step in it and suddenly thousands of ants come boiling out of the nest and up on to your legs stinging you. It’s really not a pleasant experience.
 
There are some passages in Scripture that are like that. They don’t seem to have a whole lot on the surface but you kick them around a little bit and all of a sudden you find there’s a lot of discussion and use of debate in these passages. This debate goes on in several verses in the beginning of chapter 16. It has to do with gender role which is a timely topic if you’re living in Houston, Texas.
 
Tonight we’re going to look at Aquila and Priscilla and women in ministry. To introduce this we’re going to look at a chart I developed that illustrates what goes on with evangelical Christians today. On the left side it has to do with unbelievers, individuals who are just totally influenced by the pagan culture around them. It starts at the bottom which is the foundation. At the top we see behavior, how a person behaves, what they think about law, what they think about politics, how they would implement or shape policy. That top level is the area where we usually engage in conversation with people when we are debating.
 
Tonight I was handed an editorial that was written by Scott Wall who is the pastor of Magnolia Bible Church. Scott Wall is the son of Joe Wall who used to be the pastor of Spring Branch Community Church near here. I’ve known Joe most of my life and I’ve known Scott since he was in diapers, just about. He wrote an excellent editorial here entitled “To Mayor Annise Parker: You are wrong.”
 
What happens is that just looking at that we see a discussion on policy, law, and politics. How you approach this as a believer is going to differ but it flows from what takes place at the bottom story, your foundational beliefs. These are your view of ultimate reality, which philosophers call metaphysics, what goes beyond the physical. It’s frequently called ontology. It means the same thing and it has to do with the essence of something from the Greek word ONTOS.
 
Ontology is probably not a word you throw around too much. Probably most of you learned that word or were exposed to it in about 7th grade biology when you were erroneously taught that ontology recapitulates phylogeny. How many of you remember that? One or two people. That was a Darwinian doctrine that the form of the fetus goes through the same processes and morphology as evolution so when the fetus grows it looks kind of like a little tadpole and then a guppy and on and on like that. That was the little catch phrase that impressed everyone that ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Ontology has to do with being. It’s the same word as the word for metaphysics. We’re going to get into this a little later on because it’s important to understand ontology when you talk about gender roles.
 
So we start with our ultimate view of reality, which is metaphysics. This also relates to those of you who have heard of the ontological view for God. I’m not going to go there tonight. I wrote a master’s thesis on it. I’m sick of the subject, twenty-five years later. So we start off with metaphysics which tells us what we think about ultimate reality. What we build on that then, if we’re consistent, is our understanding of where we get knowledge, how we get knowledge, and what the ultimate authority for truth or knowledge is in the world. Once we ascertain the nature of knowledge and truth we ask: is truth absolute or is truth relative or is truth somewhere in between? Out of that come our values.
 
What do we value? What are our priorities? What do we value in terms of the structure of society that affects our norms and our ethics? What do we think about marriage? I read a statistic this last week that the number of marriages has declined to its lowest level in the U.S. ever. That’s because people just aren’t getting married anymore. That’s not important to a lot of people. They just want to shack up and that’s it.
 
So we have values and norms and standards and ethics. Out of that comes behavior. Out of that comes our understanding of law, what should be encapsulated in law, what shouldn’t be encapsulated in law. It relates to politics and policy as well. That’s the structure.
 
Most of the time when we get involved in political arguments with people it’s always on the top layer. Sometimes we might dip down a little deeper and that’s as far as it goes. The real issue takes place down in the foundation. For believers as I pointed out last time, we have to go back to our ultimate authority which has to do with God. Knowledge of truth comes from God. If you don’t have a Biblical God, if you have a pantheistic or a polytheistic concept of god then that’s going to dictate a different understanding of knowledge and truth. If you have no god whatsoever, as an atheist, or you’re just not sure, you’re confused, and you’re agnostic, then that’s going to change things as well. So if you fiddle with that bottom layer, the foundation, it’s going to change everything built on top of it.
 
When it comes to knowledge or truth, if there’s no Biblical view of God, and by that I mean a Judeo-Christian view of a personal, infinite God, then knowledge and truth become relative. This affects your norms and your standards, things of that nature. So when we come along and talk about marriage, if marriage is no longer something instituted by God who created not only the physical world but the norms and standards that should govern the world, and decides what is righteousness, then that leads to a view of absolute truth and absolute knowledge and therefore our values should be in conformity to God’s character.
 
From a Biblical viewpoint, starting with a strong view of God we have a strong view of truth and absolute knowledge as certain. When you do not have this foundation, then knowledge and truth become relative to the creature, not the Creator. The creature determines what is true. The creature determines what the absolutes are and that can change from culture to culture.
 
As we’ve seen in its most recent iteration in what is called multiculturalism, this means that every culture’s values are equally significant and equally valuable. So whether you are a headhunting cannibal down in the rainforest or whether you are an elite graduate of Harvard, no matter what your values are, they’re really equal. So no one should ever condemn someone else’s values, they believe. They’re all good. So if you are a perverted homosexual transvestite that enjoys young children, then your values are equal to the person who is the most ethical, moral person in terms of all of his sexual mores. You can’t distinguish between those in their view.
 
If that’s your concept of truth and that’s your concept of right and wrong and that shapes your values, how is that going to shape your political theory? Political theory, essentially, always goes back to a religious position so that even secular atheism and humanism, as it was declared by the United States Supreme Court in 1973, is in effect a religion. So everything grows out of religion because everything grows out of your view of ultimate reality and that’s not something you can prove in a science laboratory but you have to assume it and believe it because it’s all based upon faith.
 
No one has ever taught this to our mayor or she refuses to acknowledge it. When it comes to this issue we’re facing in Houston which has to do with gender confusion, the underlying issue is those who are promoting it want to have equal access to restrooms, based on what sex they think they are. As I pointed out last time, these decisions, which are social policy, have economic consequences. If this gets puts into effect, then that means that every building, every business, every McDonald’s, every church, although they say it doesn’t apply to churches, are going to have to have a bathroom for the trannies, and maybe two. The men that think they’re women aren’t really welcomed by normal men in a male restroom. The women don’t want them in their restroom. So the men who think they’re women aren’t made to feel comfortable and welcome by either men or women. So you have to have one restroom for the men who think they’re women.
 
The women who think they’re really men aren’t welcome either so then you have to have another restroom. If you follow this out logically, it just leads to mass confusion and silliness and this relates to an extremely small minority. A recent study that I saw indicated that no more than 3% of the population has a gender-identification problem. That includes male homosexuals, female lesbians, and the transgender types that are really confused. The transgenders are about a half of one percent. So two and half percent just have problems with one form of homosexuality or another. So half of one percent are really the end hairs on a dog’s tail that are wagging the rest of the dog. This has enormous economic consequences but it boils down to the fact that we don’t have a belief in a Creator-God who can speak to absolutes and say that “Yes, there are these absolutes. A male is a male and a female is a female. The reason you have gender confusion is because of sin.”
 
It’s always interesting that when issues like this come up it’s always the Christians who become the bad guys. I’ve read that Orthodox Jews have very successful ministries to help homosexuals straighten out their gender confusion. You never hear about them. It’s not politically correct so the press is never going to tell you where you can find out about this. There are a number of Christian ministries. There was one in Connecticut that I became aware of right before we moved back down here. The man had grown up in a homosexual culture and was very involved in all the perversions. He became a believer. Eventually he got straightened out as a result of his Christian growth and married, has a couple of kids, and developed a tremendous ministry helping homosexuals come out of that lifestyle. If you don’t believe there are absolutes then you just believe something that is horrible.
 
All of this starts off with your view of God and your view of creation, that God created human beings in the likeness and image of God and they are distinct from the animals. You can’t draw analogies from the animals to man because this thing called the image of God is different. It not only affects the gender confusion in terms of sexual identity but it also affects role and how we understand the role of men and the role of women and the family and marriage and society and the church.
 
God created men and women equally as image bearers. In . God said, “Let us create man in our image, male and female.” So both men and women are equally, fully in the image of God. That means that ontologically [see, I knew I needed to prepare for this], ontologically men and women are equal in their being. They’re both equally and fully in the image of God. But God created men to be men and women to be women.
 
And He created souls that are different. Male souls and female souls are designed for different roles just as female bodies and male bodies are created for different functions. This is a very inconvenient truth for evolutionists and for those who want to have role reversal and role interchangeability. These ideas started getting promoted in the late 19th century as western civilization shifted from a theistic foundation and a Judeo-Christian heritage into an evolutionary foundation. By the early part of the 20th century these things were already being talked about among those who were deeply involved in the progressive agenda. It was way behind the scenes but there were people in the intellectual elites of the early 20th century who were already engaging in this as an agenda.
 
This did not really come to fruition in terms of popular culture until you got into the 1960s and the development of the Equal Rights amendment in the 70s and the development of the radical feminist movement in the 60s. All had these different things as part of their agenda. This was when you had the rise of the gay rights movements. All of these things were related together. They’re all part of pagan thought.
 
There is behavior in terms of gender confusion. Behavior in terms of role reversal and role identification between men and women all impacted laws. Those who supported this became very activistic in terms of trying to get Congress to pass laws. It affected politics. It affected policy. It affected what was taught in the college classroom and how literature was developed.
 
I was talking to a young man from my congregation this last week who ended up dropping an English class because he had made some references to God in an English paper he had turned in. The professor just scribbled all over his paper, “There is no God. This is all nonsense.” He just vented all over his paper from his hostile atheism and this is what’s normative today in most college classrooms, especially in liberal arts. Liberal arts are much more dangerous than the science classes. History, sociology, psychology, and especially English classes are dangerous. I had a double major in college, a history/English major and I saw this many years ago when I was in college. It was just horrendous what was coming across from most of the teachers in the liberal arts departments.
 
The reason I’m getting into this is because this is the area where this fire ant bed focuses on these issues. There are three verses here that talk about women in ministry. This has become a hotbed issue in evangelicalism over the last thirty years. Christians seem to always reflect the trends of the culture. I remember in 1975 I was involved with a couple of other young men who were going to go to Dallas Seminary. We met every week or so with the pastor over at Spring Branch Community Church. He talked about a lot of different issues we would be facing when we went to seminary. One of the first ones he mentioned was this whole issue of whether or not women should be admitted into the seminary and what kind of ministry they should have in the local church.
 
This was particularly important from the financial angle. See, social policy always affects finances. I keep repeating that because there’s this movement that has been around for at least twenty years in the Republican Party who say they’re conservative economically but not conservative socially. This is also a libertarian line. They think they can forget about when life begins, about homosexual or gay marriage, and they want to just forget about all these other social issues. That’s not relevant so let’s just talk about money.
 
In the mid-70s schools who wanted to allow guys on G.I. bills to attend were being pressured by the government that they would lose their federal aid if they didn’t change their policies and allow women.  Money talks. It wasn’t long before Dallas Seminary came up with a new program. The only program they had had before 1975 was a Masters of Theology program. They introduced a Master of Arts of Biblical Studies which was a two year master’s degree. It was just in summer school and over a period of three or four years you could get your MA degree. That was open to women.
 
By the time I was in my second year of seminary, women were now coming to take their MA classes. Some of those classes were the same as the ThM classes. You see this gradualism that creeps in. Then by the early 80s when Dallas Seminary had engaged in a huge capital expenditure program after building a lot of new buildings, the number of students that applied for the ThM program were fewer than the slots available. Back in the 70s they would get six or eight times as many applicants for each slot that was open. Now you had 220 applicants for 230 slots. What happens to your quality control? All of a sudden you need more students because you have to pay off your debt. “Maybe we ought to open up the ThM program to women, “some said. That was a factor. It wasn’t the only factor but it was a factor. Money talks. Things like this happen.
 
There was a lot of social pressure taking place as well. All of a sudden you had people going back and revising their exegesis of Scripture. A lot of controversy took place during this particular time. Dallas generally kept a pretty strong line although they did open up the ThM program and later the DMin program to women students. They still kept a strong line that women were not to be pastors or teach men. They continued to publish articles written by Wayne House. If you want to investigate some of this look at Wayne’s book, “The Role of Women in Ministry.” There are other books published by Dallas grads dealing with this particular issue. This is foundational.
 
Remember I talked about the fire ant bed which doesn’t look very significant until you kick it? That’s what happened here. Last week we looked at talking about Phoebe who is a servant of the church. I said this is the word DIAKONOS in the feminine form. There are those who have sold out to what is known as evangelicalism feminism who come to and say this shows they had deaconesses in the early church. This is a misuse of both history as well as language. The idea of a deacon having an official church leadership position in the sense that we have today was unheard of in the early church. It was a servant position, not a position of authority or teaching or leadership.
 
was part of what I pointed out last time and then another aspect of this is the noun that used in that Phoebe should be taken care of and helped out because she had been a helper of many and of Paul also. There have been numerous scholarly articles arguing back and forth on this word in the second verse, PROSTATIS. This is in the feminine form, a nominative feminine singular, and in the feminine form it has the idea of a patron or a benefactor. The related noun PROSTATES is the masculine form which means ruler or leader. There has been a huge amount of ink spilled on this particular issue. So you kick this little dirt hill on the ground and all of a sudden you see all these fire ants bubbling up out of the ground just as all the theologians start arguing about this.
 
Then we come to the next set of verses in talking about Priscilla and Aquila. Now this is important because they’re always mentioned together. Priscilla’s name is almost always mentioned first. Of the six times that they’re mentioned, she’s mentioned first four of those six times. Some have tried to say this shows she was more the leader and a lot of stuff is read into this. It’s probably either one of two things. Either she was more involved in terms of helping Paul or she probably came from a higher social status than her husband did so she would have been listed first.
 
Their names always come up when you hear a discussion related to the role of women in ministry because here’s Priscilla mentioned a number of times. The fact that Paul mentions her and has such a strong relationship with them indicates that the liberal position you often hear that Paul was a misogynist is just not true. He mentions a number of women in this particular list, alone. In fact, if you look at this whole chapter we see that there are twenty-four people who are named and two people who are not named. Of the twenty-six total who are mentioned, nine of them are women. Paul is commending nine women here. That’s approximately a third of them. Paul had a very high view of women.
 
What he says about women doesn’t come out of a cultural background. It isn’t influenced by his Pharisaic background and it wasn’t influenced by the Greek culture. It’s influenced by God’s inspiration and by God’s order of creation in Genesis, chapter one. Priscilla and Aquila are indicated here as his fellow workers in Christ Jesus. In this section we have several places where “in Christ” is mentioned and “in the Lord” is mentioned. For example in verse 8, “Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord.” In verse 11, “Greet those of the household of Narcissus who are in the Lord.” Also, in verse 13 and verse 22 you have this phrase “in the Lord.” It seems that it is used interchangeably with the phrase “in Christ”. What Paul is saying is that they are carrying out their ministry to Christ together. They were partners in ministry.
 
In verse 4 Paul goes on to praise Priscilla and Aquila because they had risked their lives for Paul. He singles them out, indicating how much he appreciates their ministry back in Rome at this particular time. He expressed his gratitude to them for how they had worked with him. Also he mentions the church that is in their house.
 
In 1 Corinthians he also mentions them. It seemed they traveled a lot and they always had a group of believers that met in their house as a church. What we know about them from Scripture is that they were married; they were believers who were originally from Rome although Aquila is originally from Pontus in Asia Minor which is modern Turkey. Somewhere they met and they married. They’re from a Jewish background so they had become believers at some point or at the point of Paul’s ministry. Sometimes she’s mentioned as Prisca which is actually the more formal term for the name and diminutive was Priscilla. Luke usually calls her Priscilla but Paul usually refers to her as Prisca.
 
They had an important relationship with Paul. Aquila, which is the Latin word for eagle, was a tentmaker, just as Paul was. They had settled in Rome but then they were forced to leave when there were riots in Rome, according to that were stated to be by Claudius because the Christians were debating this person called Prestus, which is probably a misspelling for Christ. All of the Jews were expelled from Rome under Emperor Claudius.
 
That brought them to Corinth which is where they met Paul. They came together, developed a friendship, worked together, and had their tent making business together. Then they continued to follow him. They followed him to Ephesus. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in he mentioned that they had a church meeting in their house in Corinth. They come up because of this particular verse mentioned in , “So he [Apollos] began to speak boldly in the synagogue…” Apollos was a Greek Jew who was speaking out in the synagogue but he didn’t understand the gospel clearly. Aquila and Priscilla heard him in the synagogue and they took him aside and “explained to him the way of God more accurately.”
 
One of the arguments you hear from the feminist evangelical side is that this means Priscilla is teaching him the Bible. Let’s look at the terminology here. It says they explained to him the way of God. This is the word EKTITHOMI which means to explain something or to expose something. It is not a synonym for the word DIDASKOLOS which means to formally teach or to instruct someone. DIDASKO is usually used to refer to a group instructional situation where you have a recognized teacher giving instruction to other.
 
What you see with Aquila and Priscilla is that they’re sitting around the coffee table at home having a cup of coffee or tea or whatever they drank at that time and they’re having a dialogue with Apollos saying they really enjoyed his message but asking him if he’s thought about certain things. Generally through dialogue and questions and answers they led him through to an understanding of the Messiahship of Jesus. Priscilla isn’t sitting there taking out her Bible and saying, “Now we’re going to have Bible class and I’m going to teach you about Christ.” It’s not a lecture. That’s a different type of scenario so it’s not legitimate to go to to try to pull out of this an example of a woman teaching a man.
 
The key passage for understanding this comes from so let’s turn there and take a look. This is a very important passage because it teaches that there are different roles in the church just as there are different roles in the home. What happens here is that Paul is having to deal with some problems in the congregation in Ephesus. Timothy is the pastor there so Paul is encouraging Timothy to deal with various problems in the church brought about by those who are getting involved in teaching false doctrine. Back in Paul writes, “I urged you when I went into Macedonia, remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine nor give heed to fables or endless genealogies which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith.” So Paul has to straighten things out. In he says, “There are those who have strayed and turned aside to idle talk desiring to be teachers of the Law.” There’s a use of our word DIDASKOLOS and that indicates a formal teaching position as it does all through the pastorals. It’s not just sitting around the coffee table and having a discussion about what the Scripture means. It’s a formal teaching position.
 
Paul needs to give Timothy some instruction on some priorities when it comes to the congregation. In he says, “Therefore I exhort first of all that all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men.” So we have a little section there dealing with the importance of prayer. Then he says in , “Therefore I want the men…” This flows directly out of his discussion of prayer. “Men” is the Greek word ANER, not ANTHROPOS, where we get our word anthropology, the study of man kind. ANTHROPOS is the broad word, not just males, but refers to mankind or humanity, the human race. It can refer to just men but usually it has a broader sense including both male and female. The Greek word ANER means male as opposed to female. The word for female is GUNE which can refer to a woman or a wife. So he says here, “I want the males in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without wrath and dissension.” Does that mean he doesn’t want the women to pray? No. He’s not addressing that. He’s talking about the orderly way of worship; when the body of believers come together. He wants the men to be in this leadership position and they’re the ones to lead in terms of prayer.
 
Lifting up holy hands is not the charismatic view that you lift up your hands and somehow that makes you a little more holy and your prayers will get a little higher toward heaven. The word there indicates sanctification. It means you’re in fellowship. Okay? That’s the idea there. They’re not unholy hands, they’re sanctified. Without wrath and dissension. The positive there is that you’re in fellowship. You’re in right relationship to God in terms of experiential sanctification. The negative is that there are not mental attitude sins in the thought life of the leaders of the church.
 
Then he addresses the women in like manner. He’s not taking on everything the men and women should do but he’s taking on these topics because apparently there was some confusion or some areas of disobedience in these particular areas.  In , “Likewise I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing.” So for women it was a matter of how they dressed when they came together for worship. They needed to dress modestly and they needed to not dress in a way that would provoke men in terms of mental attitude sins, creating lust or anything of that nature. Probably it was not so much that as that the more affluent in the congregation should not dress in a way that would over-emphasize their affluence and prosperity as opposed to those who were poor. Some who would come might even be slaves so they should not make an issue out of their status in life. They should dress modestly and discreetly.
 
I remember when I first went to seminary I went to a couple of churches in North Dallas and I was just amazed at the style show. It was a very affluent part of Dallas. I’d never really noticed how the men and women dressed in my background. It was like a fashion show every Sunday morning in Dallas. Instead Paul said the women were to focus on good works, that is, walking by the Spirit in the production of Divine good in their life “as befits a woman who is making a claim to godliness.”
 
As I’ve pointed out before the word “godliness” is the Greek word THEOSEBEIA which indicates a spiritual life. Godliness is an English verb that emphasizes God-likeness. It emphasizes character. says we’re being conformed to the image of Christ-likeness or God-likeness. So that’s what that word means. It’s not really piety. That’s one of those funny little religious words that people focus on. It has to do with your spiritual growth and spiritual maturity.
 
In Paul gives a command, “Let a woman quietly receive instruction.” It’s a present active imperative so this is to be a standard operating procedure. This is the normative expression of the role of women in the local church. They are to receive instruction. Now the word here is MONTHANO which is related to the Greek noun for disciple, someone who is a learner, someone who is a student. So women are to do this in a way that is quiet. Paul says that women are to keep silent in the church. That’s not an absolute command because he talks about women praying, how they should pray in the local assembly, and under what conditions they could pray and engage in some other vocal activities but it wasn’t teaching the Word.
 
He’s laying this out that when it comes to the time of instruction from the Word the women were not to be involved in that. They were to instead be “learning with submissiveness”.  They are to be listening with the view of applying the Word in their life. Then he goes on to explain this. Why does he say this? , “Now I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man but to remain quiet.” That word quiet is the same word for “quietly receiving instruction.” He repeats that. talks about the fact that women are not to speak in the church and it’s that sense of being quiet as opposed to interrupting, as opposed to expressing their opinions. Not that men should be doing that either but he’s focusing this on women because this had apparently become an issue in the Ephesians congregation so he’s reminding them of what the standard protocol is at all times and at all places. So he used these two words, “to teach or to exercise authority”.
 
Now what is that word between those two infinitives? It’s the little word “or”. That’s an important word. One of the first times I really recognized that and it stands out in my mind is that when I was a student at Dallas Seminary this, of course, was a hot topic along with Calvinism, pre-trib Rapture and a few other things. In my senior year the first woman was invited to speak at the chapel at Dallas Seminary. Her name was Elizabeth Elliott. Her husband, Jim Elliott, was one of the five men who were martyred down on that sandbar in Ecuador by the Auca Indians. She had written their stories in three different books, the main one of which is called “Through Gates of Splendor”. It’s a tremendous book and I recommend it. It happened in the late 50s. This gave her a measure of celebrity status in the evangelical world. She also wrote books on women’s ministry.
 
She got up in the pulpit at Dallas Seminary and said, “I understand that I’m the first woman to address the seminary up here. I just want you to understand that I recognize the proper Scriptural role of women and I’m up here under the authority of these men because the Scripture says a “woman is not to teach and exercise authority over men.” Tommy Ice was sitting next to me and he put an elbow in my ribs and whispered, “It’s OR exercise authority, not AND.” It doesn’t say you can’t teach and exercise authority. You can’t do either one. That was a misplaced quote of the Scripture at Dallas Seminary.
 
The first thing that Paul says is that a woman is not to teach. The word there is DIDASKO which means to teach publicly, to give instruction to several people but it’s not used in a one-on-one situation. In fact, Ann Bowman, who was one of the first PhD women students to graduate from Dallas Seminary back in the early 90s, wrote a very, well-done article in Bibliotheca Sacra, the Dallas Seminary Theological journal called “Women in Ministry.” She gives an excellent description of all these words. She says the word DIDASKO and all its cognates are the most common words for teaching in the New Testament. The word refers almost exclusively to public instruction or teaching of groups. It’s a formal concept. It’s not an informal one-on-one having discussions around a cup of coffee.
 
Her article states, “In the New Testament a teacher is one who systematically expounds the Word of God and gives instruction in the Old Testament and Apostolic teaching.” That’s an excellent definition of the term. It is a more formal, structured form of instruction. Paul says I don’t allow women to teach, to give this kind of instruction. Secondly he says, “Or to exercise authority over a man.” This is talking about grown-up men.
 
We have a policy about prep school, as best as we can. We draw the line that once a male child reaches puberty; he’s going to have male teachers in prep school and not women teachers. Under that age, women teachers are fine and great. But after that women are not to have authority over a man or teach a man. The word for exercising authority is an unusual word in Greek. It’s AUTHENTEO and it means to exercise or to have authority over someone else. That definition fits all six uses of the word in the New Testament.
 
Again, Paul says that they should remain quiet. Why does Paul say that? Some people today say that he’s not giving a universal principle to the church but is just addressing a specific problem in Ephesus so it only applied to that situation. There’s no evidence of that whatsoever. Others say he’s just influenced by his culture. These are usually people who don’t believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. They say he came out of a Pharisaical background like Orthodox Jewry later on. Men sat on one side of the synagogue. Women sat on the other side and the women were basically given a second-class status.
 
Now that’s a problem. As I pointed out, if men and women are equally created in the mage of God, then it’s a phony application to relegate women to a second-class status. Paul doesn’t do that. Paul’s argument for that doesn’t come from the culture. He doesn’t say that this is the way the Greeks do it or this is the way the Jews do it. It comes from God’s order to creation. He introduces this with that word “for”, the Greek word GAR which indicates an explanation. “For it was Adam who was first created and then Eve.”
 
He’s summarizing . What happens there? God first created man and then told the man to name all the animals. That was his first mission. So all the animals come trotting by Adam. He looks at them and sees there are a male and a female for each one of them. They all have a match but he didn’t have a match. What’s going on? When Adam recognizes that something is missing, God says, “It’s not good for a man, a male, to be alone.” So he created a what? He created a helper, an ASER.
 
Only two people in the Old Testament are identified as ASERS and that’s women and God. Feminists come along and say that being a helper is sort of a second-class role. Not when the only other classification of ASER is God. That elevates that role quite high. That’s a significant statement. Women have a role like God has. A helper. This isn’t a second-class position. Adam’s created first and Eve is created to be his helper in carrying out the mission God gave him as the vice gerent over all the creation. Together they both had this role as image bearers.
 
Then we had a little problem in . The woman is deceived by Satan. There’s a role reversal here. Satan goes after the woman in order to get her to functioning as the leader. He figures out she’s the weak spot so he goes after her. Paul says that it wasn’t Adam who was deceived but the woman, being quite deceived, fell into transgression. What’s important is that throughout Scripture it’s not Eve’s sin that God makes the issue out of. It’s Adam’s sin. Adam was the one who was ultimately responsible. says that it’s in Adam that all die, not in Eve. It’s Adam that’s the responsible one.
 
When God showed up in the Garden that afternoon and started to ask where they were, He doesn’t address the woman to explain what happened. He addresses the responsible party in the couple, the leader in the home. God asked Adam what happened. He said it was Adam’s responsibility. He was the representative head of the human race. Adam was not deceived. The woman was deceived so this has something to do with why women have a different role than men do.
 
Next we get into . This is a difficult verse that challenges a lot of people. “Women shall be preserved through the bearing of children.” What in the world is going on here? We have to understand a couple of different words here. The word for preserve is the word for saved. But this isn’t using SOZO from a salvation perspective. It can relate to justification. It can relate to sanctification and to glorification. If this were talking about justification we would have a real problem. Almost like Mormons who say you ladies can’t go to heaven unless you have babies. I don’t think that quite passes the smell test. Is it talking about phase 2 that women will be sanctified through childbearing? Not really because the issue in phase 2 sanctification is what you have at the end of the verse, “Continuing in faith and love and sanctity with self restraint.”
 
Maybe this verse has something to do with the fact that the verb is a future tense. This is talking about glorification and is related to rewards. Women are created to be the bearers of children within the Divine viewpoint or Divine institution family. They’re the ones who are given that position, that role, and that responsibility. That takes things to the next level in training. She has a responsibility there. That ultimately can relate to her rewards at the Judgment Seat of Christ. This is a long-term outlook, not a short-term outlook. Is that “they” talking about “they, the children” or “they, the women”? It could be either one but I think it’s primarily talking about the women. Part of their sanctification is fulfilling part of their role as being a mother and bearing children. Does that mean if a woman doesn’t have a child or is incapable of having a child, then she can’t realize that? We know that’s in God’s hands, not in our hands. This is just one of the ways a woman realizes her fulfillment in life. It doesn’t mean that if you don’t have children, then you don’t realize that. All through this we’re seeing that Paul is arguing that men have one role and women have another role.
 
If you’ve never heard this before or you’re coming at this from an understanding of the culture, then your training has come out of a “no God” orientation. When you get up to what you believe about the nature of men and women, it’s going to be radically different under paganism than it is under Biblical thought. You’re going to get out in the workplace and there’s going to be some kind of conflict. You’re going to have to decide if you’re going to live your life and function under Biblical truth or not. That’s going to impact how you relate to employers, co-workers, and others in terms of same-sex marriage and gender confusion. It’s going to impact how you view the role of men and women. This is hard in a pagan society because the pressure is on you to conform to the world and not to be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
 
This is what happens to growing believers who have an incomplete thought transformation. When pressure comes, they’re going to go toward the position of pragmatism. They’re going to go toward something that works rather than something’s that right. This is what leads to the destruction of your spiritual life. I want to close with a story that I may have told you last time but I want to draw a little different application. A man at church was telling me that if you work for the federal government and someone comes in and tells you they’re transgender and you refer to them by the wrong sex they say they are, then you may lose your job. In other words if a man tells you he’s a woman, you must refer to him as a “she”. This works across the board in terms of many different government agencies.
 
What is happening is that the government is basically using vocabulary to change your thinking and to change your values. After a while, if you keep referring to this biological male who dresses like a woman as a “she” you begin to think there’s nothing wrong with this. After all “she’s” a nice person. I don’t want to be too judgmental. This really isn’t too bad. What’s happened is government policy is forcing a breakdown in your thought life and your norms and standards and you have just lost that battle in spiritual warfare and caved into the world. Rather than being transformed by the renewing of your mind, you’re being forced and conformed into the world.
 
This is just beginning, folks. Actually, it’s just becoming very obvious. It’s been going on for twenty or thirty years in a lot more subtle ways. Now it’s becoming much more overt. We’re going to see churches and institutions attacked more and more from the left because they can’t abide for people to think so radically different about men and women and the essence of families and society. So we’re going to see this coming along in a lot of different ways.
 
In fact, I gave Alan a letter we received from an organization that is at the root of a lot of these attacks on the church. It states that they just want to warn the “kind church leaders” that there are a lot of things about politics which you can’t say from the pulpit. Make sure you don’t say these things or you will cause great harm to come to your organization. Just a little letter of intimidation! This is the kind of thing we’re going to see more and more of, not to mention the kind of things the mayor is doing.
 
We have to make a decision. Are you really willing to stay the course? That’s what discipleship is all about. All the things Jesus teaches in Matthew about discipleship about whether you’re willing to count the cost. Are you willing to make the sacrifice? Are you willing to give up everything in your life because when it comes right down to it, the only thing that matters is your relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ? If that’s all that matters, then everything else we have may go away. It may go away in our lifetime in a decade. The only thing that’s going to give us the strength to handle those battles is the Word of God in our souls.

Romans 161b-Serving the Lord Jesus Christ

Romans 16:5 NASB95
also greet the church that is in their house. Greet Epaenetus, my beloved, who is the first convert to Christ from Asia.
Romans 161b-Serving the Lord Jesus Christ
 
We are in Romans, chapter 16. Granted, this is not one of the most doctrinally exciting deep passages that you run across in Scripture. There are little things that are sprinkled throughout the closing greetings that we ought to pay attention to and we also need to realize that despite the fact we don’t know most of the twenty-five names that are mentioned here or the two or three that are not specifically mentioned here, nevertheless, under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit preserving and inspiring God’s Word, He has seen fit to preserve this. One reason for that is that it gives us an insight into the personal nature of the Apostle Paul’s ministry. That’s part of any ministry to develop personal relationships with the folks you minister to. We have a lot of opportunity to do that.
 
It’s not just a big part of the model for the local church which does relate to the teaching of the Word that has parallels to a classroom. It’s not a classroom in the same sense that you have a classroom in a university or even a seminary. I also kind of chuckle now although I used to be a little irritated by the fact that people think I would do well in a seminary. I have to constantly disabuse people of that. People who say that have no idea what goes on in a seminary. In a seminary in a class on Romans, you’ll cover Romans probably in a two-hour class. That means you have about two and half hours a week over approximately an 18-week semester. So that’s going to be approximately twenty-seven hours taking holidays into account. Is that right? We spent more than twenty-seven hours just going through the first chapter.
 
The word seminary comes from the word seminal, which is a seed. You’re just planting seeds. You’re covering the foundations of something to plant seeds for later production. This is really the model that we should see that pastors go to seminaries to learn the basics and the framework of the books that they study. You may not know this but the word for scholar in Latin has as its ultimate root meaning the word leisure. If you’re working doing a full time job of 40–60 hours you don’t have the leisure that you need to dig into the Word of God. Every pastor should be a scholar.
 
Different pastors have different other gifts so it means the gift of pastor-teacher doesn’t look the same in each person. There are different personalities. We know that people are given the spiritual gift in different measures so some have it in different ways. Sometimes the gift of pastor-teacher is combined with other gifts such as administration or mercy or helps or some of these other gifts, which are blended in with that gift of pastor-teacher. It’s always going to manifest differently but the core responsibility of a pastor is to train the congregations.
 
talk about the various gifted leaders of the local church during the 1st century AD. It included apostles and prophets and for the rest of the church age evangelist and pastor-teachers. It’s the role of those gifted men, as the passage says, “To equip the saints to do the work of ministry” We often think of the pastor as the minister. He’s the one who does the ministering. No, he’s like the coach. He’s the trainer. Y’all are the ones who are on the team and out on the field playing the game. The pastor is to coach. He’s the one who trains the team to go out and do the work of ministry. In that process you build many different relationships and so we get a little picture of that in these verses.
 
I also found out last time that another thing we see in these verses is that I compared it to a fire ant bed in some parts of Texas. It may not look like much, especially if it’s been dry. You just see that the ground has been disturbed. If you know what you’re looking for you know that means it’s a fire ant bed. But if you go up and kick it, then all of a sudden all of these ants come boiling out of the nest. If you’re not careful they will sting you and that’s quite a painful sting, which is why we call them fire ants. There are some verses like that in Scripture. They seem pretty innocuous until someone comes along and starts kicking at it a certain way.
 
I pointed out last time that there are three verses in this section that relate to the debate that’s been going on in the evangelical church for the last fifty years over the role of women in ministry. One of the books I recommended last time is by a friend and colleague of mine, which he wrote back, in the early 80s called “The Role of Women in Ministry”. He does an excellent job dealing with all the different issues. If you’re coming at this as a believer you’re going to think radically different about this than if you’re not a believer because we believe that things in God’s creation are what they are because God made them that way. Then God tells us how they are distinct.
 
Non-Christians refer to God’s creation as nature whereas believers view all of God’s creation as His. The word nature almost carries with it a sense of something that is autonomous, something that operates on its own and is not dependent upon a Sustainer/Creator for its ongoing actions. The pagan mindset looks at nature and views it as operating on its own laws whereas as a believer we know that creation operates on the laws God built into it from the very beginning of creation. Or at least they became operative in some sense after creation week and then they were modified after the Fall.
 
We look at that and try to understand what males are in the home and the family and the church. Then we look at women and the role of females within marriage and the family and the church and we come to different conclusions. When we look at these roles we look at them as God defined them and not as we would shape them based upon our experience. It always goes back to that issue of authority and building up from the Scriptures. I emphasized several things on that last time.
 
One of the issues that gets brought up is the issue of whether Phoebe as a deaconess meant she held an office in the church. If that is appropriate it’s something totally different from what we describe as the role of a deacon in many churches today. The word deacon just means a servant and this would be a woman who carried out certain responsibilities as she served and carried out her work of ministry within the local church. I don’t think there was an official office in the apostolic period related to a deaconess.
 
Then I talked about Priscilla and Aquila and the issue there because Paul talks about not allowing women to teach or give instruction to men or to have authority over men in . That doesn’t mean women aren’t capable teachers. There are many women who are. I even know some women who are better Bible teachers than a lot of pastors and men that I know but that does not justify the fact that they should teach the Bible. That is just the way that God made them. Women have spheres in which they are to primarily function and excel and men have their spheres in which they are to lead and to serve and to excel.
 
We’re going to get a third verse here that some of the feminists think support their arguments. We’ve gone through Priscilla and Aquila last time and in Paul concludes that section and says to greet the church that is in their house so we know that they were hosts for a group of believers who met in their house. That was the way in which many churches met in the early church. They were in Rome at the time and they had been expelled earlier, then they returned. While they were away from Rome Paul met with them. Also he met with them in Corinth. Later when he writes 1 Corinthians they’re in Corinth. They have a house church there. Here he’s sending greetings to the believers that are meeting in their house.
 
Then we start into a section with a series of greetings to people that we know very little about. We’ll just make some observations as we go through this particular section. He says to greet Epaenetus who is the first fruits of Achaia to Christ. I want you to have your Bible open here in and following. If you’re using a NASV or one of the Bibles based on the Nestle-Aland manuscript then it reads that he is the first fruits of Asia but the Majority text says Achaia. Greece was divided into two areas. The northern area was Macedonia that covered areas like Philippi, Berea, and Thessalonica. Then when you got down to Athens and south of there this area was described as Achaia. So he was the first convert in Achaia as Paul was moving south from Berea. Epaenetus has now moved to Rome.
 
In Paul says to greet Mary who “labored much for us.” We know almost nothing about this particular Mary except that she was a hard worker for the Roman church. Incidentally the Bible mentions six different Marys. It was a very common name. Miriam was the Jewish name and the majority of the Greek manuscripts use the word Miriam here instead of Mary. She is praised by the Apostle Paul, which is indeed high praise as one who labored much with Paul and his associates.
 
Then in we come to another verse. This is the third verse I mentioned earlier that is used by feminists to argue about the role of women in authority in the early church. This says, “Greet Andronicus and Junia.” This is from the New King James Bible. The King James has Junius. Junius is the form in the Greek and apparently it can apply to either male or female. There are some who have said that this is probably Andronicus’ wife. You can’t be absolutely dogmatic on that just because of the form of the name. A large number of scholars take the position that these are two men that are mentioned here: Andronicus and Junius. That’s not a determinative issue in however this verse is used in the debate over women and the role of women in the church.
 
This is an example of how translations have changed over the years. The 1984 translation of the NIV uses Junius. Then the 2011 version of the NIV uses Junia. It is the same as today’s NIV, which has been influenced by the gender-neutral issue where they are trying to refer to God as just a person. They try to get away from the masculine pronouns and try to make it a gender-neutral translations. All of this is driven by a secular philosophy that is shaped by the feminist movement. Instead of letting the Bible and the grammar of the Bible shape how the text is translated, they’re imposing the modern feminist ideology upon the text and the translation.
 
This shouldn’t really surprise anyone who knows anything about post-modernism and its relationship to language and linguistics and hermeneutics. Many of us believe from our readings and study that about 80 to 90% of modern language theory is heavily influenced by evolutionary thought and by post-modernism. That means you have to be extremely careful if you are in that field of study in understanding how that impacts their view of language. I just wanted to bring this out because it is something that is significant. The reason this becomes significant is because of how the rest of the verse is translated, “Greet Andronicus and Junius, my fellow prisoners…” By that Paul indicates that they are fellow Jews and also, somewhere along the line, he has been imprisoned with them.
 
There are many times Paul was jailed by the various opposing forces. Sometimes it was the Judaizers. Sometimes it was the Gentiles. We don’t have a listing of all of those circumstances in the book of Acts. Luke just tells us about some of them. Apparently these two had worked alongside Paul and served the Lord with him for some time. Then he adds, “Who are of note among the Apostles.” There are some translations because of the difficulty of words that say they were outstanding among the apostles, as if Andronicus and Junius were also apostles. You see that in the 2011 NIV translation. If you translate it that way you have taken a woman, Junia, and elevated her to the position of apostle. This has been used by some who have no knowledge of Greek saying in the early church they had a complete equanimity and they did not say that women couldn’t teach or have authority over men and that you even had women apostles. That’s just not the way the text should be translated. The best translation of this has the idea that they were of note and recognized by the apostles. This emphasizes they were well known by the apostles.
 
That’s how the NET Bible translates this. I don’t agree with a lot of the things they do with some of the more theological areas in the NET Bible. The New Testament was mostly done by the Dallas Seminary at that time and translates it that these two were well known to the apostles. Several other Bibles translate it in the sense of noteworthy or recognized by the apostles and things of that nature. So that translation resolves this. Paul isn’t saying they were apostles but they were well known to the apostles in authority.
 
That brings us to an important little study on apostles. It’s important to understand just how this term is used. The word apostle was used in everyday language to refer to someone who was sent on a mission. It had been used of military leaders, notably an admiral and others who had been sent on a mission by the king to carry out a military attack. The noun APOSTOLOS was used that way. That’s the root meaning of the word apostle. It’s someone who is commissioned to carry out a mission.
 
What’s important there is that in the Bible you have to distinguish between who does the commissioning and what the mission is. So you have someone who commissions someone to a particular mission. There are actually three different types of apostles in the Bible. The first has to do with the twelve, the ones we normally think of as the disciples of Jesus dropping out Judas. It’s a spiritual gift. So that’s the twelve. These are the ones who are commissioned directly by the Lord Jesus Christ. The first thing that we distinguish is who commissioned them. The Lord Jesus Christ did and He sent them on a mission and that is to establish the church in the new dispensation of the Church Age.
 
tells us that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Now when you build a house once you lay the foundation, it’s finished. You don’t keep building it for every floor. You lay the foundation and once it’s completed that’s the foundation. The foundation part is over with. So the Apostles with a capital “A” would have been a finite group that was active only in the 1st century when the foundation of the church was established. So that tells us it’s not an ongoing feature in the church.
 
You’re always going to find a few people who come along and read the New Testament without a good understanding of time factors and how that relates to apostles. And you have a number of people today who appoint themselves as apostles. They might be in the second sense. But that just is so confusing that I don’t think the word ought to be used in any way except referring to the twelve. The Bible does use it in a secondary sense and that refers to others who were commissioned by local churches to take the gospel to other locations. For example, Barnabas in is identified as an apostle. He’s never listed among the twelve, among those in Jerusalem. He was commissioned along with Paul by the church in Antioch to go out on what is referred to as Paul’s first missionary journey. So Barnabas is an apostle, lower case “a”. He’s commissioned by a local church. His commission is limited to just that one missionary journey although he did some things later on but that’s not his focal point. So he’s not an Apostle with a capital “A” like the twelve. So you have passages like that that refer to these other apostles.
 
So if, and I don’t think it’s true, if you’re going to say that Andronicus and Junius were apostles it would be of the lower case “a” and they were just sent on a mission by a local church. The use of the term here does not necessarily have to be equivalent to the twelve or the Apostles. In apostles are listed among the gifted leaders that God has given to the local church. First apostles and then prophets. That is the pattern of that those two gifts provide the foundation for the local church.
 
When we get into the end of the Bible in we read, “Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations…” This is the New Jerusalem and the New Earth. “…And on them were the names of the Apostles of the Lamb.” It appears in that passage that there are a limited number of apostles. There are twelve.
 
We always run into the problem of what do you do about Matthias and there’s a number of different ways that that’s handled. One of the ways is that there’s never an indication by Luke that what Peter did was wrong. It’s always presented very positively and Matthias was always included in the body of Apostles. One solution to that which I think is at least creative and may in fact give us a foundation is a recognition that Peter was thinking in terms of Matthias being an apostle to the Jews. He would be a lower case “a” and he’s commissioned by Peter, not by the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
It’s very clear that Paul was commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you’re going to have a limited number of Apostles, I would rather have Paul in that list than Matthias and certainly not having Judas. It seems like the Apostle Paul would be the one who would be included there but Matthias was always seen as part of that group of the twelve. Some people say, “Well you never hear from him again.” Well, the only ones you ever hear from again are Peter and John, and John never says anything in the rest of Acts. Only Peter and Paul are the ones that talk in the rest of the book of Acts. The fact that nothing else is said about Matthias is irrelevant because nothing else is said about Matthew. Nothing else is said about James, the Less. Nothing else is said about Nathaniel. Nothing else is said about all but two of the Apostles so that’s a specious argument.
 
The point that I’m making here is that however you handle this particular verse, the least likely thing is that Paul is indicating that a woman here is among the major Apostles. That’s your least solution. Once again you have typical post-modernism and feminism high jacking a traditional text to try to justify your own political or sociological position. The first category of Apostles then is the twelve. The second category is those who are commissioned by local churches through a particular mission, and the third category is the Lord Jesus Christ. In , the writer of Hebrews calls the Lord Jesus Christ the Apostle and High Priest of our confession. In that case it is Jesus Christ who is commissioned by God the Father to go into human history and to die on the cross for our sins. In that sense, He’s the “sent one.” That’s what it means, to be sent on a mission so Jesus is an Apostle in that sense. Those are the three uses of apostle in the New Testament.
 
Moving ahead, in we read, “Greet Amplias, my beloved in the Lord.” This is obviously someone that Paul was quite affectionate toward and someone who meant a lot to him. So we see how Paul has built these relationships with them. We don’t know anything about Amplias. It’s a common name according to Lightfoot who was one of the great British scholars at the end of the 19th century. It’s a name that’s often connected with the emperor’s household but we can’t speculate about that even though a number of people try to do that. There was a tomb with Amplioti on it in the Christian catacombs in Rome but you can’t draw any connection. So all we can say is that it’s someone for whom Paul had a great deal of affection.
 
In we read, “Greet Urbanus, our fellow worker in Christ and Stachys, my beloved.” Again Urbanus was a common name, even a common slave name. There are some who try to connect this to the household of the emperor. Again, that’s more speculation rather than any sort of Biblical fact. What we know is that he was a worker in the local church. He served his ministry. Remember pastors are to train the saints to do the work of ministry. He was a fellow worker in Christ. We know that Stachys was one that was beloved by the Apostle Paul.
 
In we read, “Greet Apelles…” Again this is a name that is found within the imperial household so since several of these are names that are common to servants or slaves in the imperial household, possibly this may indicate that several of those who were slaves in the emperor’s household were Christians. That is at least possible but again we can’t have any kind of certainty there. F.F. Bruce who is again a recognized British scholar in this area and has such a wealth of training in classics, that is, Latin and Greek, that even though their theology may be somewhat off, their study in Rome and Greece is far beyond what you get in universities even today. So Apelles is approved in Christ. This is the Greek word DOKIMOS, which indicates that he’s been tested and evaluated. Probably he’s gone through some opposition and some persecution. He has not yielded or compromised so he has demonstrated that his maturity is rock solid.
 
Then Paul says at the end of verse 10, “Greet those who are of household of Aristobulus.” Again this is a name that is common. Aristobulus was the name of a grandson of Herod the Great. It’s not at all certain that this is the proper connection, although in the next verse you do have a mention of “Herodion, my countryman.” The fact that this person has a name that contains the name of Herod gives support to the fact that this could include those who are in the household of Herod’s descendants.
 
Paul goes on and talks about “Greeting those who are of the household of Narcissus who are in the Lord”. The name Narcissus was the name of a wealthy and powerful freeman who had been prominent under Claudius and was later put to death by Nero. His slaves would have passed to the emperor because of that and all of his slaves would have been indicated by the name of Narcissus so this is either talking about the original Narcissus or one of the servants of his particular household.
 
In we read, “Greet Trephine and Typhus, who have labored in the Lord.” These could have been identical twins that were given a very similar name, which twins often have. The names are both feminine indicating they are women who “also labored in the Lord.” Again and again we see that Paul is praising those because they are involved in ministry. They’re not just coming to church and sitting and soaking up the Word and filling out their doctrinal notebooks. They are involved in ministry in different ways. They are active in the congregation. They’re helping one another. They’re serving one another, praying for one another, and serving in many different capacities in relation to their spiritual gifts.
 
Next comes the “beloved Persus who labored much in the Lord.” Then in we read, “Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord and his mother and mine.” Rufus means red and was a common slave name. This indicates that Paul knew the family and that Rufus’ mother had treated Paul as if he were family and he was very close to that particular family. Perhaps Rufus’ mother had taken care of Paul at some particular time. Even today we often say when we’re describing relationships with people that someone is a mother-like figure who was very influential in the way in which you were reared. So Rufus and his mother are mentioned there.
 
Then in we read, “Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, and the brethren who are with them.” This is a group of five names that we have no knowledge of any of them. They were again common names used in the Roman Empire and it’s very possible they all operated within the same house church. Some suggest that maybe they were brothers but again most of anything we say here is simply speculative and we can’t have any certainty there at all.
 
In he says, “Greet Philogus…” This may be a nickname because the name means a lover of words or a lover of the Word. It may be someone who is a scribe or someone working in rhetoric. The rest of the verse says, “…And Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them.” It’s very possible this refers to another house church. The mention of the word “Julia” doesn’t tell us anything. It’s sort of comparable to our name John. There are a lot of people named John. I had so many friends named John when I was in high school that my mother made me refer to all of them by their last name so she could distinguish them. Otherwise, she had no idea which one I was talking about. Julia would have been the same way. It was an extremely common name. In fact, it may be the most common of all Roman names. There’s speculation that Nereus may have one of those in Nero’s household but we really can’t be sure.
 
Then we come to where Paul says to “greet one another with a holy kiss.” This is an interesting verse. This isn’t the only place Paul makes mention of the practice of greeting someone with a holy kiss. It’s mentioned also in . Different cultures have different ways of greeting people I don’t know if you have ever had the opportunity to mix with other cultures. In my life I remember that in my last year in Dallas Seminary every student was required to take an elective in Christian education and an elective in missions. It was my last semester and there was a class offered as a mission elective on cross-cultural communication. I thought, “Well, it’s the only things they have so I’m going to take it.” It was kind of interesting because one of the things we had to do was attend different culture churches, even going to a Hindu temple and a Buddhist temple and just seeing how these different cultures and different religions operated.
 
There was a guy in the class who’d had a ministry in a black church for a while. I remember thinking, “Well you really have some interesting observations.” Little did I know that later on I would be working in a cross-culture situation where I would have a ministry with a lot of black pastors. That’s certainly a very different culture. Also going over to Ukraine every year and dealing with a different culture there I’ve seen a lot. Also I'm dealing with a lot of Jews.
 
I’ve seen that people greet each other differently in these different groups. If you go to a black church as a pastor, there’s sort of this ritual handshake and shoulder bump hug kind of thing that they greet you with each other. But if you go to a synagogue or any number of other Jewish gatherings, the women always offer their cheek. That’s distinctive among that different culture. Quite a few Americans tend to just shake hands but every now and then we might give a hug but we have our ways of greeting one another that are different from blacks or Hispanics or Koreans.
 
In this culture it was not uncommon to have a kiss on the cheek as a form of greeting but Paul emphasized that this is not to be a lascivious kiss but a holy kiss, a chaste kiss, just a brief little kiss on the cheek. He says, “Greet each other with a holy kiss.” He’s not emphasizing this as a command that would be cross-cultural. The emphasis is on greeting one another and then he says, “The churches of Christ greet you.” This refers to all of those churches where he has been ministering and the churches that he has founded.
 
When we come to all the sudden the greeting section stops and we get into something a little bit different. He starts giving a little reference here to some things going on. “I urge you brethren to note those who cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you learned and avoid them.” He’s giving another exhortation or challenge to his readers. He’s going to define what he means by divisions and offenses by stating they are contrary to what they have been taught.
 
The New King James uses the word doctrine. Something has happened to the word doctrine, sort of a dichotomy, which means two parts. Dichotomy has a Latin root and has the idea of dividing things in two. What often happens in seminary and after that is that doctrine is thought of as more abstract theology rather than just teaching. The Greek word DIDACHE means teaching or instruction. That covers everything from instruction on the hypostatic union and the doctrine of the Trinity and some of what people may think are more abstract ideas in the Scripture to how to pray, how to memorize Scripture, and how to apply what you’ve learned in the local church to the voting booth. These are all important areas of what we would call application.
 
That’s how the military uses the word doctrine. When you read military manuals they use the word doctrine to refer to everything from the original theoretical conception of a mission or developing a weapon or a strategy or tactic all the way to its final, ultimate application on the battlefield. Many of you may have already noticed that many people don’t want to learn doctrine, they just want to learn how to love the Lord, how to apply the Bible. That person has been ingrained with a false meaning of the word doctrine. The word doctrine refers to that whole realm of instruction that comes from the Scripture. Paul is talking about those who are causing division and offenses to what they’ve been taught by the apostles and prophets.
 
The first word that he uses is a present active indicative of PARAKALEO. “I urge you, brethren, note those who cause offenses and divisions.” He’s exhorting them. He’s challenging them to do something and they need to pay attention to something. The verb is SKOPEO, which means to pay close attention to something, to be watchful. This is something that the deacons in the local church ought to be doing, paying attention to what goes on in the congregation so that they can keep a lid on things that may bubble up and cause problems within the local church.
 
In the ten years that West Houston Bible Church has been around, we haven’t had any real problems like that. We’ve had a couple of little things that probably no one noticed. They just sort of simmered beneath the surface. I’ve been in congregations where you’ll have someone who all of a sudden reads some book contrary to the pre-trib rapture and they get a burr under their saddle against dispensations or they become too Calvinistic or something like this and start causing problems. We really haven’t had problems like that in this church.
 
We watch these things and the word that’s used there for divisions is the word DICHOSTASIA, which means causing divisions or causing dissension. This word is used as a manifestation of the works of the sin nature. gives a list of the works of the sin nature. “Now the works of the flesh [sin nature] are evident which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness…” The list goes on and in it’s that word “dissensions” listed there. That’s the same word we have in . It’s also in . It’s left out of the Nestle-Aland text but it’s in the Majority text and probably should be included as part of the original Scripture. It’s a concept that’s always used in a negative sense as a product of those who are arrogant and self-absorbed. I know we don’t have any problem here with people who are arrogant or self-absorbed but other churches have that problem. People who are part of the city and the secular culture certainly have close familiarity with that problem. Divisions are an outburst of the self-absorbed sin nature.
 
The next word that’s used is offenses, which is SKANDALON, which is where we get our word scandal. Originally it referred to a part of a trap. Do you remember as a kid building a trap to trap a bird? You set a box up and you would put a stick that would hold that box up and you would tie a string around that stick and run it out about fifteen feet. You’d put some bread out there and hope a bird would come up under the box. If they did, you would yank the string and that stick would collapse and the box would fall down and trap the bird. The word that described that stick was a SKANDALON.
 
The original sense was that it was used as a trap or a snare to capture someone and then it came to have the meaning of a temptation to sin and an enticement to sin or to disobey God. This word is also used in where Paul says, “Let us not judge one another anymore but rather resolve this, not to put a stumbling block [SKANDALON] or a cause to fall in our brother’s way.” He is saying that there are those who are creating situations that cause others to sin and cause divisions within the body of Christ which is contrary to what you’ve been taught. We’re to avoid those people.
When people are divisive, just avoid them. Don’t try to engage them. Don’t try to straighten them out. Just avoid them. Don’t let them become a problem in your life as well.
 
In Paul says, “For those who are of such [who are divisive and cause offenses] do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ.” So when someone is operating in self-absorption and arrogance they don’t serve the Lord Jesus Christ but instead they “serve their own belly”. The word belly here is the word for stomach or womb, KOILIA. The figure of speech here technically is called a synecdoche where you look at one part of something and it stands for the whole. What this is talking about is that their belly represents the whole person.
 
What the figure of speech means is that they’re basically just serving themselves. They’re so self-absorbed and so self-focused that they’re just promoting their own opinion, their own agenda, and their own ideas. As a result of that they’re just causing some problems in the local church. Paul uses the same figure of speech in when he talks about false teachers being enemies of Christ. “Their end is destruction, their god is their belly.” He’s not talking about the fact that they eat too much or they have a problem with gluttony. That may be, but this is referring to the fact that they’re just self-absorbed. They’re just feeding on their own desires. They are narcissists. They are arrogant. This is the idea. “For those who are such do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ but themselves.”
 
You only have two options, folks. You’re either serving the Lord or you’re serving yourself. It’s one or the other. There’s no in-between. You’re either walking by the Spirit and serving the Lord or you’re walking according to the flesh and serving yourself. So Paul says, “Those who are such do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ but their own belly and by smooth words and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the simple. “ Often you will find that they have a real way with words. They have the gift of gab and they’re able to convince people of things. It sounds good. They present a good argument and they’re a good speaker so people are being entertained. Their ears are being tickled and people like that.
 
Paul says that the simple are deceived. The word simple there is the word AKAKOS which means someone who is without evil. They’re just basically simple. They’re naïve. They don’t really expect someone to be taking advantage of them in the local church and selling them a bill or goods and telling them a lot of things that aren’t right. They just believe them. After all, they’re such a nice Christian. They have such a good personality. How could they possibly be leading us astray?
 
In Paul says about the Romans, “For your obedience has become known to all.” This is in contrast to these divisive false teachers who are leading people astray. He goes on, “Therefore I am glad on your behalf but I want you to be wise to what is good and simple to what is evil.” That word simple is AKAKOS. The “a” at the beginning is a negative like “un” in English. It basically means something that is unmixed with something else, such as wine mixed with water. Or you might mix metals with something of lesser value in order to decrease its value and still use it.
 
It could be something spiritual saying you live a life that is unmixed with evil. You’re not hypocritical. You’re not two-faced. You don’t have an ulterior motive. You’re just focused on doing the right thing and living your spiritual life. As a result Paul says, “The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.” Whatever Paul means here he’s indicating by the word shortly that this is a particular situation, a particular problem that the Roman church was facing. He’s encouraging them and saying that ultimately the opposition comes from Satan but that God was going to give them the victory and this will work itself out very, very soon.
 
Then he closes with a common greeting that is very similar to other greetings that he uses in the Scripture which is, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.” This is very similar to the way he closes many other epistles. In he said, “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you.” In he says, “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” In he says, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.” In he says, “Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.” In he says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.” says, “Grace be with you.” In he says, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” , “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.” In , “Grace be with you.” , “The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you.” , “Grace be with you all.” In , “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.” What’s the emphasis there? Grace, grace, grace, grace. Paul’s emphasizing the gospel of grace; that we need to live in a grace-oriented manner.
 
This seems like it’s bringing us to a conclusion. But then, guess what? Paul adds some more closing salutations in verses 21–24 and then his final benediction in verses 25–27. We’re going to wrap up tonight’s class here. When I come back from Israel we will spend a little bit of time wrapping up the last seven verses in and then do a final flyover. That will be the Thursday night one week before Thanksgiving. There won’t be any class on Thursday, Thanksgiving. That’s a day for people to spend with their families. It may give you some opportunities perhaps to evangelize and witness to those in your family.
 
We should wrap up Romans then by the end of November. Then in December, I believe it’s December 4th, we will begin a new series on 1 Peter so in preparation for that it might be helpful to begin reading 1 Peter so you know what we’re going to get into. There are a lot of wonderful things there. One of the major themes it emphasizes is handling adversity. Undeserved adversity. This is important. I believe we live in times when we have not seen the kinds of adversity in our lives that are coming and we need to be spiritually prepared for this. That’s one reason why I’m choosing 1 Peter and also 1 Samuel as the next books we’re studying.
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